Pray Tell: The Community of the Evangelical Trust

 

For those Americans in big and even medium sized cities, we find it hard to believe that so many people in more isolated areas cannot see through the anti-democratic and destructive impact of MAGA Trumpism. Yet throughout our history, religion (mostly Christianity) has provided the communal glue that has held us together. Religious minorities in Europe, from the Pilgrims to the Huguenots, came to this country in order to practice their faith. They formed communities shaped to support their beliefs. While most Americans think of the First Amendment as dealing primarily with free speech and assembly, its focus on freedom of religion was one of the most fundamental reasons so many European residents fled to the colonies in the Americas. Europe had spent centuries embroiled in brutal religious wars.

Just like the cities and towns in the Spanish and Portuguese parts of the Americas, built around central town squares dominated by Roman Catholic cathedrals, colonial America was dotted with churches, which any drive-around in New England, for example, illustrates. Churches were and continue to be the gathering places, particularly in rural areas, where Americans met/meet, worshipped, shared their vision of community, met their future spouses, shared news and information and socialized, often in church-sponsored social events. Religious doctrine was the glue that bound them together, and churches were the venues where their values and information were shaped. As the Salem Witch Trials point out, it wasn’t always a bed of roses and goodness, even in the beginning.

The Christina faith is anchored in the belief in a single God, ironically represented by a Holy Trinity, a notion of absolutism in the definition between good and evil, and “them” vs “us.” We justified slavery and conquest of non-white, non-Christian peoples by dehumanizing non-Christians… “heathens” with a need to “civilize” them, the very notion of noblesse oblige. Fear was a major component in many religious communities (think “God-fearing Christians” as the architype of a good and moral individual), and good Christians were used to following orders from the top. For rural Americans, the church was their primary connection to “others.”

While in the longer run, the invasion of MAGA politics will probably be the greatest source of the unraveling of evangelical power, in the present, it represents a group whose very connective tissue, whose values and expectations, are severely threatened by secular liberalism, the rise of non-traditional white European immigrants with very different values, histories and communities, and the battle between “elitist” science and traditional teachings.

It is this history of simplistic values driven into young children as soon as they could talk, living in a cloistered community, with clear rules, definitions of good vs evil, and a history of deferring to leaders who led with the autocratic justification of their biblical interpretations. Yet it is hard to look at the above images without understand the soothing comfort, the connection with others, that this church centric reality has provided Americans for centuries. Compare that with the battle in big cities for good jobs, affordable housing, the traffic jams and lurches for seats on public transportation, fear of crime and the power of urban stress.

As Randall Balmer, who teaches religious studies at Dartmouth, points in his March 24th LA Times review Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, “Leaving Christian evangelicalism means sacrificing community and comfort. There are few smooth landings.” For those evangelicals who see the hypocrisy of judging others as sick or unworthy people – like LBGTQ+ or left-leaning Democrats – in a religion based on tolerance and acceptance, there is wave of sweeping disillusionment.

Balmer presents McCammon’s “definition of exvangelicals as individuals who (like her) were reared in evangelicalism but who have come to ‘deconstruct’ their faith because of ‘their disillusionment with Trumpism, anti-LGBT+ sentiment, racism, religious abuse, skepticism of science, and a host of other concerns about white evangelical beliefs and culture.’ Many were either homeschooled or students at Christian schools. Some have left the faith altogether or tried other expressions, such as Catholicism, mainline Protestantism or Orthodox churches; others persist in their efforts to reform evangelicalism…

“The ‘purity culture’ of evangelicalism demanded that women be demure, while young men were cast as warriors and defenders… ‘On our wedding night, we didn’t know how to have sex,’ one informant tells McCammon, who adds, ‘That experience is not unusual for young evangelicals who begin their honeymoons with little or no sexual experience, and, often, years of sexual shame.’

“Many exvangelicals testify to enduring religious trauma, some of it caused by corporal punishment or perhaps fear of the Rapture, the belief popular among evangelicals that Jesus will return soon to collect the faithful and those ‘left behind’ will face terrible judgment. One psychotherapist cataloged the symptoms of religious trauma as ‘anxiety and depression, chronic pain and intestinal symptoms, feelings of shame and a tendency toward social isolation.’…

“McCammon is especially effective at juxtaposing the condemnations of Bill Clinton’s philandering with full-throated defenses of Donald Trump’s sexual predations — the condemnations and the defenses coming from the same evangelical sources with no apparent self-awareness and no hint of irony. Even more devastating is the author’s examination of her Christian school textbooks and recollections of classroom conversations in those schools regarding slavery. One textbook conjured the halcyon days on the plantation — ‘Southern weather was warm and the slaves stayed healthy’ — and a student recalled his teacher’s remark that bondage ‘was a pretty good gig for them; they got free housing and all their meals were taken care of.’

“If historical accuracy and context are missing from these textbooks, however, those qualities are also lacking in McCammon’s narrative, although her missteps are not nearly so egregious. She talks about evangelicalism reaching its peak of influence ‘beginning in the late 1980s,’ ignoring the fact that evangelicals set the nation’s social and political agenda for much of the 19th century, especially in the years before the Civil War, albeit with very different sensibilities.

“The author might have explored how white evangelicalism was different before its hard-right turn in defense of racial segregation in the late 1970s. Might an understanding of evangelicalism’s generally laudable social agenda in centuries past — abolition, prison reform, public education, even women’s suffrage were all evangelical concerns — have provided McCammon and her compatriots with a standard to which they could appeal in their quest to reform their churches?”

This circling the wagons, reliance on a figure who appears a lot like the anti-Christ, and solace that results from the power of the evangelical community is increasingly an anachronistic value system that cannot last. But for those on the outside looking in, at the very least we need to try and understand the underlying issues, fears and the positive values that are also part of their lives… a part of the underlying foundation that defines America.

I’m Peter Dekom, and without an effort to understand and accept conflicting values on all side of these issues, the penalty is the end of the United States of America.