Interesting sociological argument, via valued commentor O. Felix Culpa. At USAToday, Robert P. Jones, author of The End of White Christian America, says “Fading white evangelicals have made a desperate end-of-life bargain with Trump”:
… The key to understanding the puzzling white evangelical/Trump alliance is grasping the large-scale changes — most prominently the declining numbers of white Christians in the country — that have transformed the American religious landscape over the last decade. These tectonic shifts are detailed in a new report Wednesday by the Public Research and Religion Institute, which I direct. Based on interviews with over 101,000 Americans in 2016, the American Values Atlas is the largest survey of American religious and denominational identity ever conducted…
…[O]ne of the most important findings of the survey is that over the last decade — as the country has crossed the threshold from being a majority white Christian country to a minority white Christian country — white evangelical Protestants have themselves succumbed to the prevailing winds and in turn contributed to a second wave of white Christian decline in the country. Over the last decade, white evangelical Protestants have declined from 23% to 17% of all Americans. To put this into perspective, during this same period, the proportion of religiously unaffiliated Americans has grown from 16% to 24%.
The engines of white evangelical decline are complex, but they are a combination of external factors, such as demographic change in the country as a whole, and internal factors, such as religious disaffiliation, particularly among younger adults who find themselves at odds with conservative Christian churches on issues like climate change and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. As a result, the median age of white evangelical Protestants is now 55, while the median age of religiously unaffiliated Americans is 37. While 26% of seniors (ages 65 and older) are white evangelicals, only 8% of Americans under the age of 30 claim this identity.
The evangelical alliance with Trump can only be understood in the context of these fading vital signs among white evangelicals. They are, in many ways, a community grieving its losses. After decades of equating growth with divine approval, white evangelicals today are finding themselves on the losing side of demographic changes and LGBT rights, one of their founding and flagship issues. In the 1980s, a term like “the moral majority” had a certain plausibility; today, such a sweeping claim would be met with a mountain of counter-evidence from public opinion polls, progressive religious voices, changing laws and court decisions.
Thinking about white evangelicals as a grieving community opens up new ways of understanding their behavior. Drawing on her interactions with dying patients and their families in the 1960s, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified at least five common “stages” of grief, which have become staples of understanding responses to loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As Kübler-Ross found, when the stubborn facts of one’s own demise don’t yield to denial or anger, people commonly attempt to make a grand deal to postpone the inevitable.
While there are some lingering pockets of denial, and anger was an all-too-visible feature of Trump’s campaign, thinking about the white evangelical/Trump alliance as an end-of-life bargain is illuminating. It helps explain, for example, how white evangelical leaders could ignore so many problematic aspects of Trump’s character. When the stakes are high enough and the sun is setting, grand bargains are struck. And it is in the nature of these deals that they are marked not by principle, but by desperation…
“If we can’t be in charge, let’s burn the world down.”
rikyrah
They are phonies. Clinging to this heathen proves it definitively.
JCJ
Perhaps, but I think the simplest explanation is that they are assholes.
ChrisH
The majority of white evangelicals have given up on everything that their faith stood for in order to maintain privilege and power.
I’m not sure they should even be classified as Christians anymore. I’ve started to use the term Mammonites because you cannot serve two masters and most conservative evangelicals have been clear about which they’ve chosen.
Major Major Major Major
Old dying bigots old, dying, bigots. Film at eleven.
Bruce K
The bargaining phase of Kubler-Ross seems apt; they made a deal with the Devil to maintain their power on Earth, and Old Scratch is calling in his marker, and they’re scared.
Wjs
@JCJ: they are assholes because liberals made them do it.
The Dangerman
@JCJ:
Correct, but worse. Brainwashed assholes.
For example, I’ve seen two different instances recently (I think by two different commentators, at least one claiming a PhD) on Fox saying that Hitler’s Germany was tyranny from the Left; each made the claim that the Nazi name (National Socialism) proves it. That level of propaganda would make Goebbels proud.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I’ve said it before: there’s nothing angelic about evangelicals. From the smug “Christians aren’t perfect, they’re just forgiven,” to the toothy grins of Osteen, Jim and Tammy Fae, and the decrepit tut-tutting of the PTL crew, they’re the ultimate IGMFO* folks (with an eye towards the presumed afterlife).
*I got mine, F off!
lollipopguild
For many of these people God is a white guy just like them. They cannot imagine a true God who is all powerful, they need and want a God that they can own and control. They want a God that gives them everything at no cost and punishes all of “those people” who they hate. They sold their souls for 30 pieces of silver along time ago and the devil is coming to collect.
Roger Moore
Bullshit. Evangelicals are OK with those aspects of his character because they’re hypocritical bigots. American Evangelical Christianity has always been about bigotry first and foremost, with religion as a convenient excuse for the bigotry. They’ve long shown a willingness to tolerate leaders who fail to live up to their nominal values as long as they bring enough hate against Those People. The only thing Trump isn’t doing to fit in is pretending to care about Jesus.
Barbara
The negative halo effect of this transparent bargain with the devil, the kind that Christians are never supposed to make, is vast. They could not have devised a better suicide plan if they had tried. Their world view is so tribal and so insular that they cannot see it.
