Most readers here are aware of the statements and actions of the right-wing, Trump-loving evangelicals. They call themselves Christians, although their actions and attitudes bear little or no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus Christ in the many English versions of the Christian Bible.
But it’s important to remember that simply excoriating “evangelicals,” as if there is one unified group who classify themselves as such, is both wrong and counterproductive for those of us who embrace social justice. For Democrats to speak of people of faith with disdain or disgust is a self-defeating prophecy and belies our “big tent” umbrella. It also dismisses a large segment of our base who happen to be people of color and people of faith.
As this recent piece in The Washington Post pointed out:
In popular lingo, the word “evangelical” has often — wrongly — been used interchangeably with “white evangelical.” That is due to pollsters often lumping together white evangelicals because of their statistical similarities — their shared views, beliefs, behaviors — and also doing the same with black Protestants, who could also be seen as “evangelical” based on their theological beliefs.
The most obvious example to point out to those who may scoff is that of the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, bishop of the Repairers of the Breach, leader of the new Poor People’s Campaign, architect of the Moral Mondays Movement, and former president of the North Carolina NAACP.
His activism on behalf of all the issues many of us hold so dear cannot be questioned. Whether it is fighting against racism, white supremacy, and xenophobia or advocating for voting rights as well as economic, reproductive, and environmental justice, he is a warrior in a battle we are a part of. And yet: he is an evangelical. His church uses the Poverty and Justice Bible.
During the health care debate he wrote “An open letter to clergy who prayed with Donald Trump,” addressed to Jack Graham, Johnnie Moore, Greg Laurie, Paula White, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and others, in which he said to them, as a fellow evangelical:
My brothers and sister, I do not single you out because your position is unique. You inherited a heresy, and you are not alone in perpetuating its cruel errors. But in our present crisis, you have publicly embraced a president and a party that embody the abuses of power that the Biblical prophets decried. Millions of people have been led astray by your error, and the whole world is now reaping the consequences. I single you out because the people I know and serve literally cannot afford the cost of your willful blindness.
The letter came after this photo became public:
He discussed it with MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid in the segment below:
He stated:
When you can P-R-A-Y for a president and others while they are P-R-E-Y preying on the most vulnerable, you're violating the sacred principles of religion. A text in Amos chapter 2: religious hypocrisy looks like when a nation of political leaders will buy and sell people to do anything to make money, sell the poor for a pair of shoes, grind the penniless into the dirt, and shove the luckless Into the ditch. That's an actual text. A text that says when you do not care for sick you are violating the principles of God. We have this extremist Trump Republican agenda that takes health care, transfers wealth to the greedy. That's hypocrisy and sin.
After Charlottesville, Rev. Barber and other clergy issued a “Call to Conscience.”
The silence from white evangelicals was deafening, which is discussed in this Los Angeles Times op-ed by Randall Balmer, author of Evangelicalism in America. It was titled “Under Trump, evangelicals show their true racist colors.”
The statistics tell one story: 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. The deafening silence from leaders of the religious right in the wake of the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va., points to an even larger one, which places racism at the very heart of the movement.
This recent NPR article titled “Are You An Evangelical? Are You Sure?” expands on the issue of white vs. black evangelicals.
Because political polls often focus on white evangelical voters (which is in turn in part because those evangelicals — however one defines them — are such a coveted demographic among GOP voters), white evangelicals end up getting a huge amount of media attention. But that means they can end up being portrayed as the face of evangelicalism, period. Indeed, articles about this polling sometimes end up conflating white evangelicals with all evangelicals.
Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that race ends up getting glossed over in the hubbub over the so-called "evangelical vote," as she said in a February speech. "The media does this all the time. You never hear them talk about black evangelicals," she said. "Watch the 2016 election. When they begin to talk about evangelicals again, they won't go to Bible-believing black evangelicals. They're going to talk to white people. I know. I've watched them do this, and I have argued with people about this over and over again."
Consider an imaginary pair of evangelicals — one black, one white — who sit next to each other in the pew every Sunday. They could have the same religious beliefs. But as Smith pointed out, they're likely to have vastly different political beliefs: the black churchgoer is more likely to vote Democratic, while the white one will lean GOP. (Pew's polling on black Protestants focuses on that group as a whole, not on black evangelicals themselves. But 82 percent of attendees at historically black Protestant churches identify as or lean Democratic, according to Pew, and 72 percent of black Protestant churchgoers identify as evangelical or born-again. Clearly, a huge share of black self-identified evangelicals also tend Democratic.) All of which means something important: when evangelicalism comes into the U.S. political conversation, it's often also a conversation about race. The racial discrepancies in the numbers suggest that identifying as "evangelical" doesn't necessarily make a person more likely to vote Republican.
