Up against a Crusader

Robert P. Jones is the founder and president at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) which studies our American religious varieties. He's also a recovering white Southerner out a Baptist faith tradition which he believes has a lot to overcome in the way of sexism, racism, and unfounded smug superiority.

The Senate hearing on TV pretty boy and macho poseur Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense infuriated Jones. He concluded:

Not a single senator probed the most dangerous part of Hegseth's background: his support for white Christian nationalism.

Apparently, in addition to Hegseth's history of drinking and sleeping around fathering children, the guy is an acolyte of one of those crackpot little sects which white American Protestantism spawns, led by a patriarch with racist authoritarian politics. 

Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small newly-founded church that is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who embraces a theocratic vision of Christian dominance of all institutions in society. Wilson has written that slavery produced “a genuine affection between the races” and argues that homosexuality should be a crime. Wilson holds particularly rigid patriarchal views, asserting that giving women the right to vote was a mistake, that women holding political office “should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse,” and that women should not “be mustered for combat” (sound familiar?). 

As religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, who has studied this movement for years, points out, adherence to these theological tenets are not optional in CREC churches. Hegseth is a member in good standing and has called Wilson a spiritual mentor, explicitly saying that he is a disciple of Wilson’s teachings and learning from his books.

The Democratic Senators who might have questioned him about any of this (if they were informed enough) were stymied by our ingrained respect for the absolute right of people to adhere to any belief system they choose.

I get it; I believe quite a lot of scientifically unverifiable things too. But just because people adhere to seemingly oddball religious beliefs must not mean that they cannot be questioned about policy implications of what drives them. Hegseth is about to have much influence and some concrete power over the largest element of the national government. It was the right and duty of Senators to interrogate Hegseth about this.

Jones thinks the Senate is about to confirm someone who is committed to overturning the Constitutional principles that enable him to skate away from searching questions.

If it was not outright cowardice, the Democratic senators’ timidity was at best rooted in a desire to respect the Constitution’s important prohibition against instituting a religious test for office. But if this was the reason for their failures during the hearing, it reflects a serious misunderstanding of the purpose of that principle.

The Founders were primarily concerned about prohibiting the then familiar practice of reserving offices for members of religious groups favored by the state. But that Constitutional protection in no way prohibits lines of questioning related to whether a nominees’ publicly professed beliefs and worldview, whether religious or secular, are compatible with the fundamental principles of a pluralistic democracy and the oath of office they will take to defend and obey not a president but the Constitution.

The Republican Party—whose adherents are two thirds white and Christian in a nation that is only 41% white and Christian—has clearly given itself over to the white Christian nationalist vision that fuels Trump’s MAGA movement. If, over the next four years, if the Democratic Party continues to ignore the clear and present danger white Christian nationalism represents, history will judge them harshly for their naiveté and their abdication of duty to our nation in its time of need.

In [his book] American Crusade, Hegseth wrote, “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” With his nomination looking likely to succeed, that yet has arrived. And now, Trump will have his willing leader of an American crusade that will be fought—not just abroad but at home—with the most lethal forces and arsenal of weapons the world has ever seen.

I do not think Jones is being alarmist. Fortunately MAGA has internal contradictions as well as facing democratic (small "d") popular opposition that may constrain what the likes of Hegseth would like to do. Or not.

If the Dems were feeble, there were protesters in the house who Northern Californians might recognize.

Christian nationalism in churches

I don't usually write here about books which I found grossly unsatisfying. Books with which I disagree? Often. Problematical? Sure. But badly constructed, argued without historical context, and poorly thought out? Very seldom.

These last thoughts were my reactions to Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism by Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister, and Beau Underwood, a Disciples of Christ pastor, who run something called Words and Way.  

As anyone who reads here knows, the history and practices through which we express our encounters with whatever we take as God or Ultimate Concern is one of my themes there. Because we are human, these are all within, and manifestations of, our cultures and societies. Therefore, our religious practices and institutions reflect our cultures; it would never occur to me to assume that they sprung full-formed like the goddess Athena from the head of a Zeus nor from the tablets of the law brought from the mountain by Moses. We make what we can with what we've received and do our best to treat it as sacred.

Kaylor and Underwood write with good intent. They seem to believe they are exposing novelties. But so many others, only glancingly acknowledged here, have mined this territory, often more deeply: scanning my own wanderings in this literature on this blog, I found such names of Robert P. Jones, Katherine Stewart, Randall Balmer, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Sarah Posner, Daniel Schultz, David A. Hollinger, Jemar Tisby, Esau McCaulley, Eddie Glaude, Kevin M. Kruse ...

Okay, this book wasn't written for me. I simply had read too many of its sources. Here's some of the blurb for Baptizing America:

How can Mainline Protestants spot [Christian nationalist] practices in their own activities? ... Christian Nationalism ... exists in sanctuaries where an American flag has been displayed for decades, when we pledge allegiance to one nation “Under God,” or when the U.S. is called a Christian nation. Baptizing America critiques the concept of civil religion, arguing that such expressions are far more dangerous than we realize. Mainline Protestant congregations will likely recognize themselves in the overlooked expressions of Christian Nationalism that pop up in the activities of both church and state.

And little as I like this book, the reaction of my church book reflection group to it taught me a lesson. Everyone doesn't notice that the words "under God" in the national pledge of allegiance, flags in the sanctuary, and patriotic hymns are not intrinsically Christian. Some were taken aback to see the secular nationalism of church customs called out. This book helped them to see habitual practices a little differently. That helps all of us focus more on whatever the message of Jesus' life and death might mean. 

To me the Christian nationalist trappings of American Protestantism are simply the cultural detritus of the middle of the last century within mainline churches, a relic of when American empire was riding high. That time is long gone.

• • •

Donald Trump's first presidential inauguration in 2017 evoked a solid protest against Christian nationalism from the Rev. Gary Hall, the retired dean of what Episcopalians deem "the National Cathedral" which as been accustomed to figure in the festivities.

For more than a century, the cathedral has tried to stand in two worlds at once, attempting to be both a practicing Christian church and a gathering place for American civic expression. As the cathedral’s former dean, I believe that fidelity to the former role now requires rejecting the latter.

For much of its life, the cathedral experienced the tension inherent in playing two roles as creative but not potentially destructive.

But much has changed in American religious life over the past 110 years, and the cathedral has found it increasingly difficult to have it both ways.

After World War II, Christians began seriously to reflect on their relations with the prevailing culture. How could our religion square its validation of oppressive regimes (Protestants and Catholics in Nazi Germany, mainline Christians supporting segregation in the American South) with the principles of love and justice exemplified and articulated by Jesus.

Over the course of the past 75 years, it became impossible to see the church’s mission as compatible with its traditional role of endorsing the status quo. We began to see ourselves less as “Christendom” and more like the early church that stood up to Rome.

... I believe Trump’s election has proved that the cathedral’s attempt to continue this religious/civic balancing act is no longer tenable.

