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May 10, 2022 - Straight White American Jesus
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The Orange Wave, Ep. 1: Oranges and Peanuts
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When you're in 8th grade, it can be hard to find ways to see your girlfriend outside of school, especially on a weeknight.
So when Kelly invited me to Wednesday night Bible study at Rose Drive Friends, I immediately said yes.
Listening to a Bible lesson was well worth it if we could sneak away for 10 minutes to make out in the field behind the church.
Plus, I knew a bunch of kids from school who went to this place.
Maybe it would be fun.
Roserye Friends Church is in Yerba Linda, a small enclave in the northern region of Orange County, California.
Other than being the birthplace of Richard Nixon, it is most commonly known as one of the towns that borders Anaheim, home of Disneyland and the Anaheim Angels of Major League Baseball.
Only 30 miles from L.A., it felt like a world away from both the glamour of Hollywood And the inner city streets, where riots erupted after the Rodney King police brutality trial in 1992.
Though Kelly dumped me soon thereafter, the youth group quickly became my second home.
Instead of stuffy adults, I met cool young leaders who had tattoos, were into Christian punk bands, and played the guitar.
They taught me how Jesus would forgive my sins and grant me eternal salvation.
They taught me that the answers to my existential crises about meaning and purpose lay in God's plan for my life.
They showed me that the Bible wasn't a boring ancient text, but a personal love letter from my Creator.
We did typical Southern California things.
Camping trips, beach days, and summer camp in the Sequoias.
We played paintball and captured the flag.
We sang songs, held our hands to the heavens, and thanked God for our anointing through His Son, Jesus Christ.
My conversion was extreme.
Up until April of 1995, I was an 8th grader who was living through the Grunge Revolution, proudly blasting Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the Smashing Pumpkins through my portable CD player.
One who was experimenting with drugs, sex, and vandalism.
Who had been suspended from school, and who had worried his parents by dressing rebelliously and dyeing his hair every color possible.
Soon after visiting Rose Drive, I became a bonafide Jesus freak.
My identity became wrapped in purity pledges, dedications and rededications of my life to my savior, and evangelism to the lost.
I traded childhood friends for a new flock at church.
Instead of sneaking behind the movie theater smoke pot, I stood in front of the theater, hoping to talk to anyone who passed by about their eternal destiny and God's plan for their life.
Becoming part of God's army in the youth group of Rose Drive French Church felt like discovering a hidden world, a realm that had existed right in front of me, but I had somehow missed or willfully ignored.
We fashioned ourselves as a chosen minority, living amidst the rebelliousness of a Southern California culture, given over to licentiousness.
I learned later that my conversion was not a random blip in the American spiritual marketplace.
had abandoned the faith of their forefathers for secular humanism and Darwin's theory of evolution.
At school we handed out pamphlets decrying the atrocities of abortion, and we always awaited the rapture with bated breath, sure that Jesus would return at any moment to take us home.
I learned later that my conversion was not a random blip in the American spiritual marketplace.
It was a result of a carefully crafted insurgence, a Christian culture machine operating across political, educational, and familial domains.
It wasn't until adulthood that I came to see how my story was part of a decades-long evangelical movement that took root in Southern California in the 1940s and 50s, and then shaped the state's, and the nation's, conservative politics for the next 75 years.
Standing in the youth room of a megachurch in the heart of Orange County, California, didn't make me an outlier in the evangelical universe.
I wasn't on the fringes of evangelical life.
I was at its center.
Welcome to The Orange Wave, a history of the religious right since 1960, a series a history of the religious right since 1960, a series by straight white American Jesus and written and produced by me, Bradley Onishi.
This series is an investigation into the history of the religious right, a modern political movement founded by evangelical Christians throughout the southern regions of the United States.
While we want to help you understand how and why white evangelicals voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump, our goals are a little bit bigger than that.
We want to help you understand the religious forces that shaped the 21st century GOP.
