Evangelical Christian Worries

Saturday, April 6, 2019

 Conservatives and Evangelical Christians constitute the core of public support for President Trump. Many of them have felt besieged and under direct attack for decades. In retrospect, it may have been the case that America's changing social and legal landscape was simply too much for these groups to tolerate. The backlash gave us Trump and the rise of anti-democratic authoritarianism.

The Washington Post writes:
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals became anxious about perceived threats to white Christian culture in America. In 1962 and 1963, the Supreme Court removed prayer and mandatory Bible reading from public schools. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 increased diversity in the country by opening it to large numbers of non-western immigrants, who brought their diverse religious beliefs with them.

In 1971, the Supreme Court, in Green v. Connolly, stripped the tax-exempt status from institutions that discriminated in their admissions policies based on race. This affected a host of Southern Christian schools and academies, many of which saw the decision in terms of “big government” threatening their religious liberty — the liberty to discriminate based upon their reading of the Bible.

And, of course, in 1973 the Court supported a women’s right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade.

Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister from Lynchburg, Va., formed the Moral Majority to “train, mobilize, and electrify the Religious Right” in preparation to fight a “holy war” for the moral soul of America. Falwell’s organization played a major role in electing Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and shaped a vision for white conservative evangelical political activity that remains strong today.

Today, the Christian right remains focused on the Supreme Court, which many evangelicals see as the chief impediment to their agenda on issues ranging from school prayer to LGBTQ rights to abortion. Their political playbook requires evangelicals to elect an attentive president who, in turn, will appoint socially conservative federal judges. Once these judges are in place, evangelicals believe they will be better positioned to win the battles over these key issues; saving the nation would avoid divine punishment for its sins.

That idea has remained so potent over the decades because it is embedded in evangelical churches. Pastors use their pulpits to speak about these cultural issues. Adult education classes in churches often focus on such topics. Members of small-group Bible studies discuss them. Some church leaders consistently stoke fear in their congregations by pointing to threats to religious liberty, both real and imagined."

Asymmetric war: With a mindset driven by fear and grounded in infallible religious moral rectitude, one can see a little about why there is little or no interest in compromise. To the Evangelical mindset, compromise makes no sense. But that righteous fervor blinds Evangelicals to another truth: Each of their counterattacks, say by overturning Roe v. Wade, often or always constitutes a much more aggressive attack on people who disagree. In the case of abortion, Roe forces no woman to get an abortion against her will. On the other hand, Evangelicals are eager to force their religious belief on women by blocking access to abortion for women who want one. That is highly intrusive."

 The threats here are not symmetrical. Evangelicals simply cannot see the asymmetry, maybe because they know they cannot be wrong. At present, the state is far more threatened by the church than the other way around.

B&B orig: 4/5/19