White American Evangelicals: Redefining Christianity

 Tim Alberta is an experienced journalist covering politics in America.  He is also a Christian son of a pastor with access to ministers and theologians in the evangelical arena.  He attempts to combine those backgrounds to provide a look at the state of evangelical Christianity and explain how it arrived at that state.  He provides his reporting in the book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.  The “American” modifier is important because evangelicals in our country are somewhat unique and other claimants to that label are likely to behave quite differently.  He would also agree the filter “white” should be included to limit who is under consideration in his work.  The fact that white American evangelicals are separate from non-white American evangelicals is something he should have spent more time considering.

Alberta’s first task is to define exactly what an evangelical is.  He saves the reader much obscure and irrelevant history and provides a direct and useful definition.

“By the 1980s, with the rise of the Moral Majority, a religious marker was transforming into a partisan movement.  ‘Evangelical’ soon became synonymous with ‘conservative Christian,’ and eventually with ‘white conservative Republican’.”

The author describes white evangelicals as a group beset by religious operators who spread the fear that secular liberals were intent on destroying them and their religion.  That group was after the peoples’ money.  They would eventually be joined by another group that was after their votes.  Alberta includes quotes from Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist leader.

“Evangelicals should have seen this coming—not because of the right-wing-media-induced freakouts over immigration patterns or Obama’s birth certificate, but because of the for-profit propagandizing of Christians that had been successful for decades.  Long before your average churchgoer was addicted to Fox News prime time ‘these same people were listening to four or five hours of fundamentalist, prophecy-charting, conspiracy preachers on the radio and TV every single day,’ Moore said.  ‘So, it’s not all that different.  There’s just a lot more of it now, and its more explicitly political in its aims’.”

As to why evangelicals are so easily manipulated and taken advantage of, Alberta provides the following as a partial explanation.

“American evangelicalism has long been plagued by a certain pedagogical insecurity.  Whatever their collective influence amassed in certain arenas—politics and business certainly—evangelicals have chafed at their seeming exclusion from elite social, academic, and intellectual circles.  This hunger for relevance can result in the lionizing of men who infiltrate society’s innermost sanctums, seemingly on their behalf, representing their views and validating their beliefs and giving them a metaphorical seat at the table.  Simply put, evangelicals hate feeling like outcasts, and are quick to uncritically follow those who make them feel accepted, relevant, and enlightened.”

The pastors and theologians that Alberta spends so much time with might be concerned about being viewed as enlightened, but what about the foot soldiers of this Republican religious movement?  What is driving those millions of voters?

Alberta also noted a disturbing trend for religious issues to seek resolution in the Old Testament rather than the New Testament where Jesus’s teachings are described.  The right-wing religious refer to Jesus constantly, but rarely behave according to his teachings.

“…the great majority of what voters would hear from GOP politicians, came from the Old Testament.  That never struck me as a coincidence.  Jesus, in his three years of teaching, talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life.  Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are the meek…Blessed are the merciful…Blessed are the peacemakers’) were never conducive to a stump speech.  This isn’t to suggest that Old Testament passages are somehow backward or illegitimate; many of these writings, timeless in their wisdom, have shaped my own views of the world.  I just always found it strange that these Christians relied so infrequently on the words of Christ.”

This focus on the Old Testament has taken the evangelical movement in a dangerous direction.  If one believes that the economic and military might of one’s country makes it the greatest nation on Earth, and one believes that God is behind the Earth’s happenings, then it is a short stretch to assume that God has chosen to bless this country.  One has the example of the covenant between God and the ancient Hebrews to spark the imagination and suggest that God has a covenant with our people.

“…given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed.  The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements.  Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.”

Alberta provides the perspective of Chris Winans, a pastor friend.

“’At its root, we’re talking about idolatry.  America has become an idol to some of these people,’ Winans said.  ‘If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel.  You believe that the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected.  You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance.  At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally.  And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be’.”

Given a belief in this new covenant, are the traditional teachings of Jesus in the New Testament superseded?  Some behave as if they are.  In any event, the recognition of this view helps explain why Trump’s “Make America Great Again” resonates so strongly with the religious right.