Jeffro
Just saw this article linked to via Twitter…sums it up pretty well. They can’t compete in the blessed “marketplace of ideas” because, well, progress…so why not lash out, right? Why not go all-in on Trumpov? They certainly aren’t Christians, so it’s more than appropriate to say, “the hell with them”.
charluckles
I would have to agree with the comments here that the simpler explanation is that they are just massive hypocrites who have long been bullsh*tting us about their morals, ethics, and values.
Humdog
The last words I said to my sister, after she chided me for being upset at shitstain’s “win” and evangelicals’ support of him as me placing too much importance on the kingdom of man(?!), was that she and her people can no longer call themselves Christian. Christians are supposed to center Christ and his teachings in their lives. Today’s evangelicals center abortions as the most important beliefs/moral questions. They should therefore call themselves “abortians” instead. I have lost my whole family with their choice in this past election. 3 sisters, 3 brothers and a father and stepmother. Now an orphan but still ashamed of my former family.
O. Felix Culpa
@rikyrah:
For some of them – especially the leaders – your comment applies. However, I have fundamentalist in-laws and I can say for certain that they are TRUE BELIEVERS – in all caps. Their belief system is false and harmful, in my view, but they are not phonies. They genuinely adhere to their rigid religion and feel victimized and embattled as the culture changes around them.
GregB
For what shall it profit a man……
If someone wrote a script with a character as anti-Christ, the couldn’t have come up with a better earthly example than Donald Trump.
Barbara
@Roger Moore: I was thinking about this — perversely — when I saw a tweet by Susan Sarandon (retweeted by someone else) about how to help Dreamers. The responses were deservedly savage. But my thought was: in her world, as in the world of Evangelicals, there is never any consequence when wealthy white people fail. Not just that there is more redemption available, but that failure is never even acknowledged. There were more consequences for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for succeeding as middle class Americans than there are for the Trumps and Sarandons of the world for public, irrefutable, abject failures. It’s tribal, it’s infuriating and it’s worth pointing out every day, in every way, even if it makes you a boor.
Iowa Old Lady
I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Stone’s Sex and the Constitution, which among other things chronicles the rise and fall of various wave of Evangelicalism. When they’re ascendant, their main concern is regulation other people’s sex lives.
Butch
You’re fading so you align yourself with someone who is the antithesis of everything you claimed to believe in. I think this argument is BS; they aligned themselves with Trump because he enables their grievance and resentment.
Major Major Major Major
@Jeffro:
Why not? They say they are. It’s certainly not my place to decide whether one is or is not a true member of the faith they say they’re in. Why can’t we just say they’re shitty Christians?
BlueDWarrior
@Butch: To me, I interpret that as the lashing out from their fading. They know the numbers of like-minded souls is rapidly dwindling, and all their efforts to (re-)restructure America civil society into a White Christian Evangelical one have all but failed, so they are basically going to spend their last days making life an interminable hell for everyone who rejected them, even if that means sabotaging and crippling the government that could be assisting them on a wider, macro level.
O. Felix Culpa
@Humdog: Ms. O is in a similar position. It’s hard. One of the things she told me is that fundamentalism puts far more emphasis on “God the Father” (harsh, judging character in their system) than on Jesus, despite their rhetoric. If so, that explains the easy way fundamentalists blow off Matthew 25:31ff – whatever you did or didn’t do for the least of these – among other of Jesus’ teachings urging love and kindness.
chris
These people are in your government right now. They need to be rooted out and sent back to the cellars and catacombs but I won’t hold my breath. Fuckem, get out the vote!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Roger Moore:
Indeed. In the (liberal) churches I have attended here in the Northeast, the “Sunday is the most segregated day of the week” cliche is a source of continuing pain and embarrassment. They desperately want to be more diverse than they are, and questions about how to expand the appeal to a wider audience, especially African Americans, is a continual worry. “How do you get black people to come to your church?” is a perpetual question.
So it was kind of a shocker when someone I knew reported that they were visiting a southern congregation and at one point were asked in a hushed voice, “How do you keep black people from coming to your church?”.
Elizabelle
The first reader comment on USA Today link blew Mr. Robert P. Jones’s theory away. Had to laugh, because it was about 8% the verbiage and 150% the insight of the opinion essay.
Take it away, commenter Gideon Jones:
Truly, Mr. Jones is just doing Air Jordans not to grasp the point others see quite well.
And hurray for this, which Jones buries in about 100 words when less will do:
Shout that one from the rooftops. Think for yourselves, steeple sheeple. Our democracy and civil society depends on it.
Alain the site fixer
@GregB: This. And for such maniacs about the anti-Christ, end of the world, etc., you’d think they’d consider if herr Shitler meets many of the supposed signs. I mean, can’t you imagine him only working with folks who spend money in his branded properties/services? Isn’t that like a “mark of the beast”? And his cruelty and lack of concern for others and weird hair. I mean, I’ve been waiting for over a year now for those folks who swore Obama was the anti-Christ to start freaking out because there’s a lot more plausible case to be made now!
dr. bloor
@Butch: Yep. They’re not “bargaining” about anything in the sense that they’re prepared to sacrifice or give something up. Trump isn’t doing anything but throwing high octane on their rage, and they’re fixed only on regaining their power.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Alain the site fixer: Somehow, only Democrats are ever candidates for potential Anti-Christ. All of them.
