Counting the Right Votes
White Christian nationalism and the fight for control of America.
This morning, memeorandum highlights a piece from Salon‘s Chauncey DeVega titled “‘Apocalypticism’: Polling expert reveals the root of ‘panic among conservative White Christians.'” While I started to address it as part of my earlier post on Trump’s frustratingly strong polling, as it certainly explains part of his appeal, it’s complicated enough to deserve separate treatment.
The setup:
This year’s American Values Survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) with the Brookings Institution, shows that the American people are very conflicted and increasingly do not possess a shared set of beliefs or values across a wide range of political issues. Key findings include a growingly disproportionate amount of support for political violence, a willingness to ignore the rule of law to win political power, and a belief in untrue conspiracy theories amongst Republicans as compared to Democrats. Antidemocratic beliefs are even more acute, the survey found, among white evangelical Protestants who yearn for a return to “traditional American values” in a country they believe “is moving in the wrong direction.”
How can the American people and their leaders solve the many problems facing the country if they cannot even agree on what they are – or on basic facts and the nature of reality and the truth more generally?
I asked Robert P. Jones, founder and president of PRRI, to help make sense of the survey results that show a divided American public, the enduring power and growing dangers of Trumpism and the role of White Christian nationalism in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s swift ascendence. Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.”
The interview is worth a read in full, but I’ll highlight a few points:
The American people feel that the stakes are high and there is deep worry about the future of the country and its democracy. Three-quarters of Americans believe that the future of democracy is at stake in the 2024 presidential election. It’s one of the few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on, 84% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans. Now, of course, they mean very different things in terms of their concerns about “democracy.” There is also great pessimism about the country. More Americans than not say that America’s best days are now behind us, which is overwhelmingly coming from Republicans. There is widespread economic anxiety. But the deeper disagreement, coupled with deep divides about the country’s identity. Who are we? Who is the country for? Who counts as a “real American”? These deeper disagreements, rather than policy differences, are driving our partisan divisions.
[…]
Among those who believe that America was intended by God to be a promised land for European Christians, nearly four in ten believe they may have to resort to violence to save the country.
[…]
There is a real belief in Apocalypticism among conservative white Christians, specifically, and white conservatives and the right, more broadly. That is very much tied to changing demographics: we are no longer a majority white Christian country, and we were just 20 years ago. That has set off a visceral reaction, and a kind of panic among conservative White Christians in particular. As I document in The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, most white evangelicals sincerely believe that God designated America to be a promised land for white European Christians. That is not a joke to them. If a person sincerely believes such a thing and the country is changing and is not in agreement with that vision, it opens the door to political extremism and violence to secure that outcome. Many conservative White Christians truly believe that they have a divine mandate and entitlement to the country.
[…]
PRRI’s American Values Survey asked respondents to say which of 20 issues are the most important. The single shared concerns among Democrats and Republicans were about the rising costs of everyday expenses and housing. Among Democrats, there was a very broad range of additional critical concerns. Among Republicans, there were only four. Republicans believe that crime, immigration, what children are learning in public schools, and human trafficking are the most critical issues facing the country. All of these Republican concerns center around a racially tinged sense of fear about a loss of power in an increasingly diverse and changing country.
[…]
It’s also worth remembering that it wasn’t just white evangelicals who strongly supported Trump in the last two elections. Trump was supported by mainline white Protestants, the non-evangelicals. They voted six in 10 for Trump in both elections. White Catholics did too by the same percentage. While these white Christian nationalist tendencies are more pronounced among white evangelicals, this is more broadly a white Christian problem. These views sound extreme and crazy for people who are not of that world. But for members of this white conservative Christian community, they really believe it.
I think the deepest vein that they’re mining is a belief and feeling that America was supposed to belong to European Christians, and they’re desperately afraid that it no longer does. As they understand it, they were given the responsibility by God to create this Christian country, and it’s slipping away from them. That core belief explains so much of the extremism and the proclivity toward violence on the political right today.
