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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.”

 
    [post_title] => Pro-Biden white evangelicals are a minority. The vast majority will support Trump
    [post_excerpt] => It is wildly irresponsible to equate “good” religion journalism with highlighting moderate to liberal evangelical youth as if they are typical.
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Pro-Biden white evangelicals are a minority. The vast majority will support Trump

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    [post_content] => After years of shallow coverage, legacy media in the U.S. are finally engaging critically with white evangelical ideology. Read part one of this three-part series on the trajectory of the Christian Right; and part two.

The would-be respectable evangelical elite, which includes Beltway-based media analysts and political lobbyists who rose to power under the Reagan and Bush presidencies, have positioned themselves as Never Trumpers. But they have failed to take responsibility for their role in waging the culture wars that led to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency and subsequent consolidation of power, which happened largely on the back of the Christian Right’s unswerving support. And while majorities of all white Christian demographics voted for Trump in 2018, white evangelicals led the pack and remain America’s most Trumpist demographic.

While elite evangelicals like Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson, and David French all find Donald Trump a bridge too far, they have long supported the kind of Christian schooling that serves to indoctrinate children in patriarchal and anti-LGBTQ views, toxic purity culture, Christian nationalist history, young earth creationism, and right-wing political ideology. They also share their rank-and-file coreligionists’ obsession with banning abortion, which has served since the late 1970s as a proxy for white supremacism, as white evangelicals and other right-wingers invested in respectability felt compelled to give up overt support for racial discrimination.

Concentrated in the Republican Party since the late 1960s, white Christian America has never had to face up to its crimes. These range from supporting slavery and Jim Crow, to supporting the war crimes committed abroad post-9/11 under the presidential administration of George W. Bush—along with complicity in a predictable spike in hate crimes against Muslims at home. More recently, they include complicity in anti-Black terrorism and support for the voter suppression and “law and order” politics that Trump is counting on to win a second term in office.

Thanks to white evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support, “respectable” evangelicals have failed to keep a lid on the quiet part of their ideology; as a result, they have begun to lose control over the image of the Christian Right in the media, which means they can no longer direct the national conversation about evangelical Christianity as effectively as they used to. Although progress in this regard has been uneven, and particularly limited in major legacy outlets, a significant shift is detectable. Even if Trump loses the election this November, I hope the presence of diverse voices and critical perspectives on evangelicalism will continue to increase in the media, so that the public can begin to deal seriously with the threat authoritarian Christianity poses to democracy and human rights.

The primary barrier to covering right-wing Christianity fairly is the legacy media’s unspoken taboo on careful, critical examination of views that prominent Christians say are the product of “sincerely held religious belief.” This lack of critical coverage allows conservative Christians to get away with insisting that they are above politics; and because reporters for cable news and major media outlets fail to challenge the claim, they reinforce the white Christian supremacism that has become such an important political force.

Like freedom of the press, religious freedom is an important First Amendment right. But when believers use their faith as a bludgeon to attack othered groups and to prevent equal accommodation of members of those groups in the public square, we have moved beyond the bounds of a truly democratic approach to pluralism.

Because white evangelicals are using their religious beliefs to mobilize politically, the media must hold them to account just as they would any political movement. Advocates of democracy and human rights must make the Christian supremacism that pervades American politics visible; this is the most effective means to reclaim a robustly democratic understanding of religious liberty from the Christian Right, which defines it as their right to impose their religious beliefs on a public that does not share them.

Since 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for the flagrantly impious Trump in 2016, journalists, pundits, and commentators have scrambled to explain why. The initial flood of commentary about white evangelical support for Trump was ill-informed, presenting the Christian Right through the lens of hypocrisy; while this criticism was shallow, it was important in that it indicated the extent to which respectable evangelicals were losing their control of the Christian Right’s media image.

Eventually, critical hashtags created by former evangelicals (including myself) like #ExposeChristianSchools and #ChurchToo garnered coverage in outlets like New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press.  Liz Kineke, a religion journalist, produced Deconstructing My Religion, a documentary about ex-evangelicals for CBS Religion (I appear in the film).

More recently, New York Times religion reporter Elizabeth Dias wrote: “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” An evangelical herself, Dias has a history of uncritical, positive coverage of white evangelicals, so it is remarkable to read her critical assessment of white evangelicals in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, even if that assessment was framed very similarly to the introduction of a recent book on right-wing Christianity and gender that Dias failed to cite.

Bradley Onishi, an ex-evangelical who is Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and host of the podcast “Straight White American Jesus” (full disclosure: I have been a repeat guest), told The Conversationalist that the media still has a tendency to give disproportionate coverage to evangelicals who are critical of Trump, which he sees as “a reticence on the part of legacy outlets to be fully critical of white Christians.” He added: “We have it baked into our ether that they are good, wholesome, moral Americans who are the backbone of the country.”

Instead of exploring “the ways white evangelicals are entangled with white supremacists, white nationalists, homegrown terrorists, militias, and other anti-democratic groups,” prominent outlets take pains to represent evangelicals as largely benign, said Onishi. In his view, ex-evangelicals should be given far more media time. They know better than anyone “how and why white evangelicals became the most extreme religious group in the country when it comes to immigration, race, reproductive rights, and religious liberty.” I agree completely, because I believe in the power of stories to change minds.

The American media’s increasingly critical coverage of white evangelicals, however incomplete, has coincided with the rapid growth of the non-religious population. The latter has been driven by the Christian Right’s culture wars, which would seem to be at the root of much of the asymmetric polarization the United States has undergone in recent years. Just as Christian nationalists are concentrated in the Republican Party, a large majority of the religiously unaffiliated tend to vote for Democrats. Secular Democrats could help change the ways Americans discuss religion and pluralism; and the more the party recognizes them, the more likely we are to see such changes.

Many secular Democrats are frustrated at the heavy emphasis the Democratic National Committee places on trying to reach white Christians, the vast majority of whom will certainly vote for Trump again this year. But the Democrats have recently taken some serious steps toward embracing the nonreligious vote. These include the DNC’s 2019 Resolution 38, which recognizes the contributions of nonreligious Americans, and the appointment of Sarah Levin, formerly of Secular Coalition for America, as co-chair of the DNC’s Interfaith Council. Levin deserves much credit for pushing the DNC to include secular voters, which could create a positive feedback loop with the press that will further weaken respectable evangelicals’ control of their movement’s narrative.

Levin told The Conversationalist that the rot at the core of conservative evangelicalism “has been exposed to a new level in the eyes of everyday Americans,” who now see clearly “what it looks like when a narrow set of beliefs is privileged, when religious liberty is weaponized to undermine civil rights, when patriotic pluralism is replaced with Christian nationalism, and [how it affects] our foreign policy.”

The disastrous impact on American democracy of an empowered Christian Right could easily, as Levin points out, have been predicted. Many secularists are ex-evangelicals who know white evangelical subculture intimately have been sounding alarm bells for years; they should be part of the national conversation. The lesson of the Trump years could and should be that if the media learns, with the help of ex-evangelicals, to cover the danger of Christian nationalism accurately, it could make possible a healthier democratic future in the United States of America.
    [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism, part 3
    [post_excerpt] => In the third of a three-part series about the trajectory of Christian nationalism to its current powerful position, the author looks at the media's failure to engage critically with white evangelical ideology.
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The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism, part 3

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    [post_content] => Elite evangelicals who oppose the current president built their careers on the culture wars that brought him to power.

For my July column at The Conversationalist, I began exploring the failures of what I call “respectable” evangelicalism—that is, the kind that is associated with a prestigious professional pedigree of some sort and an investment in civility politics. The members of this conservative Christian subculture have established a friendly-seeming presence across prominent liberal media outlets, from the major network television news broadcasts to The New York Times and the Washington Post. Because they have easy and regular access to these platforms, PR-savvy commentators from within the conservative Christian community can claim that their fellow white evangelicals are an unfairly maligned and misunderstood demographic, sincerely motivated by moral convictions about abortion and a fear of losing their “religious freedom.” Liberals, in other words, should empathize with them.

This framing, which has contributed mightily to the normalization of extremism, still dominates the American discourse. But the majority of white evangelicals are ostentatiously enthusiastic for Donald Trump; their unwavering support for the president is accompanied by a remarkable statistical about-face on the question of whether a leader’s immoral private life can coexist with an ethical public and professional life, a fact that has certainly thrown a wrench in the gears of the evangelical PR machine.

Respectable evangelicals are losing their ability to control the narrative, which is an important development that I will examine in next month’s column. This month, the subject is the failure of respectable evangelicals to accept responsibility for the harm they have done to our society and our polity. Theirs is an ethical failure; it reveals the rot at the very center of the conservative evangelical project over the last half century.

In my previous column I examined the ways in which evangelical public figures, particularly Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, have failed to convince their coreligionists that unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump reflects poorly on evangelicalism. Wehner’s career as a GOP operative goes back to the Reagan administration, a connection of which he remains proud. Despite the hagiographic image the media has built of President Reagan, he was in many ways a proto-Trump. Reagan was catapulted to power in part thanks to the efforts of a then newly surging Christian Right, whose foot soldiers were moved by his anti-government rhetoric and projection of “cowboy” masculinity.

During the 1980 presidential campaign Reagan even used the slogan “let’s make America great again.” It was that election that set the United States on its trajectory toward Trumpism. Perhaps there is no better symbol of what Reaganite conservativism always was than the popular Soviet defector and Cold War comedian, Yakov Smirnoff, who, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, opposed a mandatory mask policy in his adopted hometown of Branson, Missouri. The town is a sort of geriatric evangelical Las Vegas—at least in terms of the entertainment it offers to tourists, if not so much the libertinism. “What a country,” indeed.

