December 22, 2020
nATIONALISM IS ANTI-cHRISTIAN:
Why Do They Hate Us?: Race, Christian nationalism, and white Evangelical alienation from America (David French, Dec 20, 2020, The Dispatch)
But there's also a less comforting--and also quite true--answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" There is a growing cultural divide between white Evangelical America and much of the rest of the nation that has nothing to do with Christian faithfulness.
No, I'm not talking primarily about Donald Trump. Support for the president is a symptom, not the disease. Instead, I'm talking about race, immigration, history, and the vast and growing gulf between white Evangelicals and the rest of the United States on issues that dominate so many American hearts.
Last month, the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture published a report called Democracy in Dark Times that was designed to take a deeper look at the different beliefs and motivations of red and blue America. Its findings regarding white Evangelicals were startling. Evangelicals, it said, were emerging as the "cultural other":
The cultural other is an individual or, more than likely, an entire group, whose beliefs and practices place them outside of "normal" or "acceptable" society. Their way of thinking and of life offends the sensibilities and ideals of the dominant group, and in this sense, they are stigmatized in the extreme. As such, the cultural other is regarded as not just outside of the in-group, but so far outside that their very presence represents a profound ethical violation that might even be experienced as repugnant to those who are not part of it. This would now seem to be how many people outside of Evangelicalism have come to think about the modern-day Evangelical movement and those who comprise it.
The authors--James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman, and Kyle Puetz--recognize that theological and philosophical differences explain part of the divide, but so does politics:
On theological and philosophical grounds alone, Evangelicalism today finds itself outside of the mainstream of the contemporary world. But the more political power the Evangelical movement has sought to wield, and the more the Evangelical movement has aligned itself with the politics and practices of the political Right, the more its reputation has been diminished.
So far, many conservative Evangelicals would nod along. "Tell us something we don't know," they'd say. "We're remaining biblically faithful in an increasingly unfaithful world. Of course secular America won't like us."
But wait. What does the data say regarding America's widest gaps? Where is the gap between white Evangelicals and the rest of America particularly acute? On matters of race:
The widest divisions in America are, in fact, between White Evangelicals and the African American community as a whole. It is a racial chasm, to be sure, but one intensified and deepened by the particular character of conservative White Evangelicalism--a chasm not mirrored between Black Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals. This division is seen most sharply on those issues that specifically bear on African Americans and Hispanics as well.
The numbers are just immense.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 22, 2020 12:00 AM