Evangelicals, Individualism, and COVID Re-Open Protests
Brad discusses the correspondence between libertarian politics and evangelicalism. He points out that the stay at home orders undercut the central myth of both: working hard leads to God's favor and economic prosperity. The collective action of staying at home is, in this sense, a blow to core tenets of conservative and evangelical cultures.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi and I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and I'm gonna have, like I did last week, a shorter episode today just because we are working hard to curate our new series, A History of the Religious Right, since 1960.
And that will debut on May 26.
I will be here Friday with Dan for the Weekly Roundup, but for the moment I wanted to talk about Evangelicalism and Individualism, and I wanted to talk about that in the context of COVID-19.
I am, for the moment, living in my home state of California, and I know many people across the country envision California as a kind of bastion of Liberal politics and culture, and in many ways it is, but there are significant pockets of this state which have very long and wide conservative histories.
And that brings up something that happened yesterday.
Yesterday there were protests in Orange, which is in Orange County.
about 30 miles from LA, to reopen the state.
They were protest against Gavin Newsom's stay-at-home directives and protest against the need to keep the economy closed.
Now, something we're going to go into in our new series is just how Orange County, California, was in fact an epicenter for the conservative political and religious revolutions in the 60s and 70s that really have shaped the contemporary evangelical scene.
You'll be hearing more about this in our series, but for now I just wanted to say it might be surprising to you to see protests in California, a place that many have noticed.
Noticed has flattened the curve there have been significantly less deaths here than one might have thought when the pandemic started and in many ways governor governor Newsom and Other leaders of the state have been praised for their quick and decisive action.
However, not everyone is happy I think it is a small minority and the protesters have gained more attention than than their numbers might convey there were only about a hundred folks in orange, but Again, they were protesting the need to stay home, and this is not unlike protesters all over the country.
One of the things I wanted to get to here is that there is a thoroughgoing infusion of individualism and self-reliance in evangelical Christianity and in conservative politics in this country.
One of the central myths of both contemporary white evangelicalism and the GOP is a personal responsibility, libertarian approach to free market capitalism.
There's a myth that says if you're a responsible person, a hardworking person, then you will get ahead, then you will have a good life.
This corresponds to a brand of Christianity that says, if you are working hard and doing what God wants, then God will bless you.
Well, as we'll talk about in our series in the next month or so, this kind of gospel found a home in Orange County.
And so for me, when I saw the protests in Orange, I wasn't all that surprised.
This corresponds with the fact that evangelicals are more likely than any other religious group in the country to be defying stay-at-home orders in order to attend live church services.
So, Paul Jupe, who was a guest of our program and is one of the founders of Religion in Public, did some work with Ryan Burge, who has also been on the program, Yes, they do.
Evangelicals are more likely to report worshiping in person in states with no restrictions, as well as states with religious restrictions.
In both cases, almost a third of church-attending evangelicals reported attending worship in person.
In states with some religious restrictions, far fewer evangelicals report in-person worship, only 16%.
Evangelicals' behavior stands in contrast with non-evangelicals, among whom only about 10% report worshiping in-person and without much variation across levels of state restrictions.
So what Jupe really shows us here is that evangelicals are the group most likely to be defying the stay-at-home orders.
And as I pointed out, it did not surprise me that the protest yesterday was in Orange, which is in Orange County, and is a bastion of not only evangelicalism, but also a bastion of libertarian politics, going all the way back to the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and even prior to that.
This myth of personal responsibility, this libertarian ethos that if you're responsible and you do what God wants and you take care of yourself and your family, then you will be blessed, that myth has its legs taken out.
by the collective action of stay-at-home orders.
This may seem like an obvious point, friends, and I get that, but I think it's something that can be lost in all the hubbub and noise about the pandemic and plans to reopen and so on and so forth.
There's a very obvious point here.
If everyone is at home and that the staying at home is a collective action, we are all in this together, we are all suffering, then what it does is undercut the idea that if you work hard and you take care of yourself, then you will not suffer.
You will not be economically destitute.
You will not be out of luck when it comes time for rent.
The collective action of stay-at-home orders completely undermines the myth of hard work and bootstraps leading to prosperity.
I think that's a sort of on an instinctual level, something we should not miss here.
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