While I think Jones’ analysis of the polling data is right, I see “White Christian nationalism” somewhat more benignly than he does. While there is clearly some significant overlap, I don’t see it as synonymous with White supremacy, racism, and antisemitism. Rather, it’s a more vague sense that the United States was founded with a set of values and political and social culture that should remain at the core of what the country is.
Further, I would push back at least somewhat on this:
For many of these leaders, be it Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, or Mike Johnson, when they use the word “Christian”, it is racially coded. When they say “Bible-believing Christians” they are not talking about Black folks and the AME Church. They’re not talking about Latino Catholics. They are specifically talking about white evangelical Protestant Christians.
While I’ve been aware of Perkins much longer than I have of Johnson, I don’t know either’s mind well enough to know the degree to which this is true. I do suspect that Jones is right at least in the narrowest sense: when they say those words, they have in mind White Protestants. But, as Jones himself acknowledges, their messaging resonates with those in mainline churches, not just Evangelicals. Indeed, I would go further and argue that parts of it, at least, seem to in fact be resonating with Black AME adherents and Hispanic Catholics—particularly the men.
The notion that Trump is doing so well because he’s more openly bigoted than recent Republican presidential nominees, essentially running the Southern Strategy on steroids and saying the quiet part of loud, is comforting because it shows that his supporters are bad people. But it’s a weak explanation for the votes of 46-47% of a country that’s radically more liberal on race, gender, and sexuality than it was in 1968, 1988, or 2012.
At the same time, there clearly seems to be a greater-than-normal yearning to return to some imagined golden age. Again, I think it’s too easy to attribute this mostly to the fact that White men are now in a less powerful position vis-a-vis women and racial minorities than they used to be—although, again, that’s clearly part of it.
But it’s much broader. The sense that rural America is the real America, populated by the “salt of the earth,” has been with us for as long as I can remember. Those of us of a certain age remember the Pace Picante sauce ads of yesteryear with the punchline “New York City?!”*
I remember my bemusement in Republicans defending Trump’s 2016 win, dismissing Hillary Clinton’s 3 million vote surplus as coming entirely from California. In one sense, it was true: her margin in that state was 4.3 million votes, so Trump actually got more votes nationwide if we exclude California. On the other hand: why the hell would you exclude far and away the most populous state in the country?
And, no, I don’t think it’s mostly about California’s racial demographics. (Whites comprise 71% of the population, but that drops to 35% if you exclude those of Hispanic origin.) Rather, it’s viewed by many in Trump country as some caricature of hippy culture and thus not authentically American. Thus, despite being the home of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and, indeed, a reliably Republican state in my memory.
Jones hits on a longstanding theme here:
If you listen carefully to Johnson and others on the right, they use the word “republic” and not “democracy.” That is not just something pedantic. They believe in the rule of the virtuous, not in a “we the people” democracy where everyone is equally represented. What they’re actually committed to is a particular outcome where America’s laws and government and society correspond to God’s laws as they see it. That’s the only legitimate outcome for Johnson and other white Christian nationalists. Everything else is illegitimate. They will use the language of democracy and voting if it achieves their ends and goals, but Johnson and the other white Christian nationalists and many other conservatives at present are not committed to those principles and values if they come out on the losing side of a democratic election.
I don’t think evangelical Christians are unique in being more concerned about outcomes than process. But it has been apparent going back to at least the 1992 election—and there’s an argument to be made for 1972—that the other side winning wasn’t just a catastrophe but simply illegitimate. Nixon cronies like G. Gordon Liddy saw the McGovernites as enemies of the country, justifying extreme measures to safeguard the Republic. We didn’t see anything like Watergate in 1992 but there was no doubt that huge swaths of the GOP—and particularly the Falwell wing—saw him as morally unfit and spent his entire presidency trying to find scandals to remove him from office.
