The Evangelicals are Hypocritical and They Don’t Care
One of the bigger stories in the news last week was about how Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council offered Trump a “mulligan” over his life and affair with Stormy Daniels. This caused millions of people to be offended by the sheer hypocrisy of the Evangelicals.
My view on this is a bit different. I think it is true that the “Moral Majority” is hypocritical, but it is also futile and useless to point out. One of the first political events I remember was the Republican Revolution in 1994. I was a freshman in high school at the time. People were call Evangelicals hypocrites back then too! Often by taking New Testament quotes and showing how contradictory they were to Republican policy. So the more things change, the more they stay the same. I even remember stories about Republicans getting high and mighty about Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky even as they hid their own extra-marital affairs.
The reason these stories are futile is that I don’t think Evangelicals really care if people are upset with them. I don’t think they care if a bunch of liberals view them as hypocrites. Evangelicals care about winning and to them winning means judges, judges, judges. Despite a few comedic missteps, Trump and company have been remaking the Judiciary at a rapid clip. Trump’s young appointees to the Courts of Appeal can stay on the bench for decades and significantly imperil future liberal legislation for just as long.
In some darkly utilitarian ways, I admire Evangelicals for their sheer ability to vote with strategy and tactics. The Left seems more inclined to take their toys and go home as soon as things don’t go their way 100 percent of the time. The left seems to like the idea of losing so much that they don’t understand when they are winning. To borrow from the Sex Pistols, the Evangelicals know what they want and they know how to get it. It doesn’t matter if they are getting old and dying. It doesn’t matter if they are sacrificing the future. They know what they need to do to stymie liberals in the long run and they are doing it. They don’t even pretend to hold their noses to vote for a vulgarian like Trump like some lefties needed to say they were “holding their nose” to vote for Hilary because she gave some speeches to Goldman at the going rate.
Why do people think calling out the Evangelicals for their hypocrisy is a great act? What purpose does it serve? As far as I can tell it serves none and they get their victories and we get a far-right Judiciary. The Evangelicals might be more diminished in 20 years but Trump’s appointees will still be on the Bench.
I would merely note that Evangelical Christians don’t only vote on the right. And I think the left movement within Evangelicalism, like the left movement within Mormonism, is growing.
That said, there are not only fundamentalists, but also more middle-of-the-road Evangelicals, who fit your description quite well, especially en masse.
Have you read FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America yet? It’s gotten a lot of really great reviews, but I’m holding off on it until I have some energy/time to dig in.Report
White Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Something like 80-83 percent of them.
The only other religious group to show that much loyalty to one candidate/party is Jews to the Democratic Party and there are much fewer of us than there are Evangelicals. Sure there are Jewish Republicans but they are a minority within a minority.Report
@saul-degraw It might be more useful, given their large numbers, to understand *why* that stubborn 16-24 percent (depending on the election) doesn’t vote Republican but continues to identify as Evangelical, and perhaps see what we can do to shore up their point-of-view in the internal debate and/or offer them fellowship outside it.Report
Well, I spent a fair part of my youth as an “evangelical”. At the time, in the 70’s, we understood the term to mean “not as crazy as the fundamentalists, but still really earnest about being faithful to the Lord”.
I can’t call myself an atheist these days, though I wouldn’t pass theological muster for most of my old comrades.
And I vote pretty solidly blue, too.Report
There is a big issue of definitions here, since there isn’t any consensus on what “Evangelical” means. Mixing historically black churches into the discussion, as the linked article does, further confuses the issue and is unhelpful.
Yes, there is a theological argument for including most historically black churches among Evangelicals, but when discussing politics, they are an entirely separate group. This can occasionally produce confusing results. The first go-around in Maryland on gay marriage lost, in part due to opposition from black churches. A lot of white liberals were nonplussed by this, not having a scorecard to correctly identify the players. But on the level of voting for candidates, conflating black and white Evangelicals is incoherent.
