Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

The Economist has a great review (behind a paywall) of a new upcoming book entitled "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity" which looks at the systemic racism in American Christianity, especially among Southern Baptists and white evangelicals. The book bears out my view that the rise of racism within the Republican Party directly correlates to the rise of evangelicals and "conservative Christians" within the party base.   A piece at CNN also looks at the book to be released next month and has an overview which many white Christians - especially those in the South - will find uncomfortable to face even though the author uses numerous surveys and studies to document the book's damning conclusions.  Here are excerpts from CNN (sadly, those who most need to read the book will likely not do so):

Growing up in the South, Robert P. Jones attended Southern Baptist churches, Sunday schools, even a Southern Baptist college.

But it was only in seminary, in his mid-20s, that Jones says he learned the full truth about Southern Baptists' white supremacist roots. The denomination was founded to defend slavery and did not formally rebuke its past until 1995, when Southern Baptists voted to apologize for their history of racism.

"White Christian churches have not just been complacent; they have not only been complicit," he writes in his book, "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," publishing next month.  "Rather, as the dominant cultural power in America, they have been responsible for constructing and sustaining a project to protect White supremacy and resist Black equality," he writes. "This project has framed the entire American story."

In the book Jones, CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, blends church history, memoir and contemporary public opinion surveys. Together, they make a clear and compelling case for why White American Christians need to reckon with their past.
 But American Christianity's past is only part of the problem. In survey after survey, said Jones, contemporary white Christians repeatedly deny that structural racism is a problem, that shootings of unarmed Blacks are not isolated incidents, or even that African Americans still face racism and discrimination.
 One of the challenges, historically, has been that the Christian theology developed in White churches intentionally blinds White Christians to racial injustice. White Christians are nearly twice as likely as non-religious Americans to say police shootings of unarmed black men are isolated incidents. That is a moral and theological problem. As long as White supremacy has a hold on our culture, it's pretty comfortable for White Christian churches to say their theology is about personal salvation and personal lives. Theology has been constricted to be only about personal piety, disconnected from claims of social justice. Everything outside of salvation has been labeled "politics."

It's a self-protective move. If you read sermons in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s you would have no idea that there was a Civil Rights movement. It was a lulling of white consciences to sleep.
 I see the last four years as a moment of reckoning for White Christians. The election of President Trump, who has put White supremacy front and center, has brought these issues from just barely below the surface into plain view. Charlottesville changed things. Charleston changed things. Dylan Roof was a confirmed Lutheran, who, in his journal while imprisoned has been drawing crosses and white Jesus and is completely unrepentant. White Christians have inherited a worldview that has Christians on top of other religions, men over women, Whites over Blacks. There is a top-down authoritarian structure to it. 

Biden’s Rising Evangelical Support

While the vast majority of white evangelicals continue to display their abject moral bankruptcy through their support of Donald Trump - a thoroughly immoral individual - some are beginning to shift towards Joe Biden a Catholic for whom his religious beliefs actual mean something. While not large, the shift has instilled panic in the Trump campaign whose game plan is to garner even higher margins of support among those who voted for Trump in 2016 even as Trump continues to alienate the remainder of Americans. The defections among white Catholics who voted fro Trump in 2016 are even larger despite Trump's efforts to paint Biden as a pro-abortion radical. A piece in Politico looks at Trump's growing problems with the so-called religious conservatives. Here are article highlights:

It was June 10, 2008. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama had gathered with dozens of evangelical leaders — many of them fixtures of the religious right — at the urging of campaign aides. If he could offer genuine glimpses of his own abiding faith, they insisted he could chisel away at the conservative Christian voting bloc.

The strategy worked. Obama’s campaign stops at churches, sermonlike speeches and his professed belief in Jesus Christ earned him 24 percent of the white evangelical vote — doubling Democrats’ support among young white evangelicals and gaining 3 percentage points with the overall demographic from the 2004 election.

Now, allies of President Donald Trump worry his 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, can do the same — snatching a slice of a critical voting bloc from Trump when he can least afford departures from his base.

Biden, a lifelong Roman Catholic, has performed better in recent polling among white evangelicals — and other religious groups — than Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did in 2016 and is widely perceived as more religious than the current White House occupant. A Pew Research study conducted earlier this year showed that a majority of U.S. adults (63 percent) think Trump is “not at all” or “not too religious,” versus 55 percent who said they believed Biden is somewhat or very religious.

Many conservative evangelical leaders have argued that Biden’s positions on cultural issues — like abortion, judges and religious freedom — are disqualifying. Still, anxiety is growing inside Trump’s orbit about the former vice president’s ability to peel off Christian voters who supported Trump in 2016, including the 81 percent of white evangelicals he carried, according to eight administration officials, White House allies and people involved with the Trump campaign.

Such an outcome could deal a fatal blow to [Trump's] the president’s reelection, which largely hinges on expanding his support among religious voters to compensate for enthusiasm gaps elsewhere.