It should not surprise us that, as White Christians become and ever-shrinking part of the population, some of them have adopted a bunker mentality. The fact that their view of the world has been increasingly manipulated within an information bubble (Limbaugh-Fox News-Newsmax-Twitter-Facebook) that stokes fears of a great replacement surely contributes to that.
_______________
*Somewhat tangentially, I wonder if the Yellowstone phenomenon isn’t partly a reflection of this impulse. While I have mixed feelings about the show, there’s something viscerally appealing about strong, violent men protecting their family and property. The Western and its variants seem to rise and fall and I suspect the rises come in times when Americans feel less good about the current state of affairs.
I defy any of these whackjobs to point out where any of this stuff is in the Bible – you know, the book these “Christians” claim guides their actions or as Johnson put it, their world view. These people have projected their preferences onto a perversion of their faith because then they can just say it’s God’s will and leave it there. When they look in the bathroom mirror, they see God.
Chip Roy is my congressman. I follow his Facebook feed. He has some 56K followers from around the country (far more than from his district). If you want to really hear what the White Christian Nationalists say, just go to the commentary from his posts. Out and out authoritarian.
I would encourage readers to look at the full survey results. There are some eye-opening numbers in there.
This is likely correct, but “We want to keep the country out of the hands of others” IS racism (and sexism, and homophobia, and antisemitism). It’s super-frustrating that Christianists don’t understand this.
I had a great deal of direct contact with evangelical Christians back in the mid-90s when I was working in Republican politics. It was shocking how limited their worldview was (I remember being asked at what point (note: not “if”) I would give up my job when (again, not “if”) I got married; the individual asking was a woman who firmly believed that men should work and women should tend the home and have babies). Many of these people are the ones supporting Israel right now because they believe a big war there is necessary to bring about End Times.
As someone who had grown up abroad, it was shocking and appalling.
My sister is conservative. She’s a capable doctor, smart and aggressive. So, it is always a little shocking to me to see how deferential she is to men in authority. She downplays her capabilities in front of her husband. For instance, if a problem occurs, she always tries to get him to fix it first, even though she could fix it faster.
The latest example occurred during the Spanish women football scandal with the coach. Although she initially supported the women, she wound up supporting the coach because he had the right to do what he did.
The reality is most of these people explicitly believe David Barton’s false history claims that the U.S. was founded by Christians to be a de jure Christian country – they want Christianity to be the state religion with non-Christians in second class citizen status.
They mean people who believe in “Bible Inerrancy,” a belief that is required of Southern Baptists. That belief was the basis for the 1845 origination of that denomination.
This feature has been a major feature of evangelical Christianity, and Fundamentalism before it, for as long as I’ve been alive. That black evangelicals and fundamentalists took the same kind of separatist world view has been less noted but is something I’ve met up close and personal.
And for the record, no, these people aren’t getting this world view from reading the Bible. Most Christians I’ve met during my life, me included, will admit privately that they don’t read the Bible often enough. Then again, as a teenager, my pastor once called me for a meeting with him at his office to tell me that I was a dangerous individual because I was one of *those people* who believe that I can “just read the Bible and decide for myself what it means.”
@Jen:
Indeed! And on all counts. [sigh]
Andy is correct, lots of stuff in the details.
Frightening stuff, if you care about democracy.
Welp, I’ve been saying this since about 2016. Specifically that white Christians became a minority, and it has radically frightened them. I think there’s a fair dose of White Man’s Burden in there. This is a racist idea, even if it is also a compassionate one – or at least can be.
Meanwhile, having come up in a dissenting denomination, I had no sense at all from the pulpit that the laws of the land should reflect my denominations distinctive morals (it included no dancing and no playing cards. I, ahem, ignored these.) But it was clear even then that some folks wanted to make this moral stuff – with no victim – illegal. This has never stopped. It’s intensified by the fear of losing their grip, which gets fanned by grifters and authoritarians every day via the internet.
I feel this attitude needs to have a bit spotlight on it during this election cycle. Pieces like this will help.