[bold emphasis added]
This article from The Gospel Coalition makes clear that “No, the Majority of American Evangelicals Did Not Vote for Trump.”
All conclusions about 2016 voting patterns reported by the media are based on a single survey conducted by Edison Research. (Edison collected the survey for the National Election Pool, a consortium of ABC News, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News.) While there are reasons to be skeptical of exit polls in general (e.g., they don’t use a random sample), let’s assume that this poll is sufficiently reliable as far as the factors it was able to measure. For this reason alone, we should be leery of claims made about “evangelical” voters.
This exit poll survey asked people to self-identify their religion from a range of choices. You could, for instance, choose to identify as evangelical on the survey—but only if you are white. If you’re an evangelical of non-white race or ethnicity—Latino, black, Asian, and so on—your closest option was to identify as “Protestant or other Christian.” As far as this exit poll is concerned, the label “evangelical” is reserved for whites only.
This means the exit poll literally has no way to determine how evangelicals voted. It doesn’t even try to do so. Like the media that commissioned the survey, it is merely interested in the subset of evangelicals who happen to be white.
Ed Stetzer, who holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College wrote “No, Evangelical Does Not Mean ‘White Republican Who Supports Trump.’”
Having worked in church and culture research for over a decade, I can tell you that one of the most-asked questions is about the category of Evangelicals. It has been this way for a long time, but this election has brought it to the top of everyone’s list. With 4 of 5 White Evangelicals voting for Donald Trump, everyone on both inside and outside of Christianity is trying to understand just who this group is. And among self-identifying Evangelicals who did not support Donald Trump, many are wondering how they can share the same label. This is the moment when more people than ever are asking: What exactly is an “Evangelical” Christian?
And, Evangelical does not mean “White Republican Who Supports Trump.”
Evangelical?
Some have said they don’t want to use the label anymore, embarrassed because of its identification with Donald Trump. But that’s backwards. It’s not the label that supported Trump, it’s people—White Evangelicals, primarily. But it’s not politics that unite all Evangelicals; it’s the gospel. You see, most Evangelicals did not support Donald Trump; it was White Evangelicals who did.
Yes, researchers say “Evangelical,” and that’s a demographic category, but usually they mean “White Evangelicals.” But Evangelicals did differ, precisely around racial and ethnic categories, during this election.
Lisa Sharon Harper wrote in “Black Evangelicals, White Evangelicals and Franklin Graham's Repentance”:
Twentieth-century white evangelical understanding of the Gospel guided (and in many ways defined) my friend’s Christian walk. Therein lies the disconnect between his Christian faith and Dr. King’s. According to sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith (authors of Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America), only one thing separates white and black evangelicals, but it makes all the difference in the world: Vastly different experiences of structural and systemic oppression.
Black evangelicals have a long history of interaction with oppressive systems and structures. When African Americans read the Bible, they see the more than 2,000 passages of Scripture about God’s hatred for poverty and oppression. They see God’s desire for systems and structures to be blessings to all of humanity — not a curse to some and a blessing for others. And they see Jesus’ own declaration that he had come to preach good news to the poor, which, by the way, is decidedly not a reference to the “spiritually impoverished.” Jesus meant that he had come to preach good news (of liberation, freedom and new life) to people trapped in material poverty.
White evangelicals generally do not experience such systemic oppression. According to Emerson and Smith, most white evangelicals don’t prioritize or even see the thousands of references in the Hebrew Scriptures and and New Testament about structural and systemic injustice. Accordingly, the Gospel — and by extension their evangelism — is about only one thing: Personal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, who died for their sins, and a personal relationship with him.
Black evangelicals also have personal faith that Jesus’ death paid for their sins, but their Gospel doesn’t end with personal (and individual) salvation. For Dr. King and Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. John Perkins and Nelson Mandela and for hundreds of thousands of Black Christians around the world and for me, the good news of the Gospel is that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were for the redemption of both individual souls and the redemption of whole societies.
It is worth taking the time to listen to the often cited Dr. Anthea Butler, associate professor of religious studies and graduate chair in the department of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out her website, too.
This piece could not have been written without the help, support, and knowledge of a sister who is very dear to me and to many readers of Daily Kos. TrueBlueMajority is a fighter for social justice and a pastor.
