White and non-white evangelicals: do their politics differ?

Evangelicals are usually spoken as a group that supports political and social conservatism. They are identified as a religious group that votes as a block and as it is close to 20-30% of the population, its views become very important during the US elections. However, while almost all evangelicals are socially conservative, research shows that, politically, evangelicals have diverse opinions and positions. Then, why it seems that evangelicals vote as a block for the Republican Party. There are three reasons:

• About two-thirds of the evangelicals are non-Hispanic white;
• White non-Hispanic Americans, including white non-Hispanic evangelicals, are more likely to vote than African-Americans or Hispanics;
• Many conservatives, who are not evangelicals according to most religious/doctrinal definitions, identify themselves as evangelicals.  

Add these three factors and it would be easier to see why more than 80% evangelicals regularly vote for the Republican Party even when the party leadership has regularly supported racist and anti-immigrant policies. President Trump's nomination, election, and continued popularity among evangelicals show that the political choices of evangelical voters (who are mostly white) are informed as much by race as they are by religion. 

A previous blog post discusses in detail the debate over how to define an evangelical and whether self-identification (which is the way most political polls identify evangelicals) is the right way to identify evangelicals, so we will not explore these issues here (for those who want to read about it: Who are evangelical Christians?). 

Here are two articles that explain the link of evangelism, race and voting behavior. 

The FiveThirtyEight article How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals? contends that race and President Trump are dividing evangelicals or exacerbating their differences:

 America’s community of self-described evangelicals, about a fourth of the population, is increasingly divided between a more conservative, Trump-aligned bloc deeply worried about losing the so-called culture wars; and a bloc that is more liberal on issues like immigration, conscious of the need to appeal to nonwhite Christians and wary of the president. The split in evangelical Christianity isn’t new, but it appears to be widening under Trump. 

Two factors appear to be driving this divide. First, the number of white evangelicals is in decline in America at the same time that the evangelical population is becoming more racially diverse. According to 2016 data from the Public Religion Research Institute, about 64 percent of evangelicals are non-Hispanic white, compared to about 68 percent in 2006... 

And these nonwhite evangelicals see politics differently than white evangelicals. While the largest plurality of white evangelicals identify as Republicans, most black evangelicals are Democrats. A plurality of evangelical Latinos, in contrast, identify as political independents — and they’re less supportive of the Democratic Party than Latinos overall — but they are still more likely to consider themselves Democrats than Republicans.

Source: How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals? 

The second factor driving this divide among evangelicals is Trump himself. His governing style is, in effect, forcing evangelical leaders to choose between embracing the white evangelicals who overwhelmingly support the president or distancing themselves from the president — and even politics generally — as part of an appeal to their diversifying congregations.

The Religion & Politics essay We Are All Evangelicals Now blames a "sense of “racial embattlement," the belief that one's group faces more discrimination than any other group in the US, for the voting pattern of evangelicals, who are mostly white. The author, Janelle Wong, argues that evangelicals are not outliers and their views are close to those of white Americans as white Americans also feel being discriminated against. The only difference is intensity, "Evangelicals embody U.S. racial attitudes on steroids." Wong concludes the essay by focusing on narratives of white persecution: 

The bottom line is that the racial divides and racial anxieties we see in evangelical America are not so different from the views of white Americans more generally. I speculate that these attitudes are more extreme than those of other white Americans because their fears of demographic change are even more exaggerated than other whites. A narrative of religious persecution runs deep in white evangelical theological circles. Believers expect to be attacked for their religious commitments. Hence, their defenses may be easily raised by “the War on Christmas.” Narratives of persecution have primed them to expect a broad cultural assault, despite the fact that white Christians face the least religious persecution of any religious group in the United States. These fears of religious persecution, unfounded or not, interact in an especially potent way with fears of racial embattlement to produce the political conservatism detailed above. That being said, the racial patterns we observe among evangelicals are more intense, but consistent with the racial patterns that define the country as a whole. In this respect, we all share something very deep with evangelicals.

American (Christian) Churches and Racism

The last blog post focused on whether religion is part of white nationalism. This blog post furthers the debate on how white racism was supported by the Christian churches in the US. It is very difficult to separate white racism (or for that matter white nationalism) from Christianity in the US. Protestant Christianity was part of American nationalism. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs controlled the state and were the leaders of the society. And they were not ready to accept Blacks or Jews or even Catholics or Mormons as American. The national identity was defined by the WASPs and they drew the boundaries around them.

Jemar Tisby's new book, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, narrates the history of complicity of American churches in racism:

The Color of Compromise takes readers on a historical journey: from America’s early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, to today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Author Jemar Tisby reveals the obvious—and the far more subtle—ways the American church has compromised what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality. 