What about white Evangelicals? Take a look at patheos.com, at how it separates “Evangelical” and “Progressive Christian” bloggers. Many of the “Progressive Christian” bloggers self-identify as Evangelical, but Patheos doesn’t recognize this. In practice, the “Evangelical” category contains those who vote Republican and the “Progressive Christian” category those who vote Democratic. A person might self-identify as “Evangelical” while voting for the Democrat, but Patheos’s functional definition would disregard this self-identification. And so would many of those Evangelicals who vote Republican no matter what.Report
A fair question and I also respect how realist minded right-wing evangelicals are in their will to power. You have to hand it to them in their ability to disregard decades of moral grandstanding for victory where it counts.
But I also think the backlash against this current moment in evangelical politics is not going to be from the left (which was always against them). It will be in other Christian and religious communities that will see the abandonment of stated morals for what it is. Especially if Trump and the Republicans fail to win elections going forward, there will be some reflection by the those wishing to see moral character as a key element of an elected offical.Report
Talks about 1994… talks about the hypocrisy of the Republicans in taking on Clinton… talks about the will to power of the Republicans in doing so…
Huh. Nothing that I kinda expected might show up when discussing those topics and the nature of the will to power’s willingness to abandon previously championed principles… huh.
Anyway, I still think it’s interesting that Bob Livingston was deliberately dropped as Speaker due to his extramarital affairs (notice the plural!) and he, instead, retired… And they went with Dennis Hastert because they wanted someone unimpeachable.Report
Just yesterday aging standard bearer Hillary Clinton praised the young lady one of her campaign advisers sexually harassed for speaking up about that incident and she encouraged other women to speak up too! Their voices need to be heard, she said. But apparently Hillary didn’t think that woman – or anyone else – needed to hear her explain why she didn’t fire the guy even tho her campaign director advised that she do so.
Oh well.
More to the point, evangelical voters need to look in their own hearts about the choices they make. I mean, the religious *leaders* publicly defending Trump are all grifters on the take anyway, so what’s a little more hypocrisy thrown into the mix?Report
She also read an excerpt of Fire and Fury at the Grammys.Report
Someone* apparently thinks that what the Dems need right now to really get the electoral juices flowing into a House flipping 2018 wave is Hillary Clinton bashing Donald Trump on the national stage.
*HillaryReport
Oh, we all think that too- Its just that only Hillary thinks the bashing should be figurative.Report
Wait…why was Hillary Clinton at the Grammys? Did Chelsea have a baby?Report
Here’s what needs to *REALLY* freak you out:
I was not making that up.Report
Lucky that one didn’t fall apart until decades later.Report
Everyone is a hypocrite. Every last one of us. That’s because of how our brains work. We are, first and foremost, driven by emotion, by feeling, by tribal instincts. The tendency to group people into Us and Them is etched deep on our souls. The evidence for this is in the action of oxytocin, among other things. It makes us more altruistic, more helpful, more generous to those we classify as “us” and more aggressive, more harmful, more mean to those we classify as “them”.
And because we wish different things for Us as opposed to Them, that ends up as what we might call hypocrisy, but often seems to others of the same group as loyalty.
What is happening is our national identity is falling apart, in part because we can’t agree on a “them” against which to define an “us”.
I have no solution to this problem.Report
Given that the definitions of “them” and “us” breaking down along national lines often leads to very, very bad consequences, it’s not clear to me that this is that bad a deal. I’ll take internal bickering over actual war any day.Report
I acknowledge the point. Scapegoating happens under hard times, not under good times. But with internal dissension its easy for others to take advantage, make things worse, and get away with stuff. That includes other national actors (not all countries are our friends) and corporate actors and just powerful individuals.Report
The point in bringing it up isn’t to convince them that they’re wrong. Evangelicals (censored by maribou – we’re not in the business of calling any group of religious believers names, Sam, and you know it) than anything bordering on substantive, meaningful belief. The idea is picking off those who had been convinced of Evangelical sincerity, something that obviously isn’t true.Report
@sam-wilkinson See my note above. Also on a personal note, when you say what you said, you are talking about my mother-in-law, about whom it is not accurate – and I don’t think it really gets more uncivil than calling people’s moms names.