Why, it’s almost as if there’s a political bias to their religious beliefs.
Major Major Major Major
@Alain the site fixer: a lot of these people take the Left Behind books as more or less the true interpretation of Revelation, and those books clearly say that the antichrist is a liberal.
And for them, the coming of the darkies into god’s kingdom (America) is much more apocalyptic than supporting actual evil.
p.s. Thank you for getting rid of that ad
p.p.s. Why didn’t you allow comments? It would’ve been a fun thread! Ding dong the witch is dead
Elizabelle
@Major Major Major Major: I’m good with calling them shitty Christians. It’s true.
bystander
@O. Felix Culpa: It’s a lot easier to oppress people hiding behind a faceless, voiceless God, than it is to hide behind what Christians believe to be the acts and words that form the body of the teachings of Christ. God sends the hurricane because he hates same sex marriage and illegal immigration. Jesus is busy blessing the ones who left Houston for a long weekend in Malibu.
Cermet
Tragically, these lying hypocrites vote as a percentage at a far higher rate than most any other group and will continue to dominate elections for some time – especially off years.
bystander
@Elizabelle:
If only we could get the pollsters and tv talkingheads on board. “Tonight, new results show 75% of shitty Christians voted for Trump. Shitty Christians overwhelmingly rejected Hillary Clinton.”
Cheryl Rofer
Anne Laurie: Lindy West has a takedown of Ivanka Trump that is right up your alley!
Brachiator
A wonderfully provocative post. Very thoughtful stuff, even though it has serious problems.
Disagree, especially since this ignores or downplays political and social history.
The stages of grief are great pop psychology and good for metaphors, but are probably wrong and have never been empirically verified.
Evangelical movements have been central to American history, and have been grand shapers of public policy. As the Wiki notes,
The Great Awakening, in the US in the 18th century was one of the first times that an intellectual and social movement became centered not in the New York and Boston elites, but with supposedly lesser educated people. This has been part of the push-pull in American social life, the alternation of obedience to the elites with rejection of their dominance.
Evangelicals obviously are not dying, but they fear and reject the loss of their dominance. In contemporary America, one symbol of the ongoing influence of Evangelicals was the importance of preachers like Billy Graham, and his ability to move among the political elite. All this is going away, and white evangelicals don’t like it ’cause they don’t know what’s coming next. There is no consensus. No group has ever easily embraced their increasing impotence of obsolescence.
The decline of Anglo Indians in post-independence India comes to mind. This group had been raised to be the middle men of the Raj and believed themselves to be the heirs of colonialism. Independence turned them into the punch line of a political joke.
@Roger Moore: RE:
It helps explain, for example, how white evangelical leaders could ignore so many problematic aspects of Trump’s character.
Yep. Agree with you here. There is something incredibly phony and pathetic how evangelicals try to rationalize a godless maniac like Trump as somehow an agent of divine will. Unlike Dubya, who authentically viewed himself as born again, Trump barely even bothers to mouth religious pieties and obviously lived a life of a-religious excess. The closest that evangelicals get to honesty is when some of them declare that the main thing they care about is abortion, and they will embrace anyone who will deliver on an anti-woman agenda.
MomSense
@Elizabelle:
They are shitty Christians. I know my bible pretty well and I always find their ignorance of the text shocking.
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle: It is tribal for sure. And racist too, but I’m not sure they know it. True fundamentalists isolate themselves from everyone who is not like themselves, so everyone who is different is suspect. It’s truly cult-like in their otherizing and programmatic isolation and authoritarianism. I’m not exonerating them from their hateful ways, but through Ms. O I have a bit of a gateway into their worldview. The scary part is how virtually impossible it is to penetrate their “thinking.” They elude all reasoning, even from Scripture, never mind facts and data.
But her emails!!!
The beginning of the article mentions the earlier decline of the more liberal denominations. The allegory to dying patients is a nice rhetorical device, but it doesn’t explain why the expression of this pattern for the evangelical movement is so much different than that of the more liberal denominations. Sure, checking a few last things off the bucket list, spending more time with family and bathing in the blood of infants is consistent with the 5 stages of grief for a dying person, but it doesn’t really explain why an individual chooses the 3rd option instead of the first two.
MomSense
@Cheryl Rofer:
If I were her PR rep, I’d advise her to start easing up on the Botox now so that when she cries on national tv about how she was betrayed by her father, husband, and brothers she can slightly furrow her brow so as to seem more believable. Then she can talk about what a challenge it will be to raise her children alone and to leave their home etc. But she won’t be able to sell herself as a victim if her face is still frozen.
Elizabelle
Why are USA Today and other outlets so in to normalizing ridiculous behavior, and not seeing it for what it is? Jones’ essay was notable for the excessive wordiness — why did they allow him so much? Yesterday was not exactly a slow news day.
Had CNN on a little overnight, following the hurricane, and CNN was all “Trump sent this tweet that says he might reconsider on DACA.”
Lucy with the football. Every. Single. Time.