Gerson acknowledged in an April 2018 article for The Atlantic that evangelical Trump supporters “have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism,” but in the same piece he disingenuously implied that the nineteenth-century history of evangelicalism lies entirely in the abolitionist movement. In fact today’s white evangelicalism is much more a descendant of slaveholder Christianity, which claimed to have found its justification for human bondage in the Bible.

Gerson has not, as far as I know, ever expressed regret for his work in the George W. Bush administration, the politics of which—his politics—helped pave the way for the rise of Trump. The disastrous Iraq war boosted paranoia in the United States; its legacy is a climate of permanent fear, the flames of which the GOP fanned briskly after 9/11. The path from “truthiness” to post-truth is short. But please, sir, continue to wring your hands about how alienated “religious voters” are by Kamala Harris’s record on abortion while the country burns, in large part thanks to a movement you helped build.

Around the same time I was writing about Gerson and Wehner, I published related analysis in Religion Dispatches focusing on the failure of evangelical commentators David French and Ed Stetzer to dissuade rank-and-file white evangelicals from embracing conspiracy theories and spreading disinformation. The almost desperate tone of French and especially Stetzer in their commentary belies, perhaps, a sense at least of embarrassment, if not guilt, about how far into the post-truth wilderness their coreligionists have proven willing to go. What I do not see from them, or other similar commentators, is any serious attempt at self-reflection on the role they played in creating this state of affairs.

Stetzer scolds his fellow evangelicals for their “gullibility,” but not for their paranoid “mistrust of media and government.” According to Stetzer, all evangelicals need is a little more “discernment,” a perfectly vague concept he does little to fill with specific applicable content. He also invokes the Ninth Commandment’s injunction against bearing false witness and worries that the evangelical “witness” is being harmed, a tack that will fail to get results for reasons I explored in last month’s column. Meanwhile, French unconvincingly proffers his own supposed solution to the issue of evangelicals embracing QAnon and Bill Gates nonsense. If evangelical churches were simply to preach a better “political theology,” he maintains, one predicated on a robust understanding of the Ninth Commandment, the issue would be resolved.Clearly, neither man is willing to dig down to the roots of the problem—namely, the conservative evangelical theology that, as scholars in religious studies and sociology have demonstrated, was developed within, and with the purpose of justifying, an unjust hierarchical social order. Although many evangelicals with pretensions to respectability would deny they are racist, conservative evangelical thinking places men above women, white people above racial minorities, and straight people above LGBTQ people; it also emphasizes absolute parental authority over children and prescribes corporal punishment.

In other words, white evangelical subculture is a perfect recipe for authoritarianism. This is reflected in the many revelations, in recent years, of a culture of sexual misconduct and coverups.

Stetzer holds a prominent position at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution that made headlines in recent years for firing a woman hired to “support” LGBTQ students, essentially because she turned out to be “too gay,” and for ousting the only tenured African-American woman in the history of the school for the manner in which she chose to express solidarity with Muslims at a time of surging Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate crimes. Evangelical colleges such as Wheaton depend on right-wing parents and donors who make sure the schools enforce social conservative orthodoxy, even if, quietly, some professors teach “controversial” subjects, such as evolution, psychology, and even human sexuality more or less responsibly—though always at the risk of becoming too visible and thus being purged.

These colleges depend on K-12 Christian schools feeding into them, which brings us back to French, who has a record of staunchly defending them, despite the fact that they discriminate against LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff. They also teach the sort of “alternative facts” that constitute, ahem, false witness. Be that as it may, French proudly notes that he sent his own children to a Christian school, where he served as chairman of the board. As openly queer Florida State Representative Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-Orlando) noted in a recent webinar hosted by Secular Democrats of America, at least 83 Christian schools in Florida that receive taxpayer funding through vouchers have policies in writing that they will expel openly gay or trans students. Typically, such schools also teach young earth creationism and a version of history distorted by Christian nationalism. Is it any wonder that many children socialized in these schools—as I was, by the way—emerge ready to embrace conspiracy theories?

The refusal of elite evangelicals to accept any responsibility for the harm they have done by encouraging and pursuing the Christian Right’s culture wars agenda reveals the rot at the core of the entire conservative evangelical project over the last half century.

The consequences of culture warring include paving the way for the rise of President Trump, whom #NeverTrump evangelicals now seek to scapegoat due to his penchant for saying the quiet part of their ideology out loud. But they are also much broader, affecting everything from the problems of LGBTQ youth homelessness and suicide, to our country’s failures to address urgent problems in the areas of climate change and public health, to our lack of regard, as the only United Nations member state not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, for children’s rights to a robust education and to freedom from abuse and neglect.

America’s respectable evangelicals, still upheld by establishment media as commentators who deserve to be taken seriously, will not have any sort of “come to Jesus” moment over the harm they have done. If, however, enough Americans demand that those of us who have suffered that harm in various ways should be treated as stakeholders in the relevant discussions, it might be possible to compel them to face uncomfortable realities. In any case, sustained public pressure over their lack of accountability will likely be necessary if the United States is to have a healthy democratic future.
    [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism: part 2
    [post_excerpt] => The refusal of elite evangelicals to accept any responsibility for the harm they have done by encouraging and pursuing the Christian Right’s culture wars agenda reveals the rot at the core of the entire conservative evangelical project over the last half century.
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https://conversationalist.org/2020/04/30/jesus-is-my-vaccine-culture-wars-coronavirus-and-the-2020-election/
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The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism: part 2

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    [post_content] => Trump did not cause the rise of authoritarian Christianity. He is its symptom.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, prominent conservative commentator Peter Wehner, who worked for the Reagan and both Bush administrations, lamented the “Faustian bargain” his fellow white evangelicals have made in aligning themselves with Donald Trump. But the coreligionists Wehner finds so problematic represent the base that made his own high-profile career possible, and they do not agree that they are dealing with the devil. That the vast majority of white evangelicals have embraced Trump has caused prominent evangelicals invested in respectability, like Wehner and Michael Gerson of The Washington Post, considerable consternation. Gerson also played an influential role in the George W. Bush administration, and his hand wringing over the alliance between the Christian Right and Trump likely represents concern for his own legacy and that of “compassionate conservatism.”

The fear is not misplaced. One key lesson the American public should take away from the Trump years is precisely that the project of “respectable evangelicalism,” to which men like Wehner and Gerson have devoted much of their careers, has emphatically failed.

Specifically, the avatars of this “genteel” conservative Christianity have failed in three interrelated ways:
  1. they have failed to convince their coreligionists that supporting Trump is hypocritical or damaging;
  2. they have failed to take responsibility for the harm they have done by encouraging the culture wars and trying to put a benevolent face on them;
  3. they have failed to maintain control of the national conversation around evangelicalism to the extent they once did, which contributed to the major U.S. media’s tendency to normalize extremism.
If the United States is to have a healthy democratic future, Americans will have to reckon with the consequences of these failures. Wehner and company still represent the conventional wisdom, but their hold on the dominant narrative is cracking. Increasingly, ex-evangelical and other critical voices are breaking through, because the would-be respectable conservative Christians have failed to provide a satisfying answer to the nagging American question, “What’s wrong with evangelicals?” I will be devoting this and my two upcoming monthly columns here to addressing each of these three failures, starting with the first: the failure of the Wehners and Gersons of the world to influence white evangelicals away from support for Trump. As I will argue in subsequent months, this failure is essentially a symptom—a reflection of respectable evangelicals’ complicity in fueling the culture wars, which they can no longer contain. The fallout from the culture wars has also finally allowed ex-evangelicals to begin to be heard in the public sphere. Wehner argues that Trump is a cause of authoritarian Christianity’s rise, rather than the symptom of a decades-old movement, which he helped build, that is centered implicitly around protecting white privilege and explicitly around paranoid sexuality politics. In his recent article, Wehner writes, “The Trump presidency… has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement.” He is particularly concerned with the reputation, or “witness,” of evangelicals, which is vitally important to members of a faith community grounded largely in valorizing the conversion experience and the concomitant drive to convert others. But while the reputation of the evangelical movement has deservedly suffered greatly in the Trump era, we now have the data to show that, despite warnings from men like Wehner and Gerson, most conservative evangelicals simply don’t see this. The vast majority of white evangelicals support Trump because they believe he is doing the will of God. There is some disagreement among them over whether Trump is a Christian or simply an irreligious man willing to fight for Christians, but his white evangelical base does not doubt that the president fights for them. Of course, when they maintain he fights for Christians, they mean Christians “of the right sort”—i.e., those who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion, and who dislike immigrants and refugees. If a large, powerful body of Christians insists that backing a strongman credibly accused of sexually assaulting numerous women in order to grab power is Christian behavior, then, empirically, it is Christian behavior. Religions are complex cultural systems with traditions and texts that are subject to communal mediation and interpretation, which means that well-meaning liberals who dub Christian Trump supporters “fake Christians,” fail to see that authoritarian Christianity is just as “real” a version of the faith as any sort of progressive or liberationist Christianity. Meanwhile, “respectable” commentators like Wehner who mostly agree in substance with the majority of white evangelicals’ illiberal Christianity may see Trump support as a bridge too far, but their cries to this effect fall on deaf ears among their more uncouth brethren. According to findings by Denison University political scientist Paul A. Djupe, about three quarters of white evangelicals either disagree (46.5 percent) that “Christian support for Donald Trump has hurt Christian witness” or believe that it has neither hurt nor helped Christian witness (28 percent). Probing further into the influence of whether respondents to his study perceive their friends as mostly supportive or mostly opposed to Trump, Djupe argues, “these results help us see that, at this point, it is difficult, for instance, for evangelicals to see that the Christian brand has been damaged in society by its close association with Donald Trump. In part, that is because it has probably not been damaged among their bits of society.” Men like Wehner interact with a much more ideologically diverse crowd than rank-and-file evangelicals do; they are able to see the damage that evangelical support for Trump has caused, and thus fret about their inability to rein it in. Wehner’s willingness to call out his fellow evangelicals for accepting Trump’s overt racism (for example, Trump’s pejorative use of “kung flu” to refer to COVID-19 and his pushing the birther conspiracy about President Barack Obama) accomplishes nothing except, perhaps, to assuage his own conscience. In his analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Wehner argues that evangelicals, despite their “devil’s bargain” with Trump, have largely failed to get what they want. This is simply wrong. Trump has delivered in numerous ways on what he promised white evangelicals; and while they might see Bostock as a setback, subsequent “religious liberty” decisions have granted evangelicals sweeping exemptions to civil rights laws and education regulations. Since I cannot see “his heart,” to use the evangelical speak of my youth, I cannot say whether Wehner truly believes that Roe v. Wade will remain settled law when it is very much threatened. I can say, however, that he is out of touch with the evangelical movement if he sincerely fails to see that their embrace of Donald Trump is not a betrayal of their values, but rather a reflection of them. [post_title] => The failure of 'respectable' evangelicalism, part I [post_excerpt] => A minority of 'respectable' Christian conservatives who oppose Trump claim that he is responsible for the rise of authoritarian Christianity, rather than a symptom of a decades-long movement that is centered implicitly around protecting white privilege and explicitly around paranoid sexuality politics. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-failure-of-respectable-evangelicalism-part-i [to_ping] => [pinged] => https://conversationalist.org/2020/06/25/the-christian-right-the-bostock-decision-and-the-struggle-to-define-religious-freedom/ [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:13 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1921 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