We want to provide insight into the theology, culture, and politics that anchor the Republican Party here and now.
While all of us are affected by national elections, we also confront the reach of the religious right in local politics.
Whether in debates over guns and safety at school board meetings, climate denial and QAnon conspiracies peddled by state representatives, or homophobic and transphobic policies put forth by city councils.
The coalition between Trump and white evangelicals is reflective of an expansive religious coalition that fuels these policies, conspiracies, and social movements.
Over the course of 10 episodes, we will dig into how the religious right has formed through megachurches, secret financial networks, Hollywood icons, cowboy masculinity, libertarian ideologies, and Christian nationalism.
Instead of simply trying to explain the affinity between Trump and white evangelicals, We will view Trump as the crest of a wave formed three quarters of a century ago by multiple currents and high-pressure systems.
One that originated in an unlikely place, Southern California.
Let's begin with a few definitions.
First, what is an evangelical?
Since we are doing history, I ask the historian.
Randall Balmer is a professor of religion at Dartmouth College and widely considered to be one of the leading historians of American evangelicalism.
Yeah, a lot of people try to make this terribly complicated, and I don't think it really is.
I use a three-part definition to describe an evangelical, somebody who takes the Bible very seriously as God's revelation to humanity, and for that reason is likely to approach it even literally.
There's a lot of talk about biblical literalism among evangelicals.
Observation over the last half century or so is that evangelicals engage in what I call the ruse of selective literalism, as does anybody else who reads the Bible.
Some people take different parts of the Bible literally and ignore others, but the central point here for characteristic number one is believing that the Bible is God's revelation to humanity.
A second characteristic of an evangelical is somebody who believes in the centrality of a conversion experience, or a born-again experience.
This, of course, comes from the third chapter of St. John in the New Testament when Nicodemus, the Jewish leader, visits Jesus by night to ask how he, Nicodemus, can enter the kingdom of heaven.
Nicodemus, or sorry, Jesus replies, you must be born again, or some translations have it, born from above.
And that's where the term born again comes from.
Evangelicals typically will be able to say, I was born again, I was saved, I was converted on June 17, 1982.
I was in the hospital, about to go in for surgery, was reading the Bible and gave my heart to Jesus, or was converted, born again, again, These are all synonymous terms.
The point of bringing that up is to say that it is very often a dateable experience, sometimes accompanied with emotion, sometimes not.
Billy Graham, for example, was afraid that his conversion experience wasn't valid because he wasn't emotional, as other people in the same gathering were, and he worried about that.
But it's a dateable experience, and it represents a transition from death to life, from hell to heaven.
So it's a turning toward, which is what conversion means, and this is the second characteristic of an evangelical.
And the third characteristic is an evangelical is somebody who takes seriously the mandate of what we call the Great Commission in the New Testament, where Jesus tells his followers to go out into all the world, preach the gospel, and baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Again, my observation over the last half century or so is that evangelicals talk about this a good bit more than they actually do it.
They tend to hire professionals to do it for them, missionaries or outreach pastors on megachurch staffs or something like that, evangelism ministers.
But I don't know many evangelicals who would deny that part of their mandate is to evangelize or to bring others into the faith.
So it's a three-part Trinitarian definition, taking the Bible seriously as God's revelation, centrality of conversion or born-again experience, and finally the impulse to bring others into the faith.
And just to give a sense, numbers Over the years, over the decades, the number or percentage of Americans who would fit into that definition has varied, I think, roughly from maybe 25 to 46 percent of the population, depending on the polling data.
I think it's probably safe to say that one-third of the population in the United States, and probably more extensively in North America, would fit into that definition, that three-part definition of evangelicalism.
Now that we have a basic idea of what defines evangelicalism, let's put down a baseline for the term religious right.
In Thy Kingdom Come, Balmer defines the religious right this way.