Amaranthine RBG
Which, for significant minority in the evangelical tradition is literally true.
They believe the end of the world is a good thing, because in their eschatology, it is foretold that armageddon comes along with the second coming.
I am not saying all evangelicals are this nutty, but there are probably hundreds of thousands of people in this country who, upon hearing that a massive nuclear attack against the US has been detected, would say “Hallelujah”
tobie
Mr. tobie calls white evangelicals “God botherers” and I think he’s right. One of the endless ironies of the last election is that both HRC and Tim Kaine are devout in their faith (Methodism and Catholicism respectively) and that meant nothing to evangelicals.
OT: Is anyone following the story of Devin Nunes’ subpoenas to the AG and FBI Director for any and all material related to the Steele dossier? The GOP is trying to do everything to discredit the Mueller investigation.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: I wasn’t around to respond, and didn’t want a bunch of bitching. That will be welcome next week. Warning, the ad will likely be coming back!
I’m going to do a bunch of stuff on the test site and we’ll go from there, hope to roll it out to the main site early next week.
Nicole
@O. Felix Culpa: You speak truth about them being impossible to penetrate with pesky things like facts. I had one in my life for over 30 years (we met when we were both 11) and once, just once, I came close to shifting her view on abortion (the Evangelicals’ big issue, although, if you follow the history, it’s also based in race- specifically, in Carter coming down on taxing religious schools that were just excuses for segregation. How they connected that with abortion I don’t know, but they are Evangelicals. Why ask why, as long as there is someone to hate?). Anyway, after taking her through the history of abortion in the country, and the statistics on pre- and post-Roe v Wade mortalities, and the typical woman who gets an abortion, she said to me she could almost agree with me, but if she did, her pastor would get really mad at her.
Some years later she said we needed to stop talking politics, although she did let in that she thought Trump as President would be a fun roller-coaster ride. And then I was done with her. She lives off of SSDI benefits. I’m curious if his plan to cut $80 billion from that program over 10 years has filtered through to her yet. But I don’t care enough to reach out and find out. Life is nicer with fewer toxic people in it.
Spanky
Well OK. Since it’s an OT, and our current second-favorite disaster for discussion is the forecast, the 11:00 o’clock models have been run:
Hellooo, Carolinas.
Nicole
@tobie: To the Evangelicals, Catholics aren’t real Christians, so they don’t count. And Killary wants everyone to have free abortions, so she doesn’t count either.
(Never mind many of them have had abortions themselves. That was totally different and God forgives them.)
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: The Creator gave them good minds. They choose not to use them, that’s on them. It is frustrating.
Does anyone know if Fox News went after the evangelical audience right away? People with no critical thinking skills, a belief in magical thinking, taking stuff on faith with no evidence required, who like to spend a lot of time on their asses listening to others proclaim the world as it is and will be. Hello, Fox News!
A Ghost To Most
Religion is for rubes.
schrodingers_cat
For some, religion is just another means to power this is true for T and his evangelical supporters. They are united in purpose and hence allies.
Major Major Major Major
@Alain the site fixer:
…why
Matt
That assumes the average Talibangelical has a problem with any of Trump’s “character”. They’ve never had any problem with the long line of grifters and pervos that have fleeced them over the years, why would they suddenly develop a problem with any of that now?
O. Felix Culpa
I think many of the criticisms of the article are valid and yet miss the point – which is from the [white] evangelical and fundamentalist point of view, they are losing ground against “the world” (their term) and are therefore lashing out to try to take back what they perceive they’re losing.
Are they lousy Christians? Yes. Are they fetus-fetishizing racists (among other negatives)? Yes. Enumerate other bad things about them? Yes. BUT, they are not us and they live in a different construction of reality that is starkly dualistic – us vs. them – and nearly impermeable. They are afraid of the changes around them and fearful people can do terrible things to protect themselves against external threats, whether real or perceived.
hueyplong
Elizabelle has already planted the USA Today article, but even without getting to the comments, my immediate reaction to reading the excerpt here was to laugh at the part about rejecting principles in the “grand bargain” with Trump because they’re “desperate.”
So the nut of this whole thing is to absolve assholes/racists from any responsibility for embarrassingly bad behavior. Religious insecurity (and, hilariously, “grieving”) sure reads a lot like #economic insecurity.
Funny how insecurity leads to torchlight parades and the debasement of the nation that is a Trump Presidency. And what is it about other people not sharing their religious beliefs that makes them insecure? No one is stopping them from believing whatever they want to believe. They either have a personal relationship with Jesus or they don’t. It doesn’t matter if Cletus or Jose next door is unacquainted with their version of the Savior. If they have to be in a majority to keep the faith, their faith is not very strong, is it?
It’s political. The rest is lies and excuse-making.
The lot of them can go perform seemingly impossible acts of self gratification.
Wapiti
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I once had a evangelical working for me say, “Some people say that Mohammed was the anti-Christ”. I had to take a breath before saying something to the effect of “not to denigrate your religion, but isn’t that stupid? Mohammed died like over a thousand years ago. Are we a thousand years past the end times?”
He chose to hide behind “some people say…”
Ian G.