In his words and actions, Trump has shown himself to be outside the bounds of all mainstream norms of Christian faith and practice. His often-expressed xenophobia and misogyny, not to mention his mocking of the disabled and admission of abusive behavior, place him well outside the values of compassion and respect for human dignity that mark historic Christianity at its best. It is simply inappropriate to use a precious institution such as Washington National Cathedral to suggest that the church bestows its blessing on a leader so obviously beyond the pale of Christian thought.

The cathedral’s dilemma exemplifies this watershed moment in the Christian church’s role in American public life. The community that claims to follow Jesus must choose between its role as what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement” and its long-standing practice as the validator of the status quo. With Trump’s election we cannot, with any integrity, be both.

If the church is going to be faithful to Jesus, we must (as he did) stand as a force of resistance to unjust and oppressive civil authority. We cannot use the words, symbols and images of our faith to provide a religious gloss to an autocrat. ... I simply do not believe that the most visible symbol of compassionate faith in America should lend itself to endorsing or espousing their shrunken, fearful vision of our national life.

That was then. How much more so now. I doubt Trump will want to take his circus to that historic church this time, but who knows? A cursory search does not reveal plans.

American Jewish life: not acquiesence, nor complicity, nor renunciation

Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer is a comprehensive, brave, and thoughtful attempt to describe the history and evolution of his communal home -- and to raise uncomfortable questions.

I was a little hesitant to write about this book -- this is not my tribe after all. I belong to a different and frequently hostile Abrahamic lineage. But I often write ethnographically about my own kind, for example about white supremacy in American Protestantism or Christian nationalism. So I was interested in Leifer's take on his own problematic community. 

His story is full of pointed questions and not a few Jeremiads, well-aimed denunciations of aspects of American Jewish evolution. I will quote here at length from what I think is the fulcrum of his story:

... We are on the cusp of a new -- and in Jewish history, unprecedented -- demographic reality.

By many accounts, Israel has already surpassed the United States as home to the largest single population of Jews in the world. ... By the year 2050, Israel is projected to be home to the majority of the world's Jews. According to a 2015 Pew survey, by mid-century Israel's population "is expected to be significantly larger than the U.S. Jewish population." ...

In raw numerical terms, the eclipse of American Jewry by its Israeli counterpart marked the end of the American Jewish century. From 1945 until the early 2000s, the long postwar period during which the American Jewish identity as we know it took shape, the United States claimed the majority of the world's Jews. No longer...

The Holocaust destroyed European Jewry, and with it the world European Jews had made. In the aftermath, the United States emerged as the demographic center of global Jewish life, while the new state of Israel claimed to be the Jewish people's spiritual core and its national and physical future. ...

For ordinary American Jews, however, Israel mainly made being Jewish easier by allowing them to jettison the pesky rituals and obligations or religious observance for political nationalism. With assimilation imagined by American Jewish leaders as the only alternative, Zionism's replacement of religion seemed a reasonable means of sustaining Jewish identity in a secular age, and the dual-centered model thus appeared as a mutually beneficial arrangement. Most Israeli leaders, however, imagined this situation as merely an interim one. As they saw it, the day Israel surpassed America as the global center of Jewish life -- when the diaspora would finally be negated -- was only a matter of time.

The emergence of Israel as the homeland of the majority of the world's Jews will mark more than a simple demographic shift -- it will constitute a revolution in the most basic conditions of Jewish existence. Diaspora defined Jewish life from 70 CE onward. Centuries of exile constituted Judaism and gave rise to the rabbinic tradition ... By 2050, for the first time in two millennia, most Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state. It is not just the American Jewish century that will have ended, but an entire era of Jewish history.

American Jews today live in the slipstream of this epochal transformation. The turbulence and incoherence of Jewish life in 2024 owes much to the interregnum in which we find ourselves, the time-space between two paradigms of Jewish existence, increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of Jewish collective fate.

It is a reality to which few have adequately managed to respond. Neither the American Jewish establishment nor the anti-Zionist left offers sufficient avenues for navigating the diasporic double bind. While the former carries on as if nothing has changed, ignorant or inured to the suffering in Israel/Palestine, some on the left hope to escape their condition by fantasizing of Israel's destruction. But neither complicity nor renunciation will work. ...

Leifer sees four main paths forward for American Jewish identity now that the community's century of primacy within the world Jewish community is over: the "Dying Establishment" (think AIPAC, the Israel Lobby), "Prophetic Protest" (think Jewish Voice for Peace), "Neo-Reform" liberal religiosity, and Separatist Orthodoxy. None fully attract him.

The book was completed just days before the October 7 2023 Hamas massacre and Israel's unconstrained devastation of Palestinian Gaza, both the people and the territory. He cannot see his way forward: 

As a Jew and a progressive, I often feel closed in on from both sides, pinched between great shame and great fear. I am infuriated by the crimes of the state that acts in my name, and more worried than I have ever been by the rising acceptability of conspiratorial thinking and demonization of Jews. It often feels like an impossible place.

But it is the place we must hold. ... To change our people, we must be with them. That is our responsibility.

That sentiment should be familiar to any American (which is what Leifer is after all, in addition to being a Jew) who has lived the last 70 years of an ascendent and declining American empire, mucking about the world to the detriment of too many. That too is an impossible place to be. But here we all are.

A threat to religious liberty on the ballot

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. And she is the author of a bestselling account of rightwing evangelical Christian religiosity, Jesus and John Wayne. (Link is to my review.)

Currently on her substack, Du Mez Connections, she tries to figure out how to talk to and with evangelical Christians who are attracted by Donald Trump's promises.

On multiple occasions (and included in the GOP platform), Trump has promised to set up a “new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias” that will focus on “investigating all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”

Promising to “aggressively defend” religious liberty, this plan to go after those “persecuting” Christians will do no such thing.

Instead, the targets of such a task force will likely be Christians themselves.

... Drawing from my own experience, I’ll wager a guess that it will be fellow Christians.

That’s right. If Trump is promising to go after his political enemies, I can only imagine that his Christian nationalist allies will want to go after theirs. And Trump has told them he’ll have their back. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he promised his Christian supporters that if he got back to the White House, he’d give them power: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.”

What does this mean for Christians who aren’t Trump supporters? For Christians who don’t toe the Christian nationalist party line?

Having interacted with more than my share of Christian nationalist types over the past few years, I have a pretty clear sense of what this could look like.

The greatest threat to the Christian nationalist agenda are Christians themselves.

Christian nationalism thrives on an “us-vs-them” mentality in which God is allegedly on their side.

Christian nationalists are not in the majority, but their power depends on convincing ordinary Christians that any who oppose their religious and political agenda are opposing God—and if you oppose God, you are clearly on the side of the devil.

Fellow Christians who speak out against Christian nationalism get in the way of this false narrative, and that’s why Christian nationalists have spent so much time attacking fellow Christians. Those of us who impede their agenda are targeted as “wolves,” “false teachers,” and “Jezebels,” accused of allying with the devil, of destroying “the Bride of Christ.”

