Some of these same schools are now attempting to separate sexual identity from sexual behavior in their policies and campus customs. However awkwardly, they’re trying to welcome gay students while preserving rules against same-sex “behavior.”
.. This fall, two conservative Christian colleges, Eastern Mennonite University and Goshen College, added sexual orientation to their nondiscrimination policies. Ultimately, this move forced both of them towithdraw from the nation’s most prominent membership organization of evangelical universities.
.. Baylor, the nation’s largest Baptist university, quietly removed its policy forbidding “homosexual acts” last year. But the college’s spokesperson, Lori Fogleman, didn’t say whether this change means legally married gay students can now enroll at Baylor.
.. this posture often effectively creates two sets of rules: one for gay students, and one for straight students. For example, at College of the Ozarks, ranked by U.S. News as the No. 4 regional college in the Midwest, the student handbook explicitly forbids “touching, caressing, and other physical conduct of a sexual nature with a person of the same sex.” Yet heterosexual students at the same school are allowed to date and show affection as long as they abstain from sex.
.. Likewise, at Messiah College, ranked by U.S. News as the No. 5 regional college in the North, heterosexual couples are expected to refrain from sexual intimacy, but they can openly date. Meanwhile, gay students have to follow different rules.
The Huge Cultural Shift That’s Helping Trump Win Evangelicals
In Mississippi, where evangelicals turned out in record numbers—and white evangelicals accounted for a whopping 75 percent of Republican voters—Trump won by double digits.
.. He seems like he’d be more comfortable on Tinder than in a church pew.
.. America’s evangelicals just aren’t all that evangelical any more.
.. Even nominal churchgoers like Reagan have done what no European politician would ever do: pledge their prayerful allegiance to Christ. Along the way, they have repeatedly promised to restore school prayer or stop gay marriage or overturn Roe v. Wade.
What they have delivered, however, is defeat after defeat in the culture wars.
.. Moore has repeatedly whacked Trump—a man whose “attitude toward women is that of a Bronze Age warlord”—as a reprobate unfit for the presidency.
.. Moore essentially admits this: in a recent op-ed, he announced that until voting habits change, he won’t even to refer to himself as an evangelical anymore. He lamented how so many of his coreligionists “have been too willing to look the other way when the word ‘evangelical’ has been co-opted by heretics and lunatics . . . as long as they were on the right side of the culture war.”
.. the group that used to refer to itself as a “moral majority” is at best a tiny minority, and a shrinking one at that. “We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America,” he told NPR recently. “Now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined—defined by commitment to core evangelical values—there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.”
.. During the civil rights era, Falwell denounced black ministers for their political activism. In a 1965 sermon—delivered the day the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led marchers from Selma to Montgomery—Falwell criticized the “left-wing” leaders of the “so-called freedom movement” for stirring up hatred and violence. “Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners,” he said.
But Falwell had a change of heart. Today he is remembered as the fundamentalist who, by co-founding the Moral Majority in 1979, officiated at the marriage of economic and cultural conservatism—the birth of the New Religious Right. Christians did not live in isolation, he reasoned. So it was not enough merely to save souls. You had to save the nation. And who better to convert it than pastors like himself?
.. Back in 1976, Falwell had supported the born-again Christian Jimmy Carter for president. But Carter disappointed many of his fellow evangelicals by taking on the tax-exempt status of Southern “segregation academies” and refusing to fight the good fight on abortion. So Falwell and his friends cozied up to the Republican Party.
.. Its alliance with the GOP meant that its members would fight not only to overturn Roe v. Wade but also to oppose the SALT II treaty, teachers unions, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In addition to calling the nation “back to biblical morality” he called it “back to patriotism.” And for him true patriots supported nuclear weapons, massive increases in military spending, a balanced budget amendment, tax cuts, and consumer capitalism. “The free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs,” he said... Though it’s common to talk about the Republican Party having been captured by white evangelical activists, if you really look at the way the two groups have interacted over the years, it’s more accurate to say that evangelicals have been captured by the Republican Party. They ape its talking points about welfare cheats rather than the Bible’s compassion for the poor and the oppressed.
.. Today, when born-again Christians hold up posters at rallies that read, “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for President Trump,” when they say they are sick of false promises from supposedly pious presidents on abortion or gay marriage and just want a strong man in the White House who can stop illegal immigration or keep us safe or just “smash things,” what are they saying? They are saying that their political identity has trumped their religious identity. They are saying that they are conservatives first and Christians second.
.. Cruz’s father is a traveling evangelist and a preacher of Dominionist theology who believes that Christians like his son must take dominion over “seven mountains”: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.
.. In fact, it is exceedingly difficult to find any moment when Reagan, Bush, or any of today’s Republican candidates put biblical faith over conservative principles.
.. When the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the Baptist Press praised it for “advancing the cause of religious liberty, human equality, and justice.” Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978—when the nascent Religious Right was casting about for ways to attack Democrats as moral relativists stuck in the “Bad Sixties.”
.. Views about abortion or gay marriage are more salient than beliefs about the Trinity or infant baptism.
.. The result is a population of self-identified “evangelicals” who find it harder and harder to see the difference between the teachings of the Bible and the policies of their beloved candidates.
.. Classically that narrative ran from sin in the Garden of Eden to redemption on the cross. Today it takes place in an America that has fallen from its founding glory yet will, by God’s grace and Trump’s hand, be made great again.
.. it can seem like there aren’t any evangelicals left in the Republican Party; there are just Republicans who happen to go to church.
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
.. when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news.
.. even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they’ve also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child.”
.. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
..Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical.
..But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.
..More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners.
.. if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost.
.. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.
.. “the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing.”
.. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
.. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”
.. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, “Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.”
.. “Abstinence works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”
.. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system.
.. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready.
The Christian Penumbra
The social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief. And where practice ceases or diminishes, in what you might call America’s “Christian penumbra,” the remaining residue of religion can be socially damaging instead.