I generally agree with Balmer's definition, with one important caveat.
since the late 1970s have sought to exert their influence in political, cultural, and legal matters in its broadest construction.
I generally agree with Balmer's definition, with one important caveat.
The religious right formed earlier than the 1970s.
It formed in essence in the 1960s.
Though it has participated in and influenced by Roman Catholics, Mormons, and some conservative Jewish people, it has been principally formed and cultivated by white evangelicals.
We need to say that not all white evangelicals are part of the religious right.
20% of them did not vote for Donald Trump.
While it's hard to know the personal feelings and beliefs of each voter, they seem to represent a minority bloc that has not joined their evangelicalism with the right-wing politics of Trump and other far-right components of the Republican Party.
We also need to mention evangelicals of color.
In our recent work on evangelicals, immigration, and politics, Janelle Wong, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, has shown that while evangelicals of color maintain many of the same theological beliefs as their white evangelical brethren, they often have drastically different approaches to politics and contemporary issues, including they often have drastically different approaches to politics and contemporary issues, including refugee resettlement, immigration, income inequality, As I will make clear over the course of this series,
The religious right is a political marriage between certain forms of evangelicalism and far-right conservative political ideologies.
It emerged in the 1960s, but really became noticed in the 1980 presidential election when evangelicals supported Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter.
Evidence shows that the religious right is the most conservative voting bloc in the country when it comes to issues related to gender and sexuality.
This is clear from statements made by Jerry Falwell, a famous progenitor of the religious right,
The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this, and I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked, and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.
I really believe That the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face.
Members of the religious right are also more conservative than any other American when it comes to immigration.
This is clear through their support for President Trump's executive orders banning Muslims and other people from the country.
Here's Robert Jeffress, spiritual advisor to President Trump and pastor of a Dallas megachurch.
...is going to be temporary until we're able to vet these people more carefully, and I think you would agree with me that some people need more scrutiny than others.
Let's face it, a 25-year-old Muslim male trying to enter this country from Iraq ought to be looked at more carefully than an 85-year-old Episcopalian grandmother coming from Great Britain.
That only makes sense, and I think that's what the president is saying in this study.
Finally, members of the religious right score high on metrics of Christian nationalism.
They believe this country was founded for and by Christian people, and they want to maintain a hierarchy where white Christians are at the top of the social order.
This is clear in their attitudes towards religious minorities, especially Muslims.
Here's Jerry Falwell Jr.
speaking at a convocation for Liberty University, the largest evangelical school in the country where he is the president.
I've always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they go out there and kill us.
It is not the case that the religious right has become more extreme as the decades have passed.
It began in extremism and has stayed the course throughout the last 60 years.
Because white evangelicals have become so synonymous not only with the GOP, but also with President Trump, It's easy to think that the religious right is an extension of conservative Christian politics and culture throughout the story of the United States.
It's easy to go backward from the present to the Reagan era and assume that the religious right is a reflection of how American evangelicals have always approached politics and culture.
The story is more complicated than that.
Going back to the 19th century, evangelicals were not known as ultra-conservative political actors.
They were not the guardians of far-right policies on gender, race, or free market capitalism.
In fact, it was just the opposite.
Let's trace our story to the Second Great Awakening at the dawn of the 18th century.
From about 1795 to 1835, Meetings were held in small towns and large cities throughout the country, and the unique frontier institution known as the Camp Meeting began.
Many churches experienced a great increase in membership, particularly Methodists and Baptists.
Many churches experienced a great increase in membership, particularly Methodists and Baptists.
The Second Great Awakening made Evangelical Protestantism the most formidable subculture in 19th century America.
While not every American was converted at revivalist meetings, the movement's reverberation reached almost every level of the young country's politics and culture.
The Second Great Awakening combined personal conversion, the experience of being born again, with social reform and action.
The evangelical experience of personal religiosity went hand-in-hand with a mandate To make the world a more humane and livable place for all.