The failure of ‘respectable’ evangelicalism, part I

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    [post_content] => When Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Christian Right celebrated. Now they're wondering if they've been betrayed.

On June 15 the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination “on the basis of sex,” extends to sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a young Trump appointee with a solid conservative background, wrote the 6-3 decision—leaving many right-wing Christians feeling betrayed and outraged.

“Bostock is as bad as you think,” reads the headline of one take published on June 19 in conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today. The New York Times reported that Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called June 15 “a sad day” and worried that the decision would “make it harder to defend our religious freedom, as far as being able to hire people of like mind.”

Readers will remember that Gorsuch filled the vacancy left by arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died toward the end of Obama’s second term. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the unprecedented move of refusing to hold senate confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, the candidate named by President Obama. McConnell insisted instead on leaving the seat vacant until after the 2016 presidential election. The dubious Gorsuch appointment, in other words, was seen as a major victory for conservative Christians and Republicans.

What are we to make of Gorsuch’s seeming “defection,” and what are the implications of the SCOTUS decision for the 2020 election?

The U.S. Christian Right’s primary strategy to gain and maintain theocratic control over other Americans is to weaponize the concept of religious freedom. Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney who is Director of Strategic Response at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, explained that "the end goal is to make conservative Christians and Christian nationalists a special, favored class.”

In other words, the Christian Right wants the "right" to discriminate against anyone whose lifestyle or professed views conflict with white evangelical Christian thought. According to this view, a pastry chef can refuse a commission to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because gay marriage conflicts with his religious beliefs; or an employer can refuse to cover contraception in their health coverage. Similarly, a pharmacist can refuse to sell a woman the morning after pill because his religious belief holds that life begins at conception.

In a sort of bait and switch, evangelical Protestants, traditionalist Catholics, and Mormons have, with significant success, attempted to replace a pluralistic understanding of religious liberty that is essentially in keeping with the vision of America’s founders, with a revisionist, Christian nationalist definition of religious freedom as the “right” of conservative Christians to dominate in the public square. This push has come along with the ascendance of a hypermasculine, patriarchal strain of evangelicalism that culminated in white evangelicals’ embrace of, and enduring loyalty to, President Donald Trump.

The point is neatly illustrated in another recent article from Christianity Today, in which evangelical political scientist Daniel Bennett argues in the wake of Bostock that all is not in fact lost for religious liberty, while positing a fundamental “conflict between LGBT rights and religious freedom rights." Bennett’s conservative Christian framing shows that he (like most of his coreligionists) thinks of religious freedom as a zero-sum game. In the context of pluralistic democracy, however, religious freedom should be understood as a fundamental area in which to ensure equal accommodation in the public square. Bennett, of course, ignores the existence of LGBTQ Christians and straight Christian allies. To approach religious freedom democratically means to see it as intertwined with, and complementary to, LGBTQ rights, rather than pitting the two against each other.

There is legal precedent for a pluralistic conception of religious liberty. Frederick Clarkson, a vocal advocate for the liberal reclamation of religious freedom, points to the 2014 case General Synod of the United Church of Christ v. Cooper in arguing the point. In that case, a federal judge ruled in favor of progressive Christian clergy who had been barred by North Carolina state law from solemnizing same-sex marriages—despite their religious conviction that they should do so.

There are other legal precedents that could be used by right-wing Christians to support their definition of religious freedom. The 2012 Supreme Court case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Employment Opportunity Division exempts religious institutions from anti-discrimination laws if the employee affected can be considered a religious minister. However, the case left much ambiguity around the definition of “minister,” and thus the “ministerial exception” is likely to be the site of future litigation.

Meanwhile, the Christian Right has managed to expand religious exemptions in other recent cases: in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a closely held corporation could be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage requirement if adhering to that requirement would constitute a violation of the owners’ sincerely held religious beliefs.

These precedents in favor of religious exemptions did not stop arch-reactionary Rod Dreher, an adult convert to the Orthodox Church in America and senior editor at The American Conservative, from tweeting his alarm about the supposed threat posed by Bostock to churches’ tax exempt status. “Thanks to two GOP appointees—Roberts and Gorsuch,” Dreher tweeted, “churches and schools that discriminate against LGBTs stand at risk of losing tax-exempt status, per the Bob Jones ruling. Hard to overstate the magnitude of this loss for religious conservatives.”



But GOP operative Ralph Reed, an evangelical political organizer and lobbyist with a long history of fighting for socially conservative causes, sought to downplay the significance of LGBTQ rights victories to the Christian Right. Per the Washington Post, he said: "Religious freedom and abortion just rise far higher in the hierarchy of concerns of faith-based voters.” He even went so far as to state, “Ultimately seeing a reckoning on Roe vs. Wade looms so much larger in the psyche of the right that I don’t know that this is a de-motivator.”

We need not take either man’s claims at face value, as both are heavily interested parties and old hands at spin. But the overturning of Roe, which would do immense harm to women’s rights and public health, is well within the realm of possibility. Given the importance white evangelicals place on ending legal access to abortion, Democrats should assume high white evangelical turnout to vote for Trump in 2020. Nor can we be sure that Bostock means LGBTQ protections will be safe from further court challenges by right-wing Christians.

Imani Gandy, Senior Legal Analyst at Rewire.News, dismissed Dreher’s alarmist handwringing, saying she did not believe conservatives had “anything to worry about when it comes to losing tax exempt status.” She added, “Roberts expressly left open the question of whether or not the First Amendment or RFRA would permit discrimination against LGBT people if that discrimination is couched as a religious belief.”

Seidel agreed with Gandy, adding that we can expect to see further attempts to undermine the separation of church and state via legal battles over religious exemptions.

“That fight is coming to the court very soon, and I doubt we’ll be able to rely on Gorsuch and Roberts to do the right thing. In fact, I think that inevitable future question is part of the reason Gorsuch wrote such a clear opinion. No doubt that the text of the Civil Rights Act demanded this decision, but misguided and weaponized notions of religious freedom will allow the conservatives to walk back some of these gains later.”

Andrew L. Whitehead, coauthor with Samuel L. Perry of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, suggested that there is some truth to Ralph Reed’s claim that LGBTQ rights are not as urgent a concern for the Christian Right as they used to be. Public opinion has shifted on the issue, he said, pointing out that even “those Americans who most strongly embrace Christian nationalism have liberalized significantly. In 2007, 7 percent [of them] supported same sex marriage. In 2017, 25 percent did.”

Seidel was not so sanguine. As authoritarian Christians have framed it, “religious freedom” entails the “right” to discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community in as many areas as possible. “If they are able to convince this Supreme Court that the First Amendment guarantees a right for a religious believer to act on their belief, regardless of the law, they will have won,” said Seidel. He added: “It’s no wonder Reed cares more about that fight than the others. If they can redefine religious freedom—weaponize religious freedom—they will have a right that guarantees them substantial wins in every other fight.”

If America is to achieve a functional democratic future, the public must embrace a liberal vision of pluralism and reject the idea that religious freedom, properly understood, could ever be in conflict with the promise of equal rights for all.

 
    [post_title] => The Christian Right, the Bostock decision, and the struggle to define religious freedom
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The Christian Right, the Bostock decision, and the struggle to define religious freedom

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    [post_content] => The university's decision reflects a devaluation of the humanities and critical thinking among conservative white evangelicals.

Liberty University abruptly dissolved its entire philosophy department on May 11. The administration announced its decision in a letter to the department’s seven faculty members, which included Mark Foreman, who had taught there for 30 years. In a since-deleted Facebook post, Foreman wrote, “As of June 30, I am unemployed.” He added that he had been given no advance notice; his contract was simply not renewed. Liberty faculty are not eligible for tenure unless they teach in the law school, where it is offered in compliance with the American Bar Association’s accreditation requirement.