I can attest to the ruthlessness with which Christian nationalists treat fellow Christians who get in their way. We’re attacked with vicious lies, slander, attempts at character assassination, threats of spurious lawsuits, and, for those of us who work at Christian organizations, with attempts to get us fired for speaking truth to their power.

When you are deemed an enemy of “the Church,” of Christian America, of God, anything goes.

I know this well. “We can say what we want about her and do what whatever we want to her,” one of their ilk said about me recently. Such sentiments reveal the underlying Christian nationalist worldview, one that thrives on demonizing enemies, often quite literally.

The language of spiritual warfare gives them cover, but scholars of authoritarianism know that dehumanizing rhetoric is the first step toward political violence.

If you care about religious liberty, Trump’s own rhetoric, his campaign platform, and Project 2025 all should be cause for significant concern. So should the behavior of his Christian nationalist allies.

If you are a Christian who cares about religious liberty, not as a mask for Christian supremacy (and a very specific brand of Christianity at that), but as a fundamental right for all Americans and as a protection for authentic Christian faith, then you should be alarmed.

This time around, there is a genuine threat to religious liberty on the ballot. And the threat is aimed at Christians themselves.

Talk about folks who are hard to reach! This author is close enough to them to have more chance than most people I know. Of course, from their point of view, I know the wrong people.

Evangelical women lay bare ...

... perversions of the teachings of Jesus that condemn young women to assaults on their bodies and their self esteem by men empowered by church authority.

The filmmaker, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, has followed up on her best selling book Jesus and John Wayne by collecting these testimonies on film. It's well worth the time of all of us, even if not part of this religious tendency or any religious tendency. This is a short [29 minutes] video that unmasks the intense misogyny which goes along with Christian nationalism and abuse of power. You don't have to be evangelical to know about that.

I am reminded of what South African women sang against apartheid: "You have struck a woman; you have struck a rock ..."

Where religious voters might to be found

Peter Wehner was a speech writer for three Republican presidents and is a prominent voice in evangelical Christian conservatism. He sees Donald Trump's latest efforts to run away from the backlash against the work of his anti-abortion court appointments -- and sees the demise of the anti-choice movement. 

Trump has done what no Democrat—not Bill or Hillary Clinton, not Mario Cuomo or John Kerry, not Joe Biden or Barack Obama, not any Democrat—could have done. He has, at the national level, made the Republican Party de facto pro-choice. Having stripped the pro-life plank from the GOP platform, having said that Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban on abortion after six weeks is “too harsh” and a “terrible mistake,” and having promised to veto a national abortion ban, Trump has now gone one step further, essentially advocating for greater access to abortion.

But that’s not all. The public is more pro-choice today than it was at the start of Trump’s presidential term, with pro-choice support near record levels. Approval for abortion is strongest among younger people, who will be voting for many decades to come. (Seventy-six percent of 18-to-29-year-olds say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.) Since the Dobbs decision, ballot measures restricting abortions have lost everywhere, including deep-red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. In addition—and this fact doesn’t get nearly enough attention—the number of abortions increased 8 percent during Trump’s presidency, after three decades of steady decline.

So voting for Donald Trump didn’t mean you were voting for fewer abortions. Abortions declined by nearly 30 percent during Barack Obama’s two terms, and by the end of his term, the abortion rate and ratio were below what they were in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. But they went up again on Trump’s watch. Public opposition to abortion is collapsing. Pro-life initiatives are being beaten even in very conservative states. The GOP has jettisoned its pro-life plank after having it in place for nearly a half century. And Trump himself is now saying he’d be great for “reproductive rights,” a position that pro-lifers have long insisted is a moral abomination.

Wehner has long been an anti-Trumper; he catalogues fluently the former president's multiple immoralities. But he felt he could understand his co-religionists for whom being against abortion was the only issue. No longer. Trump has rendered that stance insupportable.

click to enlarge

Meanwhile, historian of religion Diana Butler Bass thinks Democrats trying to peel Christian voters from Trump are looking at the wrong group. It's not the evangelicals (however deluded) who might change their minds; it's the slightly more than half of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics who have been giving their votes to the orange felon.

But if you think religion is still important — and you want to flip religious voters — you need to find those people who are actually willing to change their minds. And those voters aren’t in evangelical churches.

The religious “margins” are in congregations more influenced by nostalgic patriotism than Christian nationalism and in faith communities that cherish democracy and diversity over authority and conformity. Those sorts of Christians don’t believe in one-time conversions or think that doubt is evil or that changing your opinion is heresy. Indeed, they cherish the idea of faith as a journey to follow grace and goodness wherever it takes them — even to unexpected ideas and places.

And those sorts of religious people are more likely to be in white mainline and white Catholic churches than in evangelical congregations — especially in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Will these folks stay with the crazier and crazier Trump in this crucial year? 

Bizarre and hurt-filled: white evangelical culture lived

Louisiana's new law requiring all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments reminded me of an anecdote from NPR reporter Sarah McCammon's The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

Raised in an insular mid-American white evangelical home and community, McCammon recounts a visit by a Holocaust survivor to her communications class at her Christian college.

Many of us in Dr. M's [Dr. Mendoza's] class were moved by [Felicia] Brenner's story of the horror her family endured after the Nazis marched into their home town in central Poland, forcing them into a ghetto. Near the end of the war, they were taken to Auschwitz, where her parents would die in the gas chambers. Out of a family of six brothers and sisters, only Brenner would survive the war ...

... Dr. M confided in me one day after class, some of her evangelical students seemed fixated on the fact that Brenner was Jewish and, therefore, according to our theology, not saved. Why invite her to speak to us as all, a student in one of the classes had later asked, if Jews were all going to Hell anyway? ... Dr. M watched in horror as other students chimed in to agree ...

... Brenner spent the last three decades of her life telling her story about the Holocaust and raising alarms about the dangers of antisemitism. In a grainy oral history video recorded in 1985, an interviewer asks her how she reflected on her experiences after many years. She's bitter, she says, not only at the Nazis but at the rest of the world who'd abandoned the Jewish people.

And she points to the Christians who've enabled and participated in those evils.

"We gave them the Ten Commandments. We gave them their Jesus. What do they want from us?" Brenner asks. "[They say], 'You killed Jesus,' which is wrong; we did not. But they crucify us and crucify us and crucify us, over and over again."

As Dr. M told me this story about my peers, I could feel that something had permanently shifted inside me. ...

Maybe force feeding kids the Ten Commandments might have, in a round about way, have taught this young evangelical some deep moral lessons, but this seems a vicious way to get there.

McCammon's Exvangelicals is a very intimate portrait of what it is like to grow up deep within the culture of white American evangelical Christianity. The author emerged to become a respected professional political and social journalist; she combines wide ranging interviews and sociological research with a memoir of her own experience of "unraveling." 

Her story is fascinating, as foreign to me as anthropologists' accounts of "primitive" cultures.