“Here’s the problem for Trump: He needs to be at 81 percent or north to win reelection. Any slippage and he doesn’t get a second term, and that’s where Joe Biden comes into play,” said David Brody, chief political analyst at the Christian Broadcasting Network. “In this environment, with everything from the coronavirus to George Floyd and Trump calling himself the ‘law-and-order president,’ Biden could potentially pick off a percent or 2 from that 81 percent number.”

Some of Biden’s campaign appearances and debate answers have been infused with religious undertones, and his campaign reportedly hosts a weekly call with faith leaders to crowdsource policy and personnel suggestions.

At a CNN town hall in February, Biden said his faith “gives me some reason to have hope and purpose” and praised the “ultimate act of Christian charity” shown by members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., after they forgave a white supremacist who murdered nine members of their congregation in a 2014 mass shooting.

In an op-ed last December that included references to Scripture and Pope Francis’ second encyclical “Laudato Si,” Biden described “the core concepts of decency, fair play and virtue” that he learned through his Catholic upbringing as guiding principles in his political career.

Even Trump allies recognize Biden has an opening to strike the empathetic and compassionate tone that Trump eschewed in many of his comments about the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests over racial inequality.

The president's law-and-order mantra arrived at an already perilous time for his campaign, which has witnessed a steady erosion in support for Trump across key religious demographics and a leftward shift in voter attitudes on issues of race and criminal justice. Trump has already seen double-digit declines in his support from white Catholics, white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants since April — unsettling trends that triggered his recent overtures to conservative Christians, including his visit to St. John’s and an executive order on religious freedom that he signed earlier this month.

“There are evangelicals who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 who will in 2020, but there are plenty of white evangelicals who are disappointed in his administration’s response to coronavirus and are embracing — for the first time ever — some belief in systemic racism,” said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College. “They are the ones who are just dying for a reason not to vote for Trump.”

“The Supreme Court decision has caused some evangelicals to lose faith in the political playbook that says justices and judges can deliver what we care about,” said Fea, noting that one of Trump’s main appeals to white evangelicals is his record on judicial appointments and his promise to continue appointing conservative judges.

“It’s not going to have a big effect on evangelical support for Trump, but in the mix of all these other things it does add up,” he added.

Fea, who teaches in Mechanicsburg, Pa., added that “hardscrabble working-class Catholics” in the Philadelphia suburbs and across Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan should be a primary target for the Biden campaign. He noted that although Trump won the Catholic vote by a 7-point margin four years ago, his support has wavered far more with Catholic voters than it has with white evangelicals, providing his opponent a ripe opportunity.

“In some ways, just the fact that he is Joe Biden from Scranton, Pa., is going to win him Catholic votes in those states,” Fea said.

Behind Trump’s Demand to Reopen Churches: Slipping Poll Numbers

This post is a follow up on one from yesterday but is important because it reveals that Donald Trump doesn't give a rat's ass about churches, the free exercise of religion, or the safety of congregants at church services.  Rather, it is ALL about him and alarm withing his campaign that his polling with white evangelicals and white Catholics has taken a major hit thanks to his bungling of the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  His demand the church services be deemed "essential services" is a desperate attempt to restore slipping support among the falsely named Christian Right - which is neither Christian nor right on almost any issue. Trump knows that without the support of this demographic he will likely be toast in November, and hence his call to allow church services even if it means infecting congregants.  Anyone who believes Trump gives a damn about them is delusional.  With Trump, it is all about him 27/7 and nothing and no one else matters except in the context of how it helps him.  A piece Politico looks at what is really motivating Trump and it has NOTHING to do with religious freedom (A piece in Business Insider notes that church services are "super spreaders" of covid-19).  Here are article highlights:

A sudden shift in support for Donald Trump among religious conservatives is triggering alarm bells inside his reelection campaign, where top aides have long banked on expanding the president’s evangelical base as a key part of their strategy for victory this November.

The anxiety over Trump’s standing with the Christian right surfaced after a pair of surveys by reputable outfits earlier this month found waning confidence in the administration’s coronavirus response among key religious groups, with a staggering decline in the president’s favorability among white evangelicals and white Catholics. Both are crucial constituencies that supported Trump by wide margins in 2016 and could sink his reelection prospects if their turnout shrinks this fall.

The polls paint a bleak picture for Trump, who has counted on broadening his religious support by at least a few percentage points to compensate for weakened appeal with women and suburban populations. . . . . Another person close to the campaign described an April survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which showed a double-digit decline in Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals (-11), white Catholics (-12) and white mainline protestants (-18) from the previous month, as “pretty concerning.”

To safeguard his relationship with religious conservatives, Trump on Friday demanded that America‘s governors permit houses of worship to immediately reopen, and threatened to “override“ state leaders who decline to obey his directive. The announcement . . . . featured clear appeals to white evangelicals, many of whom have long supported Trump's socially conservative agenda.

Following the PRRI survey, which was conducted while Trump was a dominant presence at televised daily briefings by his administration's coronavirus task force, Pew Research Center released new data last week that showed a 7-point increase from April to May in white Catholics who disapprove of Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and a 6-point decline among white evangelicals who previously gave him positive marks.

