Category Archives: Random Blogging

Apostasy And Politics

To continue the subject of White Christian nationalism…a recent book by Robert P. Jones is worth highlighting.

Jones is the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, and the author of previous books exploring the intersection of religion and public life. His new book is Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.  An interview with Jones in The Guardian , begins by noting that the book supports Godwin’s Law–the theory that as a discussion grows longer, the probability of invoking Nazis or Hitler approaches 100%.

Jones definitely goes there. He writes that “This is our 1933,” and he begins the book by detailing the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, very much including Germany’s Christians and their churches.

Jones cites Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler, remembered for the poem First They Came. But for the first four years of Hitler’s reign, he notes, Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Jones argues that the current democratic “backslide” that America is experiencing is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, and as evidence, he cites Trump’s language on the campaign trail.

This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes.”

This critique is not coming from an atheist or agnostic; Jones grew up as a Southern Baptist who went to church five times a week. He earned a master of divinity degree. His opinions are not those of an outsider to the Christian religion; they’re the result of research and the growing concerns he has expressed in several previous books. (He wrote The End of White Christian America in 2016, White Too Long in 2020 and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future in 2023.)

In Jones’s diagnosis, white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country’s autocratic slide.

Jones attributes this backsliding–this apostasy–to demographics, noting that In 2008, White Christians were 54% of the population. By 2014, that percentage was 47%, and today it is 41%.  Among White evangelicals, the decline has been even steeper. Today, they are barely 13% of the population. “Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism embraced not spiritual renewal, but existential panic – creating fertile ground for Trump’s demagoguery.” White evangelicals have rallied to Trump’s promise to restore an America where their churches were powerful and most people looked like them.

Jones points out that the movement has abandoned its previous rhetoric of values in favor of an overtly anti-democratic Christian nationalism that says ‘We believe this country belongs to us, and we’re going to use the power we can to claim it.’” He notes that the relationship is overtly transactional: Trump essentially says “if you’re for me, I’ll be for you,” and evangelicals respond by forgiving and overlooking a “whole host of sins” for the promise that he is going to restore their dominance.

He acknowledges the extreme danger of giving “Christian warriors” like Hegseth and Vought the power to do enormous damage, but refuses to give in entirely to pessimism. He is encouraged by the emergence of the genuinely Christian voices I wrote about yesterday, and says that he hopes his book will help White Christians recognize that they face a decision not dissimilar to the one that confronted the Christians in Nazi Germany in 1933.

It’s a wake-up call to see the bright lines that are being crossed, to be clear-eyed about how dangerous that is, and for those readers who are Christian – particularly white and Christian – to realise we have a particular responsibility to offer a different version of faith. Because it is our faith that’s been hijacked and used to legitimise this illiberal, anti-democratic, authoritarian movement that’s running rampant and taking over in the US.

I want to believe that there are more Christians like Jones than there are like Pete Hegseth and Micah Beckwith…

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Let’s Hear It For Polarization

During a “catch-up” breakfast wth a good friend, the conversation turned to political polarization. My friend wondered aloud why political disputes today seem so much more antagonistic than when we were younger. My own theory–which will not come as a surprise to regular readers–is that we are no longer arguing about policy–we are arguing about values and morality, beliefs far less amenable to compromise.

Following our breakfast, I opened the day’s New York Times, and discovered–in an essay by Thomas Edsall –that a political scientist I respect has come to a very similar conclusion.

Lilliana Mason is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. In 2018, she authored “Uncivil Agreement,” a groundbreaking book about the the dramatic shift in political argumentation.

In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.

More recently, and more pertinently, in an article published in The Journal of Democracy, Mason argues that “Polarization Is Not the Problem.” I found her analysis dead-on. While I am among those who mourn the decline of civility–I wrote about it quite recently, as a matter of fact– I absolutely agree with her about the nature of the struggle we are having, and the danger of using a proposed return to more polite discourse as an excuse for a failure to confront it.

Mason wrote:

Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.

Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethno-nationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.

Polarization is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, anti-democratic movement.

Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.