By my last count, Trump has broken 9 of the 10 commandments* that these people want enshrined in public places in gratuitous fashion all over the country.
*I dunno, given his Mafia and Putin (but I repeat myself) connections, I wouldn’t exactly be surprised if it later came out that Trump ordered someone clipped, this making him a perfect 10 of 10 in commandment-breaking.
Alain the site fixer
@MomSense: likewise. I remember the first time when I asked about his Bible, an Evangelical pulled out a three ring binder filled with….1% verse, 99% what his pastor wanted him to believe it said and meant. Having read/studied the Bible, first to last word, twice, I assure you that the look of horror and the stammer in my voice when I realized that he didn’t have the real thing was priceless. One of the pillars of the Reformation was having common folks read their own bibles, not being told what it meant from their keepers/priests. I could not believe that we’ve come full circle.
I went to Episcopal schools, and I suspect you went to something similar.
Amaranthine RBG
@Brachiator:
You’re right, this is more accurate now but they are, really, dying. There is, of course, considerable overlap between evangelicals and the Fox audience and it’s not a coincidence that the average age of a Fox news viewer is over 70 years old.
Major Major Major Major
@Wapiti: I think a thousand years past the end times we’re supposed to be back to the kingdom of man (or perhaps of Satan, I forget). Jesus goes home. So maybe!
Elizabelle
Looking again at the verbose Robert P. Jones’ “analysis”:
What could it be, what could it be? What came between Bush (the president) and Trump?
Paula
We attended an annual Labor Day picnic out in Trump-friendly territory Sunday. It’s where my husband grew up — we live in a Blue city and are very lapsed Lutheran and Catholic — and is hosted by a retired union official and his wife — lovely people. They told us how they had come to change churches this year. They’d attended a particular Lutheran church their whole lives and been very active. (My husband used to clean the church with his Mom on weekends when he was a child.) But during the election season one of the members was a very aggressive Repub/Trumper who was always accosting them and saying that as union-backers and Democrats they were evil, etc. After the election he was worse, hassling them about not being supportive of Trump. The entire church population started dropping. The part-time Minister (also a Trumper) did nothing to shut this guy up — even putting him in charge of Sunday school. Kids stopped attending. Our friends started listening to services online, and found another Lutheran church with a woman Minister the next town over. They started attending; said the sermons were interesting and thought-provoking, and they left Sunday services feeling good. Meanwhile my brother-in-law, who is planning to leave the old church when his wife finishes her term as treasurer, has found a new church he will be attending, and said this past Sunday only 21 people showed up for service at the old church. The Trumper’s wife was at the picnic. She and her kids are very unhappy with her husband’s behavior but she feels helpless to stop him.
nonynony
@Brachiator:
They don’t actually care about abortion. At least not the leadership. It’s chum to feed to their congregations to get donations and to get them to support Republicans with their votes. If they truly cared about abortions they’d be working to do the things that we know reduce the need for abortions – good sex education in schools, promotion of birth control among people who aren’t ready to have kids, and a good social safety net to help people who want to have kids but can’t afford them. All of this is right in line with a scriptural reading of the Bible if you want to make the case (because liberal mainline churches often do. Also because you can literally justify any wonderful deed you want to perform or any horrible atrocity you want to commit with scripture. The Bible is a giant Rorschach blot and you can tell what a person truly is like by which parts they grasp onto and think are important).
What they care about is power for themselves first and foremost. And denying power and agency to anyone who isn’t them. They would likely be perfectly happy with an abortion regime where they got to decide who got the abortions and who did not (and this regime would likely end up exactly as racist and classist as you can imagine it to be). It’s about power, and using whatever tools they have at hand to keep that power.
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle:
Oh yes, it’s wildly frustrating. But their doctrine explicitly teaches them to distrust the mind and the evidence of the senses. Only Scripture – and only their interpretation of it – is authoritative. That’s why so many home school or send their kids to their own little church-run schools and bible colleges, to shelter their children from the pollution of worldly thinking. (Desegregation is a factor, but doctrinal purity is at least as important.) Ms. O’s mother blames NPR for her [Ms. O’s] departure from that system and, funnily, it actually was her gateway into the outside world. So NPR is still good for something. :)
Edited for clarity, with apologies for clunky sentence structure.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: It’s not my choice. I’m hoping to find some alternatives, but I expect that, before I get that all setup and approved, the ad will return (with no audio hopefully…he’s asking the folks to not make it so fing intrusive)
I owe an apology to all – until I was at my mom’s and not using my normal setup, I wasn’t affected. But here, I wondered what this super loud, annoying ad was. Lo and behold, the tab with this site. And it continued…and continued..and a few tab reloads had similar results. So I reported it to John and he told me to take it down while it’s fixed.
El Caganer
Interesting journey, taking a religion of universal love and turning it into a cult of selective hatred.
Amir Khalid
@Barbara:
Susan Sarandon doesn’t seem to be from old money, as far as I can tell. Her Wikipedia entry lists her father as having been an advertising executive, a TV producer, and a nightclub singer; jobs like these are not exactly the typical career path of someone in the upper crust. It seems to me like her very Catholic family was firmly middle-class, and may have had financially precarious periods when Dad was between careers.