I’ll allow “hypocrite / hypocritical” for a number of reasons, but mostly because as Doctor Jay says, aren’t we all? That doesn’t mean this post is therefore open season on Evangelicals.Report
Doesn’t he get a mulligan?Report
@chip-daniels, if he’d like me to delete the comment entirely, and then have another go at it without calling my mother-in-law names, he’s more than welcome.
I’m not making him any stew though.Report
Then can I have one?Report
@maribou We should change that rule when voluntarily taken actions warrant it. Nobody forced these Evangelicals to lie. They chose to do so for decades. That’s on them.Report
I always thought that judging ones political enemies by your interpretations of their views was one of the silliest stances politically. You are always going to miss the essential truth of them while you fixate on the hypocrisy that is soooooo apparent in your non-believer eyes.Report
It seems like evangelicals have been telling us exactly about their views for 30+ years now. They have been telling us what The Truth is so i think we have some idea what they think.Report
Oh, I understand that, but what gets lost in translation is how to get from point A (here and now) to point B (what they want). The old saying in pool is “if you aren’t shooting, you aren’t winning.”
.
Trump lets them shoot.Report
Well yeah of course. They want power. That’s always been clear. They’ll go with anyone who gives it to them despite any pretty words they might utter about standards, personal morality, Bible blah blah blah, etc. Plenty of them were fine with going full birther or suggesting Obama was actually Satan. But to their credit i’m sure they believed he really Satan.Report
@aaron-david Is there some other way to judge them that you recommend? I can think of a few I prefer to by my interpretations of their views, on the whole:
a) by their actions / by the effect their political choices have on you and you’rn (however your’n may be defined)
b) by their interpretations of your views, and how unfair/ridiculous those seem
c) aesthetically (not proud of that one, necessarily, but it’s true that I prefer it)
d) individually and contingently
But I suspect all four are still, on some level, filtered through my interpretations of their views, at the end of the day, because how else am I to perceive them? Not sure how I would ever get away from that (though obviously there are degrees of effort being put into the accuracy of one’s interpretations). That’s actually part of why I try to judge people (rather than actions) as little as I can get away with.
Curious as to your thoughts though.Report
Judge them like Camus.Report
I’ve never seen such a thing. Do any undergraduates have to do their own work and thinking anymore?Report
This was pretty much the comment that I wanted to make as I started reading the original piece. But I ended up agreeing with most everything that Saul wrote.
Accusing someone of hypocrisy is about the least interesting political argument that one can make. And that’s because, as @aaron-david points out, it’s mostly about one person judging other people’s beliefs by the accuser’s interpretations rather than any good faith effort to parse the arguments. What you generally get is some form of if those people really believed X, then they would (insert some form of reductio absurdum) or if those people really believed X, then they would (insert some set of beliefs more palatable to the speaker).
And it’s not that Evangelicals are not hypocrites. Of course they are. Almost everyone is a hypocrite by the right standards. Hypocrisy is just such a common term that you’re better off zeroing it out from the equation and dealing with the beliefs themselves.Report
Perhaps the tactic is to demand such groups actually state their beliefs:
“You’ve previously said that hurricanes and earthquakes were God’s punishment for sexual deviancy. Now you’re offering Trump a mulligan for an extramarital affair. How do you define “sexual deviancy” and why?”Report
I don’t think that you’re going to have much luck with that.
In my experience, there are two types of religious fundamentalists. There are those who say, “As an Evangelical Christian/Orthodox Jew/Devout Muslim, I believe X and I choose to live my life in accordance with the principles of X.” And there are those who say “X is the word of God and all should be made to submit to it.”
There is no conversation with either of those groups that gets you where you want to be with that question.Report
“I believe these propositions strongly and that is why I must change my life!” is something that pretty much everyone can respect.
“I believe these propositions strongly and that is why you must change your life!” is worthy of a gigglesnort.Report
I agree and that speaks to my point. There is no reason to demand answers from the first group and there is no point to trying to demand them from the latter.
