Elections

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    [post_content] => The true bulwark against Trumpism is at the state and local level.

In the eyes of many locals, Nate McMurray’s campaign was a fool’s errand. He was running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 27th congressional district, where a greater percentage of residents voted for Trump in 2016 than in any other district in the state. District 27 is vast: it includes Orleans, Genesee, Wyoming, and Livingston counties, parts of Erie, Monroe, Niagara, and Ontario, suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester, and farm country; altogether, it is home to over 700,000 people. Around 42 percent of voters are registered with the Republican or Conservative parties.

McMurray is a fierce critic of former president Trump; he champions Medicare For All, gun control, and legalizing marijuana. When he first ran, he lost narrowly to Republican Chris Collins, who was then under federal indictment; Collins later resigned from Congress and pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Celia Spacone, a retired psychologist who was a McMurray campaign volunteer, told me in 2019, “Collins was indicted on felony charges, and people still didn’t want to hear about a Democratic candidate.”

After Collins resigned, McMurray ran against Republican nominee Chris Jacobs in a June 2020 special election to fill Collins’ seat, and again lost by a relatively narrow margin. When McMurray challenged Jacobs in the November 2020 general election, he lost by a much wider margin. (The presidential election boosted turnout across the board, leading to a surge of Republican voters.)

Recent research suggests that the Democratic Party might have benefited from McMurray’s willingness to run in a race that he was all-but-predestined to lose. The mere fact that a forceful, energetic candidate ran a high-visibility campaign in the district mobilized volunteers, energized Democrats, and might even have boosted Joe Biden’s vote share.

According to election data compiled by the Daily Kos, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 25 points in District 27 in 2016. District voters went for Trump again in 2020, but the margin narrowed significantly, from 25 to 16 points. There are a number of possible reasons for that shift, including the pandemic and/or local voters’ preference for Biden over Clinton. But the fact that a Democrat put up a fight was good for democracy—and good for the party. (Collins faced a Democratic challenger in 2016, too, but her campaign didn’t attract as much attention as McMurray’s, in part because her platform wasn’t as bold and Collins wasn’t yet under indictment; as a result, the race wasn’t as close.)

As a candidate, McMurray worked hard and made a point of courting supporters in often-overlooked rural counties. Rural Democratic county committee chairs were especially supportive of his campaign. “Nate brought a lot of energy and passion to his races that really excited a grassroots following,” Judith Hunter, chair of the Livingston County Democratic Committee, told The Conversationalist. “That was a very impressive thing and surely helped candidates up and down the ballot.”

Hunter also chairs the Democratic Rural Conference of New York State, which represents New York’s 47 rural counties (the state has 62 counties in total). It can be tough to get people to show up to volunteer and vote for down-ballot candidates, she said, and it was easier to recruit campaign volunteers for McMurray because he was running for Congress. Still, she added, “Once people understand what a campaign needs in terms of volunteer power, it’s something a certain proportion respond to, and they’re not going to go away.”

Recently, the progressive organization Run For Something partnered with data firms Kinetic21 and BlueLabs to analyze the effect of down-ballot races on Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election. They found that contested state legislative races—those in which both Democrats and Republicans ran, rather than just Republicans—yielded a small but notable (0.3-1.5 percent) boost for Biden. Even when a down-ballot Democrat loses, the fact that they bothered to run can benefit a presidential candidate. This is known as the “reverse coattails” effect—the reverse happens when a down-ballot candidate rides the “coattails” of a popular presidential candidate.

Ross Morales Rocketto, co-founder and chief program and recruitment officer of Run For Something, explained during a phone interview why progressive candidates should run, even in places where they are likely to lose. One reason is that doing so could boost the candidate at the top of the ticket. Another big reason, he said, citing an old sports adage, is that “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take.” Given how unpredictable the results of redistricting can be, the Democratic Party doesn’t know which races may turn out to be competitive. And given that the most recent census likely undercounted Latinos, Rocketto said, Democrats should rethink their tendency to avoid running candidates in deep-red areas.

“What ends up happening is that people who live in these areas only see Democrats as the caricatures they are on Fox News or Parler or Infowars or other conservative media outlets,” he said. “But when you have a candidate there, going to their door, they get to see one of their neighbors—somebody who actually lives in their community and likely shares some of their values—talking about another way [to address local problems].” It’s especially effective, Rocketto noted, when candidates stay focused on local issues. Rocketto sees ensuring that Democrats run for local office even in districts where they have little chance of winning as part of the long-term work necessary to reverse “some of the polarization that we currently see.”

In 2016, Leah Greenberg cofounded the progressive organization Indivisible, which she now co-directs, to help counter Trump’s agenda. Greenberg, whose family is from small-town Alabama, has also spoken about how powerful it can be for residents of red and/or rural areas to encounter self-identified progressives in their communities. Democrats who live in red states sometimes compare the experience of revealing their politics to friends and neighbors to LGBTQ peoples’ experience of “coming out.” As Hannah Horick, who chairs the Ector County Democratic Party in Texas, told Politico in 2020, a number of West Texas Democratic organizers are also openly LGBTQ. According to Horick, a friend once told her it was harder to come out as a Democrat in West Texas than it was to come out as gay.

Running as a Democrat in places that have historically been hostile to Democrats is less quixotic than it used to be. This is partly because voters of color have grown as a share of the electorate in recent years, while white voters, who are likelier to support Republicans, have declined. Hispanic voters account for increasingly large shares of the electorate, particularly in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, and Nevada, and red states like Texas. And thanks to the extraordinary efforts of local organizers and pro-voter registration, anti-voter suppression groups like Fair Fight, around 130,000 more black people registered to vote in Georgia in 2020 as compared with 2016.

The GOP has sought to counteract demographic shifts and efforts to expand the electorate by making it harder to vote. Since the record turnout of the 2020 election, Republican legislators have proposed over 250 laws that would limit mail-in, early, and Election Day voting in 43 states throughout the country. In March, Georgia’s Republican governor made it a crime to distribute food or drink to voters as they wait in line to cast their ballots. A recent Washington Post analysis characterized Republican efforts to restrict voting as “potentially…the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.”

Steve Phillips, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, has long argued that the key to making Democratic gains in Republican strongholds is to register and mobilize voters, specifically black and Latino voters, most of whom vote Democratic. Millions of eligible voters, including many people of color, did not vote in 2016 or 2020. Youth turnout “surged” in 2020—53 percent of eligible young voters (ages 18 to 29) voted in 2020, versus 45 percent in 2016—but that still means nearly half stayed home. A perennial fight within the Democratic Party is whether to focus on winning over swing voters or mobilizing eligible voters who never or rarely vote, most of whom would theoretically vote Democratic.

Yet it would be short-sighted to assume that a diversifying electorate will eventually ensure that the Democrats remain in power indefinitely. In a country as large, diverse, and gerrymandered as the United States, the Party cannot rely on voters of color and/or young voters alone. Political demographer Ruy Teixeira recently reflected on a book he cowrote with John Judis in 2002, in which the two analysts posited that demographic changes in the U.S. would benefit the Democratic Party. “Democrats should take advantage of a set of interrelated social, economic and demographic changes, including the growth of minority communities and cultural shifts among college graduates,” he wrote of the book’s central argument, adding, “But we also emphasized that building this majority would require a very broad coalition, including many voters drawn from the white working class.”

That crucial nuance, Teixeira said, was lost. Instead of cultivating support among multiple groups at once, including working-class people of all races, “many Democratic pundits, operatives and elected officials have falsely come to believe that demographics are destiny.”

Ideological, ethnic, and generational differences within communities of color make it unwise to take these voters for granted. Just over a third of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters backed Trump in 2020, with the former president also gaining support among Latino and Black male voters. Conversely, as Nate Cohn noted in a recent analysis for The New York Times, Democrats have made gains among white voters in recent years, and Republicans can no longer take that constituency for granted.

None of these shifts happened overnight. That’s why dedicated and appealing candidates, especially those running for local office, can gradually increase Democratic viability in conservative areas. Even if they lose the first time, or the first couple of times, their campaigns can make a difference. In local races, if a candidate is known, trusted, and has a plan to improve their neighbors’ daily lives, that often matters more than their stance on national issues. Run For Something asks candidates seeking its endorsement whether or not they agree with a series of statements on racial justice, income inequality, immigration reform, LGBTQIA+ and gender equality, climate change, and gun violence. But candidates who emphasize local issues, Rocketto said, “tend to do better than folks who allow their races to become nationalized.”

Marché Johnson lost her first city council race in Montgomery, Alabama by just six votes, then ran again and won by 174 in April. At the end of the day, she told me, it’s everyday issues that matter the most. “Everyone needs their trash done on time, everyone needs their roads cleaned, everyone needs their lights up,” she said. “So I focus more on the problems and getting viable solutions.”

Raising money is one of the main challenges progressive candidates face in places where the Democratic Party is virtually nonexistent. “The issue this always comes down to is resources,” Rocketto said, “and competition for those resources.” The money, he said, is there, but it tends to go to high-profile candidates in widely watched races, rather than to local candidates whose races cost less and who are better-positioned to win with adequate support.

“If the Party had been treating state legislative elections with the same level of priority that we treated the U.S. Senate over the last 10 years, we probably wouldn't be struggling with [state-level voter suppression bills] today,” Rocketto said. It’s easy to convey the urgency of beating Trump, he added, acknowledging that doing so was equally critical to the Democratic agenda. It’s harder to explain that the true bulwark against Trumpism is at the state and local level. “People actually do care about this work,” he added. “They just don't always care about it with their money.”

Strong local candidates, he said, tend to be “super-charged organizers,” which brings its own set of benefits. He mentioned a candidate who lost a race in a small town in Missouri in 2017, and later harnessed the energy and contacts he had cultivated during that campaign to advocate for environmental issues before the city council. “It’s good for the civic health of a place to have these folks running,” Rocketto concluded, “even if you know they're going to end up losing.”
    [post_title] => How a political candidate can help their party win—by losing
    [post_excerpt] => Even when a down-ballot Democrat loses, the fact that they bothered to run can benefit a presidential candidate. 
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How a political candidate can help their party win—by losing

by Raina Lipsitz

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    [post_content] => Has the proliferation of electronic echo chambers hollowed out our ability to separate facts from feelings?

In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” a seminal sequence in his Republic, the philosopher Socrates describes a group of people who have spent their lives chained in a cave, facing a blank wall. Through an opening above their heads, fragments of the outside world are projected in the form of shadows, cast by a fire. But because they have no knowledge of the true nature of the world, the people chained in the cave experience the shadow puppets as accurate depictions of the forms themselves.

It is one of the most famous passages in Western philosophy and, while its exact meaning has been debated for millennia, one of its central concerns  is clearly the role that knowledge—i.e., information, facts, and truth – plays in the construction of social reality. And, above all, in politics. How can we ensure that truth is the foundation for political decision making?

Plato’s attempt to puzzle through these questions, though written some 2,300 years ago, weighs heavily on the present. Today, we are in a halcyon era of disinformation and propaganda—much of which is state-sponsored. But our contemporary shadow theatre is disturbing not merely for the proliferation of “fake news,” or the widespread belief in hysterical, reactionary conspiracy theories like Q-Anon.

What’s truly alarming is that human beings are being evacuated from the political process. Artificial entities—bots, deep fakes, even artificial intelligence (AI)— are beginning to sway the perceptions of voters to such an extent that they are, essentially, being mechanized.

To be clear, actually existing citizens are still, nominally, forming opinions and casting votes. But they are being influenced by complex, malign algorithms to such an extent that they—we—are at risk of turning into mere push-button appendages. The bots cannot vote, of course, but they have enormous power to shape the perceptions of human voters. This is extremely dangerous.

Rather than living in a “simulated reality,” as tech billionaire Elon Musk recently speculated, we are seeing the dawning of something more plausible and more sinister: democratic politics shaped, moved, and determined by a simulated public.

