Evangelicals, Israel, and the End of the F*cking World (re-release)
On this re-released episode from 2019 Brad shares his former apocalypse extremism. Dan draws on his expertise in apocalyptic literature to unpack how evangelicals envision the end of the world and what it means for their relationship with Israel.
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Download the free anchor app or go to anchor.fm to get started My name is Brad onishi I'm 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.
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and things are always developing and no matter what topic we kind of choose it's like sort of either hyper relevant or out of date like you know two hours later.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?
That 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
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 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 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.
Yeah, all great points, Dan.
And it goes back to what we talked about last week in our interview with Kelly J. Baker.
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?
Yeah, all great points, Dan.
And it goes back to what we talked about last week in our interview with Kelly J. Baker.
You know, I tried to highlight there that once you've opted into support for Trump, and you want to say that he holds my values of being anti-choice when it comes to abortion, when it comes to religious freedom or religious liberty, then you're also opting into all the other when it comes to religious freedom or religious liberty, then you're also opting into all the other Taking kids at the border, a Muslim ban, and so on and so forth.
Right.
We cannot lose sight of that.
That any time a white evangelical tells you, oh, we just don't do that, But we still support the president for these reasons.
You have to say, well, once you're in, you're in.
And if you want to tell me that you're in because of some sort of Christian principle, then you're also going to share in the xenophobia and the racism.
That's the point I made when it came to the Klan last week.
And that's the point that I think you're making today.
I want to just link this back, however, to something we've been talking about all season, which is to go beyond belief.
Right.
And sort of ask how evangelicals operate.
Like, what does religion do for them, and how does it function?
And something we've been talking about is that we have a kind of fundamentalist framework, and what that does is it reduces the world to binaries.
It says that there is good and evil here and there, us and them.
Okay, so we have that set.
It also says that whatever group I am part of, whatever fundamentalism that I uphold, means that I am the true representation of a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or whatever we're talking about.
And so why do evangelicals think of themselves as the real Americans and the real Christians?
Okay, so that means in this case that their support for Donald Trump as a representation of their values, they see an attack on him not as a political sort of tussle.
They don't see an attack on him as strategic for the Democrats or some sort of part of the process of living in a healthy democracy.
They see an attack on him as part of a cosmic war against good.
That's you may say, well, that seems a little outlandish or whatever, but that's that's kind of if you want to get inside the evangelical worldview, that's how they see it.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of the podcast, former guest Catherine Stewart, who just wrote a book on Christian nationalism, She attended the Value Voters Summit, and I asked her, I said, what did you see there?
And this was right in the wake of what was happening with the Kurds and Syria and everything there.
And here's what she told me.
If you think that Trump's abandonment of the Kurds or his impeachment troubles are going to shake his resolute base of support in the Christian nationalist movement, the Value Voters Summit 2019, which was held about a month ago, should erase that expectation.
The people I spoke to at the summit continue to see Trump as divinely appointed, and this allows them to forgive or explain away any existing and foreseeable flaws.
They continue to demonize all liberal opinion and cast the negative stories about Trump as false, treasonous, and badly motivated.
You can see there exactly what I'm talking about, that there's no room for nuance or debate, there's no room for dialogue about What may be the good aspects of the president and his sort of agenda, and what may be the things that evangelicals support.
There's a reduction of this to a cosmic war of good and evil, and you have to fall on one side.
And so the impeachment inquiry has not opened a space, right, a gray area where evangelicals now all of a sudden want to have a conversation about what's best for our republic.
It's instead entrenched the two sides of the coin, the two sides of the binary, and, you know, cause them to sort of rally onto their side and demonize anyone who's on the other one.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that values voters summit.
Part of the reason Trump went, at least sort of according to the media narrative, is that there was maybe some wavering support on the part of evangelicals.
But he goes and delivers, basically says like, you know, courts, abortion, gets a bunch of standing ovations, and like, you know, if there was wavering support, it was right back.
What you're talking about is...
I just want to emphasize some of the same points that you're talking about and sort of keep on this.