Foreman wrote in a subsequent post that he bore Liberty no ill will and had no desire to disparage the school. The university maintains that professors affected by the closing of the philosophy department will still be able to teach, online and perhaps on campus.

Liberty University’s president is Jerry Falwell, Jr., a powerful figure in the Christian right. Since succeeding his father as president in 2007 he has transformed the Lynchburg, Va., institution: it now has an endowment of more than $3 billion, while student enrollment (including non-residential) is over 100,000. The conservative Christian university wields considerable political influence. Donald Trump gave the 2017 commencement address at Liberty, and Falwell has become so close to Trump in recent years that even some Liberty students have expressed concern.

Falwell was the first leader in the Christian right to endorse Trump’s candidacy for the 2016 Republican nomination for president. Shortly thereafter, many prominent evangelicals shifted their support from Senator Ted Cruz, the son of an evangelical pastor, and threw it behind the thrice-married pussy grabber. According to 2016 exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016; their support remains unwavering in 2020. Trump has rewarded Falwell for his continued unstinting loyalty with regular invitations to the White House.

More recently, a series of scandals have exposed Falwell’s authoritarianism and hypocrisy. Several major media outlets have reported that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was recently furloughed from federal prison, claims that in 2015 he made some compromising photos of Falwell’s wife Becki disappear. Shortly after doing this favor for Falwell, Cohen asked him to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Separately, Politico published a lengthy investigative report that quotes senior Liberty University officials who accuse Falwell of committing grave financial improprieties.

Under Falwell’s leadership, Liberty University has become known for extreme censorship and hostility to outsiders. Last month, he announced that arrest warrants had been issued for New York Times and Pro Publica reporters who covered the university’s widely criticized decision to hold on-campus classes after spring break, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

Given this context, Falwell’s quiet shuttering of the philosophy department in the face of declining student interest might seem insignificant. But there is a story here—one about the devaluation of the humanities and of critical thinking that speaks to why white evangelicals have consistently been, and remain, the most pro-Trump demographic in the United States.

Christianity has historically had a fraught relationship with the discipline of philosophy and its general ethos of free intellectual inquiry. Early theologians such as St. Augustine did adopt a great deal from Platonism and Stoicism, but modern philosophy developed as a discipline increasingly distinct from, and often at odds with, orthodox theology. Some authoritarian leaders view it as a threat. Tsar Nicholas I, for example, shut down the philosophy departments in Russian universities in 1850, following the 1848 revolutions that rocked Europe, lest students absorb socialist ideas that might turn them against his repressive regime.

Modern apologists, such as C.S. Lewis and the less well-known early twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers, have tried to employ the tools of philosophy in defense of essentially orthodox versions of the Christian faith. Prominent philosophers in academia generally view these attempts as failures. According to a 2013 survey of professors in leading philosophy departments in North America, Europe, and Australia, 72.8 percent of respondents identified as atheists.

Meanwhile, the fiction of the “evil godless professor” eager to corrupt the minds of Christian college students has become a staple of the American Christian right. The 2014 Pure Flix release “God’s Not Dead,” a movie nearly universally panned by critics, is perhaps the most well-known version of this trope. The villain of that modern morality tale is a philosophy professor. The trope itself is ubiquitous in conservative, mostly white evangelical subculture, whether found in a tract that blames school shootings on the teaching of evolution or in contemporary Christian novels.

One of the defining features of fundamentalist religion is the construction of what scholars call enclave communities, where the fundamentalist group’s sacrosanct “alternative facts” can go unchallenged by inconvenient modern knowledge. This is certainly true of American evangelicals. Institutions that promote their views include the controversial Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C., which was founded and is funded by the evangelical Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby (notorious for refusing to provide their employees with health insurance that covers contraception); and the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which bases its explanation of Earth’s beginnings on a literal interpretation of the Bible. There are also Christian bookstores, the contemporary Christian music and movie industries, and, of course, Christian schools, colleges, and universities—as well as homeschooling groups and curricula.

Many of these institutions promote the idea that the “Christian alternative” to the scholarly consensus on matters such as evolution, or the reliability of the Bible, is just as intellectually sound as the consensus in what Christian fundamentalists refer to as “the world”—that is, everything that exists outside their bubble and their control. But the fear that these Christian alternatives might not withstand scrutiny lurks just below the surface. Christian educational institutions, for example, are so hostile to academic and personal freedom that they require faculty, staff, and students to sign very specific, very conservative “lifestyle statements” and statements of faith.

We see this fear at play in this moment of far right-wing backlash, in the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump. Trump pursues evangelicals’ agenda of remaking the United States so that it conforms to their worldview, which is why I have occasionally remarked over the last few years that it feels as though the entire country is turning into a Christian school. In modern democracies, the existence of pluralism is simply a fact; but to authoritarian evangelicals, it is a threat. If they can eliminate the need to accommodate those who are different from them, they will.

Liberty University’s decision to eliminate its philosophy department might still seem odd, inasmuch as it undermines the school’s aspiration to intellectual seriousness. And let me be clear—some Christians are perfectly capable of intellectual seriousness. I find a great deal to criticize in Catholic theology, but today’s Catholic Church does at least teach that evolution and faith are compatible. Nor would I would deny the intellectual discipline and rigor it takes to become a Jesuit. Meanwhile, Liberty is not only dumping its philosophy programs, but also touting a new right-wing “think tank” in partnership with the notorious troll Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA.

Asked about the situation at Liberty, Professor Karl Giberson, who became an Episcopalian after he was pushed out of his community for teaching evolution at an evangelical college, ticked off the names of Stonehill, Boston College, and Georgetown—all Catholic universities, which regard philosophy as a critical conversation partner in “a school that values the Christian tradition.” A serious institution of higher education does not eliminate its philosophy department because student interest in the humanities is declining.

Jack Panyard, who graduated from Liberty University last year, was appointed editor-in-chief of the student newspaper in 2017, only to see the position eliminated entirely after he refused to submit to Falwell’s censorship. Interviewed for The Conversationalist, he said, “It's enormously irresponsible to have a university without a philosophy department, but LU has built its base enough that they know they’ll get by.” Panyard sees the recent and current changes as part of a process of prioritizing, by which Liberty is becoming “less of a Christian university” and more of a “Republican conservative evangelical” institution.

Scott Okamoto, a former English instructor at Azusa Pacific University and a keen observer of trends in evangelical higher education said, “Philosophy eats evangelical minds for breakfast. No self-respecting evangelical would ever want to study ‘worldly’ thinking that deeply—or very few.”

Evangelicals have never had a Christian intellectual tradition comparable to that of the Jesuits, but they do often pretend to intellectual seriousness. Liberty’s decision to drop the pretense is perfectly in keeping with the Trump era, when all sorts of masks are coming off.
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https://conversationalist.org/2020/04/30/jesus-is-my-vaccine-culture-wars-coronavirus-and-the-2020-election/
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Liberty University eliminates its Philosophy Department, furthering the Christian right’s anti-intellectual backlash

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    [post_content] => How to explain the Christian Right's unshakable loyalty for Donald Trump, a twice-divorced man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women? 

White evangelicals have consistently been Donald Trump’s most supportive demographic since his 2016 victory. Even as the president’s overall approval numbers decline after the initial “rally ‘round the flag” effect from the COVID-19 pandemic that he is egregiously (and arguably criminally) mishandling, white evangelicals remain steadfastly by his side. The pandemic has itself become a site of the culture wars that the anti-democratic U.S. Christian Right has been waging relentlessly for four decades as it attempts to hold back the progress of civil rights and equality in America. And Trump, who has demonstrated his willingness to pursue their culture wars agenda, can count on unwavering support from white evangelicals in the upcoming presidential election. Our analytical focus should be on why and how authoritarian evangelicals have managed to gain so much power and what can be done to fight back, as opposed to hand wringing over their willingness to partner with an impious strongman.

Pundits who do not understand right-wing evangelical subculture have over the last few years frequently suggested that certain tipping points might shake evangelicals’ loyalty to Trump. Early on, many naively believed that shaming evangelicals over their hypocrisy in supporting a thrice-married man credibly accused of sexual assault by numerous women would be an effective means of peeling some of them away. More recently, some commentators claimed hopefully that outgoing Christianity Today editor Mark Galli’s December 19, 2019 op-ed, “Trump Should be Removed from Office,” was evidence of significant dissent over support for the president within the evangelical camp.

Trump did initially seem concerned about Galli’s op-ed, tweeting angry responses and launching an “Evangelicals for Trump” initiative. He needn’t have been. His evangelical base remains unwavering in its support for one simple reason: Trump gives authoritarian Christians practically everything they want. He validates their worst culture warring impulses and pursues the Christian Right’s agenda more comprehensively and vigorously than any previous president, including George W. Bush. Not only has Trump been stacking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy with young far right ideologues; he also moved the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to play to evangelicals “end times” beliefs.

Far from revealing that there is significant division among white evangelicals over Trump, the responses to Galli’s op-ed showed that Christianity Today, while certainly a conservative publication, is no longer the evangelical flagship magazine. Instead, the periodical that Billy Graham, “America’s Pastor,” founded in 1956 is now out of step with an increasingly radicalized white evangelical demographic, one in which the racial animosity that has always been a part of this kind of Christianity is now closer to the surface than many of the “genteel” readers of Christianity Today might wish.

Meanwhile, the prominent Southern Baptist leader Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., who was once critical of Trump and refused to vote for him in 2016, now says he regrets that decision and will vote for him in 2020. In his statement, Mohler bragged that he thinks Trump may see an even higher share of the white evangelical vote this time around than the 80 percent he got in 2016, and he may well be right. The case for any shift of evangelicals away from Trump thus further crumbles.