So instead, why not just take people at their word. Personally, I don’t need to confront Evangelicals to simply oppose them when they try to assert their will on other people. There is no efficacy in the confrontation. The only reason people do it is for the sport.Report
What percentage of evangelicals do you think believe unambiguously that hurricanes and earthquakes are God’s punishment for sexual deviancy? What percentage of evangelicals do you think are offering Trump a mulligan for an extramarital affair unambiguously?Report
Unclear on the former.
It seems like substantial majorities of conservative Evangelicals are doing the latter.Report
So we’re accusing people of holding half a hypocrisy.Report
Possibly.
Like I suggested elsewhere, the alleged policy rationales for opposing gay rights, birth control, and even abortion funding, provide a much stronger basis for charges of hypocrisy.Report
@pinky
That’s one of those questions where no answer makes them look good.
If they believe that gay sex causes hurricanes, they look sincere, but sincerely loony.
If they don’t believe it, but say it anyway, they look insincere, and cravenly invoking God’s name to score points.Report
Hey, as long as I’m internally consistent, I don’t give a damn. I hold every hypocrite the the same standard, ie I’m not voting for you. It’s one reason I grew tired of politics–there wasn’t anyone to vote for. 🙂Report
Everyone thinks that his side is purists and the other side is more pragmatic. That’s because we’re convinced our side is right, and how is it possible that we don’t win all the time? We must be sabotaging ourselves. We also think that our side is reasonable, so we’re not demanding ideological purity when we ask for candidates who agree with us on every major issue.Report
Jonathan Bernstein calls this the Iron Law Of Politics. Still, I think Saul has a point about the American Left. The American Right felt that the Republicans became a me-too Democratic Party Light during the mid-20th century. Rather than go off into their own little corner, they slowly over decades remade the Republican Party into their image of what a conservative party should be. The American Left decided to generally reject electoral politics, especially in the intra-party level, and focus on protest politics, NPO work, or think tank work while decrying how useless the Democratic Party is.Report
Eh, it seems to cycle. It gets worst when there’s been a Democratic President in office for 8 years. Nader in 2000, Bernie in 2016, like clock work.Report
I think what Lee is talking about has a decades long history. The farther reaches of the left have always had a lukewarm relationship with the Democratic Party at best and a hatred of it at worse. This goes back to the late-19th/early-20th century (and with good reason).
The Far Right used to hate the Republican Party but instead of forming counter-parties, they just embarked on a decades long project to take it over and succeeded. The predecessors of the Evangelicals (The Old Christian Right) did not like or trust the Republican Party but they worked within it.
Despite Aaron’s skepticism, there are lots of Lefties who dislike the Democrtatic Party.
The big issue here is money. Real serious lefties tend not to have much of it and are suspicious of allies with money.* Righties have always had a millionaire and billionaire support network to fund them. Look at how many right-wing thinkers exist on billionaire dollars. Lefty shows tend to exist on support of lots of contributors and mainly without little money. Amy Goodman does okay but she is an exception rather than a rule.
*I once worked as an independent contractor for a left-wing radio network that was going through severe budget issues and relied solely on individual donors. There was a faction that wanted to start looking more to grants for funding but they were actively opposed by the other faction who thought that grants would equal a lose of independence in voice and being able to speak truth to power. They also had a listenership of aging and dying 60s radicals hold-outs. There was one guy on the board with lots of money that he gave to the station but I think a lot of the other lefties didn’t trust him because he knew how to succeed in the world of business.Report
Well yeah Aaron, Pinky and right wingers in general tend to sew the far left onto the Dems and liberals the way the far right has grafted itself onto the GOP and conservatives. I used to think that it was just a strategy, certainly in the 90’s and the early aughts you could sort of see the cynical smirk on the faces of the main stream conservatives peddling that line but it has gone away. Between the professional nut farming of the right wing press, the general rotting away of main stream conservativism and the astonishing disemboweling of republican libertarianism when Trump arose I am pretty sure most conservatives/right wing folks sincerely believe it’s true now.Report
Wait, left-leaning libertarians are the right wing now?*
That said, I do think that the far left has as much hold on the D’s as the far right does on the R’s. It’s just easier to see it on the other side than one’s own.