I think this is the part that's really can be difficult for people to understand when they think about like religion or something like that.
I had this conversation with students in a class that I'm teaching unrelated to this material.
I was teaching it the other day.
And I was talking about the fallacy that people have, we were talking about specifically Islam, but you can do it with Christianity or any religion, where they say, Islam teaches dot dot dot, or Christianity holds that dot dot dot.
And I was confronting my students, sort of challenging them, I said, why is that a bad way of talking about religion?
And eventually they sort of come down to recognize that, well, it's because Islam isn't an agent.
It doesn't do anything.
Christianity isn't an agent.
It doesn't do anything.
And what I tell my students is that religions are what their adherents do, right?
So when somebody says religion X is inherently peaceful, if you find adherents of that religion, people who identify as part of that religion, people that other parts of the religion identify with it and so forth, and guess what?
They're not peaceful, then it becomes no longer true to say religion X is inherently peaceful.
And we get the same thing with this, where I think it's important for people To not get wrapped up just in what evangelicals say, right, but to look at what they do, right?
If you do, in fact, by a—God, like you say, an almost 90 percentile, you know, 90 percent support a president and everything that he does, it comes to that whole package deal, and it becomes really, really difficult to argue and say, well, that's not who we are, right?
90 percent of us vote for this.
We support this.
We overwhelmingly support it.
That's not who we are, especially when you're saying, as you're saying, that Trump takes on this role as a kind of representative of the divine, which is kind of weird.
We've talked about this before, that populist movements often have, the Latin phrase that'll be thrown around is the Vox Dei, the voice of God, that the leader becomes not just a regular person and not just a representative of the people, but a kind of a Almost a channel between the regular masses of the people and that which sort of transcends them all.
And for many evangelicals, that's exactly what Trump is.
And it's important to recognize that.
I think it's also interesting historically that that's a weird position for evangelicals to hold, right?
Evangelicals come out of this tradition, this anti-Catholic tradition, right?
Where they used to decry the Pope for playing exactly that role, for being a spokesperson of God and sort of mediating access of regular people to the divine.
A kind of history of iconoclasm that is critiquing institutions and symbols and rituals as sort of unnecessary and anything that gets between the individual and God should be cast aside and yet that's exactly what Trump has become.
And that highlights exactly what you're talking about, that these are all, I think, fundamental features of not just fundamentalism, but on the political side of forms of sort of nationalist populism, and what we have in the U.S.
with white American evangelicals is a full-blown religious, fundamentalist, nationalist movement.
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Yeah.
So let me give you a quote just along those lines.
You know, I was a couple of weeks ago.
I mean, it feels like two years ago, but a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to take the temperature of evangelicals on Trump's essentially abandoning the Kurds in Syria and bowing to the whims of Erdogan and Assad and others.
And I checked in on a person who I used to do ministry with, who's not just still in the evangelical world, but continues to be actually a growing leader, is now helping to hold together a coalition of hundreds of churches and their political policies and stances.
Anyway, this is somebody who has a lot of influence.
And amidst all of that, he had posted this article from Fox, and it was an article that was in response to Mitt Romney's criticism of Trump.
Yeah.
And I pulled this quote out of it.
It really, to me, seemed to elementize everything you're talking about, Dan, that mix of seeing Trump as this Lockerbie mixed with this sort of fundamentalist cosmic war motif that we're talking about.
Here's the quote.
They see him implementing his agenda against all odds.
If the swamp gets in his way, Trump bulldozes over it.
Supreme Court Tick.
Taxes?
Tick.
Regulations slashed?
Tick.
Jobs up?
Tick.
Military rebuilt?
Tick.
ISIS stopped?
Tick.
Globalism challenged?
Tick.
Paris Climate Treaty scrapped?
Tick.
Borders strengthened?
Tick.
Wall built?
Half tick.
What I take from that quote, that's from Amanda Devine writing at Fox, and again it was posted at an evangelical leader's Facebook page, what I take from that is You know, Trump's authoritarianism, Trump's sort of considering himself the ultimate authority that cannot be questioned, is for evangelicals, it's a feature.