Consider the case of Serbia. In April last year, Facebook identified and deleted more than 8,500 “troll” accounts which had systematically engaged in “inauthentic coordinated activity” to boost posts by Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s president, and his ruling SNS bloc. They were also used to swarm Vucic’s critics. This army of trolls had been at work for years, creating a “parallel reality where everything in Serbia is great, and critics are simply enemies of the state.”

A stark illustration of this new, synthetic political regime came a few weeks later, when in the context of the country’s parliamentary election campaign, Vucic held a bizarre, virtual kickoff rally. Surrounded by more than a hundred square monitors, ostensibly showing supporters of his government from all over the country—who, in true proto-authoritarian fashion, struggled to contain their exuberance at seeing their leader take the stage— Vucic stood alone and spoke to the wall of disembodied faces for 20 minutes. As the president spoke, he was accompanied by a soft melody that would shift in tenor to match the contents of his speech.


The pandemic forced Vucic and the SNS to abandon traditional mass rallies, but it also gave them the opportunity to experiment with something even better: a totally controlled environment, a panopticon of adoration for the great leader—complete with a stirring soundtrack.

In June came the payoff: the SNS won a crushing victory, securing 180 seats in the 250-member National Assembly. Its coalition partners won another 42 seats. The main opposition blocs boycotted the elections, but the results would probably not have been very different even if they had run. In the 2017 presidential elections, Vucic won the first round with 55 percent of the vote. His nearest opponent failed to crack 17 percent.

On one level, this is the familiar trajectory of an illiberal regime veering toward outright autocracy. Vucic’s control of the print and electronic media, for instance, is something he largely learned from his mentor Slobodan Milosevic. The use of mass media to maintain control and incite violence was not, of course, invented by Milosevic.

But the contemporary conflagration of bots, deep fakes, and extremism-promoting algorithms is more than the sum of its parts. And it is not unique to Serbia. All over the democratic world, large segments of the public have fallen under the sway of illiberal movements and regimes, who have in turn tightened their grip on them by unleashing massive digital influence and surveillance mechanisms. These are proving so adept at creating partisan echo chambers, that they are birthing a whole new form of political society.

Already, large segments of the American public believe, falsely, that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald J. Trump through an elaborate, international conspiracy. That view is reinforced through an expansive ecosystem of right-wing disinformation media. Their stories are promoted by untold numbers of bot accounts that originate both inside and outside the United States.

In this maelstrom, the conspiracy theorists, the fantastical worlds they have collectively (if unconsciously) constructed via social media, and the politically-directed bots and algorithms that signal boost their alchemy, there is the appearance of frenetic public discourse. Except all of it is make-believe, all of it is a kind of synthetic idiocy.

The result of this combination of traditional and emerging forms of propaganda is not merely a more ignorant public than in decades prior. We are witnessing the emergence of forms of social control in (erstwhile) democratic societies that were previously reserved to totalitarian regimes—or science fiction. And genuine democracy cannot survive the production of such industrialized, mechanized ignorance.

Nor can civil society endure such a phenomenon. Our modern conceptions of that term originate with what Plato and other classical philosophers called the polis; meaning, literally, city, but conceptually signifying the idea of an informed, participatory society in which all citizens share the burdens of debating and resolving the issues facing the community. We have never quite achieved this level of enlightened egalitarianism, but the whole concept of modern citizenship, and accompanying theories of its rights and obligations, is rooted in this notion.

What Plato did not quite anticipate is a future in which the polis and the demos (the people) disappears entirely. Not because they have been silenced by a despotic king per se, but because have been convinced by digital phantasms to willingly march themselves into underground caverns, and chain themselves to the walls. And there they will sit, periodically raising their hands to affirm being governed by shadows.

This is more than the reverse of what the ancients believed the process of enlightenment would precipitate. Plato’s cave was an allegory for the process of intellectual liberation. The rise of this synthetic public discourse is dissolving the very idea of the public square and the rational, autonomous public. And it may soon leave behind a world inhabited only by automatons, ones of flesh and blood but of no agency.
    [post_title] => Digital disinformation is driving illiberal democracies toward authoritarianism
    [post_excerpt] => Human beings are being evacuated from the process of politics as artificial entities sway the perceptions of voters to such an extent that they are, essentially, being mechanized.
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Digital disinformation is driving illiberal democracies toward authoritarianism

by Jasmin Mujanović 

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    [post_content] => Simons, who rose to fame as a glamorous television personality, leads an explicitly feminist, radical, intersectional party.

If you want to know how Sylvana Simons came to be the first Black woman in the Netherlands to head a political party elected to the House of Representatives, you’ll need to look back further than her glamorous 25-year career as a model, dancer, MTV host, television personality, and political activist. You’ll have to go back to when she dropped out of school and ran away from home at the age of 14 because there were “rules” she “didn’t agree with,” and then became a single mother at the age of 21, when she had not a penny to her name. 

It is this lived experience that informs Simons’ political views as leader of BIJ1 (“Together”), the explicitly intersectional, feminist and radical political party that she founded in 2016. Simons was elected to the House of Representatives in March, largely on the back of the urban youth vote. 

BIJ1 ran an impressively diverse list of candidates for parliament. Among the top 10 were five Black people, three of them women; a Muslim woman who is disabled; a trans woman; a sex worker; an artist and youth worker; and a woman of Indonesian background (Indonesia is a former colony of the Netherlands). The party’s manifesto breathed intersectionality. 

In April Simons made headlines with a scathing 5-minute speech in the House of Representatives on the failures of the government’s pandemic policies. “It turns out,” she said from the podium in the House of Representatives, “That allowing intensive care units to fill up with the goal of reaching herd immunity is harmful to the economy, harmful to our wellbeing, harmful to our freedom, harmful to our health, and has cost us many lives.” The government’s vaccine rollout had failed, she continued, and her party intended to pursue a parliamentary inquiry into the matter. 


The speech garnered applause and a rush of positive publicity.

For Simons, the pandemic debate was an excellent opportunity to show what her party stood for, and to push parliament to hold the government to account—an obligation she accuses them of having neglected. “What kind of country do we want to be?” she asked, rhetorically. “We propose systemic change. Do you want authorities to crush citizens, or to protect and help them?” 

Sylvana Simons was born in 1971 in colonial Suriname, four years before the South American country won its independence from the Netherlands—where her family has lived since she was 18 months old. She has been a well-known media figure since the mid-1990s, when she was a presenter for Dutch MTV. But in 2015 her fame morphed into notoriety when, as the host’s side-kick on the popular talk show De Wereld Draait Door (The World Moves On), she pushed back against a guest who used a derogatory term for Black people. The backlash was immediate: Simons was targeted with a tsunami of racist, sexist attacks on social media. 

Overnight, the popular media personality became the most hated woman in the Netherlands. The television guest appearances and invitations to give speeches at corporate events dried up, as the establishment rushed to distance themselves from the suddenly controversial Simons. But she told The Conversationalist that she has no regrets. “It was inevitable,” she said. "I had to practice what I preached: speak out if you are in a position to do so."

The feminist writer and activist Anja Meulenbelt chuckled appreciatively upon seeing Simons suddenly regaining some of her pre-2015 popularity in the wake of her speech criticizing the government’s failed pandemic policy. Meulenbelt, an icon of 1970s second wave feminism, was one of the first people to join BIJ1. “Sylvana is audacious; she is not afraid of anything,” she said.  BIJ1 had succeeded, asserted Meulenbelt, where the established leftist parties had failed: “We don’t talk about representation; we are representation. We do what other leftist parties [only] talk about.” 

The praise Simons received for her pandemic policy speech was remarkable for the frequency with which it was accompanied by disclaimers—such as, “I’m not a fan of hers, but..!” or “I didn’t vote for her, but..!” or “In general I don’t like her, but..!”

Simons believes those disclaimers are just temporary. She has the stage now, and no longer needs opinion leaders and journalists for exposure. “People think that because of my anti-racism, my politics are exclusive,” she said, adding that the opposite is true. “My politics aren’t exclusive, but inclusive. I act against power. Against a government and institutions that don’t care about citizens but treat them like tools to keep the economy going. That affects all of us, regardless of the color of our skin. And sometimes that means pointing out that the situation of some groups, like Black people or disabled people, requires extra attention.” 

Simons said that her now-famous speech had been “brewing” for a year. But the fluidity and incisiveness of her remarks reveal that she must have been thinking deeply for at least a decade about the issues she addressed so eloquently. Her words reflected a combination of heightened political awareness and outrage over not only the handling of the coronavirus pandemic but also over social justice issues like equality, humanity—and dignity.

Part of her impact is based on her understanding of performance, said Aldith Hunkar, an independent Dutch-Surinamese journalist who has known Simons for many years. “She knows like nobody else which camera is pointed at her, and at which moment to look into it,” said Hunkar, who conducted a video interview in English with Simons earlier this month. She added that Simons was completely sincere—as well as “hyper intelligent.”

Sheila Sitalsing, a Dutch-Surinamese political columnist for the veteran daily newspaper de Volkskrant, described Simons to The Conversationalist as “sensational,” adding that she has “flawless political intuition” and is “factual, calm, with a sharp eye for the rule of law.” 

Simons is a huge fan of Mona Eltahawy, the uncompromising and outspoken Egyptian-American journalist, commentator and activist, but considers herself to be a “diplomat.” In describing her approach, Simons said, “I can find common ground with everybody,” no matter what their background. “I am not bothered by who you are,” she said. “This has to do with my life path.”

Now 50 years old, Simons became a grandmother last year. Reflecting on her life as a high school dropout and single mother who started out as a TV dancer and worked her way up, she said. “I say with pride that I have hardly any formal education. I wasn’t flattened by a system that didn’t work for me. I overcame institutional hurdles, including racism and sexism, and despite society’s consistently low expectations of me. I learned to make connections with everybody. I consider that my strength.”

But how did that life experience transform into a solidly grounded intersectional worldview seemingly overnight? Where did the theory come from? 

Simons mentions Gloria Wekker, a Dutch-Surinamese professor emeritus in gender studies who authored the acclaimed seminal work on Dutch racism, called White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Wekker joined BIJ1, taking it upon herself to educate the new party leader—and was struck by how quickly Simons read and understood the texts.

 “I asked Gloria which books I had to read,” said Simons. “The books made scientifically tangible what I have lived and felt throughout my life.” 

Feminism is, naturally, a big part of the story. But Simons cannot answer the question of which comes first for her—feminism or anti-racism. During the interview, she chooses feminism: “But one cannot exist without the other and I may choose anti-racism next week.”

Simons’s feminist, anti-racist message disrupts the Netherlands, a country that sees itself as a beacon of tolerance and progressiveness. She is not the only one speaking out fiercely against Dutch racism. A decade ago, the campaign “Kick out Black Pete” started, aiming to abolish the blackface tradition that pollutes the Dutch Sinterklaas (Santa Claus) festivities. And last year the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were numerous and huge in the Netherlands. Momentum was building for BIJ1’s politics.

Surprisingly enough, Simons reveals that 15 or 20 years ago she defended Black Pete from foreign criticism. “I’d tell people to butt out of our traditions, even though I’ve hated Black Pete since I was a child. But I too suffered from internalized racism. You know, we are raised in the Netherlands to say that we don’t ‘see’ color, that it’s all kumbaya, but underneath that layer of kumbaya we deny identities.”

Foreigners, in other words, are not the only people surprised to discover racism in the Netherlands. The Dutch themselves are surprised, too. “Our tolerance was a facade we were collectively hiding behind and that has only now started to crumble,” said Simons.

Aldith Hunkar, the Dutch-Surinamese independent journalist, agreed. “The Netherlands has built this system over 500 years and it still refuses to see the implications,” she said. “It’s learning very slowly. Simons has changed the discourse already, but it reflects the rigid, dismal Dutch mindset that she is not yet on a pedestal.” Hunkar, 58, resigned in 2007 from a position she held for 14 years as a television presenter for NOS, the state broadcaster, after accusing it of racism in its editorial decisions. 

To know where Sylvana Simons is coming from, one must consider those 500 years of Dutch colonial, racist history. On March 31, the day she was inaugurated into parliament, the party gave its leader a present: a traditional Afro-Surinamese religious ceremony, held at a public square close to the parliament building. A priestess offered a libation to ask the ancestors and God to give Simons power and wisdom. 