In other words, the other side alwaaaaaays looks crazier than your own side (and yes, I do know how kooky most libertarians are.)
*Yes, I am left leaning, not surprising considering I was a D.Report
Everyone knows the subtle distinctions and arguments among the groups that lean is his direction. On the other hand, his opponents all look the same from so far away.Report
It isn’t just the evangelicals.
All the Christian faiths are having a quiet existential crisis, where they struggle to craft a narrative that is persuasive in creating meaning.
When any institution loses its defining narrative of why it exists, it degenerates into a racket of grifters and zealots.
I admit to an ambivalence at this. Part of me feels sorrow, grieving for the loss of what could be a wonderful and life affirming institution. But another thinks that maybe this is what needs to happen when there is a seismic shift in how people find transcendence and meaning, that the old ones die away and something new takes their place.Report
As I’ve said before, you could say that about Christianity at any point in history. It never gets the message. It was supposed to have lost to Lenin, and Darwin before him, and the French Revolution before that.Report
No, you really couldn’t.
For all the huffing and puffing of Marxists, the number of religious faithful didn’t decline much. Churches didn’t see a decline after Darwin or Galileo or even Martin Luther.
I’m partial to Phyllis Tickle’s theory of the 500 year cycle of death and renewal of faith.
And who knows?
I could be way off base, maybe the Millenials and Gen Z kids will stream back into churches any day now.
But I doubt it, because the traditions and customs and rituals and sacred talismans that meant so much to the older generations, are alien now to young people.
So even if young people feel that instinctive tug of desire for transcendent meaning of life (and I believe they will), will the Rosary for example, be the thing they turn to? Will the Book of Common Prayer seem relevant and meaningful?
Whatever follows (and I do believe that something will follow) it will be different.Report
Christianity is always on the ropes somewhere, and often has been on the ropes across the board. If it were just about familiarity with the customs and rituals, then Christianity wouldn’t have survived the fall of Jerusalem or the Germanic invasions, and it wouldn’t have ever had missionary successes. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the current younger generation in the US, but that’s a provincial question compared to the whole history of Christianity.Report
As for Tickle, her theory doesn’t pass even a brief look. The Great Schism was the result of a multi-century process, and didn’t really affect the identity of either the Eastern or Western churches, only their relationship with each other. The 300’s were more revolutionary, with the Arian heresy. In fact, just for kicks, you could do an every-five-hundred-years mapping from the 300’s and create a theory that’s arguably a better fit. The 800’s saw the rise of monasticism and the Holy Roman Empire, both of which revolutionized Christian Europe. The 1300’s saw the revolution of Aristotelian thought in theology and the birth of science. The 1800’s as I noted saw the emergence of a viable atheistic view of the world via Marx, Darwin, and later Freud.Report
I think that the social institution of churches was quite valuable, creating ties within a community that existed separately from economic activity.
We need new institutions that fill this role and have a reasonable level of good faith, as opposed to the grifters and zealots you rightly mention.Report
During the period before Prohibition, there were certain Drys that were willing to work with Wet politicians as long as the Wet politicians enacted Dry legislation. Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League was infamous for this. There was a big debate among Drys about this but in the end working with Wet politicians made Prohibition come later than sooner. The modern Evangelicals are similar. They know that working with morally compromised politicians is the only way to get what they want and that is what they are going to do.
