Policy

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    [post_content] => Launched with a hashtag, a new movement seeks to raise awareness of how fundamentalist Christianity is polarizing the national discourse.

In thousands of evangelical elementary schools across the United States, children begin each day by reciting three pledges — one to the American flag, another to the Christian flag, and a third to the Bible. The latter two might come as a shock to people who are unfamiliar with white Christian fundamentalist subculture, but they are standard practice in these schools, approximately 2,000 of which are subsidized by taxpayer funds.

The version of the pledge to the Christian flag typically recited in fundamentalist and evangelical schools, which usually self-identify simply as Christian schools, ends with “one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty for all who believe.” This is hardly a pluralistic sentiment. One wall in the elementary building of the K-12 Christian school I attended in the 1980s and ‘90s was emblazoned with part of Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” We schoolchildren knew exactly what those words meant. We were raised to be the generation that would take back America for Christ, “saving” the country from the godless liberals who, we were told (explicitly and often), killed babies and were destroying the institution of the family, and whose preferred policies, we were told, would bring divine punishment on our nation.

Eighty percent of white, born-again Christians — that is, white evangelicals and fundamentalists — voted for Donald Trump in 2016. More than 90 percent of them object to his impeachment, and polls consistently show him at over 70 percent in their favorability rating. If you want an answer to the question of where President Trump’s white evangelical base was radicalized, it’s right here. And while this demographic is down to 16 percent of the population, it remained 25 percent of the electorate in the 2018 midterms and is advantaged by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Electoral College.

Ex-evangelicals (or “exvies”) like myself have been trying to draw attention to the problem of evangelical authoritarianism in recent years, bringing the insights that come with lived experience to the table. Using hashtag campaigns like #EmptyThePews,  #ChurchToo, #ChristianAltFacts, and #ExposeChristianSchools to achieve collective visibility we have, in conjunction with the efforts of researchers who have been monitoring the Christian Right for decades, made some progress in changing the national conversation around evangelicalism. A change in the discourse is essential if we are to shift the Overton window back from the extremes to which the Right has taken it over the last few decades.

For too many pundits, commentators, and gatekeepers, the answer to “where were they radicalized” is found in taboo territory. Christianity as it is practiced by millions is not always a social good — indeed, it is sometimes downright harmful to both individuals and society. But the Americans who most need to have that conversation are often unable to engage with the idea that the Christianity they view as “authentic” is anything less than perfect. And so we continue to see hand wringing, pearl clutching, and an increasingly desperate barrage of unhelpful think pieces about the “crisis” of young people leaving the church and about evangelical hypocrisy.

Repeating that the “coastal elites’” reading of the Bible is “correct” and “heartland evangelicals’” reading of the Bible is wrong will not, despite the former’s best intentions, convince evangelicals to withdraw their allegiance from Trump. The vast majority of white evangelicals are not going to listen to mainline Protestant, liberal Catholic, moderate to liberal evangelical, or Jewish commentators who quote Bible verses exhorting readers to treat foreigners with kindness. And fellow conservative evangelicals like Michael Gerson, a George W. Bush administration alum who helped create the monster of which Trump is a symptom — but who now sees Trump as a liability — are not going to rein them in. And none of this does anything to reverse the normalization of Christian extremism that now dominates the American public sphere.

Hashtags like #EmptyThePews can harness the democratic potential of social media — which still exists, despite the anti-democratic forces that exploit it for nefarious purposes — to break through these barriers. Indeed, hashtags may prove critical in the fight for human rights and democracy, the greatest threat to which, in the United States, is undoubtedly represented by the Christian Right and the Christian nationalist ideology to which its members adhere.

In August 2017, I launched #EmptyThePews out of frustration with the response from conservative white evangelical leaders to the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, at which protestor Heather Heyer was killed. Prominent Christian Right voices either remained silent on Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comments, or even went so far as to assert on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network that there was “not a racist bone” in Trump’s body. Opining on how, as authoritarians, white evangelicals typically refuse to listen to any criticism, I observed that the only things they’re really afraid of are declining church attendance numbers and losing the youth. We should, therefore, throw their alienation of young Americans and their loss of members in their faces.

On August 16, 2017 I tweeted, “If you left Evangelicalism over bigotry and intolerance or this election specifically, please share your story with the hashtag #EmptyThePews. The hashtag trended, representing perhaps the first viral ex-evangelical hashtag, and my call for stories received a robust response.



Ruth Tsuria, a communications scholar who is working toward the publication of a peer-reviewed academic article on #EmptyThePews, said that the hashtag has created a community and provided it with a platform to discuss the bigoted and discriminatory behaviors its members experienced in church. Akiko Bergeron*, a former Southern Baptist who was an early adopter of the hashtag, told me: “Finding the Exvangelical community and using #EmptyThePews has been an enlightening and enriching experience for me. I have met others of different faiths and no faith at all. I have met people that have never been welcomed in evangelical churches because they don’t fit the rigid mold expected by a white patriarchal and authoritarian system. I have been changed for the better.”

But can #EmptyThePews create a lasting impact beyond this community? Can it help change the ways in which we discuss religion and society at a time when a large faction of Christians are unswervingly devoted to a president who continually undermines democracy and the rule of law?