As the linked article points out, Mason is not a voice in the wilderness; her analysis is shared by other academics, both here and abroad. In a paper titled, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam argues that there is a crisis across advanced democracies “resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails.” He argues that “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.”

Yphtach Lelkes, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees, pointing out that in Germany before Hitler, Spain before Franco and Italy before Mussolini, mainstream political actors had been willing to accommodate authoritarian movements. He added that he takes “a Goldilocks view of polarization–Too little polarization leaves out the diversity of ideas, viewpoints and maybe even the anger needed to make progress. Too much polarization creates the conditions for many of the problems we’re seeing today.”

Marc Hetherington, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, argues that today’s polarization has resulted from a shift in what had previously constituted the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans. The argument has shifted from a debate about how much government should do to a far more visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.” The debate now is a  disagreement about social change and the various “rights revolutions” that have benefited African Americans, women, and L.G.B.T.Q. folks. He argues that it is MAGA’s rejection of those racial, social, and cultural changes–changes that have produced greater equality for a range of previously marginalized groups– that is the primary source of today’s polarization.

Which brings me back to the analysis I shared with my friend at breakfast.

We no longer argue about how to achieve largely agreed-upon ends. We no longer argue about how government should go about combatting discrimination or poverty or ameliorating disease. Today’s Republicans are attacking the ends. They don’t want to combat discrimination or feed hungry children or ensure that Americans have access to health care.

We are inhabitants of different moral universes.

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The Thirty Percent Problem

Most reliable polls tell us that thirty percent of Americans continue to support Donald Trump. While pundits point out that this is an unprecedented low, my own reaction is somewhat different. Thirty percent means that three out of every ten Americans are still in the thrall of a rage-filled madman who undermines this country and the rule of law every single day. 

I recently came across a cartoon that makes the point. A man and woman are at the kitchen table; the man says “Wow. Trump told our enemy to bomb American cities, and it didn’t move the needle!” The woman responds with a litany of other Trump actions that failed to move the needle–mocking a disabled reporter, refusing to release the Epstein files, the “insurrection thing” when he tried to overturn the election, the times he became a convicted felon and an adjudicated rapist, the time he stole government documents and tried to cover it up…at which point, the husband interrupted, saying “Okay, okay. I get it.”

And we all get it.

Whatever that thirty percent finds to admire in this would-be autocrat, it’s shameful. I’ve previously shared my own theory that it’s his permission to hate the “other” that attracts them–bigotry reinforced by their choice of “information” sources. Others have looked at the data and concluded that they are cognitively impaired. Whatever the reason for their continued defense of a man who is very clearly indefensible, that thirty percent constitutes a clear and present danger to the American Idea. As a recent headline in The Bulwark put it (rather inelegantly) “Our politicians suck. But our voters do, too.”

The article quoted an opinion piece from The Financial Times, in which the author noted the current global distaste for incumbent politicians, irrespective of their policies. It doesn’t seem to matter if the rejected leaders are conservative or liberal, young or old, successful or terrible. As he notes, the unpopularity is durable, making every election a change election. He concluded that “either (a) the quality of leaders in Western democracies has declined; or (b) the citizens of Western democracies have become . . . problematic.”

He chose problematic voters, and Jonathan V. Last, the author of the Bulwark article, agreed.

It is self-evidently true, at least in America, that voters are not serious adults. (Please don’t make me show my work; we’ve done dozens of newsletters on this topic.) Are they less serious at the innate, human level than they were twenty years ago? Or forty years ago? Possibly.

It’s possible that environmental factors—such as changes in technology and media—have made them more decadent and less serious.

But it is also true that in America the structural processes by which our leaders are chosen have changed in ways that have lowered the quality of the leaders.

Last identifies three major developments that have contributed to the change.

The first is geographical sorting. For the past forty years, as Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort documented, Americans have been gathering geographically  This sorting, where people move to areas they find ideologically compatible, has increased the number of counties in which one political party is utterly dominant. And–as research clearly shows– “the lack of ideological competition lowers the overall quality of the leaders who win power.”