To be sure, a small minority of white evangelicals remains critical of Trump, but only 16 percent of the white evangelical vote went to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the current polling data does not show  Joe Biden gaining a greater share. The realities of American polarization have become so stark that the coveted swing voter is now essentially a thing of the past, at least according to the analysis of political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, which I find convincing. National elections thus become a contest of turning out the base, and white evangelicals vote disproportionately to their numbers. Although they are down to 16 percent of the U.S. population, they still made up 25 percent of the electorate in the 2018 midterms.

And Trump continues to deliver for them. Most recently, he pulled money from the World Health Organization, the kind of international institution right-wing authoritarians despise for their “elitism” and “globalism,” and redistributed some of it to the evangelical missionary organization Samaritan’s Purse, which has somehow been allowed to set up a 68-bed field hospital in New York City’s Central Park despite legitimate concerns about its ability to provide an equal standard of care to all patients.

Samaritan’s Purse is headed by rabid homophobe and Islamophobe Franklin Graham—Billy Graham’s son; the organization requires staff to sign a statement of faith that reads in part, “we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.” In addition to Samaritan’s Purse, Graham also heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which is deliberately seeking to capitalize on people’s fears of the novel coronavirus in order to drum up conversions. Graham has, naturally, been one of Trump’s most outspoken prominent evangelical supporters since 2016.

But it’s not all bad news for those of us who support democracy and human rights. Trump’s supporters do have some reasons to worry about the president’s reelection prospects. The economy has historically played a decisive role in American presidential elections, and the staggering unemployment numbers caused by quarantine during the pandemic would normally sink any incumbent’s prospects. This may be one key motivation of the recent protests calling for an end to quarantine restrictions on economic activity. (By the way, the phrase “reopen the economy” is a partisan right-wing talking point, and journalists should avoid using it as a supposedly neutral descriptor for these actions.)

As some states such as Georgia move to ease quarantine restrictions and allow certain businesses to reopen, Trump continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth—for example, rebuking Georgia’s governor for planning to ease restrictions too early after tweeting a demand to “LIBERATE” other states where anti-quarantine protests had taken place. Meanwhile the anti-lockdown protestors direct their anger at Dr. Anthony Fauci rather than at Trump.

While it would be wrong to dismiss these protests as mere “astroturf” campaigns, they do have backing and funding from a wealthy and well-connected right-wing network that includes billionaire Robert Mercer and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. But if those of us who value democracy and equality choose to ignore the protests, labeling them as top-down initiatives with no deep grassroots support, we risk missing their potential political impact. A number of commentators made the same mistake with the appearance of the Tea Party, which was backed by many of the same members of the donor class. Another mistake was to view the Tea Party as distinct from the Christian Right, which it is not. We must avoid repeating that mistake.

Indeed, the cab of a semi used in the protest in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on April 20, was emblazoned with the phrase “Jesus is my vaccine,” rhetoric similar to that used by pastors who defiantly continue to hold in-person church services despite shutdown orders meant to contain the pandemic. Although there is no legal precedent for the exemption of churches from quarantine, a number of right-wing organizations have now taken up the cause under the rallying cry of “religious freedom” that they have effectively employed in recent years to impose a theocratic agenda with respect to matters such as abortion, birth control, and same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, new conspiracy theories are being spread via social media, including the apocalyptic assertion that the coronavirus vaccine will be the “Mark of the Beast” associated with the “end times,” literally damning those who receive it.

Such beliefs are harmful to both democracy and public health, and, while it remains to be seen what impact they might have on the 2020 election, it is worth remembering that in 2013 a full 20 percent of Republicans believed with certainty that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. The Electoral College, as well as America’s problems with gerrymandering and voter suppression, favor the Right, but at the same time, the spectacle of Christians behaving badly in the face of the coronavirus pandemic will most likely have a negative impact on evangelicals’ reputation, and, by extension, Trump’s.

In any case, with the Christian Right and the GOP desperate to cling to their disproportionate power, we can expect a bumpy ride to November. Democrats will need to make every effort to turn out their base in order to defeat the GOP.
    [post_title] => “Jesus is my vaccine”: culture wars, coronavirus, and the 2020 election
    [post_excerpt] => The Trump supporters who protested the pandemic lockdown have support from billionaires like Robert Mercer and Betsy DeVos. But if we label them as top-down initiatives with no deep grassroots support, we risk missing their potential political impact.
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“Jesus is my vaccine”: culture wars, coronavirus, and the 2020 election

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    [post_content] => What has been driving the harmful behaviors exhibited by some Christians in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic?

The World Health Organization worries, in a February 2 report about the spread of the COVID-19 virus, that an “infodemic,” i.e., “an over-abundance of information—some accurate, and some not,” is making the public feel that it’s difficult to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance. The authors of the report seem to assume that most people want objectively reliable information. Unfortunately, far too many are looking not for objectively reliable information, but rather for “guidance” that corresponds with their political loyalties and ideological preconceptions.

In the United States, there are fundamentalist Christians who see institutions like the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of a “godless liberal” plot. Tony Spell, the Apostolic Pastor of Tabernacle Life Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said: “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.” He made this statement during a church service reportedly attended by 350 people on the evening of Tuesday, March 17, in defiance of a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people issued by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards.

Governor Edwards is a Democrat.

While CBS News reported that police told Spell the National Guard would break up any future gatherings at his church, a FOX News report quotes Louisiana National Guard Colonel Ed Bush denying that any such order has been issued. In any case, Life Tabernacle Church doubled down, bragging that it planned to bring 27 buses’ worth of area children to church on Sunday, March 22;  and, according to a public Facebook post by Tony Spell’s father Timothy, that they planned to host a blood drive on the same day. And the church followed through.

In a period of surging right-wing authoritarianism, defenders of democracy must not ignore the dangers posed by those who embrace “alternative facts.” Anti-intellectualism and pseudo-intellectualism are hallmarks of authoritarianism, and in the United States in particular, opposition to much modern science has come to define the mostly white, mostly Christian Republican Party. The problem, however, is global.

Independent Apostolic Christians like Spell are extremists even among extremists, but similar radical charismatic Christians are attaining ever more power and influence in a number of countries, including Uganda and Brazil, where these far-right Protestants represent strong-man President Jair Bolsonaro’s base. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has emerged as the global standard bearer for international efforts to oppose women’s and LGBTQ Rights. Russia, too, is one of the countries in which authoritarian Christians have undermined efforts to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus threat has dominated the news cycle, and quite a few stories about the reactions of churches—both responsible and irresponsible—have appeared. In the Orthodox Christian World, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople—traditionally considered “first among equals” among the world’s Eastern Orthodox Churches—initially sent mixed messages; now, however, in a tacit rebuke to Russian and Greek Orthodox Christians’ insistence that “coronavirus cannot be transmitted by communion,” it has announced the cancellation of all services for laity within its jurisdiction. Here geopolitical tensions are in play, as the Putinist Russian Orthodox Church has increasingly defied the more moderate Constantinople in recent years.

Meanwhile, after calling the virus, or at least Democrats’ responses to it, a “hoax,” President Trump seemed to feel compelled to address COVID-19 in a more serious (if still dubious) manner, and, for a moment his white evangelical supporters seemed to be shifting with him, at least in some cases. Jerry Falwell, Jr., who at first declared that he would not shut down Liberty University, changed his mind. Pastor Robert Jeffress, leader of the influential megachurch First Baptist Dallas, has canceled physical church services, even going so far as to state that “every pastor and every church ought to follow the guidance to not assemble during this crisis.” But then President Trump oafishly declared that he wanted America’s economy reopened by Easter (April 12 this year for Protestants and Catholics), and Falwell called for Liberty students to return to campus after all, in sharp contrast to most universities essentially shutting down in order to slow the spread of the virus. Liberty University’s residential enrollment is around 13,500 students.

What has been driving the harmful behaviors exhibited by some Christians in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic? I turned to several experts on aspects of the crisis for their assessments of Christian defiance of public health measures.

Sarah Kendzior, an expert in authoritarianism, notes in fairness that “there’s a rational component” to the fear of government malfeasance and overreach, which underlays the paranoia of American far-right actors. She sees “a combination of defiance and obedience” in right-wing Christians’ reactions to the pandemic, and is spot-on in describing Trump’s style of demagoguery as “much more similar to a televangelist than to any previous president.” Kendzior’s observation goes some way toward illustrating why white evangelicals tend to be Trump supporters.

Obedience to authority is certainly emphasized as a virtue among authoritarians, and the Christian Right is no different in this regard. However, the authority in question must conform to their white supremacist patriarchal social hierarchy in order for them to consider it legitimate. Hence the “defiance of what they think of as evil liberal officials telling them what they can’t do,” as seen, for example, in former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore calling the inclusion of restrictions on church services in public health responses to the pandemic “tyranny.” When asked about the parallels between right-wing American Christians and the Russian Orthodox Church with respect to coronavirus, Kendzior found them unsurprising.

André Gagné, a former charismatic pastor and current Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, offered some insights into why charismatic believers are so vocal in defying the imposition of public health measures to contain the spread of coronavirus. He maintains that we must understand charismatic Christians’ defiance in terms of their theology of “spiritual warfare” and the “victorious eschatology” espoused by some charistmatics, i.e., “the idea that the church will be victorious before the second coming of Christ.”

According to Gagné, “Some neo-charismatics believe that ‘end-time’ Christians will be able to heal people from plagues, diseases, or any other physical conditions, and even take dominion over entire hospitals, healing every patient in them by laying hands on the building.” Such theology is, of course, not benign. “When people die, these ministers will find a way to rationalize the consequences, saying that the Church is also called to go through a time of tribulation and persecution, and that God is somehow sifting his Church for the Second Coming of Christ.”