The Left doesn’t like working with morally compromised politicians. They don’t even like it when politicians do a bit of basking in voter approval love like Corey Booker. They want and kind of need a parliament of saints because their ideal politician is a morally effacing sort that does the right thing because it is the right thing. They don’t any politician to take any glory in it either. Not even emotional satisfaction is permitted.Report
“The Left doesn’t like working with morally compromised politicians.” I don’t understand what you mean by that.Report
They prefer politicians like Obama and, before him, Jimmy Carter.Report
@pinky @jaybird
I think if both of you read that sentence in the light of Lee’s statement above that reads (in part)
” The American Right felt that the Republicans became a me-too Democratic Party Light during the mid-20th century. Rather than go off into their own little corner, they slowly over decades remade the Republican Party into their image of what a conservative party should be. The American Left decided to generally reject electoral politics, especially in the intra-party level, and focus on protest politics, NPO work, or think tank work while decrying how useless the Democratic Party is.”
you’ll understand his point better. As well as to whom he is referring when he says “the Left” in the sentence Pinky quoted.Report
I’m not sure that the whole Wet/Dry thing worked within a left/right framework.
It seems more that the Drys were single issue voters with the single issue turned up to 11.
Wets had elbow room to talk about beer vs. wine vs. hard liquor and moderation vs. drunkenness and attitudes toward pubs vs. private drinking… and the Drys could just talk about the evils of alcohol.
If you were a Wet who opposed bars and thought that wine was as high-proof as anybody needed… you were a Wet.Report
I think the Wet fault lines were between beer/wine faction on one side and the hard liquor people on the other. During the Dry years, the call was to allow for beer and light wines but continue to disallow liquor and spirits.Report
“The Left doesn’t like working with morally compromised politicians.”
Bill Clinton smiles.Report
The Left didn’t like working with Bill Clinton. At all.
For all that it was a different world in the ’90s, there were a ton of people on the left who were furious about his crime bill, welfare reform, and the various bits of ground he gave in the culture wars, especially on gay rights. This burst back onto the scene in a lot of the Bernie v. Hillary wars, especially on the crime bill.Report
A lot of people on the left really loathe Bill Clinton.
The farther left does not trust the Democratic Party at all. The farther left goes for Jill Stein types. Maybe some of them “hold their nose” and vote Democratic from time to time but they would see me as a squish even if there are people on the right who see me as a radical leftie.Report
Color me skeptical. BC was all over the fundraising for HRC (not surprising, given his relationship) and was very much a behind-the-scenes player, getting the right people involved at the right times. The further left might not like him, but they aren’t putting up a big fight. Straight D’s of my age (gen x) remember the good times a little too well too put that aside.Report
So some of the more cynical Drys worked with the Wets to hasten… Prohibition? It was called the Noble Experiment; and like many experiments, it taught us valuable information, by failing. The main lesson learned was; don’t do Prohibition.
So, when Evangelicals vote for the orange conman, what informative failure are they building up to?Report
This is pretty important. Romans 12:2 is big with Evangelicals and not just the rightwing ones. Heck, I’m not even religious and I dig it:
Lots of very religious people try to cultivate a certain apartness from the dominant culture and this is something that the non-religious often like to mock. But in a world where so many people spend so much time signalling how with it they are and are tripping over themselves to show how they conform to the latest definition of wokeness, not caring what people say about you on the internet could very well become a superpower.Report
This seems hypocritical to you because you’re taking them at their word that religion qua religion is their motivation. It’s not. It’s really just a tribal marker like a particular face paint. Or, for that matter, circumcision or a yarmulke.
People truly motivated by a Christian faith look more like Pope Francis. Yes, they’re anti-abortion, but they’re also against the death penalty and avoidable war. They’re the ones offering sanctuary to unauthorized immigrants rather than demonizing them. That’s what “pro-life” means to them. I’m an atheist and I have my disagreements with them but I can respect their position nonetheless.Report
Here’s a tangetial question for the legal beagles around here, one that I thought of a couple weeks ago, but seems close enough to this post’s topic (and one of yesterday’s links) to post it.
Clearly, it’s illegal to refuse to hire someone because they say they’re an evangelical Christian (or any other religion)
But, is it legal for an organization to refuse to hire people that have graduated from a specific, singular university?
I.e. can the federal government, or a private employer, (if that answer is different) refuse to hire anyone with a degree from Liberty University on their resume?