She sent me this clip and link, which reminds us that not all faith leaders are ministers:
The Honorable Byron Rushing is an extremely dynamic advocate for inclusive justice. Though he is not an ordained minister, he is a man of tremendous and passionate progressive faith and has had decades of amazing social justice ministry. He has been serving in the Massachusetts State Legislature a long time, was influential in making us the first marriage equality state, and was the lead sponsor of the MA transgender nondiscrimination bill Gov. Baker signed into law last year.
This is “the first film to illuminate the role of African Americans in securing same-sex marriage as a Civil Right.”
Here is the Rev. Barber addressing the issue of marriage equality—not in Massachusetts, but in North Carolina.
Donald Trump’s stoking of blatant racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy is having an interesting impact on people of color who are part of white evangelical mega-congregations, as shown in this article titled “Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads”:
The fact that 81 percent of white evangelicals supported a candidate who channeled white nationalism is not lost on minority believers. Nor is the unending news of travel bans, appointments of white nationalists, mass deportations and racial hate crimes. It has forced a reckoning.
Today, believers of color are redefining their relationships with white evangelicalism in ways that could dramatically shift the landscape. Already, people of color make up a larger portion of the entire American Christian population than before, and church growth experts predict they will make up the majority of the Christian population after 2042. And their values are largely at odds with the white evangelical support for Trump; pre-election surveys showed that nonwhite evangelical Protestant voters, which included black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific Islander Protestants, supported Clinton over Trump by a very wide margin (67% vs. 24%), according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
So while white evangelicals captured the election, they may have lost their fellow believers, the very people who could keep their churches, denominations and institutions from the attrition that has many Christian institutions and leaders genuinely worried for the future. These days, evangelicals of color are talking next steps. Their endeavors run the gamut, but the ones gaining steam include leaving evangelicalism altogether, reframing the evangelical world as a mission field as opposed to a place for spiritual nourishment, creating ethnic safe spaces or staying firmly planted in evangelical community to combat racism from within. It’s too early to tell which will prevail, but the urgency and organization happening within communities of color point to a fundamental shift in the evangelical landscape.
A day late and a dollar short, The New York Times attempted to take on both the Rev. Barber and the religious left in a piece by Laurel Goodstein titled “Religious Liberals Sat out of Politics for 40 years. Now they want in the game.”
In Nashville, a crowd of ministers carrying palm fronds occupied the governor’s office during Holy Week, demanding the expansion of Medicaid to cover more of the uninsured. In California and 16 other states, an interfaith network has organized thousands of volunteers to swoop into action when immigrants are arrested or houses of worship are vandalized.
Across the country, religious leaders whose politics fall to the left of center, and who used to shun the political arena, are getting involved — and even recruiting political candidates — to fight back against President Trump’s policies on immigration, health care, poverty and the environment.
Some are calling the holy ruckus a “religious resistance.” Others, mindful that periodic attempts at a resurgence on the religious left have
all failed, point to an even loftier ambition than taking on the current White House: After 40 years in which the Christian right has dominated the influence of organized religion on American politics — souring some people on religion altogether, studies show — left-leaning faith leaders are hungry to break the right’s grip on setting the nation’s moral agenda.
Um … no. Just no. Many black religious leaders and congregations have not been “sitting out of politics” for 40 damn years—not at all. Nor have they shunned the political arena. Black and brown clergy have been fighting for voting rights and for immigrants while battling against against police brutality and criminal injustice. Black theologians like James Cone have had a continued presence for many decades. The Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network was founded in 1991. The Revs Dennis and Christine Wiley fought for marriage equality in Washington, D.C. The Rev. Traci Blackmon was on the streets in her community fighting back when Mike Brown was murdered.
The deaths of young African Americans at the hands of police have escalated the conversation about racial discrimination in this country. The Rev. Traci Blackmon, acting executive minister of UCC Justice and Witness Ministries, noted civil rights leader, gifted preacher, pastor and teacher, delivers an extremely powerful message in this call for justice for all the children of God.
When we say or hear “evangelical,” many of us do not automatically think of the Episcopal Church.
Yet here is Presiding Bishop Michael Bruce Curry inviting people of faith to join “The Jesus Movement.”
So when you hear the word “evangelical,” do not automatically leap to the conclusion that you are faced with someone who does not share your feelings about justice, equality, and care for the environment and our planet. Don’t assume they don’t hold dear the principles of democracy.
I am proud to link arms with evangelicals who will move this country farther along the road to justice and equality.
Join us.