New Republic, Audrey Clare Farley
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/audrey-farley>/March 16, 2021
The Post-Trump Crack-Up of the Evangelical Community
Its embrace of an ignominious president is forcing a long-overdue
reckoning with the movement’s embrace of white supremacy and
illiberal politics.
A preacher holds up his Bible while supporters of Donald Trump host a
'Stop the Steal' protest outside of the Georgia State Capital building.
MEGAN VARNER/GETTY IMAGES
A preacher holds up his Bible while supporters of Donald Trump host a
“Stop the Steal” protest outside the Georgia State Capitol building.
In 2017, beloved Bible teacher and evangelical personality Beth Moore
had the chance to meet a theologian she’d long admired. As she
laterrecounted
<https://blog.lproof.org/2018/05/a-letter-to-my-brothers.html>on her
blog, she was eager to share a meal with the iconic figure, left unnamed
in her recounting, and talk about scripture. That encounter proved to be
memorable, though not for the reasons that Moore, oftencalled
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/beth-moore-bible-study/568288/>a
“Southern belle,” imagined. The theologian, within an instant of meeting
her, scanned her up and down, smiled approvingly, and remarked that she
was better looking than another well-known woman Bible teacher.
It wasn’t the first time Moore had been degraded for merely being a
woman, and it wouldn’t be the last. As early as the 1980s, when she
began to share devotionals with other women in her aerobics class, she
wasmet
<https://religionnews.com/2021/03/09/bible-teacher-beth-moore-ends-partnership-with-lifeway-i-am-no-longer-a-southern-baptist/>with
contempt by many men in the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC. By
tradition, women were not to have leadership roles; they were to sit
cheerily at the feet of men. Even though she took care to call herself a
“Bible teacher,” rather than a “preacher,” and even though she
diligentlywore
<https://religionnews.com/2021/03/09/bible-teacher-beth-moore-ends-partnership-with-lifeway-i-am-no-longer-a-southern-baptist/>flats
so as not to emasculate men of shorter stature, Moore was regularly
“dismissed and ridiculed.”
She nevertheless became an influential force in the evangelical
community,managing
<https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/beth-moore-celebrates-20-years-with-lifeway/>to
reach an estimated 21 million people with her Bible studies and filling
arenas wherever she went to speak. Had it not been for her foray into
political commentary, Moore’s star likely would have soared even higher.
But shebegan
<https://religionnews.com/2021/03/09/bible-teacher-beth-moore-ends-partnership-with-lifeway-i-am-no-longer-a-southern-baptist/>to
bleed followers when, against the urging of evangelical leaders, she
condemned the misogyny of Donald Trump, first as a candidate and later
as president. She also spoke about the sexism she’d experienced within
her faith community. Between 2017 and 2019, the same year it was
revealed that the SBC wasembroiled
<https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php>in
a massive sexual abuse scandal, she lost $1.8 million. Nevertheless she
pushed the envelope even further in 2020, expressing grave concerns
about the corrupting influence ofwhite supremacy
<https://twitter.com/BethMooreLPM/status/1291349950312452096?s=20>andChristian
nationalism
<https://twitter.com/bethmoorelpm/status/1338134290647953410?lang=en>among
evangelicals. Her criticsrebuked
<https://twitter.com/pastorlocke/status/1338240897373401094?s=20>her
andcalled
<https://twitter.com/SaveFerris14/status/1291715303500582913?s=20>her
“woke”—the insult they also lob at those who support critical race
theory and the like.
Last week, Moore finallybroke
<https://religionnews.com/2021/03/09/bible-teacher-beth-moore-ends-partnership-with-lifeway-i-am-no-longer-a-southern-baptist/>ties
with the Convention, along with her longtime publisher, Lifeway, telling
Religion News Service, “I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer
identify with Southern Baptists.… I don’t identify with some of the
things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past.” Her
announcement set Twitter and the Christian blogosphere ablaze. Some
haveaccused
<https://twitter.com/pam_slone/status/1370444029951893505?s=20>her of
going the way of “Satanic cannibals” anddemanded
<https://g3min.org/beth-moores-departure-and-the-sbcs-failure/>her
repentance.Others
<https://twitter.com/AntheaButler/status/1369364525741453317?s=20>have
flatteringly compared
<https://twitter.com/dianabutlerbass/status/1369369672420823043>her to
Meghan Markle. But the more urgent debate surrounds the nature and
history of the institution Moore has rejected, and the fault line that
her stance has cracked open.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are those, such as SBC President J.D. Greear, whoinsist
<https://twitter.com/jdgreear/status/1369766213082046472?s=20>that the
problems of the evangelical community are cultural, not doctrinal;
others express regret that the movement has been hijacked by politics in
recent years—an idea the mediaseems
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/conservative-evangelicals-attempt-to-disentangle-their-faith-from-trumpism>to
have tacitly accepted. Still others rightly question these framings,
noting that there was never a heyday when doctrine, rather than
politics, defined the movement, nor when evangelicalism was not
synonymous with white patriarchal power. It is precisely because the
voices of these latter critics have long been excluded from the
narrative-making that so many Americans are startled, along with Moore,
by the state of white evangelicalism. In order to comprehend such
phenomena as the storming of the Capitol by militarized men waving
Christian and Confederate flags, it is imperative to acknowledge the
racist, sexist politics undergirding the modern evangelical movement
since its foundation—history that those who have controlled the
narrative have gone to some lengths to leave out.