[caption id="attachment_2609" align="aligncenter" width="840"] Afro-Surinamese ceremony honoring Sylvana Simons (center) on March 31.[/caption]

Simons said the ceremony made her feel honored: “I was carried by the ancestors. As a child of the colonies, as Simba, the chosen one, I was honored. It meant a lot to me but also for the people who brought me to this point. They didn’t vote for a politician but for their daughter, sister, mother, aunt, and it is completely emotional. It was about spirituality, about keeping the connection with the people who gave their lives for our freedom.”


Going forward, Simons will need all her strength. The same election that brought BIJ1 to parliament also handed victories to several fascist parties, some of which have been in the legislature for several years, pulling policies and the discourse to the right side of the political spectrum. Simons hopes to pull them back to the left. “Pictures of the ceremony were shared [online] and those on the extreme-right of the spectrum saw them too. Everybody saw that my community lifted me so high—who can touch me now? It gave me wings. I flew into parliament.”

The official inauguration was short. The office assigned to her turned out to be in the former Ministry of Colonies. “That is no coincidence,” said Simons. “It closes the circle.”
    [post_title] => 'I act against power': Sylvana Simons is proudly disrupting politics as usual in the Netherlands
    [post_excerpt] => A glamorous television personality for 25 years, Simons has made history as the first Black woman elected to the House of Representatives as head of a political party—and one with an explicitly radical, feminist, intersectional platform. 
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A portrait of Sylvana Simons arriving "for a ceremony where Dutch King Willem-Alexander marked the opening of the parliamentary year with a speech outlining the government's budget plans for the year ahead at the Grote Kerk, or Sint-Jacobus Kerk, (Great Church or St. James' Church) in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021."

‘I act against power’: Sylvana Simons is proudly disrupting politics as usual in the Netherlands

by Fréderike Geerdink

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    [post_content] => 'God and country' has become a toxic mix in the United States. Can they be uncoupled?

I  was a graduate student in California when I realized that some white American evangelicals decouple their authoritarian views from the type of jingoistic American Christianity that rose to prominence during the early Cold War. I no longer considered myself evangelical by then, but I didn’t tell most of my family, and I still attended church occasionally, particularly when I visited my parents in Indiana. During a conversation about the “God and country” fusion I grew up with (it is now widely called Christian nationalism), my dad said, “You know, you might be surprised, but Pastor Matt* is very critical of all that God and country stuff. For him, God should absolutely come first, and it’s idolatrous to put the nation on the same level.”

I’ve been thinking about what my dad said that day in light of the response from “respectable” evangelicals to the prominent role Christian nationalists played in the January 6 insurrection, in which evangelicals carrying “Jesus 2020” banners and Christian flags participated alongside overt white supremacists displaying Confederate and Nazi symbols. Instead of asking why the vast majority of white evangelicals have so readily made common cause with white nationalists throughout the Trump years, up to and including the events of January 6, respectable evangelical commentators have now chosen to focus on Christian nationalism, full stop, as the problem that needs addressing in evangelical communities. Conveniently, this allows them to avoid looking deeper at the authoritarian theology that upholds the systemic racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ animus underlying evangelicalism.

Not too long before that conversation with my dad, I walked out of one of Pastor Matt’s sermons when he sneeringly equated Islam with terrorism. I was thus surprised to hear that the pastor wasn’t all-in for God and country jingoism. This was, after all, post-9/11 America, when the Bush administration encouraged evangelicals “to deepen their faith’s embrace of nationalism and American exceptionalism,” according to Anthea Butler, who is an associate professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She describes the period between 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama in her new book, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, as a time in which “the seeds of that racialization [of Islam] were planted.”

From my personal perspective, it certainly was odd to see a display of brazen Islamophobia, which was simultaneously a clear expression of xenophobia, from a pastor who reportedly scoffed at patriotic sentiment. Today, it seems to me that some evangelicals are focusing on the Christian nationalism of their coreligionists precisely as a means of obscuring the bigotry that underscores it, which has deep roots in evangelical subculture and history. In fact, popular author and speaker Beth Moore set the tone here in response to the “Jericho March” that took place in Washington on December 12, 2020, tweeting, “I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.” In a subsequent tweet, she called Christian Trump support “idolatry.” Moore recently announced she is leaving the Southern Baptist Convention, although she apparently remains a conservative evangelical.

While we will have to wait and see how far Moore’s convictions may ultimately carry her, attempts to address the harm done by conservative Christianity are bound to fail if they only address expressions of nationalism. One can see the weakness of this approach in Bonnie Kristian’s February 25 column for Christianity Today titled, “Are Christian Schools Training Christians or Americans?”

The column responds to an article of mine for Religion Dispatches, in which I point that out that many of the Capitol invaders, including the notorious Proud Boys, were animated by ideology that was recognizably evangelical. My argument is that Christian schools, Christian homeschooling, and evangelical churches can and often do foster extremism and radicalization. Kristian admits there is some truth to the claim and argues that Christian schools should address the issue by eliminating the widespread practice of reciting three pledges every morning—to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. Because public schools also instill nationalism with daily recitations of the pledge of allegiance to the American flag, however, she sees them as no better on this front than Christian schools.

In my view, eliminating the practice of pledging in schools—public or private, sectarian or secular—would be a good thing. I don’t think that children should become pawns in their parents’ disagreements about the meaning of patriotism, or that children who feel uncomfortable reciting pledges should be made to choose between participating in the ritual or feeling alienated from their peers. But the issues with evangelical and fundamentalist schools, which are usually called Christian schools or Christian academies, run so much deeper. For starters, the isolation of children in an ideologically homogeneous conservative Christian environment is harmful.

In Christian schools, students are taught that the schools’ prescribed understanding of Christianity is the absolute truth and that it is their duty to help their community gain the political power to “make the nation obedient to God” in accordance with “the biblical worldview.” In other words, they are taught to reject pluralism and to pursue social domination, imposing their sectarian standards of morality on others, primarily by banning abortion and depriving members of the LGBTQ community of rights. Likewise, Christian schools frequently make headlines for racist incidents, which do not arise in a vacuum. Strikingly, Kristian’s article does not once mention the terms “white,” “race,” or “racism.”

Public schools have their flaws, but they are better suited than their Christian counterparts in preparing children to embrace pluralism and diversity. A healthy democratic society is one composed of people who respect the dignity and human rights of those who are different from them. Exposure to diverse ideas and views helps children develop their own personalities and strengths and values. In Christian schools, children are forced to accept “alternative facts” about science and history, and to conform to ideologies that may negate their identities, which can result in trauma and long-term psychological damage (see also: queer people in evangelical environments). On this point I would direct readers to the work of journalist Rebecca Klein, who describes the Abeka and Bob Jones textbooks commonly used in Christian schools as having “overtones of nativism, militarism and racism.” Klein notes, for example, that the textbooks represent Nelson Mandela as a “Marxist agitator” and denounce the “radical affirmative action” of post-apartheid South Africa, in addition to downplaying the harm and long-term consequences of slavery in America.

Cindy Wang Brandt, an author, parenting expert, and ex-evangelical, was educated at a Christian missionary school in Taiwan. She sees a direct connection between conservative, mostly white evangelicalism and the colonialism and systemic racism that she experienced as a Taiwanese child in a Christian school. Brandt contends that it is impossible to separate the way Christianity is taught from the culture and unconscious biases of those who are teaching it. In practice, Christian teachings and interpretations of the Bible “are delivered by human beings enveloped and shaped by their cultural influences,” she says. Brandt believes it is possible for parents to teach children their religion without indoctrinating or coercing them; in fact, she considers indoctrination to be spiritual abuse. But Christian schools are sites of indoctrination, whereas formal education, according to Brandt, should “give a child tools to investigate the world and to find their place in it with their own agency.”

Reflecting on her experience in the missionary school, Brandt writes that she was taught “to become fearful of [her] own culture.”

I was taught to reject our dearly held values of respecting our elders, with Scriptures quoting Jesus saying we should reject our mother and our father. I was evangelized with the gospel of Jesus Christ by white Americans. When they taught us things of the Christian faith, it was always this is what it means to be Christian, without any acknowledgement that perhaps some of their values have been influenced by white American culture. The result is that I grew to understand that to be white is to be godly, and vice versa. My own culture was colonized out of me as a child taught to follow Jesus Christ.

If “respectable” evangelicals want to engage in good faith with people like me, who have left the fold and who write critically about the Christian education we received, they must grapple honestly with the deeper issues of supremacism, racism, misogyny and anti-LGBTQ animus that underlie the Christian nationalism we all saw at the January 6 insurrection. Even if a large number of evangelical pastors and educators were willing to confront superficial expressions of nationalism in their communities, the deeper biases and supremacist theology that animates these communities would remain. Addressing those issues is going to take more than hand-wringing about white Christian Trump support or giving up the practice of pledging allegiance to the American flag.

* Name changed.
    [post_title] => Christian symbols at the Capitol insurrection ignited a debate among American evangelicals
    [post_excerpt] => Instead of asking why the vast majority of white evangelicals have so readily made common cause with white nationalists throughout the Trump years, up to and including the events of January 6, respectable evangelical commentators have now chosen to focus on Christian nationalism, full stop, as the problem that needs addressing in evangelical communities.
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Christian symbols at the Capitol insurrection ignited a debate among American evangelicals

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => This is not a time for unity in American politics. It's a time for accountability.

With Joe Biden finally inaugurated after a rocky transition period and a dubious first for America—a non-peaceful transfer of power—elite American influencers and legacy media outlets will no doubt be tempted to take their eyes off the festering fascism that brought Donald Trump to power. One key constituent element of the toxic brew that became Trumpism is Christian nationalism. It was prominently on display in the January 6 storming of the Capitol in the form of prayers, Christian flags, “Jesus 2020” signs, crosses, and more, and it will remain a powerfully destructive force in local, state, and national politics. Will the media do the responsible thing and continue to shine a spotlight on it?

Given that Biden is now calling for national “unity”—without emphasizing accountability for those who implemented hateful policies, committed crimes, incited violence, and engaged in corruption during the Trump presidency—the belated and modest progress we’ve seen in how major media outlets report on the Christian Right could be rapidly reversed. Americans invested in the health of their civil society must maintain pressure on media platforms to keep their reporting on the right track, which may help to prevent the resurgence of Christofascism four or eight years from now.

And count on this: the Christofascists will not go gently into that good night. They will be organizing, and we must keep the public informed of their activities and plans.

Conservatives, including those affiliated with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project that unfortunately became a darling of many liberals during the 2020 election cycle, have long since revealed their obvious investment in painting Trump as the problem, rather than a symptom of a problem with much deeper roots—one for which they bear much responsibility. If these conservatives have their way, no one will face real accountability for the horrors of the Trump years and their violent culmination—no one except, maybe, Trump himself. Although even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of Trump’s greatest enablers since the 2016 election, agreed not to obstruct  an unprecedented second impeachment trial that will take place in the Senate even with Trump already out of office, it looks like the Republican senators will once again refuse to convict Trump. After all, that’s what “unity” means to Republicans, the ostensible “party of personal responsibility”—no consequences for the destruction they have wrought.

If “unity” wins the day, there will be no justice for the victims of those who, under the auspices of the Trump presidency, violated the human rights of asylum seekers, presided over a grossly incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the concomitant spreading of disinformation, and incited the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6. The reputations of high-level Trump administration officials and associated enablers will be rehabilitated; their lucrative, high-profile careers will be back on track.

Meanwhile, cable news and the major media outlets will likely tread lightly at best around the structural problems in America that give the Right disproportionate power. If this happens,  conditions will be ripe for the rise of a smoother, more competent fascist leader than Trump. The Republican Party remains a bastion of far-right authoritarianism, and, while many Republican leaders seemed embarrassed in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, they are now mostly trying to simply “move on” as if it never happened.