Here's how scholar Donald Scott summarizes the emphasis on conversion.
The core of 19th century evangelicalism was the experience of conversion.
What students need to understand is that conversion was an experience.
It was not simply something that people believed, though belief or faith was essential to it, but something that happened to them, a real, intensely emotional event they went through and experienced as a profound psychological transformation that left them with a fundamentally altered sense of self and identity as a new kind of Christian.
As they interpreted it, they had undergone spiritual rebirth, the death of an old self, and the birth of a new one that fundamentally transformed their sense of their relationship to the world.
The Second Great Awakening made soul winning the primary function of ministry, but its revivalist preachers also demanded that converts transform their redemption into action.
To Charles Grandison Finney, the most influential Great Awakening preacher, said that if Christians were united all over the world, the millennium might be brought about in three months.
Finney and other evangelicals believed that Christian reformers would establish a thousand-year reign of peace and justice on earth, at the end of which Christ would return.
Therefore, evangelical communities resolved to, quote, Make it the business of our life to do good and to glorify God and build up the Redeemer's kingdom in this fallen world.
This was manifest in work for the poor and the destitute.
For example, Dorothea Dix petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to improve, quote, the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast, those beings wretched in our prisons and more wretched in our almshouses.
The Second Great Awakening also fueled the women's rights movement.
Historian Nancy Hardesty explains it this way: "The 19th century American women's rights movement was deeply rooted in evangelical revivalism.
Its theology and practice motivated and equipped women and men to adopt a feminist ideology, to reject stereotyped sex roles, and to work for positive changes in marriage, church, society, and politics." As Hardesty observes as America entered the 19th century, socially concerned evangelicalism continued to flourish.
Evangelicals were often on the front lines of the fights for abolition, government regulation on business, and labor rights, not to mention women's suffrage.
Here's Randall Ballmer again, talking about how evangelical history informs his own politics as an evangelical.
I identify myself as a political liberal precisely because I'm an evangelical.
I don't understand how you could be anything other than that.
Jesus called on his followers to care for the least of these, to care for widows and orphans and visit the prisoners and take care of the sick.
And those in our present political landscape tend to line up toward the left of the political spectrum.
Frankly, I think the burden of proof in my judgment is on those who insist that they can be conservative and still cling to the evangelical gospel.
I think that's a tough argument, frankly, but I say that as someone who has studied and is certainly aware of the of the history of evangelicalism as it's unfolded in North America, and there I see a huge tradition of caring for the least of these, worrying about women's rights, for example, worrying about the rights of minorities.
Not that evangelicals have always done it perfectly, by no means at all have they done so, but to take one example, Charles Grandison Finney's Critique of Capitalism.
If you read about what Finney says about capitalism in the 19th century, he is blistering in his criticism.
He says, effectively, these are not his words, but he said that a businessman, a Christian businessman is an oxymoron because business necessarily Elevates avarice over altruism.
Again, this is not, those aren't his words, but that's his argument.
And he's unstinting in his criticism of predatory capitalism.
And this is a tradition that's been part of evangelicalism All the way into the 20th century.
Now, we've lost that.
Jerry Falwell says that capitalism is God's way of doing business, which is kind of hard for me to imagine, but that's how far we've fallen away from the standards of 19th century evangelicalism and the New Testament itself, in my judgment.
There certainly was a 20th century movement for progressive evangelicalism, even if it is often overshadowed now by more conservative forces from the religious right.
One of the momentous events of this movement was in 1973 in Chicago, where over 50 progressive evangelical leaders gathered The Chicago Declaration is striking for how it differs from the attitudes of the religious right in the contemporary political landscape.
Let me read you just a little bit.
We acknowledge that God requires justice, but we have not proclaimed or demonstrated his justice to an unjust American society.
We affirm that God abounds in mercy, In that he forgives all who repent and turn from their sins.