This trend towards the Old Testament is not a new phenomenon.  It is as old as the existence of slavery in our nation.  If one wishes to believe that their Christian religion allows the buying, selling, and killing of a specific group of people, one will not find support in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament; but in the Old Testament almost anything is possible.  The heart of the evangelical movement has always been in the South where the abuse of black people has been part of the culture and part of the white Christian religion.  In the first half of the twentieth century many millions of black people would flee the South looking for relief from Jim Crow in northern and western cities.  In numbers many millions more than that, Whites would escape from the South looking for better economic conditions.  They would bring their culture with them in what has been referred to as the “Southernization of America.”

Alberta recognizes that racism is a part of the evangelical community, but he does not pursue that lead.  Anthea Butler is a black professor of religion whose experiences with white evangelicals led her to produce the book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.  She provides the following perspective.

“It was evangelically sanctioned racism that motivated believers to separate and sell families during slavery and to march with the Klan.  Racist evangelicals shielded cross burners, protected church burners, and participated in lynchings.  Racism is a feature, not a bug of American evangelicalism.”

“It is racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans.  It is racism that impels many evangelicals to oppose immigration and turn a blind eye to children in cages at the border.  It is racism that fuels evangelical Islamophobia.”

If Alberta had spent more time talking with what he considered a minority of troublemakers in the evangelical world, he might have better understood who and what he was dealing with.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley who wished to understand what drove the Tea Party movement that arose after the election of Barack Obama as President.  She resolved to spend time in what she considered the heart of Tea Party support.  She would end up spending several years in communication with the residents of a town in Louisiana trying to understand why the people of that location did what they did and voted the way they voted.  She produced the fascinating book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016).  Hochschild was thinking in terms of the Tea Party, not evangelicals, at the time, but those she dealt with satisfied Alberta’s definition of an evangelical as Christian and a white conservative Republican.

Hochschild digested what she was learning and managed to assemble a description that captures and illustrates the perspective shared by those she encountered in Louisiana.  She refers to it as a “deep story,” a concept that is a bit hard to describe but is clear once an example is provided.

This is Hochschild’s deep story.

“You are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage.  You are situated in the middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian, and predominately male, some with college degrees, some not.”

“Just over the brow of the hill is the American Dream, the goal of everyone waiting in line.  Many in the back of the line are people of color—poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees.  It’s scary to look back; there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well.  Still, you’ve waited a long time, worked hard, and the line is barely moving.  You deserve to move forward a little faster.  You’re patient but weary.  You focus ahead, especially on those at the very top of the hill.”

“The sun is hot and the line unmoving.  In fact, is it moving backward?”

“Look!  You see people cutting in line ahead of you!  You’re following the rules.  They aren’t.  As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back.  How can they just do that?  Who are they?  Some are black.  Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches, and they hold a certain secret place in people’s minds…Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it end?”

“Then you become suspicious.  If people are cutting in line ahead of you, someone must be helping them.  Who?  A man is monitoring the line, walking up and down it, ensuring that the line is orderly and that access to the Dream is fair.  His name is President Barack Hussein Obama.  But—hey—you see him waving to the line cutters.  He’s helping them.  He feels extra sympathy for them that he does not feel for you.  He’s on their side.  He’s telling you that these line cutters deserve special treatment and that they’ve had a harder time than you’ve had.”

“You resent them, and you feel that it’s right that you do.  So do your friends.  Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.”

When Hochschild communicated her “deep story” to the people she met in Louisiana, they generally agreed that it was an accurate representation.

Racism is a feature, not a bug, in the Christian right wing.

For completeness Hochschild also produced a deep story for the liberal left.

“In it, people stand around a large public square inside of which are creative science museums for kids, public art and theater programs, libraries, schools—a state-of-the-art public infrastructure available for use by all.  They are fiercely proud of it.  Some of them built it.  Outsiders can join those standing around the square, since a lot of people who are insiders now were outsiders in the past; incorporation and acceptance of difference feel like American values represented in the Statue of Liberty.  But in the liberal deep story, an alarming event occurs; marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and selfishly steal away bricks and concrete chunks from the public buildings at its center.  Seeing insult added to injury, those guarding the public square watch helplessly as those who’ve dismantled it construct private McMansions with the same bricks and pieces of concrete, privatizing the public realm.  That’s the gist of the liberal deep story, and the right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life.”

If one is searching for evidence of Christian behavior, one is more likely to find it in the activities of secular liberals than in those of the religious right.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.