samsnewsletter.doc is a collection of thoughts about feelings and feelings about thoughts. The newsletter is free, but I’d be honored if you shared it with a friend or two. Enjoy!
Hi! One of the things I’m hoping to do after a few newsletters is compile some sort of monthly or bi-monthly Q&A newsletter. A goal of mine in this newsletter is to introduce new ideas and thinkers that I encounter in my graduate school studies to my audience. Of course, in a relatively short space, I’m not able to always go into as much detail about them or their thoughts as I’d like to. So if you have a question about a thinker or a thought I offer, feel free to respond to this email with a question and I might add it to a monthly Q&A newsletter. Without further ado, here’s this week’s newsletters:
I’ve talked to countless people my age over the past five or six years who have gone through intense crises of faith as they’ve watched their evangelical parents and elders support and defend Donald Trump as a justifiable person to serve as president. I had my own experience with this while at Liberty University. I heard people I respected give what seemed to be bizarre excuses for Trump and his lifestyle, which led me to my own significant crisis of faith in which I left the church and gave up on God for a good long while. I don’t think I need to (nor do I want to) rehearse the shock many young Christians had when they heard that 81% of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2016. Suffice it to say that the 2016 election felt like a betrayal by these parents and elders. Not only a betrayal against me but of God and of the things they raised me to believe. It felt like these people had changed. But over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that this shock did not come because white evangelical parents and elders had changed significantly to become apologists for Trump. Rather, this shock that many young people felt was a realization of who these parents and elders already were.
As I’ve come to terms with the reality that the white evangelical church has incredibly deep issues that led them to support Trump so strongly, I’ve begun to ask myself what we missed as the children and students of these leaders. How were we so blindsided by this support? What caused such a gap between what we thought we were being taught and what the reality of our communities were? In many ways, these are the questions that have led me to graduate school. I’ve learned quite a bit so far, but I’m not nearly done asking these questions, and these questions have expanded my view to ask even more questions. But I do think I have a better idea now of why me and so many others were blindsided, and I want to elaborate on that for a bit today.
In trying to explain this feeling of betrayal, I spent years rehearsing evangelical theology attempting to understand how things got so out of hand. To be honest, I didn’t get very far with this approach. There are definitely some very concerning theological positions in evangelicalism, but there are two things that didn’t seem to fully support the idea that evangelical theology naturally led to far right politics. First, many of the theological positions were extremely conservative, but none of them seemed to support Trump’s character and lifestyle. In fact, the more conservative theological positions seemed like they would be even more uncomfortable with Trump. This is why my shock was at its greatest when the Access Hollywood tape came out and evangelical men came in swarms to throw themselves under the bus for Trump’s sake by saying, “Well I’m sure I’ve said worse in my life. It’s just locker room talk.” This justification was far from the theology I had been taught from evangelicals as a child. I was scared to even kiss a girl until I was out of high school, let alone ever think about doing the things Donald Trump had done while talking about them in such a grotesque manner.
The second reason theology didn’t seem to be the primary motivator for Trump’s support from white evangelicals was that many evangelical theological positions are underdeveloped. I don’t mean to say that all scholars of evangelicalism do underdeveloped work, but rather that most lay evangelicals don’t seem to be paying attention to evangelical scholars. In her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristen Kobes Du Mez states, “In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith.” Instead, evangelicalism today can be defined more by what kind of content people consume, how they celebrate their holidays, and which politicians they vote for. Du Mez goes on to say, “Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture.” Evangelical culture, then, has lost a grip on a firm theology and instead can now be characterized by many things outside of theology. Instead, they choose popular Christian influencers on social media and authors of the booming genre of “Christian Living” as their theological guides (see Daniel Vaca’s book Evangelicals Incorporated for a more thorough discussion on the industry of evangelical books). To me, it seems like an extremely difficult argument to make that most of the 81% of white evangelicals who supported Trump were rigorously engaged with a theological justification for why Trump was the right choice for president.
Ultimately, despite theology being purportedly central to the lives of many white evangelical Christians, I don’t think it’s the primary reason for their wide reaching support of Trump. What is odd, of course, is how evangelical culture spends so much time talking about theology and creating content around it. If you grow up in evangelical culture, you’re fed daily devotionals, weekly podcasts, and multi-weekly church services filled with theological concepts and ideas. Therefore, it seems pretty natural to look at what people talk about the most to understand their reasoning for making a decision like supporting a certain political candidate with such vigor. So I spent years reading theology and listening to evangelical leaders trying to make sense of why I felt so blindsided by Trump’s success. But then I realized that maybe I was looking in the wrong places for the evidence. So I began thinking outside of theology, and the dots started connecting for me.
Over the past year or so, I’ve been spending significantly more time learning about theories of social thought as well as researching the social history of evangelicalism. The history is long, complex, and often debated. Any small form piece I write will fall sorely short of properly telling the history of evangelicalism. Instead, I want to simply point today toward how thinking about history and social thought has changed the way I understand white evangelicalism and what happened in 2016.