We could have a fight on our hands, but I think it is @JimBrown32 who noted that the current crop of insurrectionists is too old to make a violent revolution work. So they are going to have to cheat.
What we have here in large part is sorting by IQ. Call it education, if that feels more small ‘d’ democratic, but it’s intelligence, which is related to but not coterminous with education. Smart people have moved away from religion, especially the more dogmatic religions. This leads to a downward spiral into bizarre conspiracy theories and fantasies of violence on the panicky Right, and obnoxious arrogance on the prematurely-triumphalist Left. It’s a version of Town vs. Gown. Reg’lar ‘Murricans, and insufferable college kids.
Personally, I don’t like either group, though only the Right is an actual threat to my kids’ future. The (perhaps fatal) mistake the Left has made is allowing our side to be defined by Insufferable College Kids (ICK?). Religious thugs vs. smug sophomores. (And here I am, a smug thug, alienated from both worlds.) The ICK’s are astoundingly bad at making friends and allies, and brilliant at annoying people. In a perfect world the Left would impose a gag order on anyone currently attending, or teaching, college, and let someone like Fetterman or Sherrod Brown be our public face.
@charontwo:
Actually this is probably true about the Pilgrims and Massachusetts Bay colonists, so Barton’s history is more “selective” than “false.” Alas, the Barton’s of the world come up short because The Founders [tm] seem to have remembered that Roger Williams, a Baptist*, was beaten and left for dead just outside of Salem, MA–for being a Baptist, IIRC–and decided that non-/dis-establishmentarianism was the way for the nation to go.
*Why beaten for being a Baptist? Alas (again) the Puritans (and Separatists, maybe a distinct subsect in those days) were Congregationalists. And not the warm, fuzzy, liberal Congregationalists we have these days, either. Perhaps they’ve learned something.
@just nutha: I was clearly someone who, in high school, thought I could read the bible and decide for myself what it means. Of course, I would seek other people’s input, adults, pastors, books, etc.
Thing is, if I found I had a different opinion than my pastor, I would generally keep it to myself, unless there was a forum for discussion. And when I did speak up, I was deferential in my presentation. I would say, “Well, I have a question…what about this?” instead of a more confrontational tone, “That’s not what the Bible means!” which would be more typical for a teenager.
So that’s probably why I didn’t get into hot water. Also, maybe my pastor at the time was not so authoritarian. He sure didn’t seem like it. He was more focused on counseling and teaching than on being a moral authority.
@Not the IT Dept.: The classic Onion headline, “Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be” also applies to the Bible.
@Jay L Gischer: Calvinists (in my case, Presbyterians, Alliance churchers, and Baptists) in the US, for all of the blather about being genuinely democratic, have a strong hierarchical authoritarian and usually paternalistic governance pattern. And I’ve probably never been as much of a “plays well other children”-type as you seem to be from your posts. That there would be conflict was a given.
ETA: And for the record, “I have a question…what about this?” WAS considered confrontational in my home church. But mostly, the pastor knew what I thought because I was one of the more active/involved kids in our youth group. Lower profile==less conflict.
First, eek. I could elaborate, but what’s the point?
Second, this “sense” is a well-crafted and publicized myth.
Third, while we are oversimplifying, I’d like to point out that one of our Founding Fathers — the writer of the Declaration of Independence no less — rewrote the Bible to remove the divinity of Christ. That’s a little factoid that sends some of those myth-believing people for a loop, and one that they can research for themselves by just going to “Duck Duck Go” or whatever and looking up the Jefferson Bible to attempt to prove that I am wrong. They struggle to fit it into their world, usually just deciding Jefferson was a freakish outlier.
I wish we had something similar for Washington.
@just nutha:
I take it from context that this was a Protestant pastor. Wasn’t that kind of what the whole Luther/Reformation thingy was about?
Well, yeah, as it originated with Thomas Jefferson, who put the yeoman farmer at the his idea of the center of America.