Also in play is Christian nationalism, a phenomenon that sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry have found to be predictive of Trump support. Whitehead was kind enough to speak with me about the issue and about his forthcoming research with Perry and Joseph O. Baker, which shows how anti-science views in the United States are intimately intertwined with Christian nationalism. Noting that “Christian nationalism is a threat to a pluralistic democratic society,” an issue I have also written about for both The Conversationalist and Religion Dispatches, Whitehead observes that Christian nationalists “legitimate their desires for the country in the will of the Christian God. This severely inhibits any chance or even desire for compromise.”

But how is this related to the kind of science denial we find in right-wing Christian responses to the coronavirus pandemic? Whitehead summarizes some of the key findings from his forthcoming paper with Perry and Baker as follows:

We find consistent evidence that Christian nationalism—a desire to see a particularistic and exclusive version of Christian symbols, values, and policies privileged and enshrined in US civil society—is a strong predictor about Americans’ attitudes toward science. In fact, the effect of political conservatism on skepticism about the moral authority of science is mediated through Christian nationalism, meaning that political conservatives are more likely to be skeptical of science because they are more likely to be Christian nationalists.

The conclusion of the new paper puts it more simply: “Christian nationalism is many things, but above all it is an effort to (re)assert the dominant moral and cultural authority of a white, native-born, straight, masculine, and Christian social order. Likewise, disputes about ‘science and religion’ are primarily conflicts over moral and cultural order.” We can only hope that the empirical demonstration of such connections will prove useful in the struggle for a more equitable democratic future for reasonable believers and non-believers alike. Charismatic and evangelical Christians represent, after all, varieties of Christian fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is a constant source of disinformation. Indeed, fundamentalism is incompatible with democracy, yet for the most part the American press remains deferential to authoritarian Christians. That needs to change if we have any hope of stemming the influence of the radical right-wing Christians Trump has surrounded himself with. As has become clear, they threaten not only our human rights, but also our public health. [post_title] => Authoritarian Christians are deliberately undermining the public health response to coronavirus [post_excerpt] => In a period of surging right-wing authoritarianism, defenders of democracy must not ignore the dangers posed by those who embrace “alternative facts.” [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => authoritarian-christians-are-deliberately-undermining-the-public-health-response-to-coronavirus [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1669 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

Authoritarian Christians are deliberately undermining the public health response to coronavirus

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    [post_content] => For the Christian Right, religious freedom means their right to discriminate against people who don't share their beliefs. 

In Bible class at my evangelical high school, I was taught that pluralism is “heresy” and must be rejected. This was a more formal way of conveying what I had already learned as a small child— that it was the task of all Christians to convert everyone to Christianity, and that the world would be a much better place if everyone were Christian.

A person who is committed to the liberal democratic project will probably be appalled at the idea of teaching children to desire a world in which everyone follows the same religion. Many, however, do not share that reaction—and that is because Christian hegemony is so smoothly woven into the fabric of American life that they fail to recognize it. Christian privilege and Christian supremacism are very real; if we are ever going to see the United States live up to the democratic potential contained in the higher ideals of the founding fathers, however much they failed to realize those ideals, we must be as committed to its dismantling as we are to that of white supremacism.

Pluralism: what’s at stake

Pluralism, of course, refers to people of diverse and conflicting beliefs coexisting peaceably, linked by their adherence to a shared social contract which commits members of different groups to treating others fairly and accommodating them equally in the public square. Outside academic settings, however, pluralism is little discussed these days—except by right-wing Christians. That’s a problem: failing to articulate a liberal understanding of pluralism will allow the authoritarian Christian Right, already advantaged in what I recently argued in Playboy Magazine is our de facto Christian public sphere, to drag the country ever further rightward. Liberals do not feel comfortable discussing the place of religion in the public sphere, says Jeremy Forest Price, assistant professor of education and chair of the Jewish Faculty and Staff Council at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis. Avoiding the topic, however,  has unintended consequences. “It allows those who seek to push their own religious agendas, particularly evangelical Christians, Christian dominionists*, and Christian nationalists, to [convince the public] not only to support their beliefs and practices over others, but to make the public sphere itself mirror their beliefs and practices.” Because they reflexively support the separation of church and state, and therefore may not feel an innate sense of urgency to articulate its value, liberals and progressives run the risk of ceding the national discourse on pluralism to the Right. Fortunately, there is an increasingly visible broad-based movement, including both believers and non-believers, who oppose the Christian nationalism that is ascendant in the Trump era. They are working actively to reclaim the meaning of religious freedom from those who would define it as the right to discriminate against members of othered groups on the basis of “sincerely held religious beliefs,” even at the expense of equal accommodation in the public square. I contend that we need similarly to reclaim the liberal value of pluralism. Paul Rosenberg, a writer and activist who has documented and championed this movement, says that pluralism requires an openness that religious fundamentalists lack, and when it comes to building and participating in a functional democratic society, what people do is more important than their espoused beliefs. “It is in doing the work that we discover what we have in common,” he said, noting that the work itself leads to an appreciation of our differences. I asked other stakeholders to comment on what pluralism means to them in theory and practice, hoping to encourage further discussion of this critical civic concept among those of us who reject the Republican Party’s authoritarianism. To understand the stakes, we need to take a brief look at the state of the discourse around pluralism on the Christian Right. According to reactionary Catholic scholar Brad Gregory, “hyper-pluralism” is to blame for everything that ails the modern West, and the solution would seem to be a return to some sort of imagined Catholic unity. This would undoubtedly entail many horrors for non-Christians, women, and members of the LGBTQ community. Russell Moore , the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is among those conservative Christians who dismiss pluralism as “heresy.” Sohrab Ahmari, the radical Catholic writer, unabashedly argues that conservative Christians should “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” Attorney General William Barr seems to share this view: in a speech he delivered at Notre Dame University this past October, Barr decried “militant secularists” who were supposedly “behind a campaign to destroy the traditional moral order.” C. Colt Anderson, a Catholic theologian and professor of religion at Fordham University, was so appalled by the extremism in Barr’s remarks that he called him “a threat to American democracy.” There are other conservative Christian commentators, however—people like evangelical historian John Fea and David French, a frequent contributor to The National Review—who embrace a concept of pluralism very much of a piece with the Christian Right’s understanding of “religious liberty” as their liberty to discriminate against others, including Christians with whom they disagree. Fea and French are public figures who enjoy a degree of respectability; it is dangerous to cede our contemporary understanding of pluralism exclusively to them and to those even further to the right. The Christian Right already dominates sex education in our public schools and has effectively ended abortion in numerous states. Christian hospitals regularly deny women and queer people life-saving healthcare on the basis of strictly religious views that many of their patients do not share. Deregulated homeschooling, pushed above all by conservative Christians, allows abuse and fundamentalist indoctrination to flourish. If liberals will not argue the meaning of pluralism and religious freedom precisely as liberal values, the Christian Right will only subject more and more of American life to its harmful theocratic agenda. So what might a liberal pluralism predicated on robust separation of church and state and equal accommodation in the public square look like? And how might we navigate the tensions not just between representatives of different confessions, but also between believers and non-believers?

Liberal pluralism in theory and practice

Non-religious voters now make up the single largest defined bloc within the Democratic Party. But a large and significant part of the party’s base is composed of Christians—especially African-American Christians. It is self-evidently necessary for progressive atheists and agnostics to build coalitions with progressive believers and to work together toward the common good. Loud voices in the visible atheist community, like the prominent neuroscientist Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author, often alienate not only religious believers, but also women and people of color with remarks that are Islamophobic, racist, and misogynist. Progressive atheists who are interested in coalition building must work to repair the bridges that these men and their trollish online fans have damaged. Tom Van Denburgh, communications director for American Atheists, acknowledged that “people within the atheist community sometimes engage in anti-religious rhetoric,” but attributes this anger in most cases to their having been harmed by religion. But he agrees that justifiable anger at religious privilege, which in the United States primarily pertains to Christians, must not become an excuse to dehumanize all religious people. “While there’s still a lot of work to do, the atheist community has become increasingly inclusive and more concerned about how religious privilege impacts different groups in disparate ways. And that means advocating for women, LGBTQ people, members of minority faith communities, and people of color.” He added: “Integral to [our] work is building bridges with religious allies when we find common ground.” American Atheists can point to practical achievements in this regard, notably the launch of BlitzWatch Coalition, a project dedicated to opposing the Christian nationalist agenda of Project Blitz, which seeks to impose hardline Christian values on every aspect of American political and civil society. Van Denburgh sees the work involved in BlitzWatch Coalition as authentic pluralism in practice, and BlitzWatch Coalition’s member organizations include the Interfaith Alliance and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). For Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson, RCRC’s Director of Spiritual Care and Activism, pluralism is associated above all with compassion. “To be compassionate requires decentering or stepping outside one’s own experiences in order to give priority to the experiences of others,” Jackson said. This task is more challenging, she added, for those who “are part of any privileged hegemony” because of “a limitation of experience and exposure.” Christianity represents one of these hegemonies, said Jackson. “For interfaith dialogues to be healthy and viable, now is a critical time for atheist perspectives to be included,” she said, adding: “The path to social harmony and national unity is paved by compassion for and a genuine valuing of the stranger, those whose beliefs, practices, and so on, are different from those in the social, religious or political majority.” Jeremy Forest Price, who is involved in interfaith work, agrees with Jackson on the importance of clear-eyed honesty regarding power dynamics and the importance of representation. “An emphasis on pluralism will help open up the discussion around religion (and worldviews, spiritualities, and the absence of religion) so that we can trace the ways that specific religious ideologies influence our shared public spaces,” he said. Such tracing must include facing the impact of Christian supremacism in the United States, which means breaking the social taboo on criticizing any large Christian group. The focus of much of my own work in recent years has been on facilitating the collective visibility of ex-evangelicals and others who have left fundamentalist religion, and on advocating for us to be heard in our national discussions of religion and politics. Efforts to halt America’s lurch into authoritarianism will fail unless we shift the national discourse on Christianity. I believe that by devoting some serious thought and effort to pluralism, both theory and practice, those of us who support democracy and human rights might succeed in nudging the American public sphere toward the kind of discourse that will aid us in the the realization of this country’s democratic potential. * While there are a number of specific fundamentalist Christian ideologies whose adherents refer to themselves as Dominionists (for example, Seven Mountains Dominionism), broadly defined, Christian dominionism simply refers to the beliefs and politics of Christians who pursue social domination over members of other groups by enshrining their religious beliefs in coercive law. [post_title] => The only way to save democracy from the Christian Right is by fighting for pluralism [post_excerpt] => “The path to social harmony and national unity is paved by compassion for and a genuine valuing of the stranger, those whose beliefs, practices, and so on, are different from those in the social, religious or political majority.” [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-only-way-to-save-democracy-from-the-christian-right-is-by-fighting-for-pluralism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:14 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://conversationalist.org/?p=1616 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

