This 18 minute interview by NPR's Michele Martin with American Christianity historian Kristin Du Mez (do may) discusses the Evangelical movement, its origins and one aspect of its moral mindset. Du Mez argues that the American Christian right is undermining democracy and fracturing the country.
One of the points that Du Mez asserts is that the modern White Evangelical way of thinking is so innate and natural that they sincerely believe that their Church and Evangelism is not political. To them, it's just ordinary day to day life. They fully engulfed by this religious culture and society. In their prayers they thank God for anointing Brett Kavanaugh to be on the Supreme Court and they vilify big government, but they see no politics in any of that. Instead, they see these things as merely being Christian. They have lost sight of most or all differences between politics and religion. In their minds, religion has swallowed politics.
Regarding Evangelical values, Du Mez asserts that most people did not understand them. Support for the ex-president was not a betrayal of those values. Instead, he was the embodiment of them. One needs to puts White patriarchal authority at the center of the Evangelical morality, to see that the ex-president embodied their moral beliefs and values. The vulgarity, disrespect, mendacity, infidelity, bigotry and so on were all beside the point. The core value is a strong, even ruthless White man capable of defending Christianity, the nation, the women and the children. She argues that is what many Evangelicals, men and women, saw and liked about him.
Along with white unease over the rise in minority populations and various social changes, White patriarchal moral authority is another factor in what Christian nationalism and the Republican Party are today.
Du Mez notes that prominent Evangelicals in leadership positions who opposed the ex-president as being to radical or otherwise not acceptable or Christian turned out to be wrong. Now they have either lost their power in a populist American Evangelical Christianity by being pushed out or by leaving after realizing that their leadership position has simply vanished in the face of a a populist insurgency and the White patriarchal moral authority the ex-president represents in the insurgents' minds.
The purity/sanctity moral frame[1]: Wife beating, rape and uncontrolled lust --
It's the woman's fault, men just can't help it
In a fascinating segment beginning at ~10 minutes in the interview, Du Mez describes why Evangelical women do not find the ex-president's marital infidelities or sexual vulgarities strongly offensive or objectionable. Evangelism teaches that men are aggressively sexual, while women are not. Because of that, it is the woman's duty to defend purity. When men do bad things related to sex, the woman has tempted the man or has failed him sexually. That is the woman's fault. For example when a man has sex with his young daughter, it is the wife's fault for not properly satisfying her man's sex urges. According to Du Mez, this strain of belief dates back to Evangelical teachings from the 1960s and 1970s. It is a central theme in Evangelical moral belief today.
If what Du Mez argues is mostly true, that would help explain some or most of why supposedly moral Evangelical women accept and support people like T****. That is a manifestation of their moral purity belief that the woman is responsible for taming men's uncontrollable sex urges. That may seem counter intuitive, but it does make moral sense to me. I think I get it.
Christian nationalists are happy campers today: They got what they wanted, Roe overturned: The sacred ends justified the dirty means
Finally, the interview ends with a segment on how Evangelicals see the situation today. They are overjoyed at the impending reversal of Roe v. Wade. They also see that, unpleasant as the means may have been, the sacred ends morally justified what the ex-president and the Republican Party have done.
These people are scary. They will accept the fall and loss of democracy, the secular rule of law and civil liberties if those things are demagogued into truth as the will of God. These anti-democratic impulses to obey God are deeply embedded in Evangelical minds. Contrary facts and reasoning are not persuasive or even relevant. One just cannot question God's will. God is first. Democracy and all the rest is arguably not even a close second.
Footnote:
1. Purity is one of the moral values hypothesized to be important in Moral Foundations Theory. MFT was mentioned here a couple weeks ago. That post discussed what happens when the loyalty moral value clashes with the honesty moral value. Propagandists and demagogues intentionally create artificial moral conflicts to divide, distract, foment distrust and subjugate the masses.
The core moral values hypothesized in Moral Foundations Theory are Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. The purity that Du Mez mentions refers to the sanctity/degradation moral.
No comments:
Post a Comment