It's not a bug.
This is what they want.
They do not want compromise.
They do not want dialogue.
They do not want conversation.
They want victory.
It's a will to power.
And nothing has changed about that in the last month or so when it comes to impeachment or the Kurds or anything else.
This is what fundamentalisms do.
I mentioned in our fundamentalism episode, and I know that this sounds a little bit alarming, and I'm not trying to be outlandish here, but fundamentalisms are often prone to violence.
Now, that could be symbolic violence, right?
That could be political violence, and that could be actual physical violence.
Well, why?
Why are they prone to violence?
And the reason is because if you reduce the political and social sphere, To a cosmic war of good and evil.
And if you see yourself on the side of good, then it's a next step to say, okay, whatever we need to do to accomplish victory in this war, we will do.
And so, and you can say, well, Brad, that's a little crazy.
Come on, man.
Like, don't, you know, don't be hyperbolic.
And I'm not trying to be, but I will say that when it comes to impeachment, you know, we've been talking about impeachment for about a month, month and a half now.
Evangelical leaders cannot stop themselves from talking about civil war.
So, you know, what I wrote the other day is that when it comes to impeachment, when it comes to this cosmic war that I'm talking about today, what's been the reaction, right, of some of the most influential evangelical leaders?
Well, Franklin Graham said, if you begin an impeachment inquiry, our country, quote unquote, could begin to unravel, and he points to civil war.
Robert Jeffress, who I quoted earlier, pastor of Omega Church in Dallas, spiritual advisor to Donald Trump, says that if we go down the road of impeachment, then you will see something along the lines of a civil war.
If you turn to True News founder Rick Wild, also the founder of a big church, he says that mountain men and cowboys and many others will take up arms and Uh, rally around the President in a kind of Civil War-like atmosphere.
So, if you think I'm overdoing it here, if you think that I'm the one who's like, well, come on, like, you know, you're being a little, like, outlandish when it comes to Evangelicals' reaction to impeachment, they themselves are the ones saying, if you impeach our President, the man we consider the Vox Dei, the one who is leading us in the cosmic war against evil, if you do that, then Civil War is the next step.
I mean, in their mind, that's the, like, natural outcome.
And so I don't think I'm, you know, I don't know what you think, Dan, but I don't think I'm sort of out of bounds here by saying that this is how and why fundamentalisms often are only two or three steps away from physical, symbolic, or political violence.
Yeah, I don't think you are out of bounds, and I'm just going to, I think, amplify your point, but going in a little bit different direction, in that once you have not just a fundamentalist movement in contemporary white American evangelicalism, but a nationalist religious movement that sees itself as, or desires to, take the full reins of the political state, right?
States, political states, even the best of them, rely on the exercise of violence.
And again, to echo you, I don't want people to think that sounds outlandish and so forth.
States that function well, function well because they pass laws and people see those as legitimate and they follow the laws and in the best cases people see themselves reflected in those laws and so they understand them and so forth.
But all that legality, all those structures, they only work because the state also has the threat of exercising violence, right?
If you break the law, we will arrest you, or we'll come after you, or whatever.
And everybody's had the experience when they get pulled over speeding, right?
It's not violence in the sense of soldiers lined up firing on a crowd or something, but you have to stop.
And if you don't stop, bad things will happen to you as a result, and so forth.
So, when you have this language of fundamentalism now, but they're now, when they talk about Civil War, they're not just talking about, you know, we as a church are going to do something symbolic.
They're picturing themselves as the kind of authentic, organic voice of real America, of real Americans.
And so they would, if necessary, that language of civil war is the language of seizing state power, of using the mechanism of state against your opponents, not just about sort of religious beliefs or, you know, burning books in a parking lot or something like that, as you say, other symbolic acts of violence or, you know, having effigies of people or things like that.
So I think it's actually different.
And this is, of course, this is one of the things I'm really interested in, right, is the sort of political side of this and how these political ideologies form.
