The ritual post-election discussion of the Christian Right and conservative white Christians in US politics

Here we have Emma Green writing on The Evangelical Reckoning Begins The Atlantic 11/15/2020.

And here are Daniel "Pastor Dan" Schultz and Chrissy Stroop discussing Cherry Picking in the God Gap: A Post-Election Conversation on the Religious Vote and the Battle to Spin It Religion Dispatches 11/13/2020.

Articles on the topic have been a post-election ritual since 1978 or so, when the Christian Right as we know it emerged as a significant influence in American politics, attacking prominent Democrats as "anti-family" allegedly because of their support of abortion rights. And the ritual conversation typically turns around the notion that if Democrats would just oppose abortion rights and not be so picky about not providing public funds to racially segregated schools and colleges that operated with some kind of church imprimatur.

The main result over decades has been that the Democratic candidates spent much of that time repeating various versions of the formula, "I'm personally opposed to abortion (thus adopting the basic Republican/Christian Right framing of the issues) but I support a woman's right to choose." Jerry Brown is the only one I ever hear deliver a similar line convincingly without sounding like he was hedging his support of abortion rights. Hillary Clinton for years used the formula that she thought abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare," achieving the usual result of accepting Republican framing while coming off as hedging her position on legal abortion. To her credit, in her 2016 Presidential campaign, she straightforwardly defended a woman's right to abortion.

Chrissy and Pastor Dan discuss the current state of play of the question. The latter observes, "We’ll see different numbers floating around (there are as many measures of evangelicals as there are demographers), but preliminary indications are that the white evangelical vote for the GOP dipped little, if at all."

At this point, I'm hesitant to make sweeping judgments about changes in the behavior of subgroups of the electorate from the exit polls because of the (for the US) unusually large turnout of eligible voters for the November election. And apparently the Republicans had a better get-out-the-vote ground game nationwide than the Democrats did in 2020.But based on the polling for the last four years on Trump's support among white evangelicals, it would be a notable surprise to find that their actual voting behavior showed any significant shift toward the Democrats.

Chrissy calls particular attention to the lazy habits of the corporate media in covering the intersection of religion and politics:

And yes, I think that good religion journalism ought to be covering mainline and progressive as well as authoritarian Christianity, even though I believe we agree that there should not be, and cannot be, a “religious Left” in the same sense that there is a “religious Right” in this country. Journalists need to stop looking at white Christianity through rose-colored glasses, and when it comes to coverage of Christianity and politics, we need both greater diversity of representation and more nuance..

Of course, as a religious none and the ex-evangelical founder of the loosely organized #EmptyThePews movement, I think good religion journalism needs to cover youth secularization and include the perspectives of those who have left high-control religious traditions like evangelicalism. I also agree with you that we should be hearing a lot more about Black young people’s attitudes toward religion and secularism and the current generation’s relationship to the Black Church.

Emma Green's article is based around an interview with a megachurch pastor, Andy Stanley, who decided not to be a cheerleader for Donald Trump this year. He worries that Christian Right support for Republicans and for Donald Trump in particular is damaging the "evangelical" brand.

Green's article is an example of an effort by a reporter to get beyond the lazy media clichés about the Christian Right. But I think the key thing to understand about the Christian Right is that is a political trend based heavily on conservative cultural attitudes, including particularly white supremacist and patriarchal attitudes, with a strong authoritarian streak. Even under Trump, they remain as an important and highly visible component of Republican Party politics. That may change over time if the trend away from conservative evangelical churches continues. But there doesn't seem to be a significant reason to assume so right now.

The Democratic Party's politics are not only compatible with conservative Christians theological beliefs. But there is certainly no inevitability that someone taking the story of the Good Samaritan as a serious moral and spiritual example would be attracted to the kind of ugly bigotry and cruelty that Trump's politics have so prominently featured. In fact, it's a valid Christian theological question how such a person could not actively oppose it.

There is a "religious left" in the US. And has been, even before the terms "left" and "right" came into use in the French Revolutionary Parliament of the late 18th century. But Chrissy Stoop is correct in saying that it's unrealistic to expect a Religious Left in the US politics that would be an obvious parallel to the Christian Right. Because the Christian Right is an authoritarian movement that is, at best, less than comfortable with liberal democratic values. The religious left as we have know it in civil-rights, antiwar, and other social reform movements is very unlikely to present their case as authoritarian claim to know the explicit will of God.

A comparison of the sanctimonious authoritarian Christian Right devotee, Vice President Mike Pence, with the Rev. William Barber would provide copious evidence of the difference in their approach.