 Tisby uncovers the roots of sustained injustice in the American church, highlighting the cultural and institutional tables that need to be turned in order to bring about real and lasting progress between black and white people. Through a story-driven survey of American Christianity’s racial past, he exposes the concrete and chilling ways people of faith have actively worked against racial justice, as well as the deafening silence of the white evangelical majority. Tisby shows that while there has been progress in fighting racism, historically the majority of the American church has failed to speak out against this evil. This ongoing complicity is a stain upon the church, and sadly, it continues today. 

Tisby does more than diagnose the problem, however. He charts a path forward with intriguing ideas that further the conversation as he challenges us to reverse these patterns and systems of complicity with bold, courageous, and immediate action. The Color of Compromise provides an accurate diagnosis for a racially divided American church and suggests creative ways to foster a more equitable and inclusive environment among God’s people.

Religion and Politics did an interview with Mr. Tisby. Some excerpts of the interview are given below (Full interview can be read here): 

R&P: As the subtitle states, your book is a sweeping survey of the American church’s complicity in racism. To your mind, what constitutes complicity?
Jemar Tisby: The book opens with the story of four girls who died when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Shortly after that event, a white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. got up in front of an all-white business club and gave an address in which he asked who was responsible for throwing that bomb. In answer to his own question, he said, “We all did it.” 

He went on to explain that every time that the white community—especially Christians—failed to confront racism in its everyday, mundane forms, they created a context of compromise that allowed for an extreme act of racial terror like planting dynamite at a church. That’s the idea of complicity. It’s not that every Christian was a foaming-at-the-mouth racist hurling racial slurs and burning crosses on peoples’ lawns. It’s that when they had the opportunity to intervene in everyday ways, they chose complicity over confrontation, and this enabled a larger atmosphere of racial compromise.

R&P: Though some American Christians were enthusiastically racist and others were anti-racist, most just accepted racist institutions. To what extent are we free to judge that, and to what extent do we have to accept them as products of their time?
JT: I think some would argue that most of those who I am identifying as complicit in racism were merely men and women of their time. But I would respond that the abolitionists and civil rights activists and others who struggled for black freedom were also men and women of their time. So it’s not as though Christians—particularly white Christians—didn’t know there were alternatives. It’s that they must have had some investment in maintaining the status quo, or that they had some fear of what other people would say or what they would risk if they stood up for racial equality. 

R&P: Was the situation in the South markedly different from that in the North?
JT: A lot of people like to point a finger at the South and say, “Those are the real racists.” The implication is that there is no comparable problem in the Midwest or the West coast or the Northeast. But the reality is much more complicated than that. 

I purposely included a chapter in the book on Christian complicity in the North, and by North I mean anywhere outside of the South. There are examples from various geographic regions. The bottom line is that bigotry knows no boundaries. It’s not that racism stopped at the Mason-Dixon line. The thing that makes the South stand out is that this was the physical site where race-based chattel slavery occurred. It’s the place where the plantations were located. But the entire country was implicated because the agricultural production in the South fueled industrial production in the North and other parts of the United States. 

Later, when the country played host to race riots—and here I mean white race riots—these occurred in urban areas outside of the South, like Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and others in the Northeast as well. So there was no region that was free from complicity and no region that was free from racism. 

R&P: As the nation moved from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining and mass incarceration, did the church response reveal any sort of moral trajectory? Did it get noticeably better or worse over time?
JT: Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, when it came to issues of justice, the church was often the taillight rather than the headlight in society. By that, he meant that the church often followed along after changes in the racial status quo were already taking place in different arenas, from politics to entertainment to corporations, and that’s what we often see throughout U.S. history. Though many Christians were actively engaged in struggles for racial equality, they tended to be in the minority. The majority of white Christians, at least, did change, but only as the national sentiment was already moving toward more openness and more equality. The change was slow and a little reluctant. 

Consider G.T. Gillespie, for example. In 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Gillespie was president emeritus of Belhaven College, and he gave an address called “A Christian View on Segregation,” in which he justified racial segregation, he said, based on the Bible. It’s just one example of many white evangelical Christians fighting against the political changes that would promote racial integration. 

It was only after Brown v. Board that many Christians capitulated to what was already the law of the land. But there was a disappointing scarcity of Christians who were promoting racial integration or celebrating the end of Jim Crow.

Is White nationalism Christian or religious?

Three articles debating whether white nationalism is Christian? Murali Balaji's articles support the contention while John W. Morehead's article negates it.

Source: The way of improvement

Behind New Zealand Terror Attack Is a Problem Bigger Than Islamophobia

Mar 18, 2019, 3:21pm Murali Balaji

Even as advocates point to growing Islamophobia as the cause of the attack, the larger issue seems to be white Christian nationalism.