I did see an recent work that looked at the least advantageous areas for someone growing up there. They found, not inner city locations, but Appalachia, the old cotton belt of the lower South and the Texas Rio Grand area. They also looked at the most advantageous areas and rural counties in the Upper Midwest; Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin. So rural is a bit of a wash, but long brought over cultural practices did seem to differentiate.
@Andy: I’m curious about the 14% of Democrats who are QAnon believers.
“Yes, President Trump was fighting a Globalist Cabal of Pedophiles Harvesting Children AND HE MUST BE STOPPED!”
Polling data always frightens me.
@just nutha: My HS history talked about the Pilgrims coming to America for religious freedom. ‘Taint so. They came here to be the religious oppressors.
@gVOR10: The freedom to oppress others, rather than be oppressed.
If that was the case, I was a terrible Southern Baptist. And no one called me on it, even when I did 7th and 8th grade in a Christian school. There are “sects” that believe that, I expect, but when someone when that way, I rolled my eyes and moved on. I somehow doubt that Southern Baptists have gotten more fundamentalist since I went to church in the 1970s.
But remember, we are not suppose to paint every Muslim with the blood of the person beheaded by the Islamist. Why are you trying to find the extremes and declare it the norm for Christians.
@JKB:
I’ll admit I’m a bit baffled by this, as there is a lot of evidence out there that yes, Southern Baptists have become more fundamentalist (there’s literally a Wikipedia page dedicated to the rise in fundamentalism after 1979), and they are not alone in that. MOST religions in the US have become more conservative. As someone raised Catholic, the evidence is very clear–one of the items addressed by Vatican 2 was birth control, and a *majority* of commission members recommended dropping the prohibition on same. We all know how THAT worked out.
@JKB: The “Inerrancy Debate” was a big deal in the 7o’s. I remember it well. It had a front page on Christianity Today.
It might well have not come up in the pulpit at a particular church, since pastors often seek to avoid controversy.
I have found Baptists to be all over the map as far as the details of belief go, though. Not that it’s that unusual in human institutions.
It’s also useful to look at the numbers in terms of trends and how many people are in each category.
The TLDR version is that – as of 2020 at least – 7 in 10 Americans identified as Christian, 4 in ten as “white Christian,” a number roughly equally divided between evangelicals, mainline protestants, and Catholics. IOW, the white evangelical Christian component is about 14% of the country. About 25% of the country is some flavor of non-white Christian.
@Gustopher:
Yeah, that was one weird result of several. 14% is too big to be accounted for by the Lizardman’s constant.
@Michael Reynolds:
Unless you believe that there is some sort of genetic imperative to live in cities that is closely related to a genetic predisposition for smartness, we are talking education (in the broadest terms.)
Your antireligious thing is like JKB’s “trans people are a step to far for most LGB folks” — based on very little other than your gut feeling and a few cherry picked bits, and unsupported by data.
We’re also seeing an urban/rural divide growing stronger more than any kind of sorting. This is part of why I think that Democrats need a set of industrial policies to bolster small cities.
@JKB:
Historically, Bible Inerrancy was the basis for the Southern Baptists splitting, separating themselves from the other Baptists back in 1845. Too many abolitionists in the North, the point being slavery is in the Bible, so if the Bible is inerrant slavery must be OK.
It’s definitely a thing, mostly fed by the “anti-vax, here hold this crystal instead and do some nidra breathing” crowd.
Via NPR: She was a popular yoga guru. Then she embraced QAnon conspiracy theories
@JKB:
I don’t know if you were a terrible Southern Baptist, but it’s pretty clear that you were an inattentive one.
My grandfather was a Southern Baptist preacher. Two of my uncles were Southern Baptist preachers. My dad, a Southern Baptist preacher, met my mom when they were both students at a Southern Baptist seminary (though her degree was only a masters of religious education, since clearly she could not get a degree that would lead to her preaching or otherwise having authority over men). I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on what Southern Baptists believed in the 1970s.