While no one can control the ways in which a hashtag is used once it’s out in the world, I framed #EmptyThePews not as anti-religious, but as means of creating a coalition for those of us who leave toxic versions of Christianity — whether for better religion or for no religion at all. Even so, the hashtag does flip the predominant script about American secularization in our elite media. Peter Beinart contends, for example, in a sloppily-argued article for The Atlantic, that religion is a social good for its ability to foster good citizenship and national cohesion, full stop. Those who abandon it, he indicates, are divisive and probably disproportionately responsible for American polarization. In fact, Beinart frames the issue of asymmetric polarization in the United States precisely backwards — our polarization is driven from the right, and, I maintain, the Christian Right above all. #EmptyThePews points to the necessity of abandoning and confronting anti-democratic Christianity. Some religion embraces pluralism, but fundamentalism, in its intolerance, undermines pluralism, and white evangelical Protestantism is a variety of fundamentalism.

Two years after its launch, I still believe in the message, the protest quality, and the storytelling capacity of #EmptyThePews and similar hashtags as a means of inspiring people to confront the threat to democracy, human rights, and pluralism represented by right-wing evangelicalism and the Christian nationalism it fosters. As more stories of leavers of high-demand, anti-pluralist, fundamentalist religious groups are highlighted in the public sphere, we might begin to see prominent media outlets and personalities grappling seriously with the nexus of authoritarian religion and the authoritarian politics currently on the ascendant in America.

Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional attorney with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, notes that representation matters when it comes to attaining social equality. “It is absolutely critical to showcase heathens, apostates, heretics, dissenters, and ex-believers. Conservative and insular religions only survive as closed information loops.” The hashtag “tells the truth about what happens behind the closed doors of the churches,” he said, adding: “The truth might hurt the church, but that doesn't make the truth anti-religious.” Indeed, as Seidel argues throughout The Founding Myth, there can be no freedom of religion without freedom from religion.

In addition to providing Trump with his most enthusiastic and immovable base, right-wing, mostly white American evangelicalism has been shown in recent years to have widespread issues with sexual abuse and cover-ups, and even with child marriage. This kind of born-again Protestantism is, like all fundamentalisms, ultimately incompatible with democracy; it must be defeated politically if we are to have a functional democracy in the United States. The first step to achieving that defeat must be the ability to name the problem and discuss it frankly.

My hope for #EmptyThePews and similar hashtag campaigns is that they will help to make those conversations possible in the upper echelons of America’s public sphere, and sooner rather than later. Without that shift in our national conversation, we could well be doomed to at least a generation of authoritarian rule imposed on the majority by the minority of America’s unreconstructed, waving their flags and worshipping at their megachurches.

*Akiko's surname is a pseudonym.
    [post_title] => If we want to save American democracy, we must have a very difficult conversation about evangelical Christianity
    [post_excerpt] => Born-again Protestantism is, like all fundamentalisms, ultimately incompatible with democracy; it must be defeated politically if we are to have a functional democracy in the United States.
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If we want to save American democracy, we must have a very difficult conversation about evangelical Christianity

by Chrissy Stroop

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    [post_content] => America's foreign policy and international image would be improved if the foreign policy community were more diverse.

I am a black man in America, which means I am physically vulnerable all the time. The United States leads the world in police killings of its own black and brown citizens, and ranks first in incarcerating them. Its education system disproportionately funnels black children through the school to prison pipeline. Millions of people  — many of them black — are disenfranchised from voting because they served time in jail for felonies. In many cases they never regain their right to participate  in American democracy. Despite all these obvious and well-documented injustices, the white majority believes America has the moral pedigree to tell the rest of the world how to handle its own internal affairs. 

This attitude among white Americans speaks to an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The people who dominate and shape global conversations in the western and English-speaking world — think tank presidents, diplomats, foreign correspondents, and business executives  — are almost exclusively white men. They have no experience of the America I grew up in, and this limits their ability to understand the world. 

 As a black man who grew up in Detroit and then spent a good part of his adult life traveling and reporting in Eastern Europe, I have learned that white supremacy and imperialism are the same. The difference is that one is global while the other is domestic. Africa is least responsible for global warming but suffers most of its consequences, which are caused by the world’s leading powers. This is the type of visceral understanding gained from lived experience that the white men who dominate and shape the foreign policy conversation do not have. Their understanding of the world is thus limited, and the consequences are becoming increasingly clear: the American conversation about the world lacks nuance and insight; this undermines our ability to engage effectively — which, in turn, weakens both our own society and our place in the world.

I welcome the conversations about the need for more ethnic diversity in foreign policy conversations. I am glad that people are beginning to understand that with more diverse voices, America could develop a foreign policy that was less expansionist in its global engagement. Unfortunately, however, these conversations are predicated on inaccurate beliefs.

A flawed democracy

America is not the world’s most successful democracy; nor is it an example for the world to follow. Its own legal system has kept black people from gaining any real electoral power at the local and national levels. In Florida alone, more than a million people convicted of felonies were disenfranchised from voting before a November referendum restored their rights; the current governor is trying to slow the restoration process. This is not a system to export. It is a system that must be changed.