Trump campaign aides, White House officials and outside allies are responding to the threat by boosting their outreach to religious voters and promising to prioritize religious gatherings as they push to reopen the U.S. economy.

It was not immediately clear whether the president's order on Friday — that state and local officials must take immediate action to reopen religious institutions — was legally permissible, nor was it clear how administration officials planned to enforce the guidance.

Guidelines released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about reopening certain establishments — including schools, public transit systems and child care facilities — did not mention how religious institutions should go about returning to in-person worship services and ministry opportunities. One senior administration official said the guidance was omitted due to concerns that the prescriptions CDC staffers planned to provide were too restrictive.

It’s unlikely that critics of church closings alone are responsible for the decline in Trump’s favorability among critical religious demographics. According to the Pew survey, 43 percent of white evangelicals and 52 percent of white Catholics think the current restrictions on public activity in their areas are appropriate versus 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively, who think fewer restrictions would be better. Greater shares of white evangelicals and white Catholics also said they are more afraid about their state governments lifting restrictions on public activity too soon than they are about leaving the restrictions in place for too long.

Laura Gifford, a historian of politics and religion at George Fox University, said it’s likely become harder for the president’s supporters to embrace his plans for an accelerated reopening of the country. The more Trump contradicts health officials who have warned against reopening schools and nonessential businesses, she suggested, the less accepting his usual supporters might become of his overall response. . . . . “This is something where that is harder to ignore than previous controversies or crises because it has life-and-death consequences for congregations and religious populations.”

Part of the strategy Trump allies have adopted to protect his relationship with conservative Christians is to frame the novel coronavirus — and church closures in response to social distancing restrictions — as a threat to religious freedom. . . . . But the religious freedom framing might not matter if the economy remains in free fall through the November election, even after churches are permitted to reopen and conservative outside groups ramp up their outreach to religious voters.

Why Evangelicals Love Trump: It's All About Race

I have followed the misnamed "Christian Right" - mainly evangelicals - since the early 1990's when they began to infiltrating the local city committees of the GOP in southeastern Virginia - an infiltration that was facilitated by cynical Republican who foolishly thought they could control these religious extremists and hypocrites. These supposed "Christians" wore their religion on their sleeves, but was limited to opposing abortion and being anti-gay. Christ's social gospel message was absent from their agenda.  So too was any shred of racial acceptance except when hated groups in all but formal designation such as The Family Foundation manipulated black pastors to urge their followers vote against their own best interests. Over this period of time, two things became obvious to me: (i) few groups are more morally bankrupt than evangelicals, and (ii) racism is a primary motivation for evangelical voting patterns.  An op-ed at NBC News looks at the reality of evangelicals' racism and their corresponding adulation of Donald Trump's message of racial division.  Here are excerpts:

Liberals have a tendency to wring their hands at the strong support President Donald Trump — he of the three wives and multiple affairs, and a tendency to engage in exceedingly un-Christian-like behavior at the slightest provocation — continues to receive from the white evangelical community. White evangelical support for Donald Trump is still at 73 percent, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016.

But focusing on the disconnect between Trump's personal actions and the moral aspects of their faith misses the issue that keeps their support firm: racism. Modern evangelicals' support for [Trump] this president cannot be separated from the history of evangelicals' participation in and support for racist structures in America.

They have a long history in America, and include a number of different groups, including Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists and nondenominational churches. After the schism among the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians in the 1850s over slavery, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptists — who defended slavery through their readings of scripture — came into being.

Evangelical denominations formed from these splits in the South were usually comprised of people who had made money from slavery or supported it. After the Civil War many were more likely to have supported the Ku Klux Klan and approved of (or participated in) lynching. The burning cross of the KKK, for instance, was a symbol of white Christian supremacy, designed both to put fear into the hearts of African Americans and to highlight the supposed Christian righteousness of the terrorist act.

Ronald Reagan, who also counted evangelicals among his most vociferous supporters, started his presidential campaign on the platform of states’ rights from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered by several Klansmen with the participation of local law enforcement in 1964, while attempting to register African Americans to vote. Decades later, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical leader, opposed sanctions on South Africa's apartheid regime and insulted Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize Peace winner, as a "phony."

And when Barack Obama was elected president, they regrouped, bought guns and became Tea Partiers who promoted fiscal responsibility and indulged in birtherism, promoted by no less than the son of Billy Graham, Franklin.

[E]vangelicals have worked to make a good show of repenting for racism. From the racial reconciliation meetings of the 1990s to today, they have dutifully declared racism a sin, and Southern Baptists have apologized again for their role in American slavery — most recently in 2018 via a document outlining their role.

But statements are not enough. Proving how disconnected they are from their statements about atoning for the sin of racism, the 2019 Annual Convention of the Southern Baptists was opened with a gavel owned by John A. Broadus, a slaveholder, white supremacist and the founder of their seminary.