Elizabelle
@Paula:
A great real-life example of Josh Marshall’s theory that Trump exposes the rot that is within people, perhaps initially hidden from view. Support for Trump has that clarifying effect.
So, the old Lutheran church has gone Trump purity pony. Gonna be fun putting on that next roof.
Trump is breaking up congregations, and damaging marriages (the poor Trumper’s wife).
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
In that sense, though, the article has a point. It’s not so much that Trump actually disagrees with the Evangelicals’ core beliefs (i.e. White Supremacy) as it is that he doesn’t bother with the religious trappings. By publicly embracing somebody who doesn’t go along with their religious trappings, they’re tacitly admitting that they don’t really care about that stuff nearly as much as they do about hating on Those People. That’s a huge, and probably long-term damaging, concession to make, and they only had to do it because they weren’t in a position to get one of their own nominated.
Barbara
@Brachiator: I am not as dismissive of this article. Evangelicals are dying, in the sense that they can see the slow decline of their own churches and they have no idea what to do about it. But here is where I do part company: they have no idea what to do because they refuse all insight about what motivated their rise in the first place. And they refuse to acknowledge that by fusing themselves to a political party they have made an idol of power and authoritarian control. There are so many applicable biblical verses that you can practically open the NT to any page and find guidance: Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be. Or, refusing to accept that God has their back without worrying incessantly about earthly trappings — like the lilies in the field. I never expected white Evangelicals to readily acknowledge their part in maintaining Jim Crow, but it’s been 50 years — a long time — and they still can’t stop trying to maintain their own worldly goods by stepping on African Americans. That they used their church as an excuse for continuing repression makes them despicable as well as deluded.
My advice? Just stop. Stop trying to shape society by controlling other people. If God is the most important thing in your life, then make God the most important thing in your life. It doesn’t matter what you think you are doing indirectly, just by directly supporting Donald Trump, you are selling your soul.
MomSense
@Alain the site fixer:
I’ve had very similar experiences with evangelicals who read devotionals and texts prepared for bible study classes that have very little of the actual bible in them.
Have you read any of Elaine Pagels’ books on the Gnostic Gospels? She’s a compelling writer on a fascinating topic.
Brachiator
@O. Felix Culpa:
Fundamentalism is even stranger than that. White Catholic fundamentalists (and some British Anglicans) are happy to submit to the authority of black and Asian bishops who preach the old patriarchal orthodoxy, especially if it is against women priests and gays, abortion rights, etc. The tribalism is ideological, not always ethnic.
Also, in a related way, I am surprised and dismayed by all the supposed evangelicals of all ethnic persuasions who still defend Joel Osteen despite his despicable first reaction to Harvey and his refusal to open up his mega-church to people in need. The sucker tribe also crosses ethnic lines.
Elizabelle
@Roger Moore:
Although we have Pence waiting in the wings, his little fingers paging through his Old Testament.
Interesting Jones does not mention Pence at all.
Barbara
@Amir Khalid: She is not from old money, that’s not the point. The point is that no one would listen to her if she were not a wealthy and well-connected celebrity. And that wealth and celebrity is like a protective coating that insulates her from accountability for being wrong.
Boatboy_srq
If it’s truly murder-suicide, the theme has to be The Judys’ “Guyana Punch”.
Alain the site fixer
@MomSense: I have not, but that’s added to the list. Many thanks!
Major Major Major Major
@Alain the site fixer: don’t forget to have them fix the https problem.
Elizabelle
@Boatboy_srq: Hello there.
Still on coffee, no Jesus Juice just yet, please.
chopper
@Humdog:
a long time ago they used to print the gospels with jesus’ words in red ink so you could really focus on them. for a while now they’ve been using invisible ink instead.
O. Felix Culpa
@chopper: Lol!
Mnemosyne
@The Dangerman:
FWIW, that’s been a claim on the right for quite a while. That asshole Jonah Goldberg wrote a whole moronic book about it.
Josie
@Iowa Old Lady: I believe this. The thing I don’t understand is why that is a major concern with them. What is their reasoning on this? I really don’t get it.
Kay Eye
@West of the Rockies (been a while): A movie recommendation: The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a study of the female half of the Bakker dog and pony show – an insight into the sock-puppet (literally) beginning and meteoric rise and fall of an evangelical Christian ministry and the lure of mammon. Ultimately quite sympathetic to this innocent and unschooled young girl who became the garish Xian media star of sorts.
The first time I ever saw Tammy Faye I was flipping through channels – I thought I was watching a Benny Hill skit.
lollipopguild
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Putin has always struck me as a better candidate for the anti-christ role and guess what, lots of right wingers just Love them some Putin.
O. Felix Culpa
@Josie:
It’s easier to try to control someone else’s behavior than the attitudes of one’s own heart.
Mnemosyne
@Kay Eye:
Once Tammy Faye and Bakker divorced, it turned out that she was actually a kind and compassionate person. She embraced (and was embraced by) the gay community and became an icon, and she did a lot of charity work for AIDS.
Jim Bakker is the same asshole he always was, but their son Jay turned out okay. He lost his original church because he had a revelation that hating LGBT people was against God’s will, but he has a new one now.