But, of course, the culture from which McCammon sprang is not at all foreign. It is very much a contemporary segment of this nation within which we live and in which we struggle to develop in competing directions.

Another anecdote from one of her interviewees:

Sheila Janca grew up as an "evangelical preacher's daughter" in what she describes as an abusive home in the Midwest in the 1960s and '70s. Any questions that bubbled up to the surface had to be quickly suppressed in favor of "blind faith." ... Janca remembers the humiliation of finally discovering, during a nursing school class, that men weren't actually missing a rib. Taking her cues from the creation story in Genesis, she'd believed that because God made Eve from Adam's rib, men had a different anatomy ...

That's pretty out there -- and still manifests itself all too often when red state legislators try to explain anything about female anatomy while prohibiting reproductive choice.

At once point, contemplating evangelicals' embrace of racism, Trump, and homophobia, McCammon finds herself wondering:

That made me think about my own parents, and [other] parents... How do you weigh someone's "good intentions" against the pain their actions cause? And when is it okay to be furious?

She sees child abuse in the strict parenting enjoined by evangelical leaders. She meets people who've left these faith byways -- the exvangelicals of the title -- who are recovering from religious trauma arising from apocalyptic vistas of Hell and a Last Judgment. Therapists report that an upbringing in this religious culture results in people who can never feel safe. However

... leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life's most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of "answers" -- about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you're sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It's often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve the community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world.

In this "wilderness," she finds new community among other exvangelicals. She reports that many reach a sort of truce with parents and other relatives who think they are going to Hell: they just avoid conversation.

There's a lot my own parents and I don't talk about, that we can't talk about. When we have tried over the years, the conversations inevitably end in misunderstandings, tears, and an everwidening distance. They spent years building a world for me that was intended to protect my spiritual safety and warning me not to leave it, only for me to feel anything but safe inside.

She goes on:

... Like so many exvangelicals I've spent much of my adult life slowly crawling away, trying to hang on to something for dear life, often feeling like a wrecked -- or shipwrecked -- soul, swimming for solid ground. Even now in middle age, nearly two decades out of that world, the nightmares still haunt me, as they do so many others. ...

... the evangelical impulse -- the idea that "people need the Lord," that we have been given a unique understanding of the Truth about the most complex questions about reality, and which we must impose through persuasion or coercion -- has never made much sense to me when I survey the complexities of the world, and the diversity of experiences and points of view. Even worse, that way of thinking seems to be at the root of so many evils that have been perpetuated throughout human history by religious fundamentalists and other extremist ideologues. I fear the same impulse is currently laying the groundwork for irreparable harm in our country and the world, and I fear that some of the people I have known and loved, and who've loved me, are being persuaded to aid and abet that evil.

... what mission can I subscribe to in good conscience, as an exvangelical? ... Grandpa noted that the purpose of life was something Jesus had also worried about. His advice was simple, even biblical: help others.

I'll give a plot point away here: it helps to have a gay non-believing grandfather.

This is a complicated, horrifying, and impressive book; highly recommended.

On the well organized perversion of Christian attachments

For too long now America's Christian nationalist movement has been misunderstood and underestimated. Most Americans continue to see it as a cultural movement centered on a set of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, preoccupied with symbolic conflicts over monuments and prayers. But the religious right has become more focused and powerful even as it is arguably less representative. It is not a social or cultural movement. It is a political movement, and its ultimate goal is power.

Five years ago, Katherine Stewart published her exploration of the movement infrastructure of Christian nationalist right, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

The book is a tour of that infrastructure, built, in Stewart's telling, by power hungry political entrepreneurs out of a culturally narrow -- and very white -- religiosity.

The Christian nationalist movement is not a grassroots movement. Understanding its appeal to a broad mass of American voters is necessary in explaining its strength but it is not sufficient in explaining the movement's direction. It is a means through which a small number of people -- quite a few of them residing in the Washington, D.C., area -- harness the passions, resentments, and insecurities of a large and diverse population in their own quest for power. ... From the perspective of the movement's leadership, vast numbers of America's conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party ...

Stewart seems to have had little difficulty infiltrating and observing the components of the movement. She reports on clergy trainings where Protestant pastors are taught how to mobilize their flocks to vote and work for the most wackadoodle Republicans, those who seek to repel "the humanists" and "the homosexual agenda."  

She visits megachurch leaders who make a very good living out of preaching intolerance and organizing for their own power. 

She adopts Randall Balmer's thesis that outlawing abortion became a central issue for Christian nationalists because their real beef -- racially segregated schools denied federal funding -- didn't sell as well.

Stewart reports her own experience of heavy bleeding while pregnant with a wanted child, being transported to a Catholic hospital, being left to hemorrhage alone on a gurney until she went into shock, and only being given a necessary abortion to save her life when she had lost 40 percent of her blood. This was long before Dobbs -- Catholic doctrine has long readily dictated what became a pillar of a broader Christian nationalism.
 
She introduces readers to disciples of the fascist monarchist R.J. Rushdoony who gave the movement a pseudo-intellectual gloss.

Perhaps the most obvious paradox of Christian nationalism is that it preaches love but everywhere practices intolerance, even hate. Like Rushdoony the man, members of the movement are often kind in person. They love and care for their children, volunteer in their communities, and establish long friendships -- and then they seek to punish those who are different.

The Christian nationalist movement has made up and adopted a dense false story of the United States, propagated by an unqualified charlatan of history named David Barton. This fanciful hash undergirds their anti-democratic aspirations. Most likely our crackpot Supreme Court justices get their "originalist" notions of the American past from this current.

This is all convincingly reported, fluidly written journalism about some of the scariest people now in the MAGA fascist base.

I had issues with some of Stewart's framing. She treats the mechanics of how Christian nationalist leaders activate their followers as a kind of conspiracy. Trainings in messaging and how-tos for activism are always the stuff of getting groups of people moving for collective power. This is very American. As a community and electoral organizer myself, I see movement techniques as simply how you get a lot of people engaged and effectual. But for Stewart, as perhaps for most Americans, the process is novel. Since she loathes and fears Christian nationalist ends, she slides easily into seeing organizing methods as simply evil plots.

Some of this book feels a little dated after only five hard years of MAGA. But it is still a smart window into white Christian nationalism and we only need more such understanding today.

This is not a Christian nation

If it were, neither of these tidbits from mainstream media would have been considered necessary explanation by their editors. I trust my many Christian readers will find these as horrifying, yet also humorous, as I did.

A bipartisan push in Congress to enact a law cracking down on antisemitic speech on college campuses has prompted a backlash from far-right lawmakers and activists, who argue it could outlaw Christian biblical teachings. ...