If America’s white majority were truly interested in making sure that non-white voices were included in foreign policy discussions, they would first work to stop the disenfranchisement of people of color. Nor are teachers with unchecked racial biases qualified to shape the minds of the next generation of foreign policy thinkers.

Besides its many misguided military interventions, such as the now widely-reviled Second Iraq War, the U.S. also has a long-documented history of allowing its intelligence service to carry out assassinations against world leaders whose policies deviate from the administration’s. In the twentieth century the CIA backed the assassination of elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende because he was a socialist, and helped engineer the coup that deposed Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh because he wanted to nationalize his country’s oil reserves. 

The United States is accustomed to implementing its foreign policy via the barrel of a gun, which makes a twisted kind of sense for the most gun-toting country on earth with the second-highest number of gun-related murders of any industrialized nation. But if the United States wants to be an example to the world it must change its gun laws and change its ways. It must ban the sale and distribution of military grade weapons to law enforcement agencies that treat the communities they are supposed to serve like enemy combatants. 

There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.

I write for The Root, the largest black news site in America. I have the rare opportunity of covering national politics from the perspective of a black person with a black editor. I do not have to deal with a white male editor who might try to change my voice or question my using personal experiences to inform my reporting. I love working at The Root, but my ambition is to be a foreign correspondent. I have two graduate degrees in journalism and another in Russia area studies; I speak two Eastern European languages and can point to many other achievements. But I have never been invited to an interview for any foreign reporting job. 

An editor at a mainstream newspaper once told me that I wasn’t qualified to write about U.S.-Russia/Ukraine relations because I was not a diplomat. This same publication has hired white people without any relevant credentials for foreign reporting positions. One of the recurring claims one hears in foreign policy circles is there aren’t enough qualified people of color to fill open positions. And yet, despite my qualifications, I cannot find a job as a foreign correspondent.

Hypocrisy won't win hearts and minds

The lack of diverse voices in international news has a profound  impact on the coverage of countries like Russia, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. The foreign press corps in Moscow and Kiev are almost exclusively white. I am quite confident that the reporting from those regions would be richer and more nuanced if half the press corps were composed of black and brown reporters who had personal experiences of immigration and of police abuse.

In the United States the coverage of Russia over the past two years has been weak. Analysts have focused on Putin, at the expense of nuanced reporting about ordinary Russians. Our media has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to blame the Kremlin for the fact that millions of Americans decided to vote a white supremacist into the White House, even as they have refused to engage in a serious conversation about the white supremacy that played a far greater role in getting Donald Trump elected than Putin could have done.

Incorporating more ethnically diverse people into foreign policy spaces goes well beyond cherry picking brown faces that seem non-threatening to sit at the table. If the U.S. is to pursue an honest, effective foreign policy, it needs to recruit people who are willing to break from the neo-liberalism that underlies the racism in contemporary American society.

There is transparent hypocrisy in insisting that Russia remove its troops from Ukraine while threatening military intervention in Iran. America regularly condemns Russia and other nations over their abuse of LGBTQ people, even as black trans women in America are murdered at alarming rates. 

Why diversity is important

Too many of our white diplomats are blind to this hypocrisy, because they are the products of an America that was built by and for them. There are too few people like me representing the United States at the table of global affairs, and this undermines the effectiveness of its foreign policy. Take Haiti, for example. Under the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, the United States deployed Marines to the island in 1915 to fend off German influence during World War I. But instead of helping to protect Haiti’s independence, the U.S. occupied the Caribbean country until 1934, exacerbating the theft of resources and political instability caused by French colonization. More recent U.S. policy towards Haiti hasn’t been much better. During the 1970s and 1980s successive administrations supported the violent  regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, while Donald Trump stripped Haitians in the United States of their Temporary Protected Status and made them vulnerable to deportation. 

House Democrats have held hearings on reparations for the descendants of slaves who were brought to America from Africa. The conversation needs to go global in the case of Haiti, with a hearing to address reparations for that country — or, better yet, a Marshall Plan.

What is good for Europe is good for Haiti. 

Americans see their country as a global cop enforcing democracy around the world, but Putin, Kim Jong-un, China’s President Xi and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei see a state with dubious motives and a narcissistic worldview.

I am working to diversify the international affairs conversation through my fellowship at Global Strategists Association, a non-profit organization that helps people from the black diaspora to engage in foreign policy spaces. Most of our events are held in spaces that are majority people of color, and look at domestic and global issues through the lens of blackness. Founder Apprecia Faulkner created the organization after encountering obstacles that prevented her from persuading white-dominated organizations to open up for black participants. I and other fellows are benefiting from her efforts, but the fact that she had to build that space illustrates the problem: America’s foreign policy circles are not interested in being as diverse as the image of America they sell to the world. 

The United States needs to carry out a major makeover of its domestic politics so that it is committed to all of its citizens, and not just the white ones. Only then can America truly promote an honest foreign policy that is not predicated on exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people — which is precisely what it does to its own minority groups at home. 
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    [post_excerpt] => There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.
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America’s foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men

by Terrell J. Starr

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