The only way to save democracy from the Christian Right is by fighting for pluralism

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    [post_content] => Even peaceful, prosperous Canada is not immune from the populism that thrives on tribal anxiety and prejudice. 

Last week Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province, passed a law that bans public employees from wearing religious symbols at work. Known as Bill 21, the law would force public school teachers, police officers, Crown attorneys, and judges who wear hijabs, turbans, or yarmulkes, to choose between their religion and their profession.

Quebec is not the only democracy to enforce this type of ban in the name of separation of religion and state: France bans Muslim women from wearing a burqini to the beach or a headscarf to teach in public schools; and Turkish law prevented women who wore the hijab from working as public servants or even attending university until 2013.

But Canada’s international reputation is, not unjustifiably, one of tolerance and acceptance. The federal government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism since 1971, and more recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set a widely lauded example when he opened Canada’s doors to over 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Across Canada, Quebec’s new law is controversial at best. Legal scholars have suggested that it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the city of Brampton in the neighboring province of Ontario has voted to support a legal challenge against the law. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Quebecois — beyond the multicultural city of Montreal — approve of the new law. 

Why do Quebec attitudes toward multiculturalism and religious practice differ so starkly from those held in the rest of Canada? The complex answer is found in Quebec’s post-World War Two history.

During the 1960s Quebec underwent a radical social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution. In a single decade, the once impoverished and largely agrarian province transformed itself from a society dominated and controlled by the Catholic church, which overwhelmingly dictated public mores and laws, to a modern, staunchly secular province that rejected religion and its institutional power. Between 1960 and 1970, Quebec’s birth rate declined from Canada’s highest to its lowest; and its once heavily attended churches are now used as restaurants, gyms, and performance spaces.

The process of secularization applied to all of the province’s public institutions, from its schools and universities to its hospitals and welfare system. It was accompanied by a resurgent national identity that rested on the twin pillars of the French language and secularism. Quebec is today a prosperous middle class society with a comprehensive social welfare system administered by the province rather than by the Church.

Sixty years later, many in Quebec see Bill 21 as the next necessary step in that evolution and an extension of that same social project. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Quiet Revolution was a peaceful social movement that forever altered Quebec’s political and social landscape. It allowed the French-speaking majority to establish its primacy on the political, social, economic and cultural stage at both the provincial and the federal level. But the current movement is not about promoting the rights of the majority. Rather, by seeking to establish secularism as part of Quebec’s national identity, the provincial government is sacrificing the rights of the province’s minorities. A movement that was once about positive self-affirmation is now simply a reactionary rejection of others.

Ignoring its critics and refusing to debate, the government’s center-right Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), led by Premier François Legault, rammed Bill 21 through the legislature by preemptively invoking Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a rarely-used override power often referred to as the “notwithstanding” clause. In other words, the CAQ circumvented both the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thus preventing the new law from being struck down in court for the next five years. It also shut down debate by invoking closure, and by introducing last-minute amendments that outline surveillance powers for the ministry and rules of enforcement.

The secularism championed by Quebec’s Quiet Revolution stemmed from a deep-rooted and understandable desire by the French-speaking majority to rid itself of the Catholic Church’s asphyxiating control over the government and reaffirm its proud transformation into a modern, secular French-speaking state. In sharp contrast, Bill 21, a far more restrictive form of secularism imported from France, is primarily motivated by Quebecers’ antipathy for religion — primarily non-Christian faiths. This is not religious neutrality: it is religious persecution. The overwhelmingly white French speakers of Quebec are succumbing to anti-Muslim prejudice.

The populist CAQ tapped into this prejudice during the November 2018 election campaign; it now bases many of its legislative decisions on people’s fears rather than on facts.

Bill 21 is a response to the zeitgeist. The fear of Muslims that started with 9/11 spread to Quebec, bringing with it the impression that the government was making too many concessions to religious minorities. In 2006, Quebec created a special commission to study the “reasonable accommodation” of cultural minorities’ religious practices, in response to the perception that religion was making a comeback in the public sphere. In 2013, the Parti Quebecois, the nationalist party that ascended to power on the back of the Quiet Revolution in the mid-1970s, attempted to implement their questionably named Charter of Quebec Values, which sought to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols. The initiative failed miserably and the party was defeated by the Liberals. In 2015, Quebec’s Liberal government introduced their own version of secularism in Bill 62, which would prevent Muslim women wearing a burqa or a niqab from receiving government services. That, too, failed.

In 2019, Premier Legault’s government decided to circumvent the democratic process and put an end to long-standing debates on how to accommodate cultural minorities, by basically not bothering to accommodate them at all. His party’s goal is a homogeneous public face.

Legault, who denies that systemic racism or Islamophobia exist in Quebec, readily admitted in an interview with Radio Canada, Canada’s French-language public broadcaster, that Bill 21 “was a concession to people who are a little racist and don’t want to see religious symbols anywhere in public.” In a follow-up televised interview with the English-language CBC, Legault side-stepped the question of whether he felt empathy for a public school teacher who would have to remove her hijab if she wanted to keep her job. 

Exclusionary populism is defined by pandering to irrational fears and “solving” non-existent problems. Quebec has seen no incidents of religious proselytism or registered any complaint of bias by a public servant wearing a visible religious symbol. And yet hate crimes against Muslims have increased. Only three years ago, Alexandre Bissonnette entered a Quebec City mosque and gunned down six worshippers. 

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the same Quebec government that demands concessions from people who wear visible religious signs has decided that schools and hospitals will not have to remove the crucifixes from their walls because they’re classified as “heritage” items. Private schools, most of which are Christian, are also exempt from Bill 21. In the meantime, a crucifix still hangs on the walls of the National Assembly and most schools and city streets are still named after Christian saints. 

Despite the CAQ’s insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. Numerous French-language columnists and TV shows routinely discuss the “Muslim invasion” and a need for Quebecers to reassert themselves “before its too late.”

Meanwhile, Quebec’s largest French-language school board has announced that it will not apply the religious symbols law until it studies it further. The English School Board of Montreal has also said it will not comply with the law, although the government insists that it will not accept any delays. Civil liberties and Muslim groups have already vowed to challenge the bill and have filed an injunction in Quebec Superior Court, where a hearing is scheduled for July.

Bill 21 might feel like a win for the Legault government and its supporters, but it has created a divisive and contentious social climate. The legislation has been met with many legal challenges and by stinging criticism around the world. It could lead to a brain drain, as people who feel unwelcome in Quebec decide to live elsewhere. The CAQ might soon discover this “win” is more akin to a smugly defiant Pyrrhic victory.

In many ways, the legislation is an unfortunate manifestation of increasing concerns over immigration and its impact on Quebec’s national identity. But populism, which often seeks to provide simplistic solutions to complex problems and encroaching fears, is all the rage these days and certainly not unique to Quebec. From Brexit in the U.K., to The League in Italy, to Trumpism in the U.S., to Marine Le Pen in France, homogenous majorities struggle to come to terms with increasing diversity and religious plurality. In a 2005 opinion piece for The Times, Salman Rushdie writes:

In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact. Like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace.