But just again to, I think, amplify your point, going back to that checklist, literal checklist that Divine had, Supreme Court tick.
Okay, we get it.
Anybody looking at evangelicals says it's all about abortion.
We get why they want to stack the Supreme Court, right?
ISIS, I think everybody can understand that all Americans have a stake, and lots of people all over the globe have a stake in halting the advance of ISIS.
Great.
But things like tax cuts.
In the abstract, it's not clear why a person would oppose or support tax cuts on strictly religious grounds, especially when the religious institutions in the U.S.
are already tax-exempt, right?
Especially when money they give to religious institutions is already tax-deductible.
You're sort of like, well, why taxes?
Globalism challenged.
Well, okay, it's not clear to a lot of people, like, why exactly are evangelicals opposed to globalism?
The Paris Climate Treaty.
Again, to outsiders, they're going to say, I don't understand why being religious would then mean that you have to oppose, you know, you have to oppose anything to counter climate change and so forth.
Well, the reason is, and we talked about this early in the first season, it's been a consistent theme throughout, the four That majority white evangelicals, all those politically conservative positions are part now of their religious identity.
For them, being religious is not just about opposing abortion.
It is also about supporting deregulation and supporting tax cuts and opposing or supporting climate denial or opposing efforts to counter climate change and so forth.
And what that means is that not only do they, as you rightly say, they blow everything up into this kind of apocalyptic, all or nothing, winner-take-all action.
And as such, any violence can be justified if it's for the cause of God.
It means that all of these kind of mundane political things, like tax cuts or climate change—and by mundane, I don't mean unimportant— I just mean not sort of apocalyptic significance They gain that significance
So now you're running afoul of God and God's will and God's people and authentic Christian Americans, not just if you support LGBTQ rights or access to abortion, but if you're in favor of progressive tax plans, or if you think that in California, where you are, ravaged increasingly by wildfires all the time, if you think that that is in some way related to climate change, You are also positioned in that camp of being an enemy of God.
It expands the scope of sort of running afoul of this pretty dangerous fundamentalist ideology.
What you're highlighting too, Dan, is the result of reducing the world to binaries.
Right.
And I know I'm a broken record, and people are tired of hearing that, but I just want to keep extending the point, right?
If you just reduce life to us and them here and there, If you reduce world to good and bad, then there's no room, right, for debate.
There's no room for discussion or dialogue.
There's no room for sort of coming to agreements on certain things, even though we disagree on others.
So, you know, what really got under my skin the other day, as you mentioned the wildfires, is I'm in California.
I'm worried about family and friends.
I mean, I have friends who are having power outages and, you know, needing to shower and go to hotels.
I have people who are fleeing their homes.
I mean, it's, It's a lot, and I see on Twitter somebody claiming that, you know, the fires are God's way of punishing California for being too liberal.
Right.
And if you want me to get really angry and go on a Nazi-for-war cussing rant, I can do that, but I'm going to try to restrain myself and just say, to me, that's a function of this cosmic war you're talking about, right?
That somebody just thinks, well, obviously they're on the wrong side, and so God is punishing them somehow.
Um, as a part of his sort of will in this cosmic battle.
Um, let me go back.
Let me go back to, to a quote, uh, from William Barr, who's an attorney general.
So some of you might be saying, well, Brad's quoting, you know, uh, Robert Jeffress and Bill, uh, you know, uh, Franklin Graham.
That's fine.
Not all evangelicals listen to those guys.
And you know, that those guys aren't necessarily official parts of the government.
Well, so here's William Barr.
Who's speaking at Notre Dame Law School.
U.S.
Attorney General, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
You know, our top prosecutor, he is not an evangelical, but he's a very, very conservative Catholic.
Some would call him a sort of dominionist Catholic.
Here's what he says, and you tell me, Dan, if you think this sounds like the kind of fundamentalist cosmic war I'm talking about.
This is not decay.
This is organized destruction.
Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
You know, Dan, if people go back and listen to our second and third episode in season one, our very beginnings of this podcast, we talked about the beginning of evangelicalism and fundamentalism in this country.