In addition to holding GOP leadership to account, we must continue to shine a bright light on the Christian Right’s anti-democratic ideology. It would be a serious mistake to end the long overdue media scrutiny of evangelicalism precipitated by authoritarian Christians’ overwhelming support for Trump. The contrast of a brash, pussy-grabbing, impious bully with the hitherto “respectable” image of “family values” politics drew constant (if still often poorly informed) media attention throughout Trump’s term in office. But that could change with Democrats in charge of both the presidency and—tenuously—Congress. The Christian supremacism that pervades America’s elite public sphere is too little acknowledged, and it would be easy for many journalists to fall back into whitewashing and breezy bothsidesism in their coverage of authoritarian Christians.

Already, prominent evangelical Trump supporters are attempting to gaslight the public. Initially, Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son and the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said publicly that he believed Trump’s lie about the election having been “stolen” from him. He also said that he supported the efforts of right-wing Christian senators to overturn the election. Now, with Biden installed as president and possible legal repercussions for prominent people who promoted the lies, Graham denies any responsibility for inciting the January 6 insurrection. Even worse, he now insists, against a massive trove of video evidence, that he has seen no evidence of Christian involvement in the invasion of the Capitol (though he admits Christians were present at the rally on the National Mall).

Going forward, how will journalists report on such things—if they report on them at all? And what will those few influential white evangelicals who have been surprisingly willing to reckon with evangelical involvement in January 6—especially Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, writer David French, and head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm Russell Moore—do? Will it be back to culture-warring as usual?

French, at least, continues to blame “both sides” for America’s polarization when the Right is demonstrably far more to blame than the Left, and is stressing national unity in a way that glosses over the rot inherent in right-wing Christian ideology. And while he writes movingly of the harassment he and his family members suffered for their opposition to Trump, this does not seem to have taught him to empathize with LGBTQ folks like me, who are disproportionately subjected to bullying but not supposed to exist according to French’s theology. I suspect that so long as we are invisible to French, so will be his theology’s role in the rise of Trumpism.

Since February 2020 and over the course of the presidential election cycle through President Biden’s Inauguration, it has been my privilege to write a monthly column for The Conversationalist about the Christian Right’s politics, focusing mostly on evangelicals and Trump. While this monthly assignment now comes to an end, I plan to remain a frequent contributor to this outlet. For now, I would like to leave my readers with the following thoughts.

White evangelicals have consistently been America’s most loyal and enthusiastic Trump-supporting demographic since 2016; to say they have not taken the results of our recent presidential election well would be classic Midwestern understatement. (I am a Hoosier; don’t hate.) Many are still in denial. Most white evangelicals live in an authoritarian world rife with conspiracy theories and “alternative facts”; and that, combined with their powerful and well-heeled institutions and lobbies, means that their anti-pluralist aims will remain a serious threat to American democracy.

My 2020 reporting and commentary will remain here, bearing witness, as the country moves on from Trump. I would ask that we all do what we can to keep America’s far Right, including the Christian Right, under media scrutiny, so that we might be better prepared for the political battles to come.
    [post_title] => Christian nationalism after Trump remains a powerful and destructive force
    [post_excerpt] => President Biden must hold accountable those who implemented hateful policies, committed crimes, incited violence, and engaged in corruption during the Trump presidency.
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Christian nationalism after Trump remains a powerful and destructive force

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Under Trump, the presidency revealed itself, perhaps like no time before, to be a veritable monarchy. 

The January 6 sack of the U.S. Capitol by far-right extremists, egged on by President Trump and his refusal to acknowledge defeat at the November presidential elections, is among the darkest days in modern American history. For scholars of authoritarianism, however, and especially those of us with lived experiences with such regimes, there is little surprise at what transpired. Instead, it is a kind of informed terror.

In my case, it is the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the rise of the genocidaire Slobodan Milosevic that has informed my perspective on Trump’s rise and the chaos of his fall. I was a young child when my family was forced to flee Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s capital, in April 1992. But the onset of nationalist aggression against Bosnia, orchestrated by Milosevic’s then regime in Belgrade, was not sudden. It had been carefully prepared, organized, and regimented. So, too, the ensuing genocide in Bosnia: it involved bureaucrats, paperwork, pay stubs, and complex logistics.

My parents and their peers watched much of the Yugoslav dissolution crisis play out on their TV screens—mostly in disbelief. Yugoslavia was a one-party, authoritarian regime, but it was widely considered the most “liberal” communist polity in Europe. It had a large, relatively prosperous middle class; Western commodities were widely available, as were Western media and entertainment. Yugoslavs traveled freely to both the First and Second World. And in cosmopolitan Sarajevo, the center of multiethnic Bosnia, a litany of punk and rock bands, literary circles, and youth groups agitated for social and democratic change.

Understandably, then, when Milosevic first appeared on the radar of Yugoslavia’s educated middle class, he was seen as a deeply ridiculous figure. A dour communist apparatchik, his affect was transparently false. He spoke in an overwrought, airy way, his head perennially tilted upwards, capped by a crown-line pompadour.

But my parents and their peers were wrong. Milosevic’s appeal to the supposedly beleaguered ethnic Serbs of Kosovo, Yugoslavia’s poorest region, struck a note with many, especially in Serbia. He and his tight-knit circle of political operatives promptly outmaneuvered the sclerotic communist party apparatus in Belgrade. They quickly seized control of the country’s state media, while simultaneously ingratiating themselves with the hardline authoritarian leadership of the Yugoslav military.

And on the streets, Milosevic whipped up mobs of Serb nationalists with sinister speeches that alluded—with no evidence—to a brewing conspiracy to exterminate the Serb nation. Directing the crowds against other members of the communist regime, Milosevic toppled the governments of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro, to seize the Yugoslav collective presidency and install himself as the country’s supreme leader. He called this ploy the “anti-bureaucratic revolution”; it lacked mass support as such, but it was ferociously supported by a hardcore base of Serb nationalist radicals and extremists.

Within the span of three years, between 1987 and 1990, Milosevic emerged as the most influential and powerful figure in Yugoslavia, a complex, multiethnic federation. His adept use of Serb nationalist grievance politics was successful but only for a moment. By 1990, the leadership in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia realized that Milosevic was on the cusp of a total takeover, and that he would impose his sectarian-authoritarian rule with an iron fist.

When a last-ditch effort at curtailing his rise failed at the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990, the country began to fragment. There were no more institutional avenues left to check him and so, one by one, the remaining republics held multiparty elections, and then promptly sought to exit the federal state.

Milosevic’s pursuit of one-man rule failed but it also killed the Yugoslav federation. With the union dissolving, Milosevic used the massive Yugoslav military, and an assortment of ultra-nationalist and criminal paramilitaries, to attempt to carve out of Croatia and Bosnia chunks of territory to append to a new “Greater Serbia”. This necessarily involved the systematic killing, torture, rape, and expulsion of tens of thousands. Bosnia became the site of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II. The Bosnian War and genocide resulted in the deaths of nearly 100,000 people in less than four years.

As a result of these experiences, former Yugoslav and Bosnian scholars and writers were among the first  to warn, from the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy, that his political program was a threat to American constitutional government; that American institutions and politicians would struggle to contain his sustained assault on the rule of law; that his administration was a mortal threat to black, brown, and immigrant communities; and that he would help unleash a din of sectarian violence that would tear at the fabric of the republic.

Every subsequent week confirmed the accuracy of our predications. Privately, many of us spoke about what our “red lines” were: when was it time to try to leave the country? What was the point of no return? Flashes of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, the early days of the war in Bosnia, filled our sleepless nights.

The imposition of Executive Order 13769—the Muslim ban—in January 2017 immediately set off alarm bells for all of us. The sustained civil society push-back gave us hope, but the failure of the courts to roll back a transparently discriminatory policy gutted those prospects. Then came a flurry of scandals and horrors: family separation, the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, impeachment.

Trump kept pushing, and America’s famed system of “checks and balances” kept buckling. The presidency revealed itself, perhaps like no time before, to be a veritable monarchy. Seemingly no outrage, no violation was severe enough to warrant a meaningful sanction from the Republican Party, or Trump’s electoral base.

During last summer’s Black Lives Matters protests, when federal forces were called in by the President and used to violently clear Washington, D.C.’s streets of peaceful protesters, and military helicopters ominously hung over the few remaining crowds, I drove to a nearby ATM. I took out several thousand dollars in cash, went home, and took out all my family’s passports. I told my wife that we should seriously talk about leaving. She did not disagree, but we wondered where to go. Perhaps to Vancouver, Canada to stay with my folks, I said—or perhaps back to Sarajevo.

We did not leave. But we began recording videos for our young daughters about this moment in American history. About how we rationalized our decision to stay, and to use whatever resources we had, whatever platforms we could tap into to protect and shore up the American republic, and those most vulnerable in it.

The United States is not Yugoslavia. But it also not an unassailable bastion of good governance. It has its own long, dark histories of sectarian violence and authoritarianism. The collapse of the Jim Crow South is a recent historical event, and the struggle between white supremacy and racial equality still, indelibly, shapes contemporary American politics. America is not uniquely resistant to the threat of illiberalism or civil strife, and despite Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ electoral triumph, Donald Trump remains a significant danger to the republic.

It is imperative that once he is removed from office, all levels of American government and civil society initiate a sustained campaign to restore the American republic. Major social and financial investments must be made in renewing civic trust, rolling back disinformation and spreading media literacy, promoting the study of civics and governance, and aggressively dismantling and prosecuting domestic far right and white supremacist cells.

Above all, this moment cannot be forgotten. The page cannot be turned on this period before there is a genuine national reckoning, a true commitment to truth and reconciliation, and an accounting for how Donald Trump, a vulgar, semi-literate demagogue, was able to bring the American constitutional regime to its breaking point in four years—and why so many were, and continue to be, willing to aid him in this pursuit. America’s future depends on confronting, rather than forgetting his tenure.
    [post_title] => The predictable terror of Trump's rise and fall
    [post_excerpt] => The United States is not Yugoslavia. But it also not an unassailable bastion of good governance. It has its own long, dark histories of sectarian violence and authoritarianism.
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The predictable terror of Trump’s rise and fall

by Jasmin Mujanović 

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    [post_content] => A Washington, D.C. rally held by pro Trump evangelicals revealed the fascism in their worldview.

Prominent right-wing Christians organized a prayer rally and an affiliated “Jericho March” in Washington, D.C. last Saturday. The ceremonial act, which also took place in a number of state capitals across the U.S., was meant to echo the Biblical story about the Israelites bringing down the walls of Jericho by circling it while blowing trumpets; in its modern iteration, evangelical Trump supporters walked seven times around various government buildings while praying to “bring down the walls of voter fraud” and undo the presidential election results. Although there is no evidence of widespread election irregularities, and the Trump administration’s frivolous lawsuits have been shut down—most recently by the Supreme Court—the rally-goers and marchers believed they were engaging in an act of spiritual warfare that would “reveal” the election had been stolen and prevent Joe Biden from taking office. Michele Bachmann, former Congresswoman from Minnesota and a notorious evangelical conspiracy theorist, said in a video posted on Facebook that this was “a Hebrews 11 moment,” referring to what Christians sometimes call the Bible’s “Faith Chapter,” which recounts the righteous deeds of Biblical heroes.

Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow and a prominent Trump supporter, addressed the D.C. rally, while several other speakers peppered their talks with plugs for his company. The headliner was Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, who was compromised by Russia while in office and whom the president recently pardoned after he was convicted of lying to the FBI. At the rally in Washington, Flynn, who recently called for “limited martial law” to impose a new election, said: “We’re in a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of this country.” And, as might be expected for an event based around the invocation of a trope from what Christians call the Old Testament, the D.C. rally featured shofar blowing and “a prophetic word” from Curt Landry, a so-called “Messianic Jew”—i.e., a Jewish convert to Christianity.

Evangelicals have deservedly received negative press for their efforts to convert Jews; indeed, America’s Christian nationalism goes hand-in-hand with an appropriative Christian Zionism that has profoundly influenced Trump’s foreign policy, not least in his decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Mike Pence invited a Messianic “rabbi” to a 2018 campaign rally to mourn the then recent shooting deaths at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue; this was a stunningly tone-deaf insult not only because Jews don’t recognize Christian “rabbis,” but also because most evangelicals subscribe to the belief that Jews who do not convert to Christianity are damned to hell.