So we call our fellow evangelical Christians to demonstrate repentance in a Christian discipleship that confronts the social and political injustice of our nation.
We must attack the materialism of our culture and the maldistribution of the nation's wealth and services.
We acknowledge our Christian responsibilities of citizenship.
Therefore, we must challenge the misplaced trust of the nation.
economic and military might.
A proud trust that promotes a national pathology of war and violence which victimizes our neighbors at home and abroad.
We must resist the temptation to make the nation and its institutions objects of near religious loyalty.
We acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity, so we call both men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship.
Signed and formulated less than half a century ago.
The Chicago Declaration probably sounds like it comes from a different planet, or as if it's an artifact from an alternative history or a piece of historical fiction.
At the time, however, it signaled a budding movement, one that excited many young evangelicals, including Randall Ballmer.
It was a gathering, as you said, of 55 evangelical leaders, theologians, activists, people like Jim Wallace, people like Carl F.H.
Henry was there, a distinguished evangelical theologian.
A good number of African American evangelicals were at this gathering, and significantly, One of the signatories to the Chicago Declaration was an English professor at my little school, Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, Nancy Hardesty, who was an evangelical feminist, and she persuaded the group to insert into their declaration
In addition to their affirmations or reaffirmations of many of the principles of 19th century evangelicals, to reassert evangelical support for women's equality.
And again, if you look back into the 19th century, not only were evangelicals worried and active in issues such as abolition, but also prison reform.
The common school movement, public education as a way to lift those on the lower rungs of society into the middle class.
They also, the evangelicals of the 19th century, also were very much in support of women's equality, including voting rights, which was a radical idea in the 19th century.
And Nancy was able to persuade them at this gathering in November of 1973 to include a very strong statement on women's equality into the Chicago Declaration.
So in the early 1970s, there was this ferment of progressive evangelicalism.
Now, I won't pretend for a moment that this was a movement that commanded the allegiance of a majority of evangelicals.
That's certainly not the case.
Evangelicals had kind of been led toward the right by all sorts of things, beginning really with the New Deal and certainly with Billy Graham, And his Cold War sensibilities, which led him in turn to Richard Nixon and Graham with the force of his personality, brought a lot of evangelicals toward the right of the political spectrum.
But nevertheless, there was this remarkable statement in November of 1973 that reaffirmed the history of This is just a short commercial break to say that I have enjoyed tremendously putting together this series, The Orange Wave, a history of the religious right since 1960.
a lot of evangelicals, certainly young evangelicals at that time. - This is just a short commercial break to say that I have enjoyed tremendously putting together this series, The Orange Wave, a history of the religious right since 1960.
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If you don't believe me or Randall Balmer about the budding momentum of progressive evangelicalism in the 1970s, the only thing you have to do is look to the White House.
because in 1976, a progressive evangelical was elected President of the United States.
In this outward and physical ceremony, we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our nation.
As my high school teacher, Ms. Julia Coleman, used to say, we must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles. .
Here before me is a Bible used in the inauguration of our first president in 1789.
And I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me just a few years ago.
1976 was proclaimed by the national news media the year of the evangelical.
It was a time when many in the national press were becoming aware of the evangelical voting bloc and trying desperately to understand its theology and culture.
I often ask my students, who was the last evangelical president before George W. Bush?
They look at me quizzically and think back.
Maybe it was Bill Clinton or George Herbert Walker Bush or even Ronald Reagan.
After giving them a moment to think about it, I interject.
The last evangelical president was Jimmy Carter, and he was a Democrat.
They look at me shocked, because during their lifetime, evangelicals have been synonymous with the Republican Party.
Randall Ballmer wrote Redeemer, a biography of Jimmy Carter.
So here he is, one more time, talking about the former president's life, faith, and politics.
In Plains, Georgia, on October 1st, 1924, I grew up within the Southern Baptist tradition.
He's still a Southern Baptist, even though he has his lover's quarrel with the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention.