So it's not surprising that white evangelicals supported the Muslim ban, are the least likely to accept refugees into the country (according to the Pew Foundation) and, though a slim majority oppose it, are the denomination most likely to support Trump's child separation policy. White evangelicals certainly are not concerned with white supremacy, because they are often white supremacists.

And Trump appeals to these evangelicals because of his focus on declension, decline and destruction, which fits into evangelical beliefs about the end times. When Trump used the term “American carnage” in his inaugural address, evangelicals listened; they too, believed America is in decline. Their imagined powerlessness, and the need for a strong authoritarian leader to protect them, is at the root of their racial and social animus. Their persecution complex is a heady mix of their fear of “socialists,” Muslims, independent women, LGBT people and immigration. . . . . Rhetoric, not morality, drives their voting habits.

All of this has made a mockery of white evangelical protestations about morality and the family. Moral issues once drove white evangelical votes but, first when Obama was elected and then when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same sex marriage in June of 2015, what remained was their fear. Trump promised justices and a return to a time when they felt less fear, and he delivered, at least on the former. White evangelical fealty to [Trump] him is firm. Evangelicals in America are not simply a religious group; they are a political group inexorably linked to the Republican Party.

[P]erhaps we should take evangelicals at their word that they will support Trump come hell or high water, rather than twisting ourselves into knots trying to figure out why.

If one wants to witness moral bankruptcy, look no farther than evangelicals who support Trump.

White Evangelicals: Ignorance, Racism and Trump

A piece in Vanity Fair by a former evangelical looks at three themes that run through today's white evangelicals.  The first two are racism and an embrace of ignorance and the third, which stems from the first two is a strong support for Donald Trump, a man who embodies everything a true Christian ought to find abhorrent. As the piece correctly notes, evangelicals' involvement in politics arose for one purpose: to oppose desegregation and the consequences of the enactment of civil rights laws to end legal discrimination against blacks and other non-white minorities. As for embracing ignorance, be it the so-called purity movement or denial of climate change or modern knowledge of sexual orientation, it all boils down to one thing: anything that challenges 12th century knowledge based beliefs must be rejected and denied. The GOP long played to evangelicals through racist dog whistle messaging and opposition to civil rights for those evangelicals deemed "other." With Trump, these two pillars of GOP pandering to evangelicals has reached its peak with calls to deport non-whites, efforts to fully legalize anti-LGBT discrimination, and the firing of government scientists who refuse to distort scientific data.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

On its face, evangelical purity culture and American racism overlap only insofar as white people are the dominant participants in both. About two thirds of evangelicals are white (although Latinos make up a growing share), and more than 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Evangelical Christians have long made up the Republican Party’s base, a fact that was front of mind for Trump when he selected Mike Pence as his vice president. Still, evangelicals have long professed to value traditional sexual mores; it was telling to see them largely put those aside to support a thrice-married adulterer. It was telling to see evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. claim not just that Trump was a vehicle to achieve certain policy goals, but that he was a fellow traveler.

But that assumes that sexual morality is the primary organizing force for evangelicals. Historically it hasn’t been. Indeed, the origins of evangelicalism as a modern political movement have more to do with opposition to Brown v. Board of Education than Roe v. Wade. American evangelicalism cannot be disentangled from racism—particularly as it becomes further intertwined with the larger religious right.

There’s also a deep psychological overlap between evangelical purity culture and Trumpism. Making America great again and forgoing kissing for courtship both promise an easy route to a glorified past. Both come from a fear of the unknown, an aversion to new experiences, a deep disgust at a perceived other attaining equal footing. (Though in theory purity culture mandates that both men and women remain chaste, in practice the burden falls almost entirely on women.)

In no other pivotal area of life do we insist on the total mindless fidelity that the “send her back” crowd demands. Similarly, for no life-shaping decision do we believe it’s healthy to have the total lack of experience that the “save yourself until marriage” brigade mandates. Team Love It or Leave It also hews to the bizarre theory that less information makes for better decision-making. Both movements are fundamentally invested in embracing ignorance.

Adherents would rather know less, and as a result risk stagnation and decline, than come into contact with information that complicates their view of America as a red, white, and blue “We’re #1!” foam finger. Virginity-until-marriage proponents offer a similar promise: If you don’t know any better, you’ll never want anything more.

Much has rightly been written about the racism at the heart of Trumpism. The fact that Trump voters are motivated by racial animus is backed up by a wealth of research. In the chants of “send her back,” in the fear of an “invasion,” the bigotry is loud and clear. But I also hear the same fear that echoed in the anti-experimentation, anti-sex warnings repeated to me as an adolescent.

America Firsters demand liberal critics leave because those of us suggesting improvements threaten to shatter a closely held narrative. We all search for identity and tribe, but for hypernationalists, their sense of self is firmly rooted in being the tough guy on the winning team. If you’re a member of the long-dominant group in a particular place, your identity may well hinge on an assumption that the place in question is fair, and your dominance therefore justified. Recognizing potential truths in critical appraisals would force much harder, potentially devastating reflections.