... in trying to use the issue as a political cudgel against the left, Republicans also called attention to a rift on the right. Some G.O.P. members said they firmly believe that Jews killed Jesus Christ, and argued that the bill — which includes such claims in its definition of antisemitism — would outlaw parts of the Bible. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said she opposed the bill because it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” -- New York Times

This one is even more reflective of our times; TPM readers are -- correctly I think -- assumed to need cultural education to understand why many Christians might indulge in antisemitism. Hence these explanatory paragraphs:

Christ, who Christians revere as the son of God, was a Jewish religious figure who lived in the ancient Roman province of Judaea, which was largely located in what is currently Israel and the Palestinian territories. His teachings and growing following caused tensions with the established Roman and Jewish religious leaders in the province. Christ was ultimately crucified in the first century by the province’s Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

While some Jewish religious leaders and people in the province urged on the crucifixion, it was ordered by the Roman leader. The Christian Bible also describes many Jews who were distressed by Christ’s execution. -- Talking Points Memo

This country has come a long way toward genuine pluralism. We Christians are some among many. It's on that basis that I can like this country. Antisemitic loosely Bible-derived beliefs are dangerous to humanity. It's part of our job to combat the wackadoodles in our own tribe.

An unexpected source of support for US aid to Ukraine

How about some elements of the religious right?

Most of us who don't live their world miss nuances and small fissures in evangelical support for Trumpism. These aren't our people and their information diet is not ours.

But informed observers think that Republican Congressional Speaker Mike Johnson's willingness to allow a majority vote for aid to Ukraine derived, in part, from rightwing Christians' awareness that Russian invaders are persecuting their kind. Russia wants to impose a Russian flavor of Orthodox Christianity under the Moscow Patriarch. 

Historian of Christian religion Diana Butler Bass has flagged the resulting conflict:

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson pushed through aid to Ukraine ..., it did more than green-light funds to support the Ukrainians. In recent weeks, he changed from hard-core opposition to supporting Ukraine to championing its cause. His actions were, of course, political and personal, but they also signal a genuine conflict within American evangelicalism, one that could come to have ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections.

... While 77% of evangelicals supported Ukraine when Russia invaded, that enthusiasm eroded over the next two years. ... In general, American evangelical public opinion became clouded. It appears that in the last two years, the more evangelicals committed to Christian nationalism as a political movement, the more they began to back away from Ukraine and re-embrace Vladimir Putin. As a result, evangelical opposition to Ukraine and support for Russia essentially took over the issue. ... By November 2023, however, pro-Ukraine groups figured out the key to American aid in their war was swaying evangelicals. ...

The number of stories about Russian persecution of evangelicals appearing in the religion press increased. A good example of this can be found in The Baptist Press — their Ukraine coverage increased in its political content, urgency, and frequency beginning in the autumn of 2023 through this spring.

 Sarah Posner is a leading student of America's religious right. She sees Mike Johnson shoring up his base against purer nihilists like Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Greene and her fellow ideologues may want to tread carefully. There is a growing backlash on the Christian right against the move to oust Johnson. While Greene’s MAGA influencer antics garner significant media attention, people with longtime clout in the evangelical political trenches, including Johnson himself, have been waging a quiet but scathing war against her in Christian media. The GOP’s evangelical base — vital to Republican hopes in the fall — is hearing that Greene is groundlessly attacking a godly man and imperiling the party’s election chances, thus bringing (in Johnson’s words) the Democrats’ “crazy woke agenda” closer to fruition. 

Worship in a Baptist congregation in the village of Gat in Ukraine. (Photo: European Baptist Federation)

Meanwhile, divisions over Russian persecution of Ukrainian Baptists and others have come to the American home front. Catherine Wanner, a professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, explains:

I'm a professor at Penn State ... so I live in rural central Pennsylvania, where there happens to be a Baptist mega church. It used to be called the Russian Baptist Church – they changed their name after 2022. They are now the Salvation Baptist Church. The majority of members are either Ukrainians, Russians, or Russian speakers, and this community itself has fractured; it has divided in two. While there was universal agreement that the war should be condemned in no uncertain terms and that Russia is the aggressor in this case, the issue that prompted this community to split was over how one should pray for suffering co-religionists.

The Russians and the Russian speakers argued that the restrictive atmosphere in Russia was such that there was immense suffering among Russian Baptists in Russia, and so the suffering of Russian Baptist should be equated with Ukrainian Baptists, and the two should be prayed for on equal terms. The Ukrainians, those from Ukraine, said no. The suffering of Ukrainians is primarily at the hands of their Russian brethren, who are waging war and shelling Ukrainians every day and destroying Baptist communities throughout Ukraine.

And so, it was over the issue of how to recognize the suffering of both Baptists in Russia and Baptists in Ukraine that prompted this community to experience conflicts such that they split. This is my way of saying that these conflicts are not limited to the occupied territories in Ukraine where they are most acutely experienced, but they reverberate in communities in rural central Pennsylvania, which has a significant number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and specifically from Ukraine – as does our neighboring state, Ohio, and Michigan beyond it. 

The U.S. religious right is paying attention to such divisions, to the benefit of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. Can the rest of us listen up as well?

"So it goes ..."

A bit from the author Margaret Atwood while I'm getting settled on the East Coast. She's become fascinated by the French Revolution; she suspects its experiments with religion have something to tell us.

1. It’s very difficult to do away with religion altogether. You may attempt to abolish one kind, as the Revolution did, but then up pops another one — Goddess of Reason or whatever — and then another, Cult of the Supreme Being. If you’re going to have a religion, at least let’s hope it’s one that’s interested in kindness and mutual help, not just chopping people’s heads off and drowning them.

2. Civil wars are bad, but religious civil wars are worse, because people commit atrocities in the belief that they are being virtuous.

3. State religions are not consistent with democracy. They aren’t even consistent with religion, spiritually understood. The United States put freedom of worship into the Constitution so there wouldn’t be any attempts to force the United States into a state religion. They didn’t want religious civil wars of the kind that had been plaguing Europe since the Gutenberg printing press had given rise to splinter groups and factions.

4. There’s a movement at present to force a state religion onto the United States. If I were you I would resist it.

More on the Cult of Reason here. James Ford, a Buddhist writer, observes:

Perhaps, of course, what could have been a very interesting experiment in rational religion devolved quickly into mob reactions to the excesses of the Roman church, and mainly featured acts of desecration, quickly descending into bad theater, and more blood spilled on the ground.

Short lived, the atheistic cult of the goddess was suppressed by order of Maximillien Robespierre as he secured power, who was himself a deist, and who wanted a cult of the supreme being instead of the atheistic cult of reason…

As the great Kurt Vonnegut once observed, “So it goes…”

What's wrong with these people? -- part the nth

Tim Alberta's The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism is yet another stab at a question I can't seem to let go of -- what's wrong with the subset of U.S. Christians who make up the base of Donald Trump's ugly cult following?

I wrote about Diana Butler Bass' theological insights on the matter in a previous post and that holds up.

But Alberta's exploration of the conundrum is more intimate: Bass left evangelical Christianity a long time ago; Alberta comes from deep within the evangelical culture. His admired, recently deceased father was a successful megachurch builder and pastor. Yet the son can't square the sort of Christianity that has taken over American evangelicalism with his own faith, let along his observations as a journalist. So he uses his professional journalistic acumen and personal connections to draw a detailed, nuanced picture of a white American evangelical Christianity which has gone off the rails and rushed headlong into a Trumpist swamp.

