White evangelicalism is in for some serious short-term pain.
There’s nothing to be done about this: it was decided decades ago, the moment that the Moral Majority laid a foundation on the sands of special-interest politics.
What’s yet to be determined is long-term damage.
In an effort to mitigate short-term pain, some churches and denominations will make concessions to white supremacy, Christian Nationalism and misogyny to appease Dixiecrats who hold the purse strings.
And in the process, those churches will lose every young person who can’t unsee the hypocrisy and injustice that 2020 brought unmistakably to the fore. Thus they will sacrifice the future on the altar of the present.
The churches and denominations that last will be the ones who lean into the short-term pain—those who forsake the seduction of political power and material comfort. The future of the church in America is in the pursuit of justice on behalf of the oppressed.
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With the unwavering support of the religious right for roughly five decades, conservative politicians in the US have engineered staggering levels of economic inequality—eroding democratic institutions and inviting the rise of authoritarian populism.
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Reagan leveraged racial resentment to give middle- and working-class (white) voters the false impression that their economic interests are served by cuts to government programs that benefit undeserving (Black) welfare recipients.
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(The politics of racial resentment hardly began with Reagan—he was merely the first modern conservative to successfully couch the argument for economic austerity within the politics of racial resentment.)
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Ralph Reed is former executive director of the Christian Coalition, and an old school evangelical grifter.
He garnered fame for leveraging his Christian Coalition connections to lobby for stricter casino regulations *on behalf of the casino industry* in the 90s and early 00s 🧵
Specifically, by his own admission, Reed accepted payments of no less than $1.23 million from a consortium of casino operations. (In 2006, a bipartisan Senate investigation found that Reed had accepted payments in excess of $5.3 million.)
In return, Reed unleashed scores of evangelical ministers and political activists to lobby for new casino regulations.
Two hours ago, as an experiment, I posted this direct, verbatim quote from W.A. Criswell (SBC president, 1968-70, pastor of First Baptist Dallas for five decades, founder and namesake of Criswell College):
Aspiring SBC luminaries @William_E_Wolfe and @colinsmo , among others, have declared the author a Democratic operative, a heretic, and an unbeliever who denies the divinity of Christ.
This tells me three things.
1. They aren’t in the habit of reading carefully: given how much they engage with my tweets, they should’ve known immediately that I didn’t write this.
So, assuming the happy couple is meant to be homeowners, their mortgage would be subsidized by federal programs—which programs were funded by a steeply progressive income tax (top marginal tax rate in the 90% range).
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The equity that accrues in that home—purchased with the benefit of government wealth redistribution—will be the single largest (and in all likelihood the only) source of whatever wealth these people pass to the children pictured.
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Is *that* the sort of politics envisioned by the trads who adore this imagery? Of course not.
Because the vast majority of these people don’t study history, or philosophy, or economics, or political theory, they regard such arrangements as “Marxist.”
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It’s commonly supposed that the problem with religious fundamentalism is that its moral commitments are too rigid. In fact the opposite is true: morality based in religious fundamentalism is infinitely flexible.
In the hands of ecclesial authorities who’ve insulated themselves from expert critique, sacred texts become a vehicle for legitimizing all manner of ungodliness, injustice, and abuse, in the name of an Authority that is transcendent and therefore unavailable for interrogation.
So the moral and intellectual intransigence of the fundamentalist is a product, not of immutable principles, but a technique of knowledge furnishes an unassailable pretext for maintaining social practices and habits of mind that are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The creation science industry has come to inhabit a kind of intellectual no-man's-land in which creation scientists advance ostensibly biblical and scientific claims while avoiding substantive engagement with either biblical scholarship or legitimate science.
Over time, this intellectual no-man's-land has proven to be a hospitable base of operation for enterprising theologians and ambitious ministers who exercise social control by framing their opposition to "secular" expertise as the definitive "biblical view"—
of gender, race, parenting, politics, public school curricula, Walt Disney, progressive income tax, financial capitalism, international relations, and so on and so forth.