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.

This is an important "man in a diner" article. For me, it underscores an often-overlooked reason why white evangelicals support Trump.

Both their form of "religion" and his "politics" want to destroy things. They are not content w/any sort of difference or diverse choices. The point is to make everyone miserable. In evangelicalism, the first step to salvation is making you miserable.

You must see that you have led a miserable life, made miserable choices, are a deeply miserable person.

Misery is the door toward you being saved.

Re: Mike Johnson porn story:

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.

A guy got mad at my newsletter today - a post abt roses, summertime & poetry that included a “btw” line abt climate change.

He wrote a nasty note about how there’s no such thing as climate change, etc.

I can't believe that anyone would jump on a writer for reflecting on roses. Literally, some dude attacking me for . . . flowers.

There’s no way a Catholic college can host Trump and ever hope to attract another student. .@SaintAnselm Can you imagine? With the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse hosting a former president now found liable for sexual abuse?

If I were @Pontifex, I’d be on the phone right now.

OK. I just told a guy in my local Starbucks/Safeway to f**k off.

And I can promise you in the next hour everybody in Alexandria will know. I didn't know him. He was with a casual friend of mine, a rather nice woman whom I know from an Episcopal church in town.

She asked me what I was working on.

I'm in near despair that the critical narratives of white Xian nationalism (which is primarily a problem of white evangelicalism) are largely being controlled by writers & scholars who are themselves still evangelicals.

Much of the anti-WCN project seems vaguely apologetic. No Jews on this panel talking about white Christian nationalism? No liberal Protestants w/o the conservative theological presuppositions of evangelicalism? Someone who is actually NOT religious? These alternative narratives have intellectual tools to speak to analysis of WCN.

Watching the roll-out of PRRI's Xian Nationalism survey. They just blew the "Xian Nationalists don't attend church" myth out of the water.

Xian Nationalists are more likely to be regular churchgoers (overwhelmingly white evangelical congregations). Also, it isn't a problem of "catechesis" as @Peter_Wehner said -- it is clearly a problem of theology learned in seminary and taught from the pulpit of these churches. It is a deep, profound issue of worldview & biblical interpretation from leaders thru the entire system.

Four things Christians need to understand about religion and politics right now:

1. Christians are not being persecuted in the United States.

Congress and the Religion Imbalance open.substack.com/pub/dianabutle… 2. The imbalance between continued Christian political dominance and demographic diversity will cause more rifts and religious hostility in American society.

dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/congress-and…

I just got the absolutely most unhinged email I’ve ever received from a “freelance historian” about the 7 mountain message, the “stolen” election, Steve Bannon as a prophet, and the upcoming Civil War. It came from an Australian who patiently explained American history to me - as well as the role of Australia in this emerging new Christendom of global theocracy.

I wish I could get my Sunday Musings Substack newsletter out on Saturday night -- so my preaching friends wouldn't have to rewrite their sermons at 5am on Sunday morning.

(I get several emails a week from folks telling me they did this!) But then it wouldn't be Sunday Musings. It would be Saturday Night Musings....

It takes my breath away seeing arguments denying women's bodily autonomy-these ideas are functionally the same logic that slavers made in the 1850s.

These arguments weren't just secular. They were given moral credence by clergy who claimed such ideas were biblical & Christian. Some Christian clergy are literally re-upping 19th century slavery justifications. This shouldn't surprise me - because this never really went away - esp in certain white evangelical circles. But the blatant jubilation over such is, well, disgusting. And morally reprehensible.

I appreciate what Andy Stanley is trying to do - depoliticize evangelicalism. But Jesus doesn't stay in "2 lanes" of individual faith & ministering to those hurting.

Jesus had ONE lane - the Reign of God. That includes the heart, healing hurt, AND reorders the polis & creation. The problem is that white evangelicals have wrongly interpreted the Kingdom of God, seeing that as primarily exclusive, hierarchical, and patriarchal based on purity and obedience.

One of the ultimate historical ironies of American Protestantism is that Lyman Stewart, the man who bankrolled the Fundamentals to purify the churches from liberal error, was also the oilman who founded Union Oil Co.

He sought to cleanse the church by polluting the planet. And Stewart hated Rockefeller of Standard Oil who gave of his largess to forward liberal Protestantism.

So, American Protestantism was riven not (entirely) by doctrine by a corporate oil rivalry.

Litany in the Wake of a Mass Shooting
(Bishops of the Episcopal Church)

God of peace, we remember all those who have died in incidents of mass gun violence in this nation’s public and private spaces. Six dead at the Wisconsin Sikh Temple.
Give to the departed eternal rest.
Let light perpetual shine upon them.

The NRA national convention is this coming weekend in Texas. Some of the speakers: Yes. Major Texas politicians are going to go party with the NRA within hours of babies being shot in one of their schools.

May the NRA rot in hell forever. Along with every cowardly politician who refused to stand up to them and every judge who expanded their right to murder the rest of us.

Bill Leonard was always, always, always right.

As was Molly Marshall.

And all the good people those crusading abusers at the SBC attempted to destroy. I never want to hear another peep of theological or moral self-righteousness out of any of those SBC leaders. Not a single expletive deleted word.

Thinking abt 100 yrs of Fundamentalism: it tried to take over major denominations (1920s), retreated to a subculture (30s), divided into fundamentalist & evangelical camps (50-70s), reemerged politically (80s), took over evangelicalism (90-2K), & is now white Xian nationalism. And it became a framework and impulse to inspire reactionary religious movements globally and across religious traditions.

On May 21, 1922, a sermon rocked America.

The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy is a long shadow hanging over the last century. We experience its continued influence every day in churches & politics.

Shall the Fundamentalists Win? (a thread)
dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/shall-the-fu… Fundamentalists love to shame others-pointing out hidden sins of the heart, the “back alleys” of rejecting God & risky rebellion against righteousness.

Fundamentalists are happy to shame. But they really hate being shamed.

That’s when they fight back.

dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/shame-shame-…