We talked about how it goes all the way back to something like the Scopes trial in 1925.
And at the Scopes trial, we talked about how there was this split between evangelicals and mainline or liberal Protestants.
And evangelicals really retreated into a cultural enclave during that time, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s.
For these very reasons, they saw in culture an all-out assault on their values.
They said that the media and pop culture And all the forces of mass communication were against them, right?
Well, William Barr is reiterating that a hundred years later.
And yet this time, he is not someone in a small rural church in the south of the Midwest.
He's the Attorney General of the United States.
He himself is voicing the cosmic war that we are talking about.
Right.
Excuse me.
A couple points about that.
I had exactly that quote in mind.
I think I might have posted something about it online when it came out because it's really jarring.
Two points is that, number one, again, if you're a broken record on the binarism, I'm a broken record on the, like, nationalism, populism stuff.
But a standard feature, I mean literally a textbook feature of populist discourse and kind of authoritarian discourse, is that the media is the enemy of the people.
And media is always this really ambiguous, ill-defined bogeyman that people cite.
People on the right and the left will all critique quote-unquote media.
They never really define what that is.
And so on the one hand you have the clear connection with that for me as well, right?
That the intelligentsia, the media, mass culture, all of these things are demonized and that again is just straight out of a textbook on like sort of populist rhetoric.
But the other part of this is the irony that's there or the duplicity that's there that where is William Barr when he says this?
He's at the University of Notre Dame, right?
He's at one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the U.S.
Who have absolutely mastered the use of mass media.
The right politicians and religious actors on the right have far outpaced progressives and liberals and others at effectively using particularly talk radio and now increasingly cable news like with Fox News and so forth.
And that's another piece of this that's always, there's this kind of, it's a performative contradiction, we might say, right?
A contradiction in what they're saying is they decry the enemies of using all these things to attack them, while at the same time, obviously, they very effectively marshal all of those forces against their perceived enemies.
And you highlighted, you used a phrase, and I think it's an important phrase, and maybe we'll sort of close the discussion of this, that Barr is Catholic, and you referred to it as a sort of a Dominionist theology.
And of course, there is a kind of conservative Christian, now primarily Protestant, theology known as Dominionism.
that relates, if you were to do like a Venn diagram of religious fundamentalism and dominionism and so forth, there'd be a lot of overlap.
What are we talking about, or what are you talking about when you use that phrase, dominionist theology?
So dominionists believe that the world belongs to God and that if they are on the side of God, if they are God's people, then by extension the world belongs to them.
Right.
And so, Again, they are not interested in dialogue or debate.
They're not interested in a pluralist democracy.
Words like pluralism, tolerance, multiculturalism, they are allergic to these words.
They see them as compromised.
They see them as kowtowing to a kind of culture that doesn't accept their God-given right to power and dominion over all things.
That includes culture.
That includes politics.
I remember very clearly a woman in my church, in the wake of 9-11, I remember, George W. Bush visited a mosque.
Many people don't remember this.
Right.
And, you know, her comment was, I don't know why he's doing that, because our stance toward Muslims should be intolerant.
We have the right religion.
They don't.
And so we shouldn't tolerate anyone.
And that is kind of a nice little expression of dominionism.
And Barr seems to have That kind of worldview, right?
He seems to think that there's this us against them.
There's secularists and those who are against God's will, and then there's those of us who are God's people.
And we are involved in a skirmish.
We're involved in a conflict.
So the idea that there would be a pluralist society where people exist in a highly functioning interfaith ecumenical context is very foreign to the Dominionists.
And so This goes right along, you know, the dominionism goes right along with the kind of fundamentalism I've been talking about.
And I'm talking about William Barr, but I could be talking about Mike Pompeo, who, you know, is our Secretary of State and holds very similar views.
My overall point is, if you think this is just limited to a handful of evangelical pastors, then you're wrong.
This reaches to the highest rungs of our government.
Period.
And there's no denying that when you see the quote from Barr here.