He was very much formed within that tradition, both in the home and at Plains Baptist Church, where he grew up.
He had a religious conversion experience at a young age, which is, again, one of the criteria for being evangelical.
His occurred, if I remember correctly, at about age 14.
He was baptized.
Again, Baptists believe in adult baptism rather than infant baptism.
But really, I think he's talking about one of the most formative moments for him was in In his childhood home, they had a little farmstead just outside of Plains, about three miles from Plains, Georgia.
And he grew up as playmates with African Americans and had thought nothing of it.
And he talks about one day, in fact, there's a little plaque at the Carter Farm in Archery, Georgia, where he grew up, that talks about this.
talks about one day, about the time that the three of them, this Jimmy and his two black playmates, reached puberty.
And they were going through a gate there on the farm.
And suddenly his black playmates opened the gate for him and had him go through the gate first.
And at the moment, at the time, he thought it was a prank.
They were going to trip him or something.
He was so stunned by this, but he later realized that his friends, his playmates, were beginning to bow to the exigencies of the Jim Crow South, even though up until that time they had been perfectly equal.
So this for Carter was a kind of defining moment and he realized that something's wrong about that.
I want to talk about his military career because he was an officer and he was incredibly successful.
He, you know, the Carter family ends up moving all over essentially during his 20s because he's in the military.
And yet, when his father dies, he very abruptly decides to leave the military and return home to Georgia and to take over the peanut farm.
This did not sit well in the Carter household, which you've outlined very well and maybe you'll talk about.
But I wonder if also you could just talk a little bit about his motivation for doing so.
Why did Jimmy Carter return home?
He returned home to be at the deathbed of his father.
His father, actually everybody in Jimmy Carter's family except for Jimmy Carter, was a smoker and they've all died of smoking related diseases.
So Carter's the only one, Jimmy Carter's the only one who has escaped that fate.
But his father was dying of cancer and
Ensign Carter went back to Plains to be at his father's bedside as he was dying, and this made a powerful impression upon him, because as he was there at the bedside, various people from the community would come in to pay their respects to Mr. Earl, as they called him, and to thank him for the various kindnesses that he had demonstrated toward them,
Very quietly in that community when he had extended credit at the Carter store for people who were facing financial When he provided new clothes for a family so they could attend their daughter's graduation and be proud of themselves for doing that sort of thing and as these stories began to mount and Jimmy Carter was profoundly affected by that.
And after his father died, he went back to his connected in New York where he was stationed along with Rosalind.
And inform Rosalind that they were moving back to Plains, Georgia.
And Rosalind was not amused by this at all.
She did not think this was a good idea.
She did not want to go back to Plains.
She enjoyed the life of a Navy wife, you know, seeing the world and being stationed in various places.
And as you said, Jimmy Carter had been quite successful in his Navy career as an officer.
And according to several sources, The long car trip from Schenectady, New York back to Plains, Georgia in southwestern Georgia transpired in almost total silence between these two very, very strong individuals, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.
Jimmy Carter gets back to Plains and he takes over the peanut business.
From his father and becomes a very successful businessman in so doing.
And this also allows Rosalind to emerge as a powerful figure.
She takes over the bookkeeping responsibilities and she becomes really a full partner of her husband, with her husband, in the peanut business.
And this kind of sets him up.
But it also makes him a fixture in the community.
And he runs for the school board.
He becomes aware of the huge disparity between African American schools and white schools in the school district.
And he begins to address that issue.
And then, of course, he becomes interested in politics.
On his 38th birthday, October 1st, 1962, he gets out of bed and he puts on his church clothes rather than his work clothes.
and informs Rosalind that he's going down to the county courthouse to file to run for the Georgia State Senate.
This is the first that Rosalind had heard about this.
I asked Mr. Carter about this, and he just, you know, all these decades later, he said, I can't believe I did that.
I just can't believe I did that.