Today’s Trumpism also puts the interests of white men front and center, and makes others—women, people of color, and especially women of color—responsible for their dissatisfaction. Trump and his chanting fans have zeroed in on four female congresswomen of color because they rightly see that a multi-tonal sea of Americans is rising to contest their long-held grip on power. The fear that this rise will strip away unearned advantages from whites is just as well founded as the virginity-men’s anxiety that sexual experience would make women more romantically discerning.

Purity proponents, like Team Love It or Leave It, assuage their fears with a demand that everyone else keep their life small—a promise that if they do they’ll benefit, and if they don’t they’ll be punished. The promise-ring peddlers of my youth were afraid for a reason. If girls grew into women who recognized, validated, and acted on their desires, what would happen? We probably wouldn’t marry Trevor from church at 18, for one. We would demand more: a marriage in which sexual satisfaction was a cornerstone; an end to family structures in which men dominate and women serve.

[A]s white evangelicalism has dovetailed with Trumpism, it’s gotten collectively meaner and less subtle, more about explicit dominance and less about promises of happiness and prosperity. What were once racist and misogynist dog whistles have been turned up to ear-splitting decibels.

The racist misogyny that animates the “send her back” hordes is tied to the same underlying values and anxieties that led adults to tell preteens that ignorance and smallness were the secrets to happiness. The same adolescents who heard these messages in high school gymnasiums are now, as adults, grasping at a similar, dimming hope: that if they are effective enough at shaming, threatening, and insulting those of us who want more, we may shrink. And maybe then they can maintain their slipping grip on power.

Poll: Majority of White Evangelicals Admit to Being Racists

I have long argued that there is a very large overlap between white supremacists and white evangelical Christians.  In the case of Southern Baptists, one need only look at the denomination's history - i.e., it was formed because of its member churches' support for the continuation of slavery - to grasp that this is a racist denomination.  As for the pretend "family values" organizations like Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and The Family Foundation here in Virginia - they are mostly lily white organizations that support anti-minority Republican policies. Now, we have a Public Religion Research Institute survey - the 9th annual American Values Survey - that confirms that white evangelical Christians are anti-immigrant, support horrible family separations for immigrants and are anti-racial diversity.  They have turned Christ into a "White Jesus" and pretty much have a "fuck everyone else" attitude towards anyone who is different be they poor, elderly, refugees or children.  Indeed, they are exhibit 1 as to why one would not want to be considered a "Christian."  Here are highlights from Christian Post:

White evangelical protestants are the only religious demographic in the United States in which the majority views immigrants as a "threat" to American values and sees the country's increasing racial diversity as a bad thing, a new survey has found.

A little over a week before the 2018 midterm elections, the Public Religion Research Institute on Monday released its 9th annual American Values Survey.

The research shows that white evangelical Protestants are at odds with all other identified religious groups on many questions relating to immigration, race, the #MeToo movement and President Donald Trump.

The survey featured responses from 2,509 adults (338 self-identified white evangelical Protestants) across 50 states and contained a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

While a majority of all other religious demographics have unfavorable views of President Donald Trump, 68 percent of white evangelicals hold a favorable view of the Republican president. Meanwhile, 80 percent of black Protestants, 75 percent of religiously unaffiliated, 74 percent of Hispanic Catholics, 73 percent of non-Christian religious Americans, 52 percent of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics hold a negative opinion of Trump.

As data shows that the U.S. will become a minority white nation by the year 2045, the survey asked respondents whether or not the nation's ethnic and racial "realignment" is positive or a negative thing.

The majority of all major religious demographics surveyed said they see the realignment as positive thing except for white evangelicals. Fifty-four percent of white evangelicals surveyed said they see the U.S. becoming majority non-white as a mostly negative trend.

By comparison, 81 percent of Hispanic Catholics, 80 percent of black Protestants, 51 percent of white Catholics and white mainline Protestants see the trend as mostly positive.

When asked about the growing number of "newcomers" to the United States, white evangelicals (57 percent) were the only major religious group to have a majority say that immigrants "threaten traditional American customs and values." PRRI also found that although most Americans oppose a hypothetical law to ban refugees around the world from being able to come to the United States, about half of white evangelicals (51 percent) would support such a law. The data also finds that white evangelicals were the group least likely to oppose a policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. "When you look at the [PRRI] report, [marriage and abortion] are a very low priority for Republicans and for white evangelicals. The real key to understanding white evangelicals is through their anti-immigrant attitudes and fear of demographic change," Wong explained. "They are the group that is most conservative on the travel ban. They are also the most conservative of family separation, which to many people is a moral issue."

"They are also the only religious group to contend that immigrants threaten American values," she added. "It is really this potent mix of nativism and racial anxiety and white Christian nationalism that underlines many of the other policy attitudes that you see presented in this report."

While 69 percent of Americans feel that Trump has "damaged the dignity of the presidency," White evangelicals are the only religious group to have a majority (53 percent) that says that Trump has not "damaged the dignity of the presidency."