As Alberta explained in The Atlantic (his employer) during his book launch:

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that God took on flesh in order to model servanthood and self-sacrifice; I believe he commanded us to love our neighbor, to turn the other cheek toward those who wish us harm, to show grace toward outsiders and let our light shine so they might glorify our heavenly Father.  

Not all professing Christians bother adhering to these biblical precepts, but many millions of American believers still do. It is incumbent upon them to stand up to this extremism in the Church.

Yet the responsibility is not theirs alone. No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society—none—without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture. This Christmas, I pray it might be so.

Alberta begins his book with interviews with Chris Winans, the religious leader who succeeded his father at what had been his childhood congregation. Winans tells of elders that young Tim had known all his life drifting away to aggressively MAGA churches. He sadly concludes that he knows what has become of his former members:

"Too many of them worship America. ...  At its root, we're talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. ... If you believe that God is in covenant with with America, then you believe -- and I've heard lots of people say this explicitly -- that we're a new Israel. ... you view America as a covenant that has to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we are called to be."

Alberta used his professional journalistic access to observe and describe evangelical churches across the country and also MAGA movement para-religious formations like Turning Point USA and Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition. Mostly he is appalled; repeatedly he is able to get evangelical pastors who know better to confess that they must stifle their convictions for fear of losing their people. 

In wide ranging interviews with ordinary churchgoers, he finds a dangerous underlying crevasse:

To be sure, plenty of those evangelicals had always cared more about power than principle ... But there was something deeper at work. What I'd personally encountered during those five years wasn't just an increased appetite for power. It was a sudden onset of dread. ...

There's a reason scripture warns us so often and so forcefully against fear. It's just as powerful as faith. But whereas faith keeps our eyes steadily fixed on the eternal, fear disrupts us, disorients us, drives us to prioritize the here and now. Faith is about preserving our place in the body of Christ; fear is about protecting our own flesh and blood ... No one should be surprised to see politicians and political hacks utilizing something so powerful in the name of winning an election. ...

Simply put, American evangelicals cannot let go. They cannot detach themselves from national identity or abandon the notion that fighting for America is fighting for God. Hence the creeping allure of "Christian nationalism."... Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary.

Of course individuals are ultimately responsible for their own choices, but Alberta blames Donald Trump for exploiting the weaknesses of evangelical faith formation and practice to turn many churches into outposts of his political cult.

... his legacy in the sweep of western Christendom was already secure. More than any figure in American history, the forty-fifth president transformed evangelical from spiritual signifier into political punch line, exposing the selective morality and ethical inconsistency and rank hypocrisy that had for so long lurked in the subconscious of the movement. ... Speaking only for myself, Evangelical has become an impediment to evangelizing.

[Trump's] imprint on evangelicalism would endure. The forty-fifth president had foundationally altered the expectations and incentive structures within American Christendom. He had persuaded the churchgoing class that it was better to win with vice than to lose with virtue. He had blinded believers to the means and fixed their eyes on the ends. Most significantly, he had shown evangelicals that their movement need not be led by an evangelical.

... The forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry -- long latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism -- were destroying the evangelical church. I had seen it for myself, over the past six years, in every corner of the country. Pastors had walked away from the ministry. Congregations had been shuttered by infighting. Collective faith communities and individual relationships had been wrecked. ... [Trumpist political operatives like Charlie Kirk] did not concern themselves with the credibility of the Christian witness. Churches were not a bride to be loved, but a battlefield to be conquered.

This was nothing less than a war for the soul of American Christianity. And church by church, believer by believer, it appeared that Kirk and his allies were winning. This wasn't just because their side had more resources to deploy and fewer ethical guidelines to observe. It was because they were encountering no resistance. ...

This committed evangelical author tries to find hope for a more Biblical sort of Christian belief and practice. He finds push back on the margins; see also Russell Moore at Christianity Today and some sad pastors. He can see a small remnant:

Having spent Trump's presidency traveling the country, I knew how many sane, serious evangelicals were still out there. ...They are reasonable and realistic, making prudential political judgements that often reveal something quite limited about their core values, their commitments to others, their complex set of religious convictions. ... Their character deserves respect and the crackup of the evangelical Church is not their doing.

But this is not a hopeful book.

• • •

A couple of brief observations: what a world! -- there don't seem to be hardly any women in it, and that's not going to fly. 

And though Alberta is well aware his subject matter is white evangelicalism, he doesn't draw any implications from that. Yet despite limitations, this is a convincing, grimly fascinating picture of a subculture that deserves to dwindle.

Where is Christian nationalism?

The title here is really a secondary question. I should probably start from the framing question: "what is Christian nationalism?" 

The progressive side of our culture is amply supplied with sociological punditry,  historians of religion, and political scientists offering definitions of what has become a signal feature of our American times.

For today's purposes, I think I can go with a succinct definitoin from the (relatively) broad-minded U.S. evangelical publication, Christianity Today.

What is Christian nationalism?

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.

With that in mind,  I can go to the related question here: Where is Christian nationalism?

Click to enlarge.

The Public Religion Research Institute came up with some answers recently, mapped here. Yes, the darker greens look a lot like one of those red state/blue state maps, though with slight nuances -- who'd have thought New Mexico had more Christian nationalists than Utah? Still the general picture is familiar.

But Pastor Daniel Schultz -- a United Church of Christ minister -- who has been trying to explain religious peoples' engagement with politics for a couple of decades, has some interesting takes on this map: 

Christian nationalism should not be ignored or downplayed, but at the same time the segment of the population that embraces it is punching above its weight. Two states—Mississippi and North Dakota—reach 50% support, and only a handful land in the 40s. The rest of the nation ranges from the teens to the mid-30s. That’s a significant minority, to be sure, but a minority all the same. ...

That Christian nationalists are in a solid minority in places like Ohio, Texas, or Florida also demonstrates the perilous position of hard-right regimes in such states. Were it not for gerrymandering and other anti-democratic tactics, their agenda would be firmly rejected. To put things another way: there are a lot more places that could be opened up as swing states on the basis of rejecting Christian nationalism than the other way around.

... it may be the case that, much as it was before the Civil War, Americans are facing a theological reckoning as much as a political crisis. 

On the one side is an aging, dwindling group that asserts that its understanding of God blesses and endorses a traditionalist social order. 

On the other is a more diverse, more secular group suspicious of authoritarian faith and the ways in which invocations of religious values privilege inequality and repression.

The 2024 campaign will be finally [?] a decision about which of these views should dominate and which candidate gives the best expression to authentic American values.

Dan has always been in the optimism business. I find it hard to share his vision that a defeat for Christian nationalism in the 2024 campaign will get us over some kind of hump, but he's right to remind us we're up against a force that is dwindling.