The second is gerrymandering, the artificial partner of voluntary sorting. Gerrymandering not only reduces ideological competition, it functions as a “multiplier for radicalism. When elected officials only have to worry about intraparty primary fights and not general elections, they become more extreme over time.”

The third may seem counter-intuitive, but I agree that what was a seemingly laudable effort to democratize candidate selection via primaries has turned out to be–as Last delicately puts it–“suboptimal.” When elites in our political parties chose the candidates, the process was arguably anti-democratic, but It was also reasonably successful, giving us a lot of quality candidates—especially, as Last points out, at the presidential level.

America’s current disaster–and it is a disaster–is a combination of systemic problems and the moral and/or intellectual deficits of approximately thirty percent of the country’s voters.

We can reform structural problems–pass the John Lewis Act and outlaw gerrymandering, for example, and change the candidate selection process. I don’t see any way to keep people in a free country from moving to places they find compatible, and we have yet to devise efforts to reach the thirty percent that stubbornly rejects logic, science and evidence –it may be impossible.

We can, however, outvote them. And we must.

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They’re Coming For The Libraries

The current effort to take America back to an earlier time requires a broad-based war on information.

Science, evidence and facts of all kinds challenge those committed to narrow “truths.”  That’s why, along with their efforts to stamp out recognition of diversity, politicize the scientific grant process, ignore medical science findings that debunk favored conspiracy theories, and other assaults on knowledge, the Trump administration and its fellow-travelers are constantly attempting to rewrite history, change displays at our national parks and museums to replace “woke” (i.e. accurate) exhibits with whitewashed ones, and dismiss climate change as a “hoax.” 

It isn’t inaccurate to see these attempts to turn back the clock as a war on knowledge. And in a war on knowledge, libraries become major targets.

This year is the 150th birthday of the modern American library–which, as a recent New York Times article notes, has undergone considerable change since that founding, and is now “arguably the most versatile civic center in any community lucky enough to have one.”

In addition to its function as a repository of centuries of human knowledge and belief, today’s library provides–as the article makes clear–a safe place for people to gather around books, ideas and one another. As one librarian was quoted, “Librarians are defenders of democracy. We’re defenders of the freedom to read. We’re protectors of patron privacy.”

Another librarian explained her concerns about the current political assault, warning that what librarians are facing right now are like nothing she’d seen in her previous 27 years of librarianship.  “The attacks on libraries, the censorship, books disappearing from shelves in Texas and Florida. Librarians and democracy are aligned, hand in hand.”

Another librarian reported on her personal experience of being targeted by a Moms for Liberty group. “There were grievances filed; I was doxxed online. I live by myself and I feared for my safety…if you told me 10 years ago that this is what my job would be, I would have said you were nuts.”

Several of the librarians interviewed worried about the rising incidents of book banning and book challenges. Others noted the accelerating introduction and passage of state-level legislation limiting freedom of expression and the freedom to read. 

Those legislative attacks take a number of forms. In addition to straightforward efforts to remove books or restrict access–efforts that tend to generate considerable public opposition–there are more “sophisticated” attacks. Here in Indiana, where our legislature is dominated by MAGA culture warriors, the most recent assault has been fiscal.

As the Capital Chronicle has reported, a measure introduced by Republican Senator Gary Byrne would remove the authority of library boards to impose tax levies for certain enumerated needs, turning that power over to the counties in which they are located. Librarians who testified in opposition to the bill pointed out that board members are appointed by those same counties, in concert with the schools and cities served by the libraries–and that libraries are regularly audited to ensure that monies are being spent properly. 

As the article noted,

The bill comes as libraries continue to be under fire for their catalogs, including efforts to ban books with LGBTQ or anti-racist themes. Notably, Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith was part of the Hamilton East Public Library Board of Trustees and spearheaded a book review policy that included prominent local author John Green.

Fortunately, Senator Byrne’s bill did not come up for a vote during the last session, but it is likely to be revived, despite the fact that–as  Senator Fady Qaddoura pointed out– it’s unclear what problem this bill is intended to solve.

