Protestants & Politics 11/18/20
Andy Stanley. Billy Graham's legacy. Right-wing media. Evangelicals and racial justice. Republican Christianity. Partisan divides. Multiracial churches. Religious group voting. Atheist voters.
News
The Evangelical Reckoning Begins: Andy Stanley, the pastor of one of the largest megachurches in the country, ponders the future of an influential corner of American Christianity.
At least on Fox News and at Trump rallies, these figures have been granted the authority to speak for the whole of the evangelical world. And yet their version of Christianity reflects only one corner of the wildly diverse expanse of evangelicalism, which includes roughly one-quarter of the American population. Trump’s advisers are “not evangelical leaders. They’re evangelicals who have had their status elevated because they hang around and get invited to the White House,” Stanley said. “Those people were virtually in the marketplace, unknown, until all this happened.” It’s not that Stanley isn’t the kind of evangelical Trump would want by his side. The pastor just didn’t want any part of it. Hang around the White House for too long, “and the next thing you know, you think you’re somebody,” he said. “I just don’t have any business getting sucked into that.”
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What he seems to take issue with is the mindset that evangelicals should be all in for Trump because of their faith. “It’s disappointing,” he said. “It does not reflect anything in the New Testament. Zero.” Christians should put their “faith filter” in front of their “political filter,” he told me, putting one hand in front of the other before his mouth to demonstrate. “We dare not allow politics to define us as individuals if you’re a Jesus follower,” he said. “But that’s hard to keep straight for all of us, I guess.”
Billy Graham’s Legacy Threatened by Family Split: Evangelist’s grandchildren say his son’s pro-Trump politics brings ‘shame’
Author Stephen Prothero, a professor of religious studies at Boston University, described the grandchildren as “outliers in their own family and in the wider white evangelical community” in their willingness to accuse their uncle of abandoning Billy Graham’s example of non-partisanship by tying his ministry so tightly to Trump.
“But,” Prothero continued in an interview for this article, “they signal what could be growing disquiet about the hijacking of what was once a clearly Christian (and evangelistic) purpose for what is raw Republican politics.”
Suddenly, in the wake of Trump’s re-election defeat, it appears possible – perhaps probable – that this “disquiet” will force a reckoning within the evangelical leadership. It comes at a time when evangelicalism is at an existential inflection point weakened by declining membership and threatened by a younger generation that is indifferent – if not hostile – to it, according to numerous surveys and the anti-Trump protests of high-profile dissidents.
A former right-wing media creator on how a ‘different reality’ became so prominent.
Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood. Logic doesn’t matter. Fact-checking doesn’t matter. What matters is if I can use this information to show that liberals are evil. Many of them are not interested in reporting the world as it is, but rather to shape the world like they want it to be.
Opinion
Trump's election support from evangelicals shows we're the biggest obstacle to racial justice
As we look to the future in the wake of the presidential election, the prospects for healing the soul of the nation hinge on understanding the cultural forces that will survive President Donald Trump's exodus from the White House. One of the most daunting problems we face as a nation is the legacy of systemic racism, a problem exacerbated by a president who has denied its existence and fanned the flames of racial animus.
As we look to the future in the wake of the presidential election, the prospects for healing the soul of the nation hinge on understanding the cultural forces that will survive President Donald Trump's exodus from the White House. One of the most daunting problems we face as a nation is the legacy of systemic racism, a problem exacerbated by a president who has denied its existence and fanned the flames of racial animus.
The Cultural Consequences of Very, Very Republican Christianity
In the aftermath of the presidential election, one thing is unclear about the Evangelical vote, and two things are quite clear. Here’s what’s hazy: Did Joe Biden win the presidency in part because there was just barely enough slippage in the white Evangelical vote to make a difference in key counties in key states?
Research
Why the Partisan Divide? The U.S. Is Becoming More Secular—and More Religious
The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanship—it involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nation—nor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the country’s cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.
According to our recent survey report sponsored by the Wheatley Institution, a non-partisan research center at Brigham Young University, slightly less than one third of the U.S. population is deeply religious, frequently attending church services or engaging in other religious activities in their homes. Another third is fully secular, never participating in any sort of religious practice, whether it’s prayer, reading holy writ, or attending services. Meanwhile, a final third of Americans are nominally religious—attending services infrequently or engaging in other practices with varying levels of devotion.
Study: Multiracial churches growing, but racial unity may be elusive
According to the study, which will be published next month in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the number of multiracial congregations across the U.S. grew to 16% in 2019, up from 6% in 1998. Multiracial congregations were defined as those in which no one racial or ethnic group constituted more than 80 percent of the congregation’s participants.
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The authors of the study, however, issued an important caveat: Diversity is a one-way street. Blacks are joining predominantly white congregations. Few whites join predominantly Black churches.
Religious Group Voting and the 2020 Election
Religion, by my estimation, was a more prominent issue in the runup to the 2020 election than in other recent presidential campaigns. This reflects two factors. First, President Donald Trump over the past four years has made a concerted effort to promote policies and programs designed specifically to increase support among White evangelical Christians. Second, Joe Biden is only the fourth Catholic major-party nominee in U.S. history (along with Al Smith in 1928, John F. Kennedy in 1960 and John Kerry in 2004), and Biden made his faith a significant part of his presidential campaign.
Did either of these factors make a difference in the election outcome? The answer to that question is complex. But -- at this stage in our understanding of the dynamics of the 2020 election -- I would say that if Trump's or Biden's campaign shifted the vote of these two core religious groups, the impact was fairly minimal and/or difficult to document.
Events
Atheist Voter: Post-Election Report, American Atheists, Nov 18, 2020 08:00 PM
The 2020 election cycle saw an increased engagement of atheist, agnostic and nonreligious voters as their numbers grew to make them the largest religious voting bloc. Join our panel of experts to discuss the preliminary data on the voting behavior of nonreligious voters, the electoral gains of non-theist candidates, and the opportunity American Atheists has to work with the incoming Biden-Harris administration to reverse many of the policies harmful to the separation of religion and government.