More thoughts on the Christianity Today editorials

I suppose it's possible that the Christianity Today editorial endorsing Trump's removal from office is freeing up some white evangelicals to voice their criticisms of Trump a bit more openly than they felt comfortable doing before.

But I'm very skeptical of the proposition.

Nicole Lafond describes a more optimistic take in The Evangelical War Over Impeachment Has Been A Long Time Coming 12/27/2019:

... according to several prominent evangelicals who have long been critical of Trump, Christianity Today’s editorial, and the subsequent fallout, was the moment at which a conflict within the evangelical community that had been bubbling up for at least three years - and, according to some, for decades - burst into the open.

“This is ultimately about a community deciding, and really wrestling with whether it’s more committed to these cultural values that have been associated with the faith or the fundamental values of the faith itself,” evangelical author and pastor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove told TPM Friday.

The anti-Trump faction of the evangelical community has been active since the early days of the Republican primaries, evangelical leaders said. But impeachment was the catalyst that encouraged this section of the population to speak out before 2020.

The controversy of the last week “certainly reveals the turbulent waters of white evangelicalism in the U.S.” Shane Claiborne, an evangelical author who founded the activist group Red Letter Christians, told TPM. [my emphasis]

The only thing that will really convince me that a shift away from Trumpism is happening among white evangelicals will be national election results that show a distinct change in voting and/or voting participation that shows white evangelicals shifting away from the Republican Party. As Digby Parton continually reminds us, in the minds of its Republican adherents, conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. And after Trump leaves office, conservative ideologues will criticism Trump for not having been the Perfect Conservative.

But Trumpism is very much a result of the Republican Party's brand of True Conservatism. If in a post-Trump political world, a shift of white evangelical sentiment in public opinion polls toward Trump himself won't mean anything other than the Republican Party is doing its usual post-Republican-disaster rebranding. The Republican Party will not shift away from Trumpism unless the parties core base voters stop voting for them. Otherwise, there's no reason at this point to expect anything but a continued radicalization of the party. And the Republican base at this point is almost synonomous with white evangelicals.

If we define cultural conservatism as not liking any church music written after 1950 and thinking that smoking pot is tacky, then it's possible that we could see signifiant numbers of culturally conservative white evangelicals be jolted by the Trump experience into recognizing what the Republican Party has been for the last 40 years.

But this is why I keep coming back to the context of authoritarianism is understanding Trumpism. For authoritarians, the conservative "these cultural values that have been associated with the faith" are not distinct from "the fundamental values of the faith itself.” For them, there is no playing off one against the other.

And Republican conservative "cultural values" are deeply embedded in a broader white-identity narrative of: abortion-as-murder; sex as sin; black people as lazy, inferior, dangerous, and bad parents; Latino immigrants as dirty and degenerate; and, last but definitely not least, wimmin as inferior but threatening. As Lafond writes:

Part of the Republican Party’s Nixon-era Southern strategy - which also weaponized racial dogwhistles to recruit white Southerners in the wake of the Voting Rights Acts and the Immigration and Nationalization Act - the Republican Party’s effort to court southern white Christians has been a point of tension within the evangelical community for years.

The effort, coordinated by preachers, political operatives and conservative donors, sought to mobilize voters around “pro-family” values, most notably evangelicals’ opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

In a recent book, Wilson-Hartgrove credited that movement with fomenting an all-out culture war in the last decade by painting America as a country in moral decline that needed a fighter willing to step up and take America back.

“Trump became a champion of that agenda as a fighter, somebody who was willing to be more extreme than your average Republican in defending that,” he said. [my emphasis]

The antiabortion cause has taken on such fanatical dimensions that it can serve as an all-purpose excuse for going alone with pretty much any kind of brutality and cruely against living, breathing, human beings. The metaphor as abortion-as-Holocaust has long been common as dirt among antiabortionists. Here's Pat Robertson saying something I remember hearing him saying in the early 1990s:

Wendy, we have fifty-five million babies that have been aborted in this country since Roe v. Wade, fifty-five million, that is a holocaust. You figure, Hitler at the height of his monstrous evil killed six million people, six million; we have in this land of the free and home of the brave, we have killed fifty-five million. (Brian Tashman, Robertson: US Abortion ‘Holocaust’ Worse than Nazi Germany, Will Lead to ‘Wrath of the Lord’ Right Wing Watch 06/25/2013)

As always with far-right ideologues and especially with the antiabortion theme, we have to remember that they lie like breathing. So don't take any statistics from Pat Robertson as having any validity without verifying them from some decent source. (Also, six million is the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust; the number of deaths for which Hitler was responsible is much larger.)

Now, what Robertson is saying there very plainly means that he thinks Hitler Germany was more moral, much more moral, than democratic America today. People like him will comma-dance forever over what such a sentence really means. But there's no point. It's obvious and clear what he means.

And that formulation is a free pass to support any atrocity done by the antiabortion party. Kidnap thousands of migrant children? Nothing in comparison to our Sacred Cause? Expel all 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US even if it means massive suffering and tens of thousands of deaths, maybe more? We have to think about the Precious Unborn Babies, and, hey, Those Peolple are not part of Our Culture anyway.

I've come to the point that I find it difficult to even entertain the possibility that antibortionists who would associate themselves with a nazi-friendly formulation like Robertson's actually believe their own talk about Unborn Babies. Because I've been around long enough to remember the Vietnam War as a contemporary event. And I've never once my life ever heard a single Republican say we should oppose a war because it would kill Precious Unborn Babies. And all of our wars do that. If Republicans actually have the level of emphathy it would take to imagine a month-old fetus as being a human life that has to be protected, they would never have taken the positions on wars that they do. Not ever. I just don't believe them when they claim their devotion to the Unborn.

The 2020 election will not be decided by Republican base voters defecting to Democrats. It will be decided by Democratic turnout. What the polls are currently showing is that the gender gap is growing significantly. (See Digby's Watch your step Trumpie. That gender gap is a chasm. Hullabaloo 12/27/2019) So there could be significant numbers of women who did vote for Republicans in 2016 and 2018 who will shift their votes to Democrats. And some of the evangelicals among them may be significantly influenced in their choice by things like the Christianity Today articles.