When you compare Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump, the man who gained the support of 81% of white evangelicals in the 2016 election, The disparities are striking.
Jimmy Carter was born to a poor family in a tiny, tiny place in rural Georgia.
Donald Trump was born to a rich real estate magnate in New York City.
Jimmy Carter was a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical from the time he left the womb.
He was baptized as a teenager and committed himself to Jesus Christ.
Donald Trump rarely attended church and to this day is religiously illiterate.
Jimmy Carter joined the Navy, became an officer, went to Annapolis, and then on to many different stops around the country.
Donald Trump avoided the draft in Vietnam because he claimed he had bone spurs.
Jimmy Carter's father, Mr. Earl, as they called him, was for his time quite a progressive white southerner who helped out his community in ways that would only go noticed after his death.
Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, In 1963, Jimmy Carter ran to be part of the Georgia State Legislature, in part to prevent segregationists from shutting down Georgia schools after the 1954 Brown v. Board education decision.
In 1989, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Press, decrying the Central Park Five and calling for the death penalty.
Jimmy Carter built his presidential campaign off the conceptions of justice, inspired by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his friend Bob Dylan.
Donald Trump built his campaign on the passions of fear and anger, saying in his inaugural address that it was time for American carnage to end.
Jimmy Carter appointed more people of color and women to the federal judiciary than any other president before him.
Trump has employed open white nationalists in his cabinet, including Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
When Jimmy Carter became president, he put his peanut farm in a blind trust, giving up control of his financial portfolio.
As president, Trump has used his power to promote and grow his various businesses across the world.
When Jimmy Carter left the White House, he was badly in debt because those who had managed his blind trust had done so poorly.
When Donald Trump leaves the White House, There's a good chance he will be much richer than when he entered.
After leaving office, Jimmy Carter has, among other things, built 4,000 houses through programs related to Habitat for Humanity.
Throughout his lifetime, Trump has been a slumlord.
He's used his power and privilege to lord over an empire of hotels, casinos, and other businesses.
How did we go from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump?
How did evangelicals transform from progressive activists into the religious right?
How did the kingdom of God shift from a place of justice and equality to nationalism and xenophobia?
In order to answer these questions, we have to go back to Rose Drive Friends Church.
When I converted at 14, there was no mention of justice.
The gospel I accepted and then preached had nothing to do with building God's equal and inclusive community on earth.
At prayer meetings, we lifted up petitions for the military, for the president, and for American prosperity.
But never for peace, or for prisoners, or refugees.
Our faith was based on God's love, power, and mercy.
But it was also founded upon the principles of free market capitalism, American nationalism, and a patriarchal vision of sex, gender, and the family.
We didn't inherit these tenets from Christian brethren across the country.
We weren't copying what those in the Bible Belt or the Midwest had invented.
As evangelicals in Southern California, we were driving the Christian culture machine that wedded faith with conservative politics.
We were among the progenitors and purveyors of the religious right.
The Harvard historian Lisa McGurk says it best, Orange County was a real center and symbol of American conservatism in the 1960s.
Its conservative movement was the nucleus of a broader conservative matrix evolving in the Sunbelt and West that eventually propelled assertive and unapologetic conservatives to national prominence.
Far outside the boundaries of respectable politics, in the early 1960s, the right expanded its influence on the national scene, and eventually bolted to national power with the Reagan landslide of 1980.
of 1980.
If we want to understand how evangelicals became the most conservative voting bloc in the country, if we want to understand why the most traditional religious people in America voted for and continue to support Donald Trump, we have to return to the Orange Wave, the religious political movement that overtook Orange County and eventually played a decisive influence in the formation of the religious right.
Join me next time As we continue the story.
Thanks for listening to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Bradley Onishi.
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Visit straightwhiteamericanjesus.podomatic.com and join the conversation on Twitter.
You can find the show at Straight White JC and me at Bradley Onishi.
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