As a white terrorist from Australia emptied clips of his M16 into the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in New Zealand, killing 49 innocent worshippers, his manifesto revealed the depths and scope to which Christian nationalism has entrenched itself into white majority countries.  

Even as advocates point to growing Islamophobia as the cause of the attack, the larger issue seems to be a reactionary—and almost theological—white Christian nationalism that has taken hold over the past decade. And it can’t just be whitewashed away with the “economic displacement” trope.

Indeed, white Christian terrorists like Anders Breivik in Norway, Dylann Roof in South Carolina, and now Brenton Tarrant, are self-styled (and self-described) soldiers in a fight against greater threats: secularism and pluralism.

While white Christian nationalism has its roots in the United States during Reconstruction, it grew in the 1960s as the evangelical movement attracted new congregants fearful of racial and gender equality activism. Over time, these congregants conflated their racial resentment with religiosity, and viewed the idea of a secular country—and a pluralistic one—as tantamount to their extinction.

This Christian nationalism found its way to other parts of the globe, and weren’t necessarily tied to evangelical movements. The resentment-bred, reactionary politics of the National Front in France and far-right movements across Europe were tied to insecurities about what it meant to be a citizen of a particular country. Breivik weaponized that sentiment in 2011 with his terror attack, and Roof cited similar sentiments after slaughtering congregants of an African American Church in 2015.

We are distracted by incidents of mass murder and terror, and assume white Christian nationalism is a series of one-offs, rather than an increasingly pandemic problem across white majority nations in demographic transition. It’s growing in our own backyards, too, and not just because of Trumpism and social media.

To blame Trump, Facebook posts, and rambling manifestos for carnage overlooks our failure to confront the grievances fueling white Christian nationalism. Assuming secular values and pluralism will win out in the end does nothing to prevent the ideological violence of Christian nationalism from spreading. Just as Wahhabism spread as a grievance-based movement against ostensibly secular Pan-Arab dictatorships in the 1960s before morphing into a powerful global threat, white Christian nationalism is a tinderbox.

We have to have the tools to snuff the fire before it lights.

White Christian Nationalism May Not Be Religious, But It Is Christian

Mar 21, 2019, 4:26pm Murali Balaji

White Christian nationalism’s foot soldiers don’t necessarily connect their racial resentment with their devotion to the Bible, yet they're often trying to retake what they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance. 

After my recent post on the terror attack in New Zealand, several Christians reached out to Religion Dispatches and directly to me asking why I conflated white terrorism with Christian nationalism.

They eloquently noted that the shooter (whose name I shall not use) did not use Christian theology, but espoused anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views that seemed disconnected from religion. But in making that argument, they might be missing a larger point: white Christian nationalism isn’t religious (or even grounded in religious scripture), but its adherents nearly always frame their grievances in terms of endangered white Christian societies.

Following Charlottesville, I wrote that white nationalism does have theological roots, with evangelicals like Bob Jones standing firmly in the way of civil rights. In modern iterations, white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism have converged with folks like Tony Perkins, Steve King (who is at it again), and David Duke.

But for the most part, white Christian nationalism’s foot soldiers don’t necessarily connect their racial resentment with their devotion to the Bible. Many aren’t religious, and in fact that’s generally beside the point. Instead, their resentment towards Others (generally non-white and non-Christian populations) is built up over time, largely through online portals that function as echo chambers for the blend of history, conspiracy theory, and racism that produces and sustains white Christian nationalism.

And we should note that it’s really a resentment movement that wears religion like a hood ornament or team colors. In such a definition, these nationalists are trying to retake what they presume to be lost: white and Christian dominance. 

In a larger context, none of the nationalist and exclusivist movements—Jewish nationalism in Israel; Islamism in parts of Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia; Hindu nationalism in parts of India; Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand—that have grown in recent years are grounded in theology. They’re all connected by a shared sense of grievance and an imagined community based on assumed shared ideals.

The New Zealand terrorist might not have been religious per se, but he was 100 percent devoted to the divine providence of white (Christian) nationhood.

Misdiagnosing Nationalism as ‘Christian’ Exacerbates the Challenges of Islamophobia: A Response to Murali Balaji

Mar 29, 2019, 12:59pm John W. Morehead

Christian nationalism and White nationalism have some common concerns, but they shouldn’t be conflated in their differing narratives and responses to Muslims and other immigrants.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in New Zealand by Brenton Tarrant, many are looking to address the motivations and influences underlying the violence. In two RD posts, one from March 18 and another from March 22, Murali Balaji argues that the attacks were rooted in white Christian nationalism. But is Balaji defining Christian nationalism correctly, and is