Two meditations on the murder of Alexei Navalny

On this second Sunday of the Christian season of reflection called Lent, I find two of my favorite preachers writing of the murdered Russian activist Alexei Navalny.

Before his death, I had not been aware that Navalny was a Christian. He had placed himself at the dictator Putin's mercy by returning to the Russia he hoped to free after that state had poisoned him. That choice always seemed incomprehensible. Perhaps it is less so in the context of belief that the power of the good is released by a love so strong that killing it only multiplies the amount of love in the world. 

Diana Butler Bass distinguishes between whines of victimization (see Trump and his MAGA acolytes) and taking up the terrible power that is (relatively) selfless love.

Ultimately, a martyr complex is about you, what you’ve lost, what you have sacrificed, your troubles: Look at what I’ve done for others! See what I carry on your behalf. But look how I’m suffering and despised! No one appreciates me! No one says ‘thank you’! You may, indeed, have taken up a cross. However, such adversities can become laden with bitterness — and often become a weapon wielded first at one’s self (self pity) and then at others (manipulation or revenge).

That’s not a cross. That’s a millstone.

But those who find themselves bearing the cross — whether they wind up as martyrs or not — understand that following Jesus isn’t about nurturing and carrying grievances. It is about letting go of what weighs one down to make room for something bigger, a giving of one’s self to love and service to create a different kind of world. You understand that taking this path might involve hardship and trial. You still go — you still take up the cross — not for yourself, but for others.

Taking up a cross isn’t just an inconvenient ordeal, a persistent sin, or annoying demand. Taking up the cross doesn’t mean whining or seeking attention when confronted with trouble. When you take up Jesus’ cross, you choose to surrender the burdens of self-pretension in favor of cumbering yourself with compassion and love of neighbor. This cross puts one in tension with injustice, the powerful, violence, bigotry, and delusions of grandeur. That’s the cross Jesus instructs his followers to pick up. The “yoke” of this cross is ultimately not heavy but light.

For my friend John Kirkley, Alexei Navalny's trajectory provides a "glimpse of truth" -- a fact of the universe in which we live -- as Gandhi once explained in his autobiography. Kirkley says of Navalny:

"It’s fine, because I did the right thing."  One doesn’t have to be a Christian in order to do the right thing.  Christians do not have a monopoly on moral courage.  But Navalny clearly grounded his commitment to nonviolent resistance against evil in Christian faith.  More specifically, [he] trusted in the power of redemptive suffering, in the willingness to suffer for doing what is good no matter the consequences. 

... the point is that suffering is intrinsic to the energetic dynamics of affirming and denying forces in creation, as well as the conscious attention that seeks to intervene in their reconciliation.  Such suffering is not “stupid suffering,” it is simply a given condition for the emergence of life and the manifestation of agape love – a love that acts as a conscious force of attention to catalyze reconciliation.  The suffering of birth pangs is not stupid suffering.  The suffering of the decay of the body over time is not stupid suffering.  The suffering of an exploding star is not stupid suffering.  The suffering of the great flaring forth in the creative fire of the emergence of something out of nothing is not stupid suffering.

Navalny's self-sacrificial choice has released a power we should contemplate. (And, as so often in the history of humankind, it leaves one wondering about what this self-sacrificial heroism means to the women left behind ...)

The recurring question: what's wrong with these people?

What do so many of our fellow citizens see in a crazy, sociopathic old uncle? I mean Donald Trump of course. A majority of us just don't get it. We've got a perfectly good president who is trying to turn the unwieldy ship of state in the direction of uplifting us, materially and democratically. And yet, so many continue to be attached to this incompetent greedy huckster.

Religion historian Diana Butler Bass took a stab at that question which bears repeating:

What I suddenly recognized is that once I too wanted everything to be broken, everyone to be miserable. When I became an evangelical. You know evangelicals — especially white ones — the religious people who love Donald Trump, stick with him no matter what, and vote for him in massive numbers.

They also love making people miserable. Indeed, it is a central tenet of evangelical faith, the entry ritual into community.

In evangelicalism, the first step to salvation is making you miserable. Sermons point out your misery, your sad state of existence, the hopelessness of the human condition. If you aren’t an evangelical and seem happy, your evangelical friends are convinced you are pretending, hiding something, are in denial, or are deluded by Satan. If you ever reveal a doubt or sorrow, they are waiting to pounce — to point out your misery and remedy it through conversation. You must see that you have led a miserable life, made miserable choices, are a deeply miserable person. Misery is the doorway to being saved.

The core of evangelicalism is theological — it reveals a deep, inescapable human problem (we are locked in misery by sin) and salvation from the problem (surrender to Jesus through conversion). The only real happiness is eternal life, the heavenly realm. You cannot be happy or go to heaven without profound sorrow over the misery of your soul. You must be broken before you can be saved. Only a strong Savior can fix you. And, once you have experienced this, you have to tell everyone. Point out all the brokenness, bleakness, corruption, and carnage. Yes, soul carnage. That’s our true state. American carnage. Global carnage.

I’ve heard that sermon a thousand times. Carnage is hope. Brokenness is healing. Blood dripping from the cross, flowing in the streets, saves.

Misery means more people in heaven.

Pundits, historians, journalists — all of them recognize that Trumpism is essentially religious. But religion is more than a set of predictable voting patterns or boxes on a survey. It is a deeply held vision of the world, a shaping narrative in the soul. And this one is utterly clear and simple. No mystery really. To be broken — and to break things — is what comes first. It is the core of American evangelicalism — "You must be born again" — the ritual, the sawdust trail, the mourning bench — translated and encoded into a political movement, a political party, and American nationalism.

You can blame evangelical support for Trump on racism or misogyny. You can come up with a smart, historically informed analysis that makes sense. Those books help. But, ultimately, it is hard to understand because it is about something more subtle, more pervasive, less graspable. It is an orientation, a whisper in the wind, a stern Presbyterian minister explaining how God predestines millions to eternal torment, a half-buried memory of your grandmother singing a blood-soaked hymn over your crib.

... We’re all the South now. Even in a culture where people are turning their back on Christianity and fleeing church (she remarks ironically: Maybe these two things are related?).

There’s no escaping it. We all live in the tormented and ghostly shadow of a bloody, misery-laden story drawn from a particular interpretation of the Bible, reified by generations of prayers and sermons and songs. Now enshrined in politics. The road to heaven is lined with carnage.

They aren’t trying to be racists or misogynists or fascists. They just want you to get saved. They want America to be saved.

Sick, huh? 

Of course, in addition to the prompts from this diseased form of religiosity, this vision also serves our economic system -- one that depends on making winners and losers. Many of us are taught to blame our intrinsic inner failings for whatever lack of success we experience. This is usually bullbleep, but maybe a strong man will save us?

What church ought to be good for ...

In my ongoing fascination with the question of what makes white evangelicals Trump's biggest supporters, this grabbed my attention. 