One of the great lessons I’ve learned in my research is how to think about the ways certain ideologies and dispositions within religious communities emerge. For instance, American evangelicalism has a distinct patriarchal culture in its familial and institutional makeup. Many evangelicals deeply adhere to the belief that the man is the head of the household and chief decision maker in the family. This version of kinship structure— what many now refer to as the “traditional family”— became deeply entrenched in white evangelical culture in the early 1900s. Christians had deemed Victorian Christianity (the dominate form in the 1800s) as effeminate and attributed decreasing church numbers to the lack of true masculinity from church leadership. The so called feminization of Christianity was seen as a threat to the faith. This sense of threat was only exacerbated by the ensuring world wars, which nationalized the feeling of threat and the need for security. The wars demanded that the men join in the fight or risk losing their families, their property, and their way of life. Christianity was posed as the faith which the nation was founded on as well as the faith which could save the country from the international threats in war. Du Mez states, “With Billy Graham at the vanguard, evangelicals believed that they had a special role in keeping America Christian, American families strong, and the nation secure. The assertion of masculine power would accomplish all these goals.” The message of a national crisis of safety melded perfectly with the notion that men are the stronger gender and therefore should be in charge of the safety and security of their families.
Of course, the 1960s ushered in a revolutionary era of sexual freedom, feminism, and the Civil Rights movement, which served as fuel to the white evangelical notion that their way of life was being threatened from all sides. White evangelicals, along with conservative politicians, blamed the rise of communism as the reason for these revolutionary ideas, positioning these movements as their enemies which needed thwarting. Through the decades, this form of messaging persisted as different threats arose. Evangelicals saw AIDS as the result of the threat of the LGBTQ+ community, 9/11 as the result of the rising religious diversity within the country, and any stagnancy in the birth rate as the result of abortion being legal in the US. These culture wars continued all the way up until Trump, who positioned himself as the king of culture wars. He was ready to fight every cultural battle for white men, meaning his messaging was particularly appealing to white evangelicals.
This is but one rough example of how thinking about evangelicalism’s interaction with things outside of theology can help illuminate why evangelicals act in certain kinds of ways. And this isn’t just the case for evangelicals, of course. You can apply these methods with all sorts of other communities. To some of you, this line of history might be extremely familiar or even common sense. But I still think it’s worth rehearsing. I had no way of connecting these dots when I was younger. I was never taught to think like this mainly because so much of my education was spent applying a theological lens to every area of my studies.
As I’ve discovered the ways in which investigating social thought and history have helped me make sense of my past experiences, I have also changed the way I approach my own religious practice and commitment. I still consider myself to be a Christian, and I’m committed to the work of encouraging my religious community to be better and live up to its goal to be a positive force in the world. As it relates to white evangelicals, and frankly most white Christians in America, I believe a crucial first step to making their communities better is to commit to educating themselves. Oftentimes in religious communities this looks like educating themselves more and more in their religion’s theology. However, I think American Christians need the opposite. Leave theology behind for a bit. Stop buying every new Christian Living book that hits the market. Trade them in for a history book or social theory text.
From my estimation, Christian theology in America is almost inextricably intertwined with distinctly American notions of citizenship and subjectivity. If there is any hope for Christianity in America it will not be through further ingraining these notions by recreating theology with different words while still maintaining these toxic ideals. Instead, American Christianity must reckon with the systems that formed and shaped our theology. And hint, these systems are not primarily God or the Bible, they are American exceptionalism, settler colonialism, and racism. Until we understand these systems and how they function, the Christian religion practiced by white people in America will be nothing but another tool for Donald Trump or anyone else to gain political power with. As these leaders continue to grasp onto the Christian faith as a footstool for power, we will continue to betray younger generations the way I and so many others were betrayed by our parents’ generation. We were given a theology of love, compassion, and justice. But when theology is secondary to other commitments, these ideals disintegrate to make room for deeper, more sinister commitments.
Maybe you aren’t a Christian and have no commitment to making Christianity better. That is completely understandable, but the burden still falls on your shoulders to educate yourself as well. If you’re American and frustrated because Trump ever had a platform at all, it is crucial that you do your research as well. I’ve talked to too many people who hate evangelicals for their support of Trump but are not equipped with the knowledge of what characterizes evangelicals and what animates them. There are examples upon examples everywhere in our culture of people angrily shouting their opinions without the proper amount of research behind them. To be clear, I don’t think this is an even issue on both sides. The Right continually spews ideas that have no grounding at all. But I do think there is a general, cultural lack of doing the research.
It’s starting to make sense to me why I felt so betrayed in 2016. I had simultaneously been taught to think so much about theology while the leaders around me who taught this theology were paying almost no heed to it. This is, of course, an incredibly dishonest and terrible way to lead. And if we’re going to have any hope of avoiding this kind of leadership in the future, we’re going to have to do our research. If you want to change the world, if you care about making a difference around you, you have to do your research.
Source: Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, New York: Liveright, 2020.
The Weekly Syllabus
Reach Out / Olympus by Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine. These are the perfect summertime sadness vibes, which is basically my constant state right now.
Home by Marilynne Robinson. I’ve been very slowly making my way through Robinson’s Gilead series and this book hit me like a train. If you’re looking for a really peaceful but profound novel, I highly recommend this one.
Joji. Kiefer sent me this video and I can’t stop thinking about how perfect it is. The colors, the angles, the fur suit. All of it.
American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman). I saw this painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and I just really love it.
“Like Father” by Jericho Brown. Listening to the recording while you read along. And then read everything else by Jericho Brown.