Skye Jethani: Christian Nationalism and Nominal Christianity

Christian nationalism is the biggest predictor of Trump support.

There is more emphasis on saying “Merry Christman” than loving one’s neighbor or living out other Christian values.

More voters want America to be a nominally Christian nation than to display any actual Christian values.

Neither the Trump campaign and RNC thought Trump would win.

The RNC thought Trump had a 20% chance of winning.

polarization, entertainment, epistemology, Neil Postman

systems, structures, incentives – probably the best bet for change

  • gerrymandering, political parties, role of money, power of parties to select nominees: elites vs voters
  • in order to be more democratic it needs to be less democratic

How Democracies die: in Latin Americans use democracy to destroy Democracy.

mediated vs direct democracy.

The founders rigged it to keep too much power out of the hands of the rank and file uneducated masses.  Thinking that we need the elite to insulate ourselves from ourselves.

Since 1968, there have been reforms away from a balanced system, has swung towards the will of the people deciding almost everything.

The “unwashed masses” — not that the voters are stupid, but they are not experts.

The average voter should not have to know the difference between mandatory and discretionary spending.

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.

.. regions with heavy populations of conservative Protestants had higher-than-average divorce rates, even when controlling for poverty and race.

.. But the lukewarmly religious are a different matter. What Stokes calls “nominal” conservative Protestants, who attend church less than twice a month, have higher divorce rates even than the nonreligious. And you can find similar patterns with other indicators — out-of-wedlock births, for instance, are rarer among religious-engaged evangelical Christians, but nominal evangelicals are a very different story.

.. In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.

.. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics

.. at least some the problems they see at work reflect traditional religion’s growing weakness rather than its potency.

.. a truly healthy religious community should be capable of influencing even the loosely attached somewhat for the better.

.. On the secular side, though, there’s a sense that there’s a better way — that a more expansive state can offer many of the benefits associated with a religious community, but in a more enlightened, tolerant, individual-respecting form.

 

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.