Robert P. Jones, an indefatigable pollster of American religious byways with the Public Religion Research Institute, picks a bone with lazy commentators: 

Dispelling the Zombie Myth of White Evangelical Support for Trump

... the assertion that unchurched White evangelicals are the most supportive of Trump is not supported by the preponderance of evidence ...

White evangelical Protestants who attend church weekly or more are equally as likely as those who attend church a few times a month or less to:

    •    Believe the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (59% vs. 61%);
    •    Disagree that there is solid evidence that Trump committed serious federal crimes (69% vs. 66%); and
    •    Disagree that the 2024 election of Trump to the White House poses a threat to American democracy and way of life (72% vs. 67%).

Stated most conservatively and plainly: church attendance levels make no difference in support for Trump among White evangelical Protestants today.

... So why does this myth about White evangelical support for Trump, despite the plain evidence to the contrary, continue to be resurrected? My strong suspicion is that this theory serves a psychological purpose: It subconsciously protects a deeply-held American assumption about the positive value of church.

If church attending is a moral behavior that generates positive civic goods, then it should follow that frequent church attenders should be less attracted to a leader such as Trump—or at least to his most racist and xenophobic appeals. Asserting that Trump’s White evangelical support is being generated by those outside the church fold simultaneously resolves a paradox and absolves the church.

I'll take Jones' word for this. I've seen assertions to the contrary -- but this guy has the polling. More encouragingly, Jones' data suggests that Trump's support among all sorts of evangelical identifiers hit a high mark in 2018 and has dropped from the low 80s to the mid-60s. The defects of the Donald are getting more visible every day, even to some people who get their information from the right wing media system. He's a not particularly successful con man and serial lier. This discovery is of a piece with generational replacement; younger folks look about more widely, are more critical, and also less inclined to follow religious leaders.

Illustration by way of Baptist News which is not awed either.

A delight-filled take on a familiar story

Diana Butler Bass preached on today's prescribed Christian Biblical text, the story of Jesus beginning his ministry by calling on the fishermen to leave their boats and follow him.

Fisherman with his catch, San Francisco Chinatown, 2019

[The Hebrew prophet] Amos says, “The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks, the last of you with fishhooks” (4:2). And Ezekiel threatens the wealthy Egyptians who oppress other nations: “But I will put hooks in your jaws and make the fish of your streams stick to your scales. I will pull you out from among your streams, with all the fish sticking to your scales” (29:4, NIV).

Fishing isn’t about converting people to bring them to church. It isn’t about evangelizing the “heathen.” For the prophets, fishing was a radical snaring of the wicked, wrenching them out of the familiar environs of oppression and setting the world a-right with divine justice.

Jesus invited the peasant fishermen to fish for people — to “hook” Caesar’s elite and beach the empire. When he called them, he called them to participate in this prophetic work in the world.

Jesus bid them to angle for justice. They had probably waited their entire lives for such an invitation. They’d been entangled in Roman fishing line far too long. It wasn’t hard to drop Caesar’s nets and pick up the hooks of God.

Certainly not a traditional take. But hey, I like it. I am convinced that, unless we are scholars, we have only the dimmest idea what these old stories mean. Consequently, if we are to be enlarged by them, we have to treat them as poetic prompts to possible truths. That's what she is doing here. The results can be wise or foolish, but we only find out by trying.

How the evangelicals won

Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular by U.C. Berkeley professor emeritus of history David A. Hollinger is one of the most intriguing books I've read in a long time. Hollinger's premise here is that

What counts as "Christian" is always achieved, never given. It all depends on who gets control of the local franchise.

He offers an explanation of how "evangelicalism" won out in U.S. society in the late 20th century. In ordinary speech, "Christian" has come to mean "evangelical."  But this strain of Christianity is itself losing out to cultural secularism which is strengthened by the winners' anti-science and right wing politics.

Once upon an American time, the United States was something like a "Christian nation," in the sense that early white settlers lived in reference to British and European Christianity, even if they belonged to separate tribes or, sometimes, no religious tribe at all. Christian denominations divided, as did the nation, over the continuation of Black slavery in the mid-19th century. Some of them reunited after the Civil War, some didn't. Hollinger uses "ecumenical"  to describe the once dominant northern Protestant denominations -- Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, United Church of Christ, etc. They were the public face of Christianity for much of the country, but, as has always been the case, not for everyone.

Hollinger contends that hegemonic ecumenical Protestant supremacy unraveled in the 20th century for many reasons. One was education:

Differences in education contributed to a division between two families of Protestants that persisted throughout the twentieth century and became even more in the twenty-first. In what historian Martin E. Marty called American Protestantism's informal "two-party system," one cluster of Protestants focused on individual salvation and morality, while another "lost faith in revivalism and worked instead for some transformation of the world." ... After World War II, the two-party system become the ecumenical-evangelical divide ...

He highlights two factors in the divide which I have not seen explicated elsewhere.

1) Educated Jewish migrants escaping European fascism brought world views of equivalent depth and moral seriousness from non-Christian roots. Ecumenical Protestantism recognized equals; pretty soon the culturally dominant parts of the United States came to talk and think in terms of "Judeo-Christian civilization."

2) Meanwhile, ecumenical Protestants who had followed the call to spread the gospel to all nations returned changed.

The rest of humanity was more than a needy expanse, awaiting the benevolence and supervision of American Protestants. ... Within the churches, the missionary witness to the scope of humankind and the integrity of many cultures threatened the old habit of speaking of non-Christians as "heathens."

In Hollinger's telling, just as ecumenical Protestantism achieved its zenith in the anti-Communist, culturally conservative 1950s, it was sowing seeds of its long popular decline.

[It undertook] a multidecade campaign to achieve a more cosmopolitan Protestantism. ... The liberalizers called on the faithful to renounce a number of inherited ideas and practices which the ecumenical elite decided were racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic, unscientific, and chauvinistic, and thus inconsistent with the gospel as it should apply to American society. But these ideas and practices remained popular with much of the white population, within and beyond the churches ... Opposing these relatively cosmopolitan views -- and defined in large part by reaction against them -- were the fundamentalists. ..

... the more control white evangelicals achieved over the Christian franchise and the more they allowed it to weaken democracy and to discredit science, the more comfortable other Americans came to feel in one another's spirituality and and ethnoracially diverse company. ...The secular emerged less as a threat than the sectarians to an inclusive national community committed to democracy ...

Evangelicals seized the Christian franchise; Donald Trump grabbed up the evangelicals; organized Christianity continued on its course of discrediting itself.

Stating my own biases: it's not hard for me to believe that the kind of hegemonic, white, broad-minded, mainline Protestantism that I was raised in was not a Good Thing. It certainly was uninspiring. 

Hollinger lays out how it lost out. There's plenty missing from his account. Catholic religion is not well incorporated in this telling. Nor does he believably recount the attractiveness to many in this country of various other non-Christian spiritual paths.

But this is a very good, challenging book for those of us in a U.S. context who cling to a Christian understanding of the moral universe -- and also to those of us who just want to know where these crazy right wing evangelicals came from.