Inerrancy has been preached from Southern Baptist pulpits pretty much as long as there have been Southern Baptist pulpits, though you are correct that at one time it was not required in order to be a member of the denomination. Very little was required back then–instead, Baptists prided themselves on following Roger Williams not just in his emphasis on the separation of church and state but also on the primacy of individual conscience over hierarchical dogma. In many Baptist churches, a profession of faith is all it took to become a Baptist in good standing.
The denomination famously went through a bitter civil war in the 70s and 80s. The fundamentalists won, and took full advantage of their win by purging “liberals” from seminaries, SBC Convention administrative positions, and their publishing wings. The church hierarchy became more conservative politically (for example, changing from accepting a limited pro-choice position to full-on opposition to any abortion at any time for any reason) and more fundamentalist doctrinally. I’m astounded that you lived through this from inside the denomination without being aware of it.
@charontwo: @JKB: “Biblical Inerrancy” means lots of things to lots of different audiences. Where I grew up, after the publication and subsequent popularity of the Revised Standard version of the Bible, our church added “to the extent that the text has been correctly translated” to our doctrinal statement’s position on inerrancy. Neo-orthodoxy, neo-evangelicalism, and other additional and more arcane varieties of theological interpretation exist that hold variations on inerrancy. Most would be dismissed as heretics and worse in many circles where separatism is strong. The sadder feature of the inerrancy position is that it allows a bunch of yahoos to assert (as the quip goes)
@Gustopher:
Of course there is. Smart people find resources and opportunities in cities, always have. It’s like the way lions find opportunities at water holes frequented by wildebeest.
My ‘anti-religious thing’ shows clearly in the poll we’re discussing. If you magically subtracted all White evangelicals from the population, we’d be Sweden. If you doubled the percentage of White evangelicals, we’d be Alabama. In 1950.
Exacerbating things from ‘our’ end is the fact that fewer and fewer people on the Left have any notion of life outside of the college bubble, and thus very little ability to communicate convincingly with the hoi polloi*. College people tend to condescend to working people, to pity them, to wonder why they don’t try to improve their lot by becoming college people themselves.
Look at our OTB commentariat. There are maybe five of us who’ve ever been working class, or working poor, or just plain poor. Plenty of folks here who want to help ‘those people,’ but not many can talk to those people from a place of common experience.
*Pro tip: avoid using terms like hoi polloi.
@Roger: I always assume that with JBK, anecdotes from his personal life are free-form creations adjusted to meet the needs of the conversation and the audience. On another day and with another audience, he’d be talking about having gone to a madrasa.
@Michael Reynolds:
It depends – most Americans live in suburbs, which are considered “urban” by the census but are considered distinct from cities by the general public. The suburbs have continued to grow in population compared to rural areas and urban cores.
Also, there are a lot of poor, uneducated people that live in cities and suburbs. After all, only 38% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Strange assertion. White evangelicals are only about 14% of the US population and all white protestants together are ~43%. Sweden is 54% Lutheran (and very white). The US is ~20% Catholic, Sweden is less than 2%. The US is ~23% no religion, and Sweden has almost 40%.
In short, there are a lot of differences.
@Michael Reynolds:
The lions are being priced out of the watering holes. Not sure what happens next, but the metaphor will break down at the very least.
Also, I almost never see anyone who migrated to Seattle from Podunk or Possum Hollow… it’s always people from the suburbs of Memphis, Albuquerque, Minneapolis or Columbus. I’m not sure people are escaping the rural areas, so much as trading a smaller, fading city for a larger, growing city.
I haven’t seen really granular data on migration trends lately, just state level. There’s a huge difference in heading to Portland, OR from Oklahoma City and the Oklahoma Panhandle.*
Your anti-religious thing goes way beyond White evangelicals. You retreat to them when you get push back, but always stretch it back out to all religion.
I doubt Black Christians are particularly smarter than White Evangelical Christians, but they do have very different values coming from a church that it interested in social justice. Better values.