"Why do they stick with Trump?" Wong asked during the panel. "Because Trump's immigration agenda is the white evangelical immigration agenda. I think that has become very clear."

I have long viewed evangelical Christians as total hypocrites and this survey adds basis for view these modern day Pharisees negatively.  They simply are NOT nice or decent people. They are as morally bankrupt as Trump himself.

Are Black Christians Finally Realizing White Evangelicals Are the Enemy?

One thing that has driven me to distraction for years is the manner in which black Christians - especially many black pastors - have allowed themselves to be manipulated by racist white evangelicals.  Here in Virginia, The Family Foundation ("TFF") - an organization that traces its history to many of the the white supremacists who backed "Massive Resistance" rather than integrate public schools - has played black pastors for fools for decades and turned them into TFF's trained circus dogs.  Positions on abortion and gays have been cynically used by TFF to rally these pastors to support Republican candidates who once in office are enemies to minorities in general and blacks in particular.  A piece in Religion Dispatches speculates that just maybe in the face of the Trump/Pence regime and racist GOP agenda black Christians and evangelicals are waking up to the fact that white evangelicals are NOT their friends.  Here are excerpts:

But this new administration has changed everything for George and evangelicals of color across the nation. The fact that 81 percent of white evangelicals supported a candidate who channeled white nationalism is not lost on minority believers. Nor is the unending news of travel bans, appointments of white nationalists, mass deportations and racial hate crimes. It has forced a reckoning.

Today, believers of color are redefining their relationships with white evangelicalism in ways that could dramatically shift the landscape. Already, people of color make up a larger portion of the entire American Christian population than before, and church growth experts predict they will make up the majority of the Christian population after 2042. And their values are largely at odds with the white evangelical support for Trump; pre-election surveys showed that nonwhite evangelical Protestant voters, which included black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific Islander Protestants, supported Clinton over Trump by a very wide margin (67% vs. 24%), according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

So while white evangelicals captured the election, they may have lost their fellow believers, the very people who could keep their churches, denominations and institutions from the attrition that has many Christian institutions and leaders genuinely worried for the future. These days, evangelicals of color are talking next steps. Their endeavors run the gamut, but the ones gaining steam include leaving evangelicalism altogether, reframing the evangelical world as a mission field as opposed to a place for spiritual nourishment, creating ethnic safe spaces or staying firmly planted in evangelical community to combat racism from within. It’s too early to tell which will prevail, but the urgency and organization happening within communities of color point to a fundamental shift in the evangelical landscape.

Like these evangelicals of color, in the aftermath of the election and that party, George began to question everything.

For one attendee of a California megachurch, the questions began after her pastor made a sermon joke about how King Nebuchadnezzar’s Median Wall was built because he “got the Mexicans to pay for it.” The audience roared with laughter, but “Jan,”* who is Korean American, and her Mexican-American husband, ushered their children out of the service. Jan asked her pastor for a public apology. When he shrugged off her request, she was shocked. He had been a spiritual guide for years. He officiated the funeral of her son. But now it was as if they didn’t know each other. She resigned from her role in the children’s ministry, and her family has left that church for good.

Jan is one of many evangelicals of color choosing to depart from white evangelical spaces. For some, that means leaving churches and communities while for others, it means not supporting evangelical conferences or organizations that are predominantly white. Many describe these moves as “divestment” from white evangelicalism: they’re moving money, bodies and souls elsewhere.

“For some people, the divestment began before the election,” says Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, associate professor of practical theology at Mercer University and author of Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. “One friend said the election was the ‘final nail in the coffin of my relationship with the evangelical church.’”

She sees firsthand how nearly “everyone is reconsidering whether or not they want to remain under the moniker ‘evangelical,’” including minorities, white people, the young and the old, “because the word ‘evangelical’ has been truly hijacked by a movement to maintain the political, economic and social supremacy of whiteness.”

For those staying, they must contend with a dominant white theology, shaped in the cauldron of privilege, which suggests that a successful life springs from an individual’s good, moral choices alone. It fails to recognize how unfair policies and societal structures harm the economic and social wellbeing of those subject to those systems.

Those who stay must also contend with a politicized evangelical movement fundamentally shaped in the late 1970s by a desire to preserve segregation. As documented by historian Randall Balmer, the religious right galvanized evangelicals into a political movement when the IRS threatened to revoke the tax exempt status of racially discriminatory Christian schools. Today, evangelicals of color staying to “combat racism from within” are working against a deeply entrenched culture.

Shortly after the party, George resigned from his post as the executive pastor of his megachurch. After seeing the white evangelical role in electing Trump and after that toxic party interaction, George knew it was time for a change. His departure wasn’t a rebuke of his church, but of a faith culture that denies its brutal legacy while indoctrinating its followers to perpetuate it.

