.. Two years ago, Gianforte, a millionaire tech executive, gave a speech, at the Montana Bible College, in which he said that the concept of retirement was “not Biblical” and offered as evidence the assertion that Noah had been six hundred years old when he built the ark.
.. Quist drew national attention for his candidacy by setting aside the accumulating scandals around Donald Trump and focussing on a deeply felt revulsion toward Republican plans to gut public support for health insurance
.. Gianforte’s staffers reported that, rather than shunning the candidate, the conservative grass roots seemed to be rallying around him: his campaign pulled in more than a hundred thousand dollars in donations between Wednesday night and Thursday morning. “Gianforte, the manly and studly candidate, threw the hundred-and-twenty-five-pound wet-dishrag reporter from the Guardian to the ground,” Rush Limbaugh said.
.. Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, said, “I do not think this is acceptable behavior, but the choice will be made by the people of Montana.”
.. Steve Stivers, a congressman from Ohio, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, said, “We all make mistakes.”
.. the revelation that Trump had shared the secret locations of American nuclear submarines with the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte
Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads
But then the grumpy drunk stumbled over, pointed at the beanie on George’s head and barked, “Why don’t you take that hat off. You look like a fucking terrorist.”
The white partygoers grew silent and waited for George to react, which he eventually did, diffusing the conversation with politeness. Though he lowered the heat a few notches, the man continued to call him a terrorist so many times that George realized something that hadn’t occurred to him, “He was concerned that I might have actually been a terrorist.” Still, nobody came to George’s defense, leaving him alone with this angry, potentially-armed man. “I didn’t feel like he was going to kill me,” George says, “but he wanted to intimidate me.”
.. So while white evangelicals captured the election, they may have lost their fellow believers
.. 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.
.. Many describe these moves as “divestment” from white evangelicalism: they’re moving money, bodies and souls elsewhere.
.. “I was working on a book that was marketed toward evangelicals and I’m no longer doing that because I think it’s a waste of time. I don’t think they’re ready. I’d rather work with folks who are ready.”
.. White male evangelical neglect of issues concerning black evangelicals and evangelical women prompted these groups to turn to their own coalitions. As a result, the progressive movement lost its minority and female constituency and faded into the shadows just as the religious right was born.
.. Bill McCartney, the white leader of Promise Keepers, made this subject a focal point at his stadium-packed events in 1996, he reported that about 40 percent of participants reacted negatively to the theme, likely leading to the drop in attendance the following year.
.. white evangelical “racial reconciliation” lacked rigor. It focused on building personal relationships between races, not addressing the systemic inequalities that devastate communities of color. This led minority evangelicals to question whether “racial reconciliation” was simply a convenient vehicle for white absolution and, given the long history of white oppression within the church (using the Bible to justify slavery, supporting Jim Crow segregation, condemning the Civil Rights Movement, to name a few), to what exactly were they “reconciling” in the first place.
.. “For those of us who have been doing this for a while – making the circuit, speaking to crowds – it almost feels like it was all for nothing,”
.. “It was a blatant ignoring of everything we’ve been trying to teach for decades now. Maybe I was being naive; I thought after the election people would have a little more remorse…this is white evangelicalism revealing itself in ways that are deeply dysfunctional.”
.. these groups never invited her to create something that actually corrected the problems she called out; they listened to her critique and they thought that was enough.
.. While Johnson believes that folks in her circles “didn’t necessarily vote for Trump,” they are part of a larger culture that made widespread white evangelical support for Trump possible. By staying in this environment, she hopes to attack one of the root causes of this problem: “An impoverished theology where people don’t understand a ‘God of the oppressed.’”
Whereas, “as black folks, we’ve always had to hold onto this God of the oppressed…a God who interacts with the systems around us.”
.. If anything, white evangelical support for Trump has prompted a “big ideological shift” in her work, from an interest in producing “do gooders” to a generation of Christians willing to work for the liberation of other people.
.. “everyone is reconsidering whether or not they want to remain under the moniker ‘evangelical,’” including minorities, white people, the young and the old, “because the word ‘evangelical’ has been truly hijacked by a movement to maintain the political, economic and social supremacy of whiteness.”
.. her desire to reclaim “a movement that was about the coming of the Kingdom of God and the flourishing of the image of God on Earth,” as well as the release of the image of God from captivity
.. For those staying, they must contend with a dominant white theology, shaped in the cauldron of privilege, which suggests that a successful life springs from an individual’s good, moral choices alone. It fails to recognize how unfair policies and societal structures harm the economic and social wellbeing of those subject to those systems.