The philo-Semitism of Christian nationalism is never very far from anti-Semitism. This is neatly illustrated by the fact that the emcee of the D.C. rally, evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, recently released a racist, conspiracy-mongering “parody” music video about alleged election stealing that depicts four Jewish men—Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Jerry Nadler, and Chuck Schumer—as puppet masters manipulating Biden’s “strings.”

Once a writer for the relatively innocuous evangelical cartoon series “Veggie Tales,” Metaxas has more recently made headlines for writing fascist children’s books like Donald Builds the Wall, and for sucker-punching a protester after a Republican National Convention event. At the opening of Saturday’s rally, he “joked” about someone in the audience taking out a bazooka and shooting down a media helicopter. Metaxas clearly embodies the values and desires of most white evangelicals, but his recent behavior has alienated right-wing Christians invested in respectability. Phil Vischer, the creator of “Veggie Tales,” has rejected Metaxas’s brand of culture warring. And  Rod Dreher, the reactionary editor of The American Conservative and a convert to Orthodox Christianity, referred to Metaxas’s extreme rhetoric in a recent interview with Charlie Kirk—for example, Metaxas said that calls to concede that Biden won the election are “the voice of the Devil”—as “hysterical.”

Since Saturday’s bizarre spectacle in D.C., some of the more prominent “respectable evangelicals” have been trying to distance themselves from both Metaxas and the charismatic excesses of Trump’s most enthusiastic Christian supporters, who are holding out for a “miracle” that will somehow overturn the 2020 presidential election.

For example, Southern Baptist author Beth Moore tweeted that Trumpist Christian nationalism is “not of God.” Similarly, conservative commentator David French called Christian Trumpism “idolatry” and Metaxas’s rhetoric “a form of fanaticism that can lead to deadly violence.” Of the Jericho marchers, he wrote: “They believe that Trump had a special purpose and a special calling, and that this election defeat is nothing less than a manifestation of a Satanic effort to disrupt God’s plan for this nation.” French added that far from “holding their nose” to vote for Trump, his evangelical base was “deeply, spiritually, and personally invested in his political success.”

I am glad that French has called out this dangerous language and dehumanizing rhetoric, which he correctly identifies as a common precursor to physical violence. But when he writes, “A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic,” I can’t help but focus on that little word “now.” The abusive, authoritarian nature of right-wing Christianity is not new.

How do I know? I could point you to reams of well-sourced writing by myself and others on the topic, but what I want to say here is that my most visceral and primary knowledge comes from the simple fact that I grew up in the trenches of the culture wars that men like David French and Michael Gerson, who also recently criticized Metaxas, helped to build and further. From the time I was five or six years old, I remember the churches my family attended, as well as my Christian school, drilling into our heads at every opportunity that abortion was “murder,” a “literal Holocaust,” and that we needed to do everything we could to stop the “baby-killing” Democrats. I remember being taught through the 1980s and 90s to see our society and current events not just in starkly black and white terms, but as reflections of “spiritual” warfare being fought by the forces of God and the forces of Satan through human agents.

And the God and country Christian nationalism of my childhood was hardly subtle. One of my elementary school’s walls was emblazoned with Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” and our talent shows ended with an audience sing-along of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

Fascism backed by Christians does not emerge ex nihilo. And in our current case, it did not emerge without significant contributions from men like Gerson and French (and women like Moore), along with other “respectable” evangelicals. And until they are willing to take accountability for that, and to discuss explicitly how they might have to examine their theology and rethink its authoritarian components in order to avoid enabling the worst of Christian nationalism in the future, they should not be heralded as heroic for reaching the low bar of opposing violence based on obviously false conspiracy theories.

Religion journalists and political pundits are still far too favorable toward the idea that there is a meaningful rather than superficial ideological gap between “respectable” evangelicals and the types that showed up at the Jericho March.  Remember the reaction to the December 2019 op-ed by Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today? Titled “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” it stirred up a storm of reaction and was covered by legacy media platforms as evidence of a schism within Trump’s evangelical base. For journalists, the temptation to see greater diversity of views within the right-wing, mostly white evangelical establishment than is actually present there can be difficult to avoid. Given the extent to which Christian hegemony influences our society, criticizing the beliefs of any large Christian demographic is still largely taboo. But the truth is that white evangelical subculture, in both its “respectable” and its rabidly pro-Trump varieties, is thoroughly authoritarian; the divisions in play here are much less significant than they may seem.

The real story about respectable evangelicals is that they still want to have their cake and eat it too. They reject loudly the never-say-die Trumpist Christianity that Metaxas has embraced, but they have failed to acknowledge their complicity in the current conservative Christian circus—or to examine the authoritarian nature of their own theology. We should not let them get away with such “cheap grace” by applauding them for enabling the worst of Christian nationalism, only to then shrink from the monster of their own creation. Nor should we read into the current divisions between evangelicals the seeds of any forthcoming substantive internal reform, given that authoritarian evangelical subculture is impervious to any such possibility.
    [post_title] => 'A spiritual battle for hearts and souls': white evangelicals grapple with post-Trump America
    [post_excerpt] => So-called "respectable" evangelicals are distancing themselves from Trumpism, but without accepting responsibility for their ole in creating the Christian circus that brought him to power. 
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‘A spiritual battle for hearts and souls’: white evangelicals grapple with post-Trump America

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Part of the Trump campaign's strategy was to feed into the Christian right's martyr complex. 

When it comes to the religious vote in America’s 2020 presidential election, some clearly biased commentators are trying to spin cherry-picked exit poll data into a tale about white evangelical defectors helping former Vice President Joe Biden win. But it was Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank who got it right when he summarized the Trump 2020 phenomenon as largely about white evangelical Christians who “were fired up like no other group by Trump’s encouragement of white supremacy”—versus “everybody else.”

As evidence of his claim, Milbank cites exit poll data that shows white evangelicals, who represent about 15 percent of the U.S. population, comprise about a quarter of the electorate overall—and a full 40 percent of Trump voters. To be sure, majorities of all white Christian demographics voted Trump in 2020 as in 2016; in addition, a very small percentage of Black Christians, and a larger minority of Latinx Christians voted for Trump this year. White evangelicals, however, remain far and away America’s most solidly pro-Trump demographic, and they turned out in droves to support him. And to say that Trump’s white evangelical base is not taking the news of his election loss well would be quite the understatement.

Despite some high-profile Republican leaders and “respectable evangelicals” like Michael Gerson chiding them for a “failure of character,” many of these evangelical Trump supporters have refused, for weeks, to recognize that the election is over. In doing so, they are literally demonizing Democrats and playing up the same old wild persecution fantasies that have long since animated this authoritarian demographic.

On the notoriously reactionary 700 Club, the flagship Christian Broadcasting Network program, 90-year-old host Pat Robertson asserted, “It isn’t over yet,” and called on his audience to pray to overturn the election. “In the name of Jesus, I bind the spirit of delusion that has come over this land,” Robertson prayed, adding, “We will not surrender our nation, we will not give up this great country, and Satan, you cannot have it, in the name of Jesus.” Satan, he suggested, “wants to turn this nation over to socialism.” Robertson declared: “I still think Trump’s ultimately going to win.”

Those who grew up being taught that reality is shaped by “spiritual warfare” will instantly recognize Robertson’s language of “binding demons.” When applied to politics, such thinking is clearly incompatible with democracy. It has also been on prominent display throughout Trump’s presidency in the figure of his spiritual advisor, Paula White, who has also publicly prayed against the “demonic” forces supposedly trying to “hijack the will of God” for the election.

The prominence of neo-Pentecostal and charismatic Christians like White has been building within evangelicalism for decades, as conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture has become, along with the G.O.P., increasingly authoritarian. And it’s not just older evangelicals. While many young people leave evangelicalism, those who opt to stay in the faith even as it has careened into virulent extremism are, if anything, even more hardline than their parents.

Christians like White, Robertson, and their followers are invested in the “prophecies” that many of them have made over the last few years holding that Trump has been “chosen” to pursue God’s will for the United States. Elite celebrity preachers like White and Robertson might be cynically cashing in on the anxieties of rank-and-file believers, but there is no doubt that many evangelicals truly fear a Biden administration will “persecute” them.

According to political scientist Ryan Burge, evangelicals have a “martyr complex.” During the election cycle the Trump campaign explicitly played into this, with Trump casting Biden, a devout Catholic who has vowed to protect both religious freedom and LGBTQ rights, as anti-religious. “Essentially they’re against God if you look at what they’re doing with religion,” Trump said, while his son Eric claimed of his father:

He’s literally saved Christianity. I mean, there’s a full-out war on faith in this country by the other side. The Democratic Party, the far left, has become the party of the atheists, and they want to attack Christianity, they want to close churches. They’re totally fine keeping liquor stores open, but they want to close churches all over the country.

The fantastical message that Christianity is “under attack” matches what evangelicals themselves believe and want to hear. For the majority of them, the definition of “religious freedom” is the power to discriminate against members of other religions and to impose their narrow interpretation of Christianity on those who do not share it, using the coercive force of law. They regard having to coexist with LGBTQ people and provide us with equal accommodation in the public square as “persecution.”

Meanwhile, conspiracy-minded evangelicals frequently indulge in even darker fantasies, imagining their religious practice could actually be banned and that they could be arrested or even executed for practicing their faith by, for example, refusing to solemnize a same-sex marriage. Of course, these scenarios are about as likely to play out in America as a blanket ban on the consumption of apple pie.

Meanwhile, Eric Trump’s false claim that Democrats “want to close churches” is being widely circulated on Twitter. This is a bad faith and deliberately dishonest interpretation of America’s patchwork of county, municipal, and state-level public health requirements limiting the size of social gatherings, often including church services, which have been linked to numerous incidents of mass infection. Along with their reckless insistence that church services should continue as usual—sometimes in the form of lawsuits—prominent evangelicals have turned sensible mask requirements into fodder for the culture wars, using rhetoric that paints them as victims of a supposedly anti-Christian government. Some conservative Christians, including Kanye West, even claim to believe that the coronavirus vaccine, when it becomes available, will confer “the Mark of the Beast” on those who receive it as the Antichrist rises to power.

This reality-averse majoritarian self-victimization is a hallmark of fascism; it will not, unfortunately, simply disappear when President-elect Biden takes office. A dangerous right-wing politics of grievance will continue to shape American political life so long as conservative Christians continue to hold outsize influence and disproportionate power, a situation that is facilitated by the undemocratic Electoral College and equal representation of all states in the Senate, regardless of their population.

As I write this, Trump-supporting evangelicals continue to deny that Biden won the election and to insist that they will never accept the Democratic leader as president. They are also railing against C.D.C. advice that people refrain from attending large Thanksgiving gathering this year because they are likely to further exacerbate the already spiking spread of COVID-19 infections.

On prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel, for example, evangelist Mario Murillo declared, “I will never believe that Joe Biden is the president of the United States.” Invoking the language of spiritual warfare, Murillo called on Christians to “rebuke” the election results and described the role of the church in current events as “supernatural.”

“Our role is to command the strongholds to come down,” Murillo exclaimed, referring to the charismatic Christian notion that demonic “principalities and powers” can be defeated through prayer.

As Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” When far-right Christians like Murillo tell us they will never accept Biden (or, frankly, any Democrat) as the legitimate president of the United States, proponents of democracy need to believe them. People who think their political opponents are literally demonic, and who continue to incite irrational fears of persecution—even as the federal courts, which Trump stacked with right-wing authoritarians, continues to deliver for their culture wars agenda—are not people who can be reasoned or compromised with. Nothing short of total control will ever be enough for them.

How do we deal with that stark reality? It is important to maintain the pressure, no matter the odds of success, for democratic reforms that would limit the power of white evangelicals and other authoritarians. This means pushing for the abolition of the Electoral College; for adding seats to the Supreme Court as a means of restoring fairness after the G.O.P.’s recent power grab; and admitting DC and Puerto Rico as states.