 Our public libraries are an absolutely essential element of a free society. They provide access to books, databases, newspapers, and research tools to all citizens, regardless of income. They are fundamental to the creation of an informed citizenry and they encourage and facilitate lifelong learning. 

In our increasingly digital age, libraries also bridge what has been called the “digital divide,” providing reliable access to the internet, computers and printing–and competent help in using those tools. 

Our public libraries often fill educational gaps that schools and other institutions often don’t or can’t. They are an essential part of the knowledge infrastructure–and that’s why they are such tempting targets for the Neanderthals who want to retreat from the modern world.

We must never take them for granted.

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Our Lost Civility

Given the amount of damage Trump has done to American government, not to mention the incredible and growing extent of his corruption, the gobsmacking lack of civility he has ushered in may seem irrelevant or unimportant.

It isn’t.

I think Miss Manners got it right when she defended civility as  a system of behavior that enables people to resolve conflicts and live together–outcomes much harder to achieve when people are trading insults and expressing aggressive hostility. Civil discourse provides us with a structure within which we can disagree more or less productively–it imposes shared rules of social conduct that keep daily irritations from turning into disagreements that leave deep psychic wounds and/or necessitate legal intervention or government regulation.

Trump has yet to exhibit even basic civility–not to mention dignity or humankindness–and his (mis)behavior has been seen by far too many people as permission for the expression of truly hateful and vicious insults and attacks. As the Bulwark recently noted, his mean-spiritedness has accelerated as his approval ratings have collapsed, and as Democratic candidates have made inroads into Red territories.

As an example, the Bulwark quoted Trump’s recent diatribe against South Carolina Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews, in which he leaned in to the GOP’s current fixation with transgender Americans.

Annie “Trannie” Andrews is running against our wonderful Darline Graham for the Senate in South Carolina. . . . Darline is a High Quality person, maybe the Highest, and Annie Trannie is not, in particular, as it pertains to representing the Values of the Great People of South Carolina—She is in favor of Transgender for Everyone, Open Borders, Defunding the Police, High Taxes, a Weak Military, and will absolutely fight to take your guns away—In other words, she is against our Great Second Amendment! Trannie is not for South Carolina, and South Carolina must show, in the upcoming Election, that it is not for her. VOTE FOR DARLINE GRAHAM—SHE HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT, AND WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Republican bigotry against transgender folks has taken center stage as the party has lost any substantive policy accomplishments to which its candidates can point. The Bulward noted that the tactic is revolting, and then focused on what we have lost in an era it correctly labeled as “uncivilized.”

In a civilized era, it would be shocking to see it coming from a president of the United States. But we do not live in a civilized era. In a non-cowardly era, the slur would be denounced by Republicans as well as Democrats. But we do not live in a non-cowardly era. In a better era, Andrews’s Republican opponent, Sen. Darline Graham, would step up to criticize a supporter for using the term. But we do not live in a better era.

That paragraph reminded me of John McCain’s response to a woman who claimed that Barack Obama was an Arab who “cohorts with domestic terrorists.” McCain responded “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign’s all about.”

It is absolutely impossible to imagine Donald Trump saying anything that gracious. And as a result of his constant schoolyard insults and belligerent childish rhetoric, we live in an increasingly angry and dangerous society, where newspapers report on things like an argument about Trump in an Ohio dog park that led two men to draw guns.

Pundits frequently talk about the erosion of the democratic and social norms that have operated as guardrails to the conduct of government. Civility is one of those very important norms, and its loss has led to the embarrassing exchanges we increasingly see between elected officials and those they disdain. The recent treatment of prosecutor Jack Smith– in which Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt called Smith a “dirtbag” (before Schmitt’s ignominious face-plant)– is just one example.

Serious people don’t stoop to name-calling. There’s a reason ad hominem attacks have long been considered evidence that the person levelling such attacks has no evidence or other substantive response to offer.

As we head into the midterms, one of the bright spots for me is the quality of numerous Democratic candidates, who have largely refused to respond to nastiness in kind. If those civilized folks prevail, they’ll have their work cut out for them. But one thing they can do almost immediately is model civil and adult behavior for a country that is hungry for it.

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