Search for "evangelical left"

Will Trump’s Weakness Threaten White Evangelical Support?

By Kristin Kobes Du Mez

…Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism. In the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals insisted that strong, patriarchal authority would defend families against the incursions of feminism and the nation against the communist threat. Moreover, an assertion of white masculine authority was at the heart of “law-and-order politics” championed by conservatives who opposed civil rights and other disruptions to th…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…including regular church attendance, clearly many Americans call themselves evangelical because they subscribe to or at least identify with evangelical theology. And when they make it to a church on Sunday, they choose an evangelical one to attend. How else should they be seen but as evangelicals? The majority of evangelical voters are not supporting Trump, it’s true. But plenty of them by any measure are. If evangelical leaders really want to def…

What’s Wrong with Taming the Tongue? ‘Gossip’ and the Limits of Evangelical Abuse Prevention Efforts

By Chrissy Stroop

…f, in his view, is one of the root causes of the pervasiveness of abuse in evangelical environments, and most evangelicals are simply unwilling to face that fact. “It is evangelical theology and their concept of power that holds evangelicals back from addressing abuse,” Stollar maintains. “Evangelicals believe in divinely established hierarchies, and abuse thrives in hierarchical environments.” To riff on a parable from the Sermon on the Mount, mo…

A Pair of Christian Colleges Quietly Cracking Down on LGBTQ Acceptance

By Chrissy Stroop

…een pursuing investigative journalism into the discriminatory practices of evangelical colleges and universities. I published my first exposé of evangelical colleges and universities with RD in early 2016, documenting a conservative crackdown in evangelical institutions, including Gordon College and Asbury University, that I associated with backlash against LGBTQ civil rights gains that were made during Barack Obama’s presidency. I noted that Gord…

At This Week’s Meeting, Will SBC Vote For Voddie Baucham, The Homeschooling ‘Star’ Who Embraces the Right Wing Theology at the Heart of the Abuse Scandal?

By R.L. Stollar

…here, Baucham is well-known as a social and political extremist, for which evangelical homeschoolers love him. At majority-white evangelical homeschooling events, Baucham is often the token Black conservative sanctioning the white supremacy and Christian Nationalism ubiquitous in the community. Voddie Baucham and evangelical homeschooling To better understand Baucham, we should first turn to his history in evangelical homeschooling. Among homescho…

Why The Religious Left Isn’t Coming Together, and Why It Matters

By Daniel Schultz

…o organized liberal counterpart to the Religious Right because the secular left doesn’t need them. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. A distinctive feature of conservative Christianity—certainly with evangelicals, a little less so with Catholics—is the tendency to live within a subculture. There are distinct schools, media, pop culture, customs, behaviors, assumptions. That makes it much easier to organize a coherent political movement…

Journalistic Blind Spots and the “Centrist-to-Liberal” Christian

By Mark Hulsether

…st, pundits oversimplify the range of Christian voices, from the religious left, through evangelical and Golden Rule centrists, to a right that has garnered disproportionate attention. Second, we do not simply need to move our spotlight from the right to the center of the evangelical world, but pay attention to the entire religious spectrum. We can pull our focus back to the whole, or zero in on any part. Which voices have the most valuable things…

I’m Not Here to Fix Evangelicals, But to Show Them Who They Are: An Interview With the Author of ‘White Evangelical Racism’

By Chrissy Stroop

…pleasant history obscures the real issue of racism that is foundational to evangelicals. There are evangelicals of color who bear the brunt of racism within denominations and churches. It’s time to tell the truth about that. Moreover, evangelicals need to come clean about the fact that their theology doesn’t matter to them or anyone else when it comes to voting or upholding moral values. It’s about authority and power. So leaning on biblicism or t…

Why ‘Respectable’ Evangelicals Can’t Rein in Evangelical Conspiracy Theorists

By Chrissy Stroop

…alternative facts.” French’s hypocrisy in this regard is glaring. As an ex-evangelical commentator on religion and politics, watching evangelical critics of Donald Trump twist themselves into contortions in attempts to explain and exhort their coreligionists has been one of the stranger phenomena of this nightmarish presidential term. We’ve seen the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, Russell Moore, forced to apologize for…

New Book on Trump and Evangelicals Gets it Mostly Right

By Greg Carey

…al? And by embracing prominent evangelical leaders, whom Fea labels “court evangelicals,” Trump assuages evangelicals’ gaping wound—disenfranchisement—by granting them access to power. Readers will come away with a nuanced appreciation for fear, nostalgia, and power as fundamental elements of evangelical discourse. But there are other ways to tell the story. Fea repeatedly calls Trump a “strongman,” suggesting the threat of authoritarianism. Perha…