We must also maintain high public awareness of Christian nationalist extremism. Over time, a more realistic national conversation about white churches and Christian nationalism should contribute to the political delegitimization of Christian extremists in the eyes of the public, thus opening up new political possibilities for the future.

Biden, unfortunately, has called for a clearly impossible unity, which means that his administration is unlikely to lead the way here. Still, it seems he is willing to exercise power in the pursuit of justice; that, at least, will help fend off the theocratic threat for the time being.

 
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    [post_excerpt] => People who think their political opponents are literally demonic, and who continue to incite irrational fears of persecution, are not people who can be reasoned with.
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Why do so many evangelicals continue to deny that Biden won the election?

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Gender equality in Belarus looks good on paper, but comes with many caveats. 

Less than five minutes into a recent television appearance, the interviewer asked Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya about her last time in a kitchen. Tsikhanouskaya is generally believed to have won the August presidential election in Belarus, beating the long-term authoritarian ruler, Alyaksandr Lukashenka. During the election campaign, Tsikhanouskaya referenced her role as a housewife in what turned out to be a politically savvy move. Diverse groups within Belarus — reformists, conservatives, feminists — could all see a reflection of their ideals in Tsikhanouskaya. Conservatives could see a loving housewife and mother; reformists, an opportunity for change; and feminists saw a viable female candidate for the presidency. But the housewife trope was also used to undermine her. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed that while he was sure Tsikhanouskaya could cook a good cutlet, how could he debate with her? The President sought to diminish his female opponent by comparing her knowledge of the kitchen to her lack of political experience.

During the election campaign and the now three month-old protest movement against Lukashenka’s blatant attempt to rig the results, the media spotlight has deservedly focused on Belarusian women for the outsized role they have played leading the struggle for fair elections, an end to egregious police violence, and peaceful regime change. Maria Kalesnikava, a political activist who was abducted by security forces on September 7 and then jailed, and Nina Bahinskaya, the 73 year old woman who is an iconic protest figure, have become household names for their roles in the protest movement.

However, the long-term impact on women’s role and position in society is more difficult to gauge. While a reporter for The New York Times wrote that the movement has “already shattered deeply entrenched gender stereotypes built up over generations,” and Belarusian media TUT.BY labelled it a “feminist revolution,” this view is not shared by everyone. Women have certainly played a pivotal role, but there is a great deal of work to do in mobilizing this newfound empowerment to dismantle Belarus’s deeply entrenched patriarchal system.

Barriers facing Belarusian women

On paper, Belarus is a leader in gender equality. In The Global Gender Gap Index 2020, it is ranked 29th out of 153 countries for women’s economic participation, educational attainment, health, and political empowerment. It has signed and ratified international legal frameworks on gender equality. At 69 percent, the share of women in the Belarusian judiciary is high. The Women’s Power Index shows that women have 35 percent representation in parliament, exceeding many European countries and giving Belarus a world ranking of 39th.

On closer inspection, however, gender equality in Belarus comes with caveats. In the Cabinet, where more decision-making power lies, women’s representation falls to 3 percent. In 2004, Lukashenka declared that the presence of women in Parliament, makes it “stable and calm,” and that it will ensure that “the male Members of Parliament work properly,” thus reducing a woman's role to one of a caretaker or matron. True, there were a handful of high profile women in Belarusian politics before the August election—such as Lukashenka's press secretary Natalya Eismont, Senate Speaker Natalya Kochanova, and the Head of Central Election Committee, Lidziya Yarmoshyna—but their prominence does not reflect the reality for most Belarusian women.

The 2019 UN Gender Equality Brief highlighted entrenched systematic gender norms and stereotypes as the biggest challenge to gender equality in Belarus, where a woman’s role is defined primarily as wife and mother. The majority of men and women in Belarus believe that being a housewife is as fulfilling as working for pay, with more women agreeing with this statement than men. Maternity leave is up to three years. This might sound ideal to women in the United States, where there is no legally mandated maternity leave, but because employers in Belarus are legally required to hold a woman’s job open for her while she is on leave, women of child-bearing age can see their careers suffer. A General Director of a medium-sized factory in Minsk once told me that it is common practice to weed out newly-married women when hiring to avoid taking on an employee who is likely to seek maternity leave. This is contributing to the wage gap that is currently around 25 percent and growing. A 2019 UN report found that almost every second woman in Belarus has faced partner violence; yet in October 2018, Lukashenka dismissed a new law on the prevention of domestic violence, decrying it as “nonsense” borrowed “from the West.”

The three graces

After the government prevented the three most popular male candidates from running as opponents of Lukashenka in the August election, women stepped up to form the main opposition. Tsikhanouskaya ran in place of her imprisoned husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski; she was joined by Veranika Tsapkala representing her husband Valery Tsapkala, who had been forced to flee; and Maria Kalesnikava, who was the campaign manager for imprisoned opposition candidate Viktar Babaryka. It took just 15 minutes for the three women to agree to unite campaigns, something previous opposition had never managed to achieve. Over the course of the campaign, they emerged as a powerful triumvirate; it is because of their work, many believe, that Tsikhanouskaya won the election.

Hundreds of thousands attended Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign rallies across Belarus, amassing huge support. But for Galina Dzesiatava, project manager at the NGO Gender Perspectives, there was also disappointment. Dzesiatava attended the rally in Homel, in southeastern Belarus, where Tsikhanouskaya expressed her desire to be “back in the kitchen frying cutlets.” Another moment that stung for Dzesiatava was when Tsikhanouskaya said “I do not have a program for changing Belarus,” adding “the men…have it.” deferring to the excluded male candidates. Dzesiatava said she “was devastated” upon hearing this. 

Irina Solomatina, the founder of the project Gender Route and the Head of the Council of the Belarusian Organisation of Working Women, noted the lack of a feminist agenda in the campaign. Solomatina said they “mentioned social problems exclusively in terms of care” (for husbands, children..). In their rhetoric, “there was no place for either feminist or gender agendas.” Women rights’ issues, such as domestic violence and labour discrimination, were not mentioned during the campaign.

The women’s protests

Katya* created the initial Telegram group ‘Girl Power’ on the evening of  August 11, following two nights of protests against the fraudulent election results, which police broke up with brutal violence. She could never have foreseen the impact of a group chat she said she originally made “for close friends and friends of their friends.” The initial plan was for a flashmob of women to meet at Komarovka market in Minsk the next day wearing white and holding flowers. Katya said “the goal [of the flashmob] was to transform the violent energy of protest into something safe and inspiring.” The chat, which began inviting people that evening, had more than 8,600 members by morning, “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Katya said. By the afternoon, thousands of women were joining hands and lining the streets all over the country. Katya and her friends had to learn fast, “it was our first chat on Telegram. Me and my friends at first had no clue how to handle it, how to pin messages, change settings etc. We had to learn on the go.” Still in awe of the power behind the protests, Katya reveals that it began as “kind of a bet” saying “I promised my friend and sister that I [would] think of a safer way for us to protest.”

Katya also noted that at the time she encountered a backlash from some women who saw this form of protest — of wearing white and carrying flowers —as “revealing our weakness.” She received comments like “flowers? Don’t forget about candies for the torturers too.” Solomatina echoed this perspective, arguing that these female protests perpetuated patriarchal values and stereotypes, appealing to beauty and softness. But Solomatina also highlighted the argument that it would have been a sin “not to take advantage of the patriarchal way of life.” The idea to play on gender stereotypes and roles was central to the performance of a Belarusian lullaby as part of the protests, where women stood barefoot dressed in white holding flowers. They altered the lyrics of the lullaby, calling upon those near them to open their eyes—instead of closing them. Dzesiatava said that in these protests, the women were successfully “playing the patriarchal system against the patriarchal system.”

Leandra Bias, a Gender and Peacebuilding Advisor at Swisspeace, said that foreign feminists observing from the outside sometimes “think they know which female tropes and roles are the most emancipating” but that actually “we know nothing about the lived reality of Belarusian women.” Bias added that “when it comes to women protesting, they are the ones who know best how to navigate their daily lives, they know what is going to be effective.” 

The Fem Group

One aspect of the movement with a clear feminist agenda is the Fem Group, a working group of the Coordination Council for the Transfer of Power, founded by Tsikhanouskaya. The Fem Group was created to ensure that women are involved in all the transformation processes that would follow regime change. Their work includes increasing the visibility of women’s political participation, documenting state violence against women and raising awareness of state violence against men. The group are currently conducting an anonymous study on the needs of Belarusian women and the tools required to support them.

While Lukashenka labelled Tsikhanouskaya a “poor thing” during the election campaign, he now appears to have woken up to the political force women possess. The women’s marches, initially left alone by the regime, were soon subject to a cruel crackdown. Russia put out an arrest warrant for Tsikhanouskaya, who is now in exile in neighboring Lithuania, while Kalesnikava is in prison after tearing up her passport at the border to prevent police from expelling her from the country. Prominent Belarusian feminists Olga Shparaga, Yulia Mitskevich and Svetlana Gatalskaya have all recently spent time in prison. While under arrest Shparaga conducted tutorials on feminism for fellow prisoners from her prison cell.

Belarusian feminism

“Feminism” is still largely a taboo word in Belarus. Few women openly identify as a feminist, and there are many women currently marching each weekend who would balk at the label. A survey carried out back in 2012 which analysed attitudes towards feminism found that just four percent of women considered themselves feminists and more than half of the men surveyed said that they would treat such women with disgust. In 2016, fewer than one percent of Belarusian NGOs advanced women’s rights, and fewer still identified themselves as feminist. 

Yuliya* is an activist from Minsk who has been organizing peaceful evening gatherings; when asked how she perceives feminism she replied: “I can’t say I’m fully aware of what ‘feminism’ really means.” Katya*, the founder of Girl Power, said she identifies as a “humanist more than a feminist.”

This may change. One of the potential impacts of the current women-led protest movement is an acceptance of the term ‘feminist’ in Belarus. Kalesnikava, who openly identifies as a feminist, says that Lukashenka “accidentally did more for the development of feminism in Belarus than anyone else,” adding that “feminism will stop being a dirty word.” 

Nonetheless, feminism is advancing in Belarus. In 2019 there were more than 470 educational activities associated with women’s rights—workshops, lectures, and roundtables—and more than 2,500 consultations in legal, psychological and business support. Events in the gender sphere attracted over 5,000 participants. Some of the female-led initiatives in Belarus include: March on Baby, which aims to introduce a domestic violence law; Wen-do, which conducts self-defense training for women; and Her Rights, which strengthens women’s awareness of their rights. Gender Digest stresses however, that this work that promotes gender equality is often invisible to a wider audience.

Long-term impact

Renewed awareness of domestic violence is another source of hope. The widely publicized violence of OMON, the paramilitary security forces, repulsed many, but Dzesiatava explained that “OMON are actually the fabric of Belarusian society — this level of violence has always been visible for feminists and it is now visible to everyone.” The overt violence seen today was being committed before, but behind closed doors. Now that the violence is out in the open it will be harder to ignore; the hope is that this will inspire a national conversation about domestic violence. Dzesiatava draws parallels between an abusive domestic relationship and that of the regime and the Belarusian people. Bias noted the same thing, adding that “the most dangerous moment for someone in an abusive relationship is when they decide to leave”—just as Belarusians want to leave Lukashenka. 

The August election and subsequent protests have seen both classic femininity and feminism being used and inverted. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has become a feminist icon around the world, but she never intended for that to be. Belarusian feminism still faces many barriers, including the use of patriarchal tropes by both women and men. Yet Belarusian women are defining a feminism of their own, one that fits their lived reality, and it may well be that regime change will enable a redefining of the women’s agenda, offering up space for new opportunities. The recent women-led uprising may not necessarily be called ‘feminist’ but, as Galina Dzesiatava makes clear, they have been dubbed the ‘Revolution of Dignity,’ and dignity is a basic tenet of feminism.
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    [post_excerpt] => One of the potential impacts of the current women-led protest movement is an acceptance of the term ‘feminist’ in Belarus.
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The Belarusian protests: feminized, but feminist?

by Alexandra St John Murphy

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    [post_content] => Legacy media outlets do their readers a vast disservice in presenting the minority of anti-Trump evangelicals as evidence of a broader change in attitudes.