“I think evangelicalism is the empire that’s about to fall,” he says. “It needs to be dismantled because it’s too powerful and it’s all about money.” Rather than centering the needs of the marginalized and justice work, George sees a toxic faith system that platforms capitalism, unsustainable growth, a prosperity narrative, flashy services and pastors who hang with celebrities. To George, “everything” is at stake.  “We’re at the part of the story where Jesus goes into the temple and flips over tables.”

Better late than never.

The GOP’s Toxic God Squad

Younger generations are leaving organized religion in larger number than ever, aging evangelicals are literally - and thankfully - dying off, and a majority of Americans support same sex marriage, yet one would never get this impression if you listen to would be GOP 2016 presidential candidates who seem gripped in a contest to see who can most prostitute them self to the Christofascists and most make a mockery of the concept of freedom of religion for all citizens.  A column in the New York Times looks at this disgusting phenomenon.  Here are column excerpts:

Another presidential campaign is taking shape, and potential Republican candidates are beginning to speak with extra care — and sometimes with censorious hellfire — about certain social issues. As ever, they’re bowing to a bloc of voters described as Christian conservatives.

But these voters are a minority of Christians. They’re not such representative conservatives.

They have a disproportionate sway over the Republican Party. And because of that, they have an outsize influence on the national debate.

That’s an inescapable takeaway from new data compiled by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that interviewed more than 50,000 Americans last year.

The institute looked at three issues: gay marriage, abortion and immigration.  It gave me a sneak peek at the results, being released in full on Wednesday, and also did some special analyses.

Among religious groups with large populations, white evangelical Protestants, who represent 18 percent of all Americans but 36 percent of self-identified Republicans, according to the survey, stood out as the most conservative.

If you looked at the responses of all Republicans minus this evangelical subset, you saw a remarkably different party.

Among all Republicans, 35 percent favored the legalization of gay marriage, while 58 percent opposed it. But subtract the white evangelicals and the spread changes: 45 to 47. 

Just 39 percent of all Republicans said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 58 percent said that it shouldn’t. Subtract the white evangelicals and again there’s another nearly even split: 48 to 49 percent. So the party’s anti-choice ardor makes sense chiefly in terms of evangelicals.

[W]hite evangelical Protestants “tend to be outliers today on issues like same-sex marriage,” he said.

In terms of allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, 77 percent of Jews and at least 60 percent of all three Catholic subgroups — white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics and “other non-white Catholics” — said they favored it. So did more than 60 percent of white mainline Protestants.  But white evangelical Protestants?  Just 28 percent.

[W]hen survey respondents were asked whether immigrants “strengthen the U.S.” or “are a burden,” the only religious group in which fewer people said “strengthen” than “burden” was white evangelical Protestants. The spread was 36 to 53 percent.  Among all Americans, the spread was the opposite, with 55 percent saying “strengthen” and 36 saying “burden.”

Suffice it to say, white evangelicals are a toxic influence on politics and a toxic element in today's America.  It is far past time that the GOP cease prostituting itself to these modern day Pharisees. 

 

Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee - On a Collision Course

When it comes to Ted Cruz - today's version of Joseph McCarthy - and Mike Huckabee who has said he'd like to scrape the U.S. Constitution in favor of the Bible, it is hard to decide which is the more despicable individual.  Both are demagogues and neither of them give a damn about the common good of the nation.  Thus, it may be entertaining to watch them on a collision course as each heads toward joining the clown car of lunatic GOP presidential candidates in the run up to 2016.  The National Journal looks at who their posturing and maneuvering may lead to a collision course full of batshitery.  Here are some highlights:

When Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee were asked to deliver dueling speeches at a secret gathering of America's most influential socialconservatives, both camps knew what the invitation represented: a private audition to be the evangelical movement's presidential candidate in 2016.

They prepared accordingly, and on back-to-back nights in mid-September, the White House hopefuls delivered impassioned addresses to the Council for National Policy's clandestine conference in Atlanta.

he courtship of Christian leaders by White House contenders—"the evangelical primary," as some call it—has become a staple of Republican presidential politics. But this year is different.

After back-to-back cycles in which social conservatives failed to coalesce around a single candidate—resulting, they believe, in the nomination of moderates who haven't mobilized the Christian base to vote in November—evangelical leaders are acting early and with unprecedented urgency. In a series of private meetings over the past two months in Washington, Iowa, Florida, and elsewhere, Christian political leaders have emphasized narrowing their options sooner than ever and uniting behind one candidate to defeat the establishment favorite.

The Atlanta event, then, signaled not just that the 2016 evangelical primary is well underway but that for many leading social conservatives, the field is already winnowing.

"Those are the two," Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said of Cruz and Huckabee. "And they share the same core base, so I do think there's probably only room for one of them to be successful."

Perkins is not alone in this view. Conversations with some of the country's most influential and well-connected evangelical power-brokers suggest an emerging consensus—out of private gatherings like CNP as well as public events like the Values Voters Summit—that 2016 is shaping up as a two-horse race. Even a senior adviser to former Sen. Rick Santorum, who won Iowa in 2012 and is considering another run, admitted that talk of Cruz and Huckabee distancing themselves from the field is "accurate."