There is a new generation of religious scholars doing such corrective
history. Anthea Butlerwrote
<https://uncpress.org/book/9781469661179/white-evangelical-racism/>her
forthcoming book,/White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in
America//,/to redress what shecalls
<https://religiondispatches.org/im-not-here-to-fix-evangelicals-but-to-show-them-who-they-are-an-interview-with-the-author-of-white-evangelical-racism/>the
“White Savior” approach to evangelical history: The tendency of
media-savvy religious leaders and “insider” academics to illuminate the
noble efforts of abolitionists and other do-gooders, while giving little
or no thought to evangelicalism’s more incendiary projects. Her book
discusses how nineteenth-century missionaries used the gospel to control
heathen (that is to say: nonwhite) others; how the SBC was founded in
1845 expressly to protect the interests of Southern slaveholders from
the interference of Northern Baptists; and how Southern evangelicals
valorized white femininity in order both to justify their abuse of
supposedly barbarous Black men and obscure their own sexual violence
against enslaved women.
Nowadays, Butlerexplains
<https://religiondispatches.org/im-not-here-to-fix-evangelicals-but-to-show-them-who-they-are-an-interview-with-the-author-of-white-evangelical-racism/>,
purity culture allows for white evangelicals to disparage Black families
who don’t adhere to the two-parent model, while, again, not applying the
same moral codes to their own leaders. Butler tells/The New
Republic/that for those who have been “born again,” no scandal is
insurmountable: “Like the phoenix, they can rise out of virtually every
situation because Christ died for them, but not for other unwashed,
unsaved sinners.” (Theologically, white evangelicals do believe Jesus
died for all, but this conviction does not always inform their actions.)
The emphasis on an emotive conversion experience—one of the four pillars
of evangelicalism,according
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/evangelical-christian/418236/>to
insider historian David Bebbington—also abets the effort among white
evangelicals to downplay racial injustice. Last June, when the nation
was reeling from both a global pandemic and the horrific murder of
George Floyd, Moore made pointed mention of this fact after SBC leaders
chose that moment tofret
<https://religionnews.com/2020/06/04/without-annual-meeting-southern-baptists-continue-debate-on-race-womens-roles/>about
critical race theory. (In November, leaders formallycondemned
<https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/seminary-presidents-reaffirm-bfm-declare-crt-incompatible/>the
theory.)
“The current state of American Evangelicalism is what we get when the
gospel is reduced to an entrance exam,” shetweeted
<https://twitter.com/BethMooreLPM/status/1272167652564369408?s=20>. The
broader emphasis on spiritual, rather than earthly, salvation, too,
contributes to what Jemar Tisby, in his own book about racism in
Christianity,refers to as
<https://christiansforsocialaction.org/resource/christian-complicity-racism/>“complicit
Christianity.” During Reconstruction and the civil rights era, white
evangelicalsemphasized
<https://newrepublic.com/article/160641/conservatives-loeffler-warnock-black-church>the
saving of souls over earthly reforms, either opposing integration
outright or advocating for a more limited set of incremental (that is to
say, white-friendly) reforms. The influential Reverend Billy Graham, for
instance,made
<https://religiondispatches.org/im-not-here-to-fix-evangelicals-but-to-show-them-who-they-are-an-interview-with-the-author-of-white-evangelical-racism/>a
point to/appear/aligned with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and
other Black faith leaders, all while obstructing their efforts toward
racial harmony. His“eventually, but not now”
<https://religiondispatches.org/im-not-here-to-fix-evangelicals-but-to-show-them-who-they-are-an-interview-with-the-author-of-white-evangelical-racism/>attitude
toward civil rights isn’t fully apparent in the hagiographies that many
evangelicals have since produced.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Religion scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mezagrees
<https://kristindumez.com/resources/evangelicals-the-problem-with-insider-history/>with
Butler that white evangelical men “have played an outsized role in
writing the history of American evangelicalism,” which in turn left
Americans ill prepared for evangelicals’ full-throated embrace of Trump.
(Eighty-one percent cast their vote for the philandering xenophobe in
2016.) Her book/Jesus and John Wayne://How White Evangelicals Corrupted
a Faith and Fractured a Nation/dispels the notion that support for the
famously licentious Trump constituted any sort of aberration for the
movement.