The Trump era in American politics, which I sincerely hope comes to an end in 2021, will be forever marked by widespread public consternation over the often enthusiastic support of the Christian Right, and white evangelicals above all, for a corrupt, “pussy-grabbing,” tenth-rate would-be dictator. Over the past four years I have been trying to explain why evangelical Trump support is not only unsurprising, but also the logical culmination of the evangelical culture wars I was born into and mobilized for.

Unfortunately, legacy media outlets in the United States continue to resist this hard truth. With less than one week left before the November 3 election, they are amplifying the small minority of white evangelicals that support former Vice President Joe Biden, instead of explaining why the vast majority of white evangelicals will never dump Trump. They are also irresponsibly pushing the tired old trope that young evangelicals are changing evangelicalism for the better, in ways that will materialize any day now. Apparently we just have to keep waiting, much like Christians have been waiting for the Second Coming for the last 2,000 years.

Why do legacy media outlets continue to amplify the small liberal minority among white evangelical Christians?  Daniel Schultz, a United Church of Christ pastor and veteran civic activist, observed that they “make a good story: you’ve got white evangelicals going against the grain, so it’s unusual, and you have people standing up for their morals (or at least pretending to do so), so it’s inspirational.” However, he said, journalists need to ask whether the atypical evangelical individuals and initiatives they’re highlighting represent “meaningful change.”

Of course, the outliers do deserve some media coverage. One example is Not Our Faith Political Action Committee, a bipartisan PAC devoted to helping defeat Trump. But reporters glosses over the salient point that this organization’s  advisory council, though composed of Protestants and Catholics, is ethnically far more diverse than the white evangelicals and white Catholics who voted for Trump in 2016. Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden, which is is prominently supported by Billy Graham’s granddaughter Jerushah Duford, likewise deserves coverage—but responsible reporting should include some healthy skepticism of Duford’s optimism about evangelicals’ ability to change for the better, given the documented resiliency of authoritarianism in conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture.

The handful of white evangelicals who oppose Trump are notably more visible, and seemingly more organized, on behalf of a Democratic presidential candidate, than any similar group has been in recent memory. And there is a non-zero chance that their efforts might actually shift a few votes in swing states, which could in turn make the difference in what will most likely be a tight contest in the Electoral College even if there is a popular vote landslide for Biden, which is likely. All of this, of course, assumes a free and fair election that plays out relatively smoothly, which is certainly not a given.

Eighty percent of the white evangelical vote went to Trump in 2016, a historic high. Trump’s share of that vote could fall back into the 70s, though this seems unlikely given the GOP’s hypocritical rush to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat with charismatic Catholic extremist Amy Coney Barrett; her confirmation places the overturning of the Supreme Court’s Roe and Obergefell decisions within the Christian Right’s grasp if the composition of the court remains untouched. A Biden administration could expand the SCOTUS to restore fairness, and, while I believe it should do so, you can be sure Trump’s evangelical base will keep this possibility in mind as something to avoid by voting for Trump.

Jerushah Duford’s first name is derived from the Hebrew word for “inheritance,” but it is the notoriously bigoted and rabidly pro-Trump Franklin Graham, son of Billy, who far more embodies not only the legacy of “American’s pastor,” but also white evangelical subculture. America’s elite public sphere places far too little emphasis on that sobering fact.

If we are ever to have a proper reckoning with this moment, which is far from guaranteed even if Biden wins the 2020 presidential election handily, we will need to face not only the fact that white evangelical subculture is essentially authoritarian, but also the role of the media in obscuring that truth, and by extension enabling authoritarianism via the normalization of extremism. Major media outlets need much better religion reporting; unfortunately, however, the organizations willing to fund religion journalism, like the Lilly Endowment in my native Indianapolis, tend to be heavily biased in favor of conservative Christians.

The relatively small number of journalists who cover religion do their readers a great disservice by taking the word of the people they report on at face value, when they should be questioning them with some skepticism. Conservative Christians maintain they are misunderstood; in response, reporters seem to be striving to tell only positive stories about them, no matter how harmful the politics of those Christians might be to those who do not share their views.

It is wildly irresponsible to equate “good” religion journalism with highlighting moderate to liberal evangelical youth as if they are typical, as in this example from The New York Times, and/or parroting the aggrieved talking points of their authoritarian counterparts as if they represent “the gospel truth,” or at least something worthy of the public’s sympathy, as in this example from The Washington Post.

Or take this combative, aggressively defensive opinion piece in defense of white evangelicals published by Religion News Service in the final run-up to this year’s election. Titled “Demonizing White Evangelicals Won’t Solve Our Political Divisions,” it is another iteration of the “very fine people on both sides” argument. The writer, Arthur E. Farnsley II, posits that both liberal and conservative Americans are responsible for the divisions in our society, when it is well established that the country’s polarization is asymmetric and driven primarily from the right.

Farnsley writes that critics of right-wing evangelicals must build bridges, but provides no evidence that anyone has engaged in “demonizing” white evangelicals, let alone elite journalists and commentators. That is, unless his definition of “demonizing” is presenting the public with highly substantiated facts about the intimate connections between American white supremacism and predominantly white churches, and daring to suggest that the people who lead and attend the churches most complicit in white supremacism should be held accountable.

In a powerful response to Farnsley’s commentary in his Substack newsletter, ex-evangelical podcaster Blake Chastain, who is a friend of mine, pointed out that “it is white evangelicals who hold the flame and set fire to bridges, both in their churches and in the public square.”

We must not be taken in by Farnsley’s gaslighting, nor by right-wing extremism wrapped in “civil” trappings by “respectable” evangelicals who understand the damage that Trump support has done to their brand, and thus seek to distance evangelicalism from Trump.

The latest example of the latter comes from heavyweight Calvinist theologian John Piper’s blog, Desiring God. In a post that made waves on Twitter when it dropped on October 22, Piper strongly hinted that he will be abstaining from voting for president this year, characterizing the two choices as “death by abortion” (Biden) and “death by arrogance” (Trump). But there is simply no way to build a bridge between advocates of democracy and human rights,  on the one hand, and people like Piper who casually make false and conspiratorial statements like, “I think Planned Parenthood is a code name for baby-killing,” on the other.

How does America move forward from the Christian nationalist surge of the Trump years? Those committed to liberal democracy can and should look to build bridges with conservative Christians like Duford, who has shown a willingness to break ranks with evangelical authoritarianism and to operate in good faith in a pluralistic democracy. However, if we look away from what conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture definitively is— i.e., anti-pluralist, anti-democratic, and incapable of significant cultural change from the inside—we cannot move the country forward. Those characteristics represent unreconstructed America, and those who exhibit them must be pushed to the political sidelines or the United States will always be at risk of the unreconstructed minority imposing authoritarian, white supremacist patriarchal rule.

As sociologist of religion Andrew Whitehead, who studies evangelicals, recently observed, “there is so much inertia institutionally that it will take an extremely long time for white evangelicalism to change, and I have a hard time seeing that happen. It will be so interesting to see if younger evangelicals just leave or conform. My suspicion is those who truly embrace environmentalism or LGBTQ-affirmation, for example, will end up leaving.” And indeed, many are leaving.

True, 16 percent of the white evangelical vote went to Hillary Clinton in 2016. As Schultz explains, “About 15-25 percent of white evangelicals are liberals or at least moderates. So there's always someone to go against the majority, creating the necessary drama for a media piece.” Nevertheless, he stressed that “the numbers don’t lie: somewhere around 80 percent of white evangelicals support Trump, and that’s in line with white evangelical support for GOP presidential candidates going back to at least 2004. In other words, white evangelicals are the Republican base, and there's simply no reason to think that’s changing in this election.”

 
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Pro-Biden white evangelicals are a minority. The vast majority will support Trump

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => Belarusians have found a unifying crucible in their resistance to state violence.

Mass demonstrations erupted in Belarus on August 9 to protest what was widely viewed as a rigged election that gave long-time strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for 26-years, a victory over the popular incumbent. The protests have continued on a daily basis for nearly two months, despite mass arrests, beatings, and torture. The largest civil society movement in Belarus’s history is shaping the future of this former Soviet bloc country.

Mikita Mikado, 34 years old, is the CEO of PandaDoc, a California-based software company. From his office in San Francisco, he is following the news from his home country of Belarus. In the midst of the nationwide protests over the result of the presidential election and a crackdown of unprecedented force, he stepped in and urged police officers to resign. Money? “We can solve it,” he promised.

Never before, Mikado said, had he felt like standing up against Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader who has been president of Belarus since 1994. The breaking point was when he watched in horror as his fellow countrymen were dragged away and beaten up by riot police.

“I knew someone who was tortured and beaten,” he said. “I could no longer stay silent and do nothing, when stun grenades were exploding on the streets.”

Mikado’s crowdfunding initiative, Protect Belarus, was successful: over the ensuing three weeks it raised money to financially support police officers who quit their jobs. Hundreds of security forces members applied for re-training in the technology industry and for financial aid.

For years, Belarus’s rapidly expanding IT industry coexisted with Lukashenko’s government, keeping out of politics while benefiting from preferential tax rates and little regulation. For many tech professionals, the luxury of having a stable and relatively well-paid job allowed them the privilege of not following politics.

That relationship was already changing ahead of the August 9 election. Valery Tsepkalo, a former Belarusian ambassador to the United States and founder of the Hi-Tech Park— the Minsk equivalent of Silicon Valley—joined the opposition. Some startups created apps to monitor vote counts and collect data on poll violations.

Young and savvy engineers, fashion designers and successful entrepreneurs joined the protests. Passivity became just what a country could no longer afford. The middle class that long flourished within the system began separating from it. Post-election violence became the last straw.

An apolitical nation fights

Middle class disenchantment with the regime became apparent during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lukashenko played down the danger posed by the virus and dismissed it as mass “psychosis.” He said it was a minor health issue that could be cured easily with a shot of vodka, or with a day of working on the farm. A mass Victory Day military parade went off as scheduled. Public gatherings were not banned.

Without guidance or policy from the government, Belarusians organised what they called “the people’s quarantine”: either individuals stayed home from work, or businesses introduced work from home policies without official guidance. Lacking support from the government, dozens of local initiatives and crowdfunding efforts emerged to buy and produce medical equipment, sew protective masks and raise financial support from local and diaspora communities.

In Belarus, the pandemic utterly destroyed Lukashenko’s reputation as the controller-in-chief. Despite all his bravado, the president failed spectacularly to contain the virus. More importantly, civil society proved faster, more creative and resourceful than the state. By his very inaction, the president of Belarus unintentionally galvanized ordinary people to take action.

Andrej Stryzhak, a human rights activist and volunteer worker, co-founded the #ByCovid19 initiative to help doctors deal with the pandemic. An informal group of some 1,500 volunteers delivered personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical equipment, purchased with money raised through crowdfunding, to hospitals across the country. Private businesses contributed funds and masks. Restaurants donated food. Hotels provided rooms pro bono to medical workers.

In May, when we spoke about the initiative, Stryzhak told me he hoped the crisis would develop trust in the country’s third sector.

“I see it as gradation from dissidents to parliamentary opposition,” he said. “Even if the dissidents are being trapped, they exist. If there’s less control, they are slowly becoming civil society. Later, alternative candidates appear, after which political parties will be initiated.”

As numerous initiatives and projects exploded since then, he’s emerged from all that’s taken place in recent weeks in a distinctly optimistic mood.

“Alternative structures of society are being created at the moment. These structures, which citizens are forming themselves, will eventually take over the current dysfunctional politics,” Stryzhak says now.

The needle has indeed moved quickly.

Unprecedented solidarity

A vibrant popular movement has unfolded in the past months in Belarus. More than 100,000 rallied against Lukashenko in Minsk each of the past seven Sundays, despite detentions and police violence, insisting that his landslide re-election in August was falsified.