And I'll just say, you know, I know we've got to wind down, Dan.
One of my last comments here will just be, you know, people keep wondering, okay, Trump abandoned the Kurds.
Will evangelicals abandon him?
Trump's being impeached.
Will evangelicals abandon him?
I think what we need to understand is that until he radically changes course on things like abortion and things like religious freedom, The Evangelicals are not going to go anywhere.
And my guess is, and here's my prediction, and I could be completely wrong, and so I'm open to that, but my guess is that as the impeachment stuff continues and we begin to have public hearings, more and more Americans are going to sort of change their tone.
This is what happened with Nixon, and I think it's what's going to happen here.
However, I do think the last holdout will be Evangelicals, and we've already seen that.
Well into the 90th percentile still oppose impeachment.
Whereas over half of Americans now favor it.
So that's my prediction in light of kind of everything we're talking about today.
Yeah.
I think, again, I agree with everything you say.
The only thing I'd add to the dominionism thing, as you've sort of said, is not only is pluralism foreign to them, it's anathema to them, right?
It can't be good.
There can only be a negative.
When you possess absolute truth, When it's on your side, when you and your movement are the embodiment of absolute truth, any other movement can only be a departure from that, right?
But I think you're right that not only do I agree with you about the impeachment, I think you're going to keep seeing these public position shifts, But I also think more broadly that over time this kind of messaging, this kind of theology, this kind of support is going to damage evangelicals religiously.
That is, I don't mean within evangelicalism, I think that damage is done, but I mean sort of socially.
Pew Research Center back in, I think 2014, did this big survey of the American religious landscape and they just recently, in October of this year, So just a few weeks ago, released kind of an updated version of this, not the full study, but pieces of it.
But one of the things that they found, and again, just to tell people, right, if you look at things like PRRI or Gallup or Pew, the numbers don't all align like one-to-one because they've got different polling measures and different definitional things, but the trend lines are all the same.
What it showed is that as of 2018-2019, it says 65% of adult Americans describe themselves as Christians.
That's down 12 percentage points over the past decade.
So the percentage of U.S.
population that identifies as Christian is down.
And within that percentage, what they found was that the percentage who identify as evangelical among Christians has remained the same, but the overall percentage of the U.S.
population who identify as white evangelicals has declined.
My prediction to kind of tie into yours is that they will keep supporting Trump.
They will continue to hitch their wagon to the GOP, which means that the GOP will also continue to cater to them.
And this has been going on for decades, as we've discussed in other episodes.
But I think that what this means is that the share of the overall population that identifies with that religious vision is actually going to get smaller.
I think it's going to continue to decline.
And I hope that it does, for the reasons that we've discussed.
I affirm pluralism, and I affirm diversity, and I affirm minority rights, and so I can't obviously get on board with this.
To tie in, and I guess to wind down as we're both, you know, entering the ill-founded basis of like, you know, predicting the future, my prediction would be that I think what you say is correct, and I think that also, I've said this other places, I think I've said this in prior episodes, that I think that evangelicals will continue to remain staunchly conservative politically, but I think that over time they're going to be less and less of a portion of the overall U.S.
population.
And I don't know what that'll look like in, say, 2020 or 2030, but I'm sort of interested to see.
Final thoughts before we sign out here?
No, final thoughts are, you know, please continue to think good thoughts for California and, you know, what's happening out here.
It's scary, so keep us in your thoughts, and if you're a praying person, keep us in your prayers.
And I'll just say, as always, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google, most places that you get your podcasts.
If you can, please, please, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts.
And it is the end of the month here, and so if you'd like to support us on Patreon, that would be great.
You can find our Patreon page.
Thank you.
Yeah, we love to hear from people.
We try to respond.
As I mentioned that Facebook thread that sort of took shape and I found that really, really sort of interesting and provocative and good food for thought.
So please keep that there.
You can find Brad on Twitter.
You can find me.
I always say I'm still hiding from Twitter, but I'm not hard to find.
Feel free to email me or contact me directly or contact us through Facebook.