Already in its fourth printing since its June publication, Du Mez’s book
traces the crooked path to Trumpism: the celebrity evangelist Reverend
Billy Sunday’s championing of “muscular Christianity” and Christian
nationalism in the late 1800s and early 1900s; Graham’s more polished
and calculated efforts in the midcentury to resist both civil and
women’s rights; the Promise Keepers’ turn to “soft patriarchy” in the
nineties to push complementarianism (essentially, the doctrine of
“separate, but equal”applied
<https://www.baptiststandard.com/opinion/voices/voices-complementarianism-separate-but-equal-by-another-name/>to
men and women); and post-9/11 white evangelicals’ return to the
warrior-like masculinity that Sunday originally bolstered./Jesus and
John Wayne/takes all of the mystery out of a recent studythat found
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12717>that
evangelicals suffer from phallic insecurity: They Google “male
enhancement,” “ExtenZe,” and “penis pump” more often than their peers.
It’s the lack of such scholarship as Butler’s and Du Mez’s (as well as
that ofTisby
<https://www.zondervan.com/9780310113607/the-color-of-compromise/>,Robert
P. Jones
<https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/White-Too-Long/Robert-P-Jones/9781982122867>,Matthew
Avery Sutton
<https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975439>,Sarah
Posner
<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605774/unholy-by-sarah-posner/>,
andSamuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead
<https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190057886.001.0001/oso-9780190057886>,
authors of the above-mentioned study) that explains a recent/New
Yorker/piece, whichoffers
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-wasting-of-the-evangelical-mind>a
curiously depoliticized history of evangelicalism. Author Michael Luo
attempts to account for white evangelicals’ Covid-19 denialism, their
unfounded beliefs in election fraud, and their embrace of QAnon
conspiracies, by discussing the anti-intellectualism that has long
pervaded evangelicalism. Luo engages the work of revered evangelical
historian Mark Noll, who locates such anti-intellectualism in
eighteenth-century revivalism, which idealized fervor and individualism,
as well as early twentieth-century fundamentalism, which insisted upon a
literal reading of scripture as a way of resisting Darwinism and other
perceived threats. There’s no mention of the racism, sexism, and
Christian nationalism that animated believers during these and other
epochs. It’s as if evangelicals’ hostility toward truth emerged from an
ideological vacuum.
Several religion scholarscalled
<https://twitter.com/suzzzanna/status/1367903383147798529?s=20>attention
to the piece’s glaring failure to engage more recent scholarship. “I
love Mark, but the book is 26 years old. What are we doing
here?”asked<https://twitter.com/suzzzanna/status/1367903638341873667?s=20>Suzanna
Krivulskaya. In a recent essay on a 2019 anthology edited by Noll,
Bebbington, and another establishment historian, George Marsden,
Christopher D. Cantwellwas
<https://religiondispatches.org/how-the-study-of-evangelicalism-has-blinded-us-to-the-problems-in-evangelical-culture/>even
more pointed in his criticism: “The sense of surprise that continues to
confront evangelical zealotry for Trump might be [their] greatest
legacy.” Despite the “veritable cottage industry of editorials, hot
takes, and academic research” that took shape after Trump’s election,
too many are still wondering, “How did we get here?”
Cantwell is hopeful about the new cohort of scholars (including Du Mez
and Tisby) included in the volume, but he also warns of attempts on the
part of conservative evangelicals to accommodate new lines of inquiry
while clinging to apolitical definitions. He suggests, for instance,
that scholars beware of the metaphors describing evangelicalism. He
counted “no fewer than thirty-nine similes, metaphors, analogies, and
other extended (and sometimes tortured) turns of phrase,” including
“kaleidoscope,” “mosaic,” and “patchwork quilt.” These linguistic
devices are as prescriptive as they are descriptive, he says. They
“serve to control and contain less favorable expressions of
evangelicalism by positioning them against … truer, more authentic, and
more admirable” expressions of the faith.
Cantwell cautions against writing off the Capitol-stormers as fake
Christians. The point seems intended for scholars—but it’s not terrible
advice for the many lay people processing the state of white
evangelicalism. There is a temptation, perhaps made stronger by thefact
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/us/biden-catholic-christian.html>of
an ascendant liberal Christianity, to expose the gulf between Christ’s
teaching and the ethe of many conservative Christians today. (Many quip
that were Jesus to walk the earth today, white evangelicals would deride
him as “woke.”) But as an increasing number of evangelical historians
are demonstrating, and as Beth Moore seems to have intuited, such
thinking runs the risk of selling the subject short. When we
depoliticize religion, reducing it to some essential doctrine or piety,
we obscure the varied ways religion actually works in the world. So when
another spectacle like the Capitol-storming unfolds, we may still find
ourselves scratching our heads, wondering how it came to this, when the
answer has been at hand all along.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#7295): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7295
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81375016/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