Those who stay must also contend with a politicized evangelical movement fundamentally shaped in the late 1970s by a desire to preserve segregation. As documented by historian Randall Balmer, the religious right galvanized evangelicals into a political movement when the IRS threatened to revoke the tax exempt status of racially discriminatory Christian schools. Today, evangelicals of color staying to “combat racism from within” are working against a deeply entrenched culture.
.. But even if a demographic shift seems inevitable, the question is: will the power shift be inevitable? Do white evangelicals have the capacity to share power at scale?
.. baked into the culture of evangelicalism is a distrust of non-evangelical voices, even those who have been doing the work of social justice for decades. But the threats of this new administration might change all that.
.. George Mekhail struck an invitational tone in an attempt to “figure out this guy’s deal.” Sure, George felt “humiliated” by the man’s insistence that his hat made him look like a terrorist, but what could he say? Only a white partygoer could rebuke the man because, “as the brown guy in the room, I can’t be that voice [without coming across as] the agitator.” In a final act of submission, George yanked the beanie off his head and asked, “There, is that better?” The man took a good look at George, his youthful brown eyes, his thin trail of a beard and his short black hair unwinding from hat head.
“No,” the man replied. “You still look like a terrorist.”
.. George decided to leave evangelicalism, though he remains firmly in the Christian tradition, working to hold the faith community to a higher standard.
.. Ambiguous church policies hurt congregants, George argues. For example, most churches claim to “welcome everybody,” but quietly hold policies that exclude particular communities. For the gay person who devotes his life to a church only to discover years later that their pastor won’t baptize him or marry him, “just create[s] so much humiliation and shame
.. Demand clarity without judgment. He’s not trying to convince anyone to change their policies, even if he disagrees with them
.. His long-term vision includes a database that houses the policies of churches. “If we can do that, then we let people vote with their feet.”
.. George, who has lately been asking, “if there is anything redeemable about evangelicalism.”
“I think evangelicalism is the empire that’s about to fall,” he says. “It needs to be dismantled because it’s too powerful and it’s all about money.” Rather than centering the needs of the marginalized and justice work, George sees a toxic faith system that platforms capitalism, unsustainable growth, a prosperity narrative, flashy services and pastors who hang with celebrities. To George, “everything” is at stake.
“We’re at the part of the story where Jesus goes into the temple and flips over tables.”
‘White fragility’ is a defensive response to real conversations about race.
She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: “white fragility,” which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”
.. I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.
Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism
.. For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”
.. In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.
.. First of all, whites often confuse comfort with safety. We say we don’t feel safe, when what we mean is that we don’t feel comfortable
.. White women’s frailty and black men’s aggressiveness and danger.
.. “What are the rules for how people of color should give us feedback about our racism? What are the rules, where did you get them, and whom do they serve?” Usually those questions alone make the point.
.. the fact that they are willing to show me demonstrates, on some level, that they trust me.
The Trump-Farage Road Show
Farage, who has declared mission accomplished and quit the leadershipof the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party since the Brexit vote in June, is a self-important loudmouth who should be taken seriously. His pomposity masks political guile. His bigotry is attuned to the times.
You can’t have observed Farage over the past couple of years and not think Trump may well win in November. That’s Britain’s lesson to America. There is too much smug Hillary-has-it sentiment swilling around.
.. The thing is, the prosperity was skewed, just as it’s skewed in the United States, leaving wide swathes of the white working class in particular incensed that employment has migrated offshore at the same speed as immigrants have come onshore to take a dwindling number of jobs.
.. Britain, too, has its miniature version of flyover country now. The global citizens of big cities like London and Manchester who voted Remain were aghast that anyone out there in Lincolnshire (let alone a majority nationwide) could think differently, in the same way as the global citizens of New York or Los Angeles can’t see Trump’s appeal to tens of millions of Americans.
.. The uncomfortable truth about the Trump campaign is that, like the Brexit campaign, it is perfectly timed to ride a mood of popular revolt — against neoliberal economics, against the bankers who emerged with impunity from the 2008 financial meltdown, against what Farage called “global corporatism,”
.. Because Hillary Clinton, as a symbol of dynastic entitlement (albeit a female one), is such an easy target for an anti-establishment movement, she is particularly vulnerable to the forces that have produced Trump and Brexit.
.. “One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalization.” The most extreme expressions of this, he noted, were New Labour in Britain and the Democratic Party, led respectively by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.