(and then I guess the question is can someone terminate a employee if they didn’t disclose that fact on their job application?)Report
That’s an interesting question! I can making a case where excluding someone from a certain class of university could be circumstantial evidence of religious discrimination. It might be hardest for Evangelicals because a lot of private universities are still Protestant in name if not in spirit. Suppose that employer can point to their Kenyon-alum employees (Episcopal), Earlham College alum employees (Quakers), American U alums (still technically Methodist), etc?
But if you can show that they had a pattern and practice of not hiring people from Catholic affiliated universities and/or Jewish affiliated universities, you could have an interesting case.Report
I would guess not hiring from a group of universities all with a common denominational affilitation would cross the line. But a blacklist of a single university I think it would be different. (not to say its a good idea policywise. But obviously the reverse is true, in that certain administrations have a hiring preference for a certain university or two)Report
@kolohe
Lots of employers blacklist a huge chunk of universities. How many brass ring jobs basically require a degree from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Princeton? There might be exceptions here and there but I bet the HYPS career fairs have employers that won’t show up at any other university in the United States.
But if you blacklist Liberty but hire from Wheaton, you are probably fine.Report
@kolohe Hm, I think if that one university was Brigham Young, you might have a case…Report
I would be a lot more willing to dismiss the apparent hypocrisy of conservative Evangelicals if they hadn’t spent roughly the entirety of my adult life arguing that one of the most important things a society can do is make ostentatious public judgements of other people’s sexual and romantic lives. That was, in fact, the most common public policy rationale that they offered for trying to block gay marriage, criminalizing homosexuality [1], and, well, pretty much every other attack on gay rights they made.
It doesn’t particularly matter, or surprise me all that much if they hold politicians on Team Red to a lower standard than politicians on Team Blue.
But their hypocrisy here goes way beyond that. We’re supposed to wink and nod about a Team Red candidate for office molesting teen girls, but if two dudes want to get married it risks sending our country into a moral abyss?
Fuck. That.
[1] Which remained illegal in much of the country until 2003.Report
Constantine and Clovis were much worse people than Trump. They’re still far more important people in the history of Christianity than most of the saints.Report
Dog bites man.
These guys are Christians in name only. They are single issue voters, and, dare I say it, would elect Hitler if he promised to seat judges who promised to overturn Roe v. Wade.Report
@slade-the-leveller Since you aren’t talking about having lots of guns in the same context, and it’s inarguably hyperbole and not surrounded by an infuriated and personal-insult-spitting rage spiral, you can dare to say it. I don’t like it, I think you are better than making such petty sideways digs at me, but that’s not really a moderator problem. Plus it’s entirely possible that you weren’t even doing that and I’m over-assuming, so basically I won’t be thinking about it at all within 90 seconds of hitting post on this comment.
If you go on to clarify that you meant ALL evangelicals rather than the particular group of them that I assume you are talking about, and that Saul is describing in the OP, I’ll probably take umbrage, but probably within a range of responses that you would shrug off, annoyed, rather than being deeply upset by (depending of course on how you worded the clarification, but I can’t imagine you doing so in any way that would cause me some major issue). cf when Sam said what he said about them upthread.Report
@maribou
Since Saul is referencing the 81% of evangelicals who voted for Trump, I think it’s pretty fair to use a broad brush.Report
@slade-the-leveller 1) That’s 81 percent of *white* evangelicals, as someone rightfully pointed out to me above, it’s hardly fair to black evangelicals to lump them in; 2) that leaves 19 percent (including my mother-in-law) who wouldn’t. Given that those folks are specifically resisting strong cultural push to vote one way, to do something else, again, it hardly seems like a fair claim. There are enough white evangelicals that 19 percent of them is still several million people. Why accuse several million people of something they wouldn’t do?Report
According to this survey blacks make up 6% of Evangelical Protestants.
As for the 19% of white evangelicals who didn’t vote for Trump, good for them! I will rescind my tarring of them and be satisfied with the 81% I can get. It’s a good percentage, and the overall hypocrisy stands.
Keep in mind this statistic: …Moore, a former state Supreme Court justice, won white evangelicals by 62 percentage points….This tells the tale.Report