Unlike in previous elections, the widespread grassroots protests —the largest in the country’s history—are sustained and organized with skillful use of social media. Telegram, a social media app that often remains available even during internet outages, has become a crucial tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have swept Belarus since the election. Several channels, such as Nexta and Belarus of the Brain, have become the most popular and main tools to facilitate the protests. The crowds are coming from all walks of life. In addition to the middle class, popular public figures are joining the protests.

Among the celebrity protesters are athletes and Olympic medalists who march under the banner of the Free Union of Athletes, a newly-created movement. Nearly 600 Belarusian athletes signed an open letter demanding, among other things, new elections and an end to police violence.

The wave of solidarity and self-organization is unprecedented in this country. Strike committees have been formed at state enterprises across the country, even though police are arresting and fining workers. Students gather on university campuses to protest repression and censorship. Lecturers support them. Media outlets publish blank pages when journalists are detained. Local residents feel the pride in belonging and self-identification; nearly every neighbourhood has its own newly designed flag.

In the largest crowdfunding campaign, Belarusians have raised more than $6 million to help those who suffered from police violence and were fired for political reasons. It is a significant amount in a country where the average salary is roughly $500—and hasn’t increased in the past decade.

New values

The tide of anger and frustration with the Belarusian authorities is longstanding.

People have united in the face of blatant injustice. But why was it this particular election that proved to be the tipping point? “Now it’s different. Belarusians made a sharp leap thanks to the generational change,” says Minsk-based sociologist Alena Artsiomenka. “People who grew up in the post-Perestroika era are more inclined to contribute to the society’s well-being. Those who were brought up in more stable and safe conditions are more interested in post-materialistic values.”

Technology has been essential to the movement’s growth. Crowdfunding platforms made philanthropy easier. But this is no longer considered desirable. The work of one such platform, MolaMola, came to a halt after the government shut it down. It was launched by Lukashenko’s main rival’s son, Eduard Babariko, who has been under arrest since June. The same platform was used to collect money during the pandemic and previously for civil society projects that were not related to politics.

Mikita Mikado felt a desire for revenge, too, after police raided the Minsk office of PandaDoc and arrested four of the company's managers. The government subsequently blocked the company’s accounts. In order to save his employees in Belarus, Mikado left the project Protect Belarus. But this did not halt the initiative.

The state’s use of violence against protesters has proved to be not only a breakthrough in the way people think about the authorities— and the Belarusian public’s reaction against police brutality— but also in the way they see many realms of day-to-day life.

Belarusians have been moving away from the paternalistic culture that was the tradeoff for economic stability during the post-Soviet period. In recent years, local communities managed to preserve a historic district that was slated for demolition. Residents also protested against the construction of a plant that would pollute their environment. Belarusians have long been associated with a strong paternalistic culture. This began changing in the recent years —people took matters into their own hands.

The 2020 demonstrations are not without precedent. In 2017, ordinary citizens rocked the country with widespread protests against a tax on the unemployed, a bizarre plan that would have forced those who do not officially work to pay a penalty to the state. Injustice was the main driving force for the protests; the same is true of the current protests. In response to the 2017 protests, Lukashenko initially agreed to impose a ban on the tax—only to reintroduce it at a later date. He might not have changed in the intervening years, but the country has. Belarusian society had for years seen the trust of ordinary people in one another drain away. Now it has found a unifying crucible in its resistance to violence. Self-organizing and helping one another became fundamental. A nation’s new, yet old, encounter with its autocratic leader may not be finished yet. But there is little to no chance that Belarusians will submit any longer to Lukashenko's authoritarian regime.
    [post_title] => Belarus's protests are fueled by an unprecedented civil society movement
    [post_excerpt] => For years, Belarus’s rapidly expanding IT industry coexisted with Lukashenko’s government, keeping out of politics while benefiting from preferential tax rates and little regulation. The rigged August 9 election proved to be a tipping point.
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Belarus’s protests are fueled by an unprecedented civil society movement

by Hanna Liubakova

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    [post_content] => From Belarus to America: a lesson in how an authoritarian responds to those who threaten his power.

Six masked police officers in black uniforms and helmets were filmed beating one unarmed man, who can be heard moaning in pain. A woman runs up, screaming, and the cops turn on her, one of them explicitly threatening her, the other pushing her away. “Don’t touch him, that’s my husband!” she screams, flailing at them with her arms. The officers haul her husband up off the ground, presumably to be detained. It was just another day of violent crackdowns in Belarus, a country that has been ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko, who is often called Europe’s last dictator. 

We don’t know for certain where police took the man, but another video provides some clues. 



The women narrating the clip are clearly horrified at what they are seeing through the window. They fear the detained people lying face down in the walled yard of the police precinct will be murdered by police. One of the women wants to go out on the balcony to film, but then both decide it’s unsafe. The scene has a Children of Men vibe — dystopian and horrifyingly banal at the same time. Subsequent videos published on Twitter show protesters gathered outside a detention center in Minsk while chanting encouragement to the detainees who are being beaten inside, and weeping as large police vehicles arrive with yet more detained protesters inside. 

Reports of horrific torture in detention have begun to leak out. Here is just one video featuring the sounds of detainees screaming. Here is a video of a woman behind barbed wire, screaming “Don’t! Please stop! I can’t see anything!” A friend of mine who lives in Minsk has likened the situation to a war being waged by the state against its own populace. 

An independent Russian journalist, freed with the aid of his diplomats, was able to recount the scenes he saw after being essentially kidnapped by police (as they told him themselves, “You are not detained”), including minors being savagely beaten, people forced to lie face down in pools of blood for hours, police jumping on protesters’ backs until bones are broken, threats of rape, and much more. 

Four days into the anti-Lukashenko demonstrations, Belarusian state television broadcast a horrifying video report that shows young protesters at a detention center, obviously beaten and terrified, confirming to an off camera police officer that they will not engage in any more protests.

The mass arrests are part of a violent state crackdown on opposition demonstrators, who poured into the streets on August 9 to protest  an election that the president claimed he had “won” with 80% of the vote. Protests have sprung up all over the country, not just in the capital, Minsk. While exact numbers of protesters are hard to come by, official statistics say that at least 6,000 have been detained in just a few days. 

 

While media organizations have been careful to stress that vote rigging has been “alleged” in Belarus, I can state confidently that the election was stolen; the evidence is there for all to see. 

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the 37 year-old woman who ran against Lukashenko after her husband, a well-known opposition blogger, was jailed in May, has been forced into exile in neighboring Lithuania. Security officials threatened to make orphans of her children, whom she sent abroad before the election; they later arrested her campaign manager, Maria Moroz. 

They detained Moroz as a hostage, to be released in exchange for Tikhanovskaya’s departure from Belarus. 

Before she was allowed to leave the country, Tikhanovskaya recorded what amounts to a hostage video, in which she reads from a script while sitting in what seems to be the office of a Belarusan Central Elections Commission chairperson. In a personal video, which she recorded shortly after arriving in Lithuania, Tikhanovskaya speaks emotionally; she calls herself a “weak woman” — a chilling reference to Lukashenko having mocked her as a “poor little girl” ahead of the election. “Children,” she said in that video, “are our everything”—a  clear indication that she was told her children would not be safe. She added: “God forbid you should ever have to face the choice I had to face.”

Even with her children safely abroad, Tikhanovskaya had every reason to be terrified for them. Her husband, who was originally supposed to run instead of her before Lukashenko had him thrown in jail, remains behind bars, another hostage. 

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is young, passionate, and charismatic in a way that galvanizes voters. She has a wholesome image — an independent candidate who declared her love for her activist husband, Sergei, after he was locked up, and ran on a platform of freeing political prisoners, weakening ties with Russia, and democratic reforms. Her courage invested her with instant appeal.

The threats against Tikhanovskaya and her family are not the actions of a confident leader who easily won the majority of the polls. They are the actions of a dictator who feels his throne wobbling underneath him. Although the election was not monitored — already a major red flag — the machinations witnessed by ordinary citizens at the polls were giving the game away, Tikhanovskaya was clearly getting too many votes for comfort. Demands for “all votes to be counted” are no longer relevant at this point; to get to the bottom of what happened, one would need to hold a whole new, transparent election, which is impossible at the moment.

Look at this graph if you want to understand the generational span of Lukashenko’s rule:



Add to that stagnation and growing inequality, as well as a history of repressions and crackdowns. Now add the fear, uncertainty, and crisis that 2020 brought — a spectacle that has included Lukashenko mocking the coronavirus and hosting a parade as infections surged. 

Lukashenko’s response to the protests has included not just threats and violent crackdowns; he also cut off the internet in an attempt to stifle dissent. The people, however, appear furious and determined in their defiance. Bypassing restrictions, some have even created a Telegram channel dedicated to unmasking and doxxing Lukashenko’s security services — a situation that could escalate dramatically on top of all of the other escalations. 

It is not clear if Lukashenko will be toppled. Certainly, the savagery with which the protesters are being treated shows us that he fears as much. Some regional analysts believe that the regime is nearing collapse, but the question is — at what cost?

Americans should be paying close attention to events in Belarus. Lukashenko’s response to the opposition shows how a cornered rat behaves — with mass arrests, death threats, and attempts to shut down or limit access to the internet. Donald J. Trump is just a wannabe authoritarian, but like Lukashenko he can be dangerous when under duress. We have observed Trump’s increasing petulance — everything from the constant revenge-firings of officials and blasting his own intelligence community on Twitter — and see how it can easily turn into a rage. 

We can see how that rage finds an outlet via unidentified paramilitary police grabbing protesters  in places like Portland. We can see it in how peaceful protesters were tear-gassed in D.C. for a bizarre photo op. One of the functions of authoritarianism is to bulldoze the safeguards that a democratic system places between the individual and the state — as craven officials continue to help Trump, more and more of the American public is exposed to both his anger and his incompetence.

Americans are lucky to have a system that still provides many protections from Trump’s rage, but that system has its vulnerabilities. With the pandemic out of control in the States, voting by mail has become more important — but our Postal Service is being sabotaged, to name one obvious example. Republicans have been going after the USPS for years, but their efforts now present Trump with a potential opportunity to cast the upcoming presidential election as seriously flawed, especially if it’s a close one. When a crucial part of the societal infrastructure that is propping up our democracy is weakened, we stray further toward unpredictable scenarios. 

Keith Kahn-Harris, a London based sociologist and prolific author, explains in an excellent Twitter thread that Western ideological zealots who support foreign dictators and cast them as fighters of Western imperialism (Kahn-Harris he refers to them as “Tankies” — the term originated with British people who supported Soviet tanks rolling across Europe, but has since broadened to include different groups, united by a disdain for the Western countries they call home) have succumbed to delusion by treating Lukashenko’s state propaganda as though it were meant to be believed. 

Rather, explains Kahn-Harris, “In dictatorships the absurdity of the lie is precisely the point—it is an expression of dominance.” People who have grown up in authoritarian regimes know that official statements are lies. The trick is to understand the subtext of the lie. People who have grown up in democracies are not equipped with the necessary cynicism to combat a leader who lies axiomatically, which is why the U.S. media has failed to cover the Trump presidency with adequate insight. 

There is a very good parallel to be drawn between Trump’s base — as they do everything from cheering on our own examples of horrific police violence to ignoring or dismissing the president’s inaction on the pandemic — and Lukashenko’s Western fanboys as they seek to discredit protesters in Belarus. 

Both groups are operating in a state of unreality. As we have seen over the past few months,  2020 has shown all too well, unreality is both seductive and deadly. 
    [post_title] => Why you should care about what's happening in Belarus
    [post_excerpt] => Americans should be facing close attention to events in Belarus. Lukashenko’s response to the opposition shows how a cornered rat behaves — with mass arrests, death threats, and attempts to shut down or limit access to the internet. Donald J. Trump is just a wannabe authoritarian, but like Lukashenko he can be dangerous when under duress.
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Why you should care about what’s happening in Belarus

by Natalia Antonova

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