MattF
I used to make a little joke about Christians saying one thing and doing some other, quite different thing– they were ‘inscrutable Gentiles’. But it’s not amusing any more.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Josie: It’s the fear that someone else is having a better time than they are.
Alain the site fixer
@Major Major Major Major: lol
different-church-lady
None of it will mean shit if those religiously disaffected yutes insist on remaining too politically disaffected to vote for someone who doesn’t “excite” them.
different-church-lady
@Iowa Old Lady: Social power is a hell of a drug.
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: In or around 1951, my friend’s Southern Baptist preacher father told his congregation from the pulpit that de jure segregation was against the Bible. He was given exactly one month to get out of town. He would have been given less time but these people loved my friend’s mother, who had just given birth and felt sorry for her on account of being married to such a nut. One anecdote, of course, but it is so illuminating. Most ministers did not have his courage, and neither did he after that.
O. Felix Culpa
@Brachiator:
It certainly does. I engaged in a battle on FB with a high school friend turned fundamentalist RWNJ who had posted false and scurrilous things about the mosques in Houston opening to flood victims (HER: they didn’t really open – ME: yes, they did open, here’s an article from the Houston Chronicle about it; HER: they opened only to Muslims – ME: no they opened to everyone regardless of faith; HER: they didn’t let women in because mosques – ME: no they opened to all in need; HER: well then they had to be shamed into opening their doors – ME: actually they were among the first to open and did so freely).
On the last point, it turns out projection is a helluva drug. When someone else pointed out the Joel Osteen embarrassment, she responded that surely he had been misunderstood. It’s a closed and hateful system and almost impossible to penetrate. She and her pastor husband ended the “conversation” with all kinds of nasty derp about Islam and Muslims. I stated my position and walked away. I dislike engaging with these folks, but I also think it’s dangerous to keep silent in the face of vicious lies.
gvg
the decline of evangelical influence is at least partly caused by their own obvious lack of morals, respectability and niceness. My childhood included many examples pointed out by my parents of respectable nice Christians doing things like feeding the poor, comforting the distressed and charity fundraising where the money really did go where it was supposed to. There were also obvious charlatans pointed out like Falwell and Baker. I have viewed them all for decades and those currently calling themselves Evangelicals and Christians don’t seem to be good people. Nobody I would consider good pays any attention to them and I think that over all their influence is decreasing but the toxic core is all that is left. In the past the toxic meanies were disguised by a large number of people who weren’t as distilled and had more of a mix of good and bad to hide in.
The fact that they have clearly been following power not being good for decades means more people have noticed that their advice is bad. And by the way I consider Bush to be just as morally corrupt though not in exactly the same way and with some potential to fix himself.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@rikyrah:
The irony being if they had just the smallest faction of the morality they clam they wouldn’t be in such desperation.
Elizabelle
@O. Felix Culpa: She’s the wife of a pastor, bearing false witness against Muslims? In Facebook, which is kinda in public. Whoa boy.
I wonder if you could ever describe to her the concept of “projection” and explain that is what she’s doing. Although she is pretty far gone.
waspuppet
I’m a white guy and I’m not a Trumpite. I’m also not a fan of Nazis. So obviously there’s something uniquely terrible about evangelicals.
I know that’s not the message I’m supposed to get from this exercise in excuse-making, but it’s the message I get.
Frankensteinbeck
@Elizabelle:
The national press has, since the birth of cable at least, based its entire system on racism denial. It is getting mighty damn hard to pretend Republicanism isn’t about racism, and they’re slowly shedding pundits, but the mass are bending into pretzels trying. Bear in mind, most of them agree with Republicans on issues that ultimately are driven by racism. In the depths of their hearts, they do NOT want light shined on this.
@El Caganer:
Blame Paulites winning the Council of Nicea thanks to an opposing bishop’s death by excreting his own bowels. Whipworms decided our last two thousand years. Ain’t that fucked up?
Laura
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I’ll stand up for Tammy Faye. After the grift was over, she acted decently to the end. She died a miserible death with dignity.
She never went on TV peddling prepper slop buckets unlike her ex, who’s a grifty shit-weasel to this day.
YMMV.
SiubhanDuinne
A radio announcer on my local NPR station has a disconcerting habit of adding “R” to words. For instance, when she introduces a guest who’s written a book, she always introduces “Arthur.” When she refers to MARTA, our rapid-transit system, it’s always a discouraging “martyr.” And just now, she was talking about the monster storm, “Irmer.”
(I know there’s a regionalism that uses “R” as an elision between two vowels — “vaniller ice cream” — but this isn’t that.)
O. Felix Culpa
@Elizabelle:
Yup. I closed with a comment about the biblical injunctions against bearing false witness and for loving our neighbor. The derp continued, but I had had enough.
Explaining projection would have been beyond her ken.
Paula
@Elizabelle:
Yep. I really have never seen anything like it — how this past election is literally breaking up families, friendships, etc. I have a visceral reaction to Trumpers/Republicans these days — I recoil.
O. Felix Culpa
@waspuppet:
There’s something uniquely terrible about all kinds of True Believers, including but not limited to evangelicals.