[T]he early indicators of a head-to-head contest for the social-conservative contingent could have a significant impact on the Republican primary season. And both the Cruz and Huckabee camps know it.

In recent months, allies of both men have eyed one another as mutual threats in the quest to win the evangelical endorsement—and have even launched early efforts to undermine the other. Cruz allies have suggested that conservatives won't be able to ignore Huckabee's questionable fiscal record; Huckabee's team has questioned Cruz's ability to connect with religious audiences.

There are other potentially viable contenders, but Santorum, the 2012 runner-up, is perceived by many top social conservatives as one of the very few who might be able to crack the Huckabee-Cruz competition.  "And frankly I'm not sure there's going to be much time for anybody else to get in," Perkins said of the strength of Cruz, Huckabee and Santorum, "because I do think you're going to see conservatives very possibly coalesce around a candidate fairly early in the process, while it would still have some significance."

Cruz and Huckabee both have been courting Perkins, who's regarded as the chief rainmaker in evangelical politics. (In fact, during one recent stretch, Perkins said he spent five of six weekends with either Cruz or Huckabee—or both.) Cruz has paid a multiple visits to the early, evangelical-friendly states of Iowa and South Carolina this year. Huckabee has done the same—and, for good measure, is traveling with a group of nearly two-dozen Christian leaders from those states on a 10-day European trip next month.

[A]s evangelical leaders approach 2016 with unprecedented urgency and emphasis on coordination, it appears the decision to collectively endorse one person may come down to two very different candidates: Huckabee, the once-ran preacher with inimitable charm and religious bonafides; or Cruz, the fresh-faced agitator who refuses to compromise or play nice with his party's establishment.

I find both men incredibly frightening.  One can only hope that they will pull the GOP conversation so far to the lunatic right that they will ultimately help the Democrat cause.  

The Barbarism and Obscenity of Sarah Palin and Her Supporters

No matter what else he does during the balance of his remaining political career, John McCain will forever be remembered as having unleashed on America one of the most obscene, barbaric and false Christians to have ever carried the GOP standard: Sarah Palin.  Not only is the woman a mental midget in may ways, but she has pulled many in the GOP base down into a fetid swamp of hate, prejudice and advocacy for torture and war crimes.  Perhaps the only individual as bad or worse than Palin is the monstrous Dick Cheney, a/k/a Emperor Palpatine Cheney on this blog.  What's perhaps more frighten than Palin herself, however, is the fact that (i) her support of torture and war crimes is now mainstream among white evangelicals and (ii) few in the Republican Party have dared condemn her and/or argue  that decent Republicans need to shun her.  Palin - and her Christofascist supporters - has reached a new low in her recent support of torture and equating water boarding to "baptism for terrorists."  Andrew Sullivan takes Palin to task in a post.  Here are highlights:

If you want a classic example of political Christianism – and its active hostility to spiritual Christianity – it’s hard to beat Sarah Palin’s remarks yesterday. I offered a brief response last night, but this obscenity needs to be unpacked some more. And the first thing to say is that a former US vice-presidential candidate did not just endorse a war crime; she endorsed it as routine for every human being suspected of terrorism. And she seems to endorse it as an introduction to captivity. “Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” is a glib statement but a revealing one. 

She believes that torture should be the first resort – a sign of how America treats its foes, a badge of honor. What can one say but that this is a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in violence against individuals tied down by their hands and feet and strapped to a terrifying board in order to be suffocated hundreds of times to near-death. It is the kind of statement you might expect from the Khmer Rouge, or from the Chinese Communists who perfected “stress positions”, or from the Nazis, whose Gestapo pioneered “enhanced interrogation”, i.e. brutal torture that would leave no physical traces. Except it’s worse than that. Even totalitarian regimes have publicly denied their torture. Their reticence and lies are some small concession of vice to the appearance of virtue. Not Palin – who wants to celebrate brutal torture as the American way.

And then she manages to go one step further. She invokes torture in the context of a Christian sacrament. Not since the Nazis’ Deutsche Christen have we seen something so disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite. 

It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism. Rod should know this by now. In the best recent polling on the question, 62 percent of white evangelical “Christians” back torture as often or sometimes justified, with only 16 percent holding the orthodox position that it is never justified. Now compare those numbers with Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion: the number in that demographic is 40 percent in favor in some or many cases, and 26 percent against it in all circumstances. Is this a function of wayward and uncommitted Christians? Nope. Support for torture is highest among those who attend church at least weekly and lowest for those who rarely or never go to church. In America, torture is a Christian value. And some people wonder why I prefer to term “Christianist” to describe these people.

[T]orture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

As I have said before, conservative Christianity has become an abject evil.   Despite their posturing and self-congratulation, conservative Christians are, in my view, among the most immoral members of the population.  Decent people - and decent politicians - need to shun these Christofascists the way lepers were shunned in the Bible.  They are a menace and will be the cause of Christianity's death.