We don’t need less religion, since that ain’t gonna happen (even among the “smart” people in the People’s Democratic Republic of Seattle it’s about half and half), but better religion with a social justice bent. A bit less “religion of the wealthy” and a bit more “Jesus was an oppressed minority in the Roman Empire fighting against the man”
Psst, you know what we call that, don’t you? Privilege.
I’m not one to glorify the nobleness of poverty and all that, but a lot of people would be better off if they were smacked upside the head for a little bit and in a spot where they had to decide between food and medicine, just for a little bit. Six months of medium poverty with a safety net of moderately estranged family would do it. Poverty with training wheels.
Meanwhile the bankers chortle. Pretty sure my baristas are all paying off a hundred thousand dollars of student loans as the kids are being told that the only way to a middle class life is to go to college.
*: Fun fact: The Oklahoma Panhandle exists because anything above that line would be Free Territory, and Texas wanted to be a slave state.
@just nutha: I wonder what Ludvik von Mises has to say about the Madrass, back in 1923.
@Michael Reynolds: I have a long-time personal observation about the role of religion in political issues: It’s always bad. That doesn’t mean I think religion is bad, quite the opposite.
However, it is a very convenient club for authoritarians AND radicals to use to beat people into compliance. With a little work, almost anything can be justified with a well-chosen Bible verse. And any engagement with politics ends up also polluting the message of Christianity, which was first propounded by a figure who preached as though the world was going to end in just a few years time at most and as such did not appear to care much at all about political questions.
I can’t speak of other religions, but I think the dynamic is the same.
I think everyone understands this at some level. Attacking their religion, per se, is only going to reinforce them, drive them together. Far more relevant is the idea that they think everyone should follow their own personal interpretation and the moral rules that entails.
This is very much at odds with the founding concepts of the United States. These ideas were central to both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The Constitution itself enshrines a process whereby citizens participate in an electoral process which was intended to allow all voters a say in the laws and the administration of the country.
Someone who thinks that some people’s votes or opinions shouldn’t count is an enemy of the United States. THIS is the problem. Not religion. Religion is just a convenient psychological tool, used to justify their authoritarianism.
It’s probably easier to see it benignly when you’re not one of the abominations they want to hang.
@Gustopher:
Deeply involved in Freemasonry?
@Michael Cain: Not sure that would work. Evangelicals understand that they’re opposed to Freemasonry but don’t know why anymore. Even back in the day, the opposition to Freemasonry extended to the various fraternal lodges like Moose, Elks, Eagles, and Rotary.
I would second what Roger said. We moved around a bit and went to several Baptist churches. A couple of independents, a GARBC and a Southern Baptist. All taught the inerrancy of the Bible. I have a huge family many of them go to Baptist churches. All believe, those with whom I have talked about this over the last 50 years, in the inerrancy of the Bible. It’s a big country so I have no doubts you can find some Baptists who dont believe but I would firmly expect that they were and are a minority.
Steve
@Michael Reynolds: “College people tend to condescend to working people, to pity them, to wonder why they don’t try to improve their lot by becoming college people themselves.”
Amazing. MR is turning into JKB.
@Michael Reynolds: “Look at our OTB commentariat. There are maybe five of us who’ve ever been working class, or working poor, or just plain poor.”
I’d guess there are fewer of us who have lived in multi-million dollar homes in Tiburon, LA and a Las Vegas Strip penthouse over the last decades, drive expensive foreign cars and take extravagant vacations.
Why is it that every rich guy who hits his mid-sixties needs to spend all his time trying to prove he’s really jus’ reg’lar folks inside because he was poor forty years ago and all those decades of fabulous wealth haven’t changed him one little bit. It’s not convincing from Bill O’Reilly, it’s not convincing from Chris Matthews, and it sure isn’t convincing from you.
@gVOR10: It is often forgotten (or never learned at all) that, before the Pilgrims migrated to America, they tried living among the Dutch, who were early adherents of religious freedom. They found that atmosphere uncongenial.