From the archives, an episode from 2019 centered on how fundamentalist religions are prone to violence. This episode has renewed relevance given the recent discussions of civil war in the wake of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago:
Dan and Brad dissect why so many evangelical leaders--and high-level government officials--are threatening civil war if the president is impeached and/or removed. One thing is clear: the single group who is maintaining unwavering support for Trump's presidency = White Christian nationalists.
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I am Associate Professor of Religious Studies, and as always, I'm here with my co-host, Dan Miller.
I'm Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought, and I'm recording today a broadcast.
Brad is in California dodging fires and living by candlelight, and I am in Vermont at the studio of WLMC Radio here at Landmark.
Thank you to everybody for joining us.
We want to talk today about, we've said this this whole season, right, that things are fast moving and things are always developing and no matter what topic we kind of choose it's like sort of either hyper relevant or out of date like, you know, two hours later.
But we want to talk today about Trump and the issue of ongoing evangelical support of Trump in light of some of the contemporary things that have been going on.
Things like, most notably, the impeachment inquiry.
The House of Representatives, at the time we're talking about this, just passed a resolution to lay down the ground rules for public hearings and so forth along partisan lines.
No Republicans voted in favor of it.
All but two Democrats voted in favor of it.
And we'll probably also wrap in some things about what's going on in Syria and some other things related to Trump and evangelical support.
But the interesting thing that we want to sort of set this up is that over half of Americans now, or around half, or a little bit over, now support the impeachment inquiry.
Many support that, you know, should articles of impeachment actually come out, that Trump should be removed from office and so forth.
That's been a really big public shift.
But the one group, one group in particular, that has just remained rock solid, and this is no surprise, are white American evangelicals.
And people are sort of asking why.
And we keep reading articles that say, you know, what will it take for evangelicals, if anything, to ever abandon Trump or to soften on their stance on them?
And so I want to throw this over, Brad, to you.
You just wrote a piece recently that appeared online, and Religion Dispatch is kind of looking at this, and so I'm really, really happy to have you here with us to kind of lean on that.
Tell us what it is that you found, what you see in this.
Why are evangelicals remaining adamantly in favor of Trump despite changing public opinion and despite, again, things that would seem to an outsider to call into question his morality or his integrity?
Let me start with a couple of citations.
So this is from Johnny Moore from a report that came out on Halloween 2019.
Johnny Moore's part of a commission for international religious freedom, and he says, agree or disagree with the evangelical community, we represent a third of the country in some form.
In a democracy, our voice matters, and our voice deserves representation in the public square.
So you can hear there this sort of persecution complex that we've discussed at length when it comes to white evangelicals.
I'm claiming that, you know, the impeachment inquiry somehow means that evangelicals are no longer getting a voice in the public square.
Okay.
Let me give you one from Robert Jeffress.
Robert Jeffress is a spiritual sort of consultant for Donald Trump.
He's the leader of a huge megachurch in Dallas.
Here's what he says.
They really believe that to impeach President Trump, they, meaning white evangelicals, They really believe that to impeach President Trump would be to impeach their own closely held values.
And that's why they take impeachment personally.
Now, again, let's not lose sight of the fact that when he's talking about their own closely held values, they're talking about a man who, weeks after his third wife gave birth to his fifth child, was having an affair with an adult, you know, a porn actress, but you know, the idea that evangelicals and Trump have similar values is something we should just never lose sight of.
It's just an astounding idea.
But anyway, all of that aside, about a week ago, in the last week of October 2019, a PRRI poll came out and it shows that somewhere in the 90th percentile of white evangelicals opposed the impeachment inquiry.
So it is really, really difficult to find someone in this group who supports the impeachment inquiry or at least thinks it's somehow a good idea for the democracy, what have you.
So, Dan, you can see here, they have not budged.
I mean, they just have not budged in any sense of the word.
And it doesn't seem like they're going to any time soon.
Right.
A couple points I just wanted to add or just elaborate on the points that you just raised.
The first was this language of representation in the public sphere.
As you said, we've talked about this sort of creation of a persecution complex.
And it is really interesting.
I don't think any observer could ever look objectively and say, oh yeah, white American evangelicals lack a presence in the public political sphere.
They lack political influence.
They lack judicial influence.
It's clear that they don't, and yet, that's why it's so significant, right?
Part of what contemporary white evangelicals are really good at is creating this sense of crisis where there isn't really a crisis, right?
And sort of mobilizing the base that way.
And I think that tied in with that, you emphasize this image of shared values, and as you say, you go through the litany that we've gone through, that other people go through, that anybody who looks at evangelical support for Trump, and they're kind of baffled by this because they say, well, how can that be shared values when they talk about things like family values and all this sort of stuff?
But the point I want to make, and the point we've been making, and I'm thinking of a really sort of productive chain of comments that was on our website, on the Straight White American Jesus Facebook page, and I was reading a comment somebody made about the podcast and liking the podcast and so forth, and it drew some responses from white evangelicals who were sort of defending themselves and saying we weren't being fair and so forth.
And it always comes with this sort of notion of, well, we aren't, and then all the negative things about Trump and the Trump administration, right?
We're not xenophobic.
We're not nationalistic.
We're not racist.
We don't support caging people at the border.
We're not in favor of all these things.
And you keep saying we're in favor of all these things.
But I think for anybody, you have to look to say, OK, if there is that support and there's a sense in which we need to take seriously that language of, yeah, we share Trump's values.
The question is, which values is it that are really shared?
Trump clearly doesn't care about preserving, quote unquote, the traditional family or preserving a sense of individual morality or integrity.
He kind of wears his corruption and his profiteering off the presidency on his sleeve.
It's not even trying to hide it anymore.
The values that they share are these values of nationalism and xenophobia and authoritarianism.
And this is stuff we've been talking about this season.
We've talked about evangelicalism as a form of fundamentalism.
We've talked about evangelicalism as a kind of subculture and a kind of social identity and some of the ways that what they say and do works to maintain that identity.
We've talked about getting beyond just a sort of catalog of what evangelicals say they believe.
To looking at how those claims to belief maintain identity and so forth.
So take us, let's go deeper into that, right?
So how does this, this ongoing, unwavering support of Trump illustrate those themes, do you think?
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