The shifting relationship between nationalism, religion, and secularism continues to inform current debates about Quebec’s identity. Unfortunately, the deep-seated anxiety French-speaking Quebecers feel about their demographic future has caused it to justify exercising the same dogmatic social control on people’s appearance and way of life that, ironically, the Church once held. [post_title] => In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession [post_excerpt] => Despite the government' insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => in-quebec-a-new-law-forces-minorities-to-choose-between-their-religion-and-their-profession [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=1181 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession

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    [post_content] => While the world praises Prime Minister Jacinda Ardren and the people of New Zealand for their compassionate, inclusive response to the Christchurch mosque attack, a more complex and nuanced conversation about the flaws in their society is taking place at home 
(with contributions from Brannavan Gnanalingam, Laura O’Connell-Rapira, Lamia Imam, and Jess Berentson-Shaw)
The world has been riveted by New Zealand’s response to the terror attack committed on March 16 by a white nationalist, who murdered 50 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two Christchurch mosques. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardren’s response, from her “they are us” to her insistence that she will not say the name of the attacker, has been heralded as a new standard in how to respond to such events. Meanwhile the public reaction — with New Zealanders gathering spontaneously in their thousands to stand in silent vigil around mosques all over the country for the first Friday prayers after the attack, has been praised as an example of compassion and tolerance. But in New Zealand, the public conversation about our response to this attack and what enabled this to take place in our country is more complex. Many New Zealanders have been challenged by what appear to be two mutually exclusive stories about who we are, as individuals and as a nation, in the wake of these attacks. On the one hand, our Prime Minister rapidly assured us and the world that this attack was an abomination against the values of tolerance and inclusiveness that we as a nation hold dear. In her first public statement after the attack, Ardern was unequivocal: the person who carried out the massacre was not ‘us’. Many New Zealanders were more than ready to believe her, and to identify with Ardern as a representation of who we really are — compassionate, empathetic, inclusive. Resolute in the face of hatred and terrorism. But there is another story being told in these days of grief and reckoning. It’s the story of Muslim New Zealander Lamia Imam’s experiences as a student in Christchurch, learning to stomach racism because ‘it wasn’t a big deal.’ “When white nationalists were congregating in Christchurch I was alarmed but let it go because ‘it is their country and they can choose to hate people'," she said. Anjum Rahman of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand has written about the lengths her group went to, over five years and two governments, to draw attention to the growing threat of anti-Islamic and racist activity in New Zealand.

"We begged and pleaded, we demanded. We knocked on every door we could. … We told them about our concerns over the rise of vitriol and the rise of the alt-right in New Zealand. We asked them what resources were being put in to monitoring alt-right groups."

So which is it? Is New Zealand a country, as our prime minister has asserted, in which there is no place for the ideologies espoused by the Christchurch mosque terrorist? Or are we a country in which Islamophobia and racist hatred has been directed towards Muslim women for years, with little apparent action from our government? The mosque massacre has forced many New Zealanders to face this gap between who we want to believe we are and who we actually are.

A tale of two New Zealands

It’s the gap between the New Zealand that stood in silence outside mosques all over the country as our national radio station played the Islamic call to prayer, and the New Zealand that provides a man who compared immigrants to a snake with one of the largest media audiences in the country. It’s the gap between the New Zealand in which thousands of people stood together at vigils over the past two weeks to sing traditional Māori songs of peace, lament and love, and the New Zealand in which people regularly complain about te reo Māori — an official language of our country — being spoken on public radio, or taught in our schools. Some commentators in New Zealand have responded defensively to these competing stories, decrying it as a ‘narrative of self-loathing that wants us to think the worst of ourselves’. As one writer put it, we have to choose whether the true version of our country was to be represented by ‘a few misanthropic cranks who haven't yet got their heads around the new multicultural New Zealand, or the countless thousands of New Zealanders who attended vigils, donated money or quietly grieved at home for fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim’. But perhaps both these things can be true. For many New Zealanders, this tension has always been apparent, as has the fact that racism in New Zealand exists well beyond ‘a few misanthropic cranks’. New Zealand lawyer and writer Brannavan Gnanalingam, who was born in Sri Lanka, says that growing up, he thought Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) had a curious form of racism.

"Most people on a day-to-day basis were generally friendly to your face, but also subscribed to racist narratives that meant structural racism got embedded, particularly towards Māori. It meant we put up with casual racist jokes from friends and colleagues or faced racism from complete strangers without warning. The thing was, the discursive frameworks used in all of those 'light' situations were the same discursive frameworks used by those with far more nefarious motives."

For others, like Lamia Imam, the mosque massacre meant she could no longer maintain the illusion of the ‘better version’ of New Zealand.

“I looked at my New Zealand passport with pride and told myself I came from a country that was more compassionate and kind, a country that was slightly better. Today we are no better. We as a country failed to stop something horrific, because we like to believe we are better.”

One of the reasons these two competing narratives have taken so many by surprise, suggests Gnanalingam, is because of the highly segregated nature of New Zealand society.  

"We've got a very segregated society — class-wise, racially, politically. Christchurch took some Pākehā (white New Zealanders) by surprise because their everyday life didn't come into contact with people who subscribed to the terrorist's views. It meant they were very complacent. It also meant insidious narratives get embedded because there's no-one challenging it. Our mainstream culture is far too anti-intellectual and monocultural for that."

A leader who reflects her people

Reconciling this tension has been a challenge for Jacinda Ardern. Her first instinct — to reassure New Zealand and the world that this attack was entirely out of character for our country — was met with widespread approval at home and abroad. But as the narrative here in New Zealand has become more nuanced, and as time has passed since the attack, Ardern has begun to find ways to acknowledge the racism and intolerance that exists in our country. Ardern’s leadership has been seen by many New Zealanders to represent and reflect the best version of ourselves. She has shown very genuine empathy for the survivors and the families of those killed. She has been clear on the nature of this attack and resolute in her commitment to not naming or in any way elevating the profile of the attacker. She has demonstrated rare political skill in negotiating the support of both her more populist coalition partner and the opposition party for gun law reform. In the widespread, and justified, global admiration of Ardern’s empathy and compassion in the wake of the Christchurch attacks, her determination and political skill have perhaps been underplayed. Behind her ability to reflect back to us the best of who we want to be, is there something particularly ‘Kiwi’ about our Prime Minister? Ardern grew up in a small, working class rural town. Her father was a police officer, her mother worked in the school-cafeteria. They were members of the local Mormon congregation and Ardern has credited her upbringing as the source of her relatability, empathy and compassion. But as commentator Jess Berentson-Shaw has pointed out ‘there is something more important than our prime minister's empathy and compassion’ being demonstrated in her response to the mosque attack.   

"It is this: she has inhabited a role that was thrust upon her, and responded with a style of leadership that is guided not by a desire for personal recognition, but by a very clearly articulated set of collective values. She seems utterly genuine about putting others' needs before her own. Jacinda Ardern is restoring, in a uniquely 21st century way, the old-fashioned notion of public service."

That this public service leadership feels extraordinary, and so different from other leaders, says Berentson-Shaw, speaks volumes at how far we have travelled from what leadership should be. However, as she goes on to say, this commitment to serving the collective good is not without precedent in New Zealand. It has been demonstrated, ‘for decades, centuries even’ by Māori.

"Many Māori have made endless attempts to work with the Crown, and all New Zealanders, to find resolution and repair for violence and hate, intolerance and theft, enacted against them for decades. ... Yet they have been prepared to rebuild relationships. Māori have shown tolerance, and a willingness to work with Pākehā [white New Zealanders], even when Pākehā  refuse to see those efforts."

Maori lessons in grieving

In the immediate days following the attacks in Christchurch, it was to the example set by Māori that New Zealand looked for a guide on how to conduct ourselves. Māori campaigner Laura O’Connell-Rapira explains:

"In Māori culture, one of the most important aspects of losing a loved one is the tangihanga or tangi. The word means to weep and sing a lament for the dead. People travel from all around the country and world to these funerals to share in grief and memories of those who pass. The vigils that have been attended by tens of thousands of New Zealanders serve very much the same purpose."

In the wake of the attack, Māori from across New Zealand and Australia have also been captured, and shared across social media, performing haka to express solidarity with the Muslim community. The haka, popularised by the All Blacks, and often mistranslated as a ‘war dance’ is so much more than that. Haka can be a way of expressing grief, love, support, mourning. The week following the terror attack, Christchurch iwi (tribe) Ngāi Tahu opened their marae (spiritual meeting homes) to the Muslim community to sleep, pray and mourn their loved ones. This concept of opening up your home to others is based on a principle called manaakitanga, which means to ‘care for and uplift a person’s mana,’ or well-being in a holistic sense. So, if we turn so readily to traditional Māori values and practises to guide us in how to deal with grief and loss and prioritise collective care in our response to Christchurch mosque attack, asks O’Connell-Rapira, why haven’t we listened to Māori when they have repeatedly told us about the need to address our country’s racism? Countless commentators of colour including Muslims, Māori and migrants have been calling for New Zealanders to make the connection between this act of white supremacist terror and colonization. So much so it prompted a walk-out at an Auckland vigil. As wise elder and Māori lawyer Moana Jackson points out, “In many ways, today’s white supremacists are the most recent and most extreme colonizers." Laura O’Connell-Rapira adds:

"The person who killed 50 Muslims did so because he believes white people are superior to people of colour and he (and we) live in a society that promotes that message in a number of ways. Early colonizers also believed white people were superior to people of colour, so much so they kill(ed) us."

Recognizing colonial history

If we really want to do everything we can to ensure that this kind of violence is ‘never again’ perpetrated in our country, this may be the painful bridge we have to cross — a recognition that this is not the first time we’ve seen this scale of white supremacist violence in our country. That, in fact, the modern nation of New Zealand was built on such violence. Pākehā New Zealanders don’t have a good track record when it comes to having the ugly truths of our nation’s history pointed out to us. So the burning question is whether, as we reach for the best versions of ourselves in the wake of the Christchurch attacks, we will find the courage to look beyond the surface story of a compassionate, inclusive and tolerant New Zealand, to face the fuller, more complex story of our colonial history and its remnants, which continue to shape our country today. Marianne Elliott is co-director of The Workshop, an independent, non-profit policy and communication think tank based in Wellington, New Zealand. Follow her on Twitter @zenpeacekeeper [post_title] => After Christchurch: a tale of two New Zealands [post_excerpt] => Over the two weeks since the Christchurch mosque massacre, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has begun to find ways to acknowledge the racism and intolerance that exists in New Zealand. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-tale-of-two-new-zealands-and-the-journey-toward-reconciliation [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=771 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

After Christchurch: a tale of two New Zealands