Understanding and explaining are not the same as excuse-making. To describe why evangelicals are reacting badly and harmfully to a changing world is not exculpatory.
Tim C.
@Barbara: This is not atypical. Southern, fundamentalist Christianity was built around selective “literal” readings of the Bible. It was built around justifying slavery. The names and denominational alliances have changed over the last 150 years but the big change was the 60s and 70s when open racism became less acceptable. Think more Concerned Citizen’s Councils as opposed to the KKK. The change to making abortion restrictions a deeply held biblical truth is actually very new. As in it’s a deeply held biblical belief that’s been around for less time than McDonald’s happy meals. Trump tapped into these asshole’s programming and the latent racism has been reawakened by him.
Source: Fred Clark, a religious writer over at Patheos. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/18/the-biblical-view-thats-younger-than-the-happy-meal/
Roger Moore
@chopper:
That’s to show those parts are optional.
Jeffro
@Major Major Major Major:
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to…I mean that’s fine, but to me they’re so far beyond shitty, so antithetical to Jesus’ teachings, it seems appropriate to deny them the label altogether.
Jeffro
@Elizabelle: #104
Jeffro
@O. Felix Culpa:
It’s almost as if the country has sorted itself out psychologically these past 30 years. Now if we could just convince all the RWNJs to move to Texas and leave the rest of us be…
Boatboy_srq
@Elizabelle: You should listen. The Judys were a hoot, and that track is just eeeeevil.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
Single cause thinking like that is wrong-headed. Maybe that was the point at which they decisively seized control, but they had to be close to winning to start with. Paulite thinking won out in the long run because it was a lot more appealing to the powerful than Christian thinking. It’s the same way that archaic Arabic practices managed to take over Islam, or that the Prosperity Gospel has taken over parts of Evangelical Protestantism. There are always people who want to roll back any reform, be it religious, social, or what have you, and they’ll seize whatever excuse presents itself.
Mike G
@Brachiator:
Fixed it for you. Evangelicals aren’t happy unless they’re controlling everything, dominating society and eliminating all nonconformity (at which point they’ll go to war with each other). In the meantime they’ll whine about being ‘victims’ while being obsessed with punishing others.
O. Felix Culpa
@Mike G:
Truth, including the part about going to war with each other when they haven’t got external enemies to exterminate. They’re Splitters and Haters, all rolled up into one odious package.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Amaranthine RBG:
.That Christian snuff series “Left Behind” is a best seller for the Christian Right after The Bible, Millennialism is pretty central to Evangelical beliefs.
opiejeanne
@Nicole: They don’t consider Methodists of the United Methodist Church to be Real Christians either, and we have had them tell us so as they tried to recruit us into their churches. I’m pretty damned offended by that attitude.
The Pale Scot
@Major Major Major Major:
I just call them xristianists.
? Martin
As I’ve been saying for some time, Trump is the extinction burst of white Christianity. White Christians were the majority (by number) population in the US from the 17th century until sometime during Obama’s tenure. Obama marked the visible end of 3+ centuries of white Christian power in the US. Just like the shame that comes from eating a quart of ice cream soon after starting a diet, Trump will eventually be seen as the shame of the white Christian establishment to try and hold onto power at any cost.
Good riddance.
O. Felix Culpa
@? Martin:
You’ve said in a few words what the article’s author says in many.
J R in WV
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I have heard that question (“How do you keep the blacks away?”) in Georgia. It was many years ago, east of Atlanta, at a Methodist church in Decatur, but I have no reason to hope that the situation has changed.
If one were to answer “We work to try to get more black folks to attend and aren’t sure how to go about that!!” I expect the answer would be “Well… Bless Your Heart!” which is polite southern for GO FUCK YOURSELF!
Evil vermin wearing the collar of a priest. A friend is an Episcopal priest and was on an airline flight, by chance seated next to a fundamentalist pastor. They began a conversation, as both no doubt tended to be extrovert.
After a while the fundy asked my friend “What’s your take?” which wasn’t understood. Episcopals are employees of their diocese, with a salary, health insurance, taxes withheld, etc. Fundamentalists get a percentage of the Sunday take, the gifts from the crowd put into that day’s “offering plates”. I was surprised once when an offering was taken up at a wedding, amazed, really. I put a dollar in and felt short-changed.
At least there was a cash bar outside the reception, at a country club. Would have been mighty disappointed if there hadn’t been.
The fundamentalist minister was plainly surprised at how mundane the employment situation of the Episcopal was, and the Episcopal was shocked at how much like a carnival barker the Fundamentalist was. I wasn’t surprised a tiny bit…
J R in WV
@Paula:
I wonder if it would be worth the trouble, as you leave the church you attended for so long, to tell everyone specifically why you have found another, happier, more suitable church to attend. Naming names, in other words, Trump, the minister (I thought Lutheran ministers had to go to college?) and the Trumpist Sunday school bully.
It would make me feel better, I think, to be sure than no one wondered where I went, or why I went. But I’m not a church-goer much. Last time we went we were visiting the minister who presided over the Christmas Eve ceremony. I suspect many questioned why we didn’t participate in communion that night. It was a very nice ceremony, a crowded Episcopal church in a rural working class town.