Protestants & Politics 12/1/20
SCOTUS and church shutdown. SBC and CRT. Evangelicals and Trump. Christian nationalism and COVID. Evangelical environmentalists. Religiosity and trust. Covering religion. Biden, religion and politics.
Supreme Court
Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown Order
The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus.
The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.
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In an unsigned opinion, the majority said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.
Reactions:
Don’t Read Too Much Into Supreme Court Religion Ruling: A new majority this week showed elevated concern for the rights of believers but not necessarily a devotion to other conservative principles.
Notwithstanding the public reaction, the decision is hardly pathbreaking, and it doesn’t signal much at all. As a technical matter, it’s close to a yawner. If it is to be taken a signal, it should be of something more specific: the existence of a majority that will be highly protective of the rights of religious believers.
SCOTUS Gets It Right on Religious Liberty: Church IS Essential
First, I don’t think this decision is as momentous as commentators are suggesting. It is fairly fact-specific injunctive relief, and the nature and scope of pandemic orders vary greatly around the country. It’s hard to generalize much from this decision, and I’m concerned that public messaging about it will fuel a broader culture wars narrative from religious leaders like John MacArthur who insist “there is no pandemic” and continue to hold services for 7,000 unmasked people. An injunction against a 25-person cap is not a green light to return to regular worship. Given the current state of the pandemic, it’s not even a yellow light.
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That said, I think the Court’s decision is correct and offers some important observations. One of the most important is that these shutdown orders cause irreparable harm because they restrict First Amendment freedoms—and that virtual worship is not a constitutionally sufficient alternative. In other words, worship is absolutely an “essential activity” and to say otherwise is constitutionally incorrect and politically unwise. The New York City order and others like it should not be classifying worship as non-essential. Of course worship is essential.
SBC & CRT
Seminary presidents reaffirm BFM, declare CRT incompatible
In recognition of the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the Council of Seminary Presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention has reaffirmed “with eagerness” the BFM’s status “as the doctrinal statement that unites and defines Southern Baptist cooperation and establishes the confessional unity of our Convention.”
In a statement adopted in the council’s annual session, the seminary presidents assert that as “confessional institutions,” the SBC’s six seminaries stand “together in this classic statement of biblical truth.” Additionally, the statement declares that while condemning “racism in any form,” the seminaries agree that “affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.”
Opinion
Evangelical Christians once were saved. After Trump, they’re lost.
For much of the last four years, Donald Trump has put this rhetoric at the center of his message. Trump will be remembered as a president who did more than capture white evangelical Christians’ votes: He in many ways became the face of white evangelicalism.
The irony is that, unintentionally, Trump’s morality — or more accurately, his lack thereof — has forced many white evangelicals into a long overdue reckoning with their culture’s indifference to systemic racism and its unholy alliance with partisan politics. We once were saved. Now we were lost.
Research
Prejudice and pandemic in the promised land: how white Christian nationalism shapes Americans’ racist and xenophobic views of COVID-19
During the COVID-19 crisis in March/April of 2020, far-right American political leaders and pundits proffered xenophobic explanations for the pandemic while ignoring that poorer, Black Americans and prison populations were being disproportionately infected. We propose such xenophobic and racist evaluations of COVID-19 drew from and appealed to a pervasive and politically strategic ethnoreligious ideology—white Christian nationalism. Panel data fielded before and during the COVID-19 crisis show that Christian nationalism was invariably the strongest predictor that Americans felt it was not racist to call COVID-19 “the Chinese virus”, blamed minorities for their own disproportionate infection rate, favoured immigration restrictions to solve the pandemic, and minimized or justified the infections of prison inmates. Racial identity also moderated Christian nationalism’s effect such that it was typically a more powerful influence among whites compared to Blacks. Findings affirm that racist and xenophobic views promulgated during the COVID-19 crisis were undergirded by white Christian nationalism.
Evangelical Environmentalists? Evidence from Brazil
While scholarship on the relationship between religions and environmental attitudes has been inconclusive, evangelical Protestants present an exception: they consistently report less environmental concern than other groups. However, prior studies have largely been conducted in the United States. Following a recent “contextual” turn, we revisit the assumption that universal cognitive and doctrinal factors drive the previously documented negative association between evangelicalism and environmental concern. Leveraging qualitative fieldwork, nationally representative surveys, and a survey experiment from Brazil, we find that evangelical and Pentecostal affiliation and church attendance are not associated with reduced environmental concern; that members of these groups simultaneously embrace otherworldly beliefs and advocate for this‐worldly solutions to environmental problems; and that being primed to consider divine intervention increased support for environmental protection. Even in a tradition emphasizing orthodoxy, doctrine appears not to exert a universal influence, a finding we suggest results from different issue frames in the United States and Brazil.
Religiosity and Trust: Evidence from the United States
Background
Trust is one of the key driving forces behind human action and an important factor in shaping human interaction. Trust can improve economic growth, political and civic involvement, democratic stability, and subjective well-being. Yet, trust has been in decline for the last 60 years in the U.S.
Purpose
This article tests the effect of several indicators of religiosity, including an index for both social and individual religiosity, on trust. Common religious doctrine instructs followers to place their trust solely in God, and can therefore be interpreted as a determinant of generalized trust. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to find out whether religious people are more likely to be distrustful of others and whether they are more likely to be misanthropic.
Methods
We use the US General Social Survey (GSS, 1972–2018, n>10k), a large, recurring, and nationally-representative sample of U.S. adults. Using the GSS, we investigate the relationship between religiosity and trust (interpersonal and generalized) in a well-controlled model using OLS regressions. We examine both the effects of social religiosity (e.g. church attendance, membership at religious organization), and individual religiosity (e.g. belief in God, feeling of closeness to God, prayer), on trust and on misanthropy. Several additional robustness tests were conducted.
Results
The findings demonstrate that while social religiosity or belonging (services attendance, church membership) predicts more trust, individual religiosity or believing (prayer, closeness and belief in God) predicts lower trust. Likewise, social religiosity lowers misanthropy, while individual religiosity promotes it. Furthermore, we show that it is important to consider individual and social religiosity simultaneously because they correlate and have opposite effects–this is an intriguing and not entirely obvious finding as most people would expect that religiosity in general, has a positive effect on trust.
Conclusions and Implications
Our results indicate that religiosity is a substantial determinant of social trust and of misanthropy. The divergent results based on whether religiosity is social or individual in character is a new conceptual approach towards religiosity not previously undertaken in the literature. Ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation theory explains our findings—connecting with God disrupts connection with humans.
Podcast
Carl Cannon and Ryan Burge: On Covering Religion
Events
Moving Forward with Faith - Religion and Politics in a Biden Presidency
Join us for a Zoom panel discussion with leaders of faith who will share their action plans for the next four years, hosted by The Associated Press, Religion News Service and The Conversation. Open to the public.
Register for the 4 p.m. EST, Thursday, Dec. 3 event.
Hosted by Peter Smith, former president of Religion News Association and religion reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Panelists include:
• Dilshad D. Ali, the former editor-in-chief of Altmuslim, is an editor at Haute Hijab, and a member of Religion News Service’s journalism advisory board.
• Dr. Steven P. Millies, an associate professor of public theology and the director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union.
• Dr. Russell Moore, theologian and president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
• Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, CEO and co-founder of Skinner Leadership Institute and co-convener of the National African American Clergy Network.