I keep thinking about a conversation I overheard in late November 2016 - in the breakfast room at a Hampton Inn in Louisiana.
I was speaking at a church. But it happened that there was a conference for Pentecostal pastors at the hotel.
I was still in shock from the election. Two pastors sat at the table next to me. They were talking about how excited they were about Trump.
They were excited that he was a businessman.
"About time," they said. "Somebody who can finally run this country like a business."
There have been countless articles about why white evangelicals support Trump.
But I've always thought about their conversation. A businessman. That's who they believed would fix things. Nothing more than that, no vision of political messiah.
Just some weird patriarchal mystique about businessmen.
Nothing about morality, nothing about the common good, nothing even vaguely religious.
Just a businessman will finally fix America.
I've always thought this said more about American evangelicalism than just about anything I'd ever heard.
Faith in business.
There was no theology at all. Just obvious, overt sexism and trust in money.
Oh, and the coffee that I accidentally spilled on them.
Don't worry it was lukewarm.
"accidentally"
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With all due respect & gratitude to the ELCA, y'all gotta take "evangelical" out of your formal name in the US. It is the source of endless confusion. Sorry sorry sorry but you can't redefine it here apart from American evangelicalism. (I know what it means in Greek, German, yes)
I wish I've had $1 for how many times I've explained your name to a group of 1) Lutherans who can't understand American evangelicalism; and 2) Evangelicals who can't figure out why mainline Lutherans would call themselves "evangelical."
And even after explaining, no one gets it.
Two entire questions after my conversation w/Sarah McCammon today on her fine new book, Exvangelicals, were wasted on this ridiculous confusion.
30 yrs ago, I knew a librarian at a prominent evangelical seminary whose sole job was going thru personal papers of ministers donated after they died. Her responsibility? Removing all the porn from such collections BEFORE they reached the cataloger.
In the 80s, there was a very famous, anonymous article in Leadership magazine (a CT publication) on porn and sexual addiction among evangelical clergy & leaders. It was rampant. That article was secretly passed among male evangelical seminary students & clergy like a banned book.
I'm hearing anecdotally that a number of progressive mainline churches are seeing a post-pandemic steady influx of ex-evangelicals looking for new spiritual homes.
This doesn't mean that all ex-evangelicals are making this shift, but it suggests that at least some are.
In the 1990s and early aughts, the progressive mainline attracted mostly disaffected Catholics - a trend that strengthened congregations & attendance.
That the next disaffiliation wave might come from disgruntled & deconstructing evangelicals isn't surprising.
Mainline types: Don't expect this is a trend where folks will knock down your doors. You're going to have to prove yourselves trustworthy, open, loving - and you'll need to overcome years of stereotypes these folks learned in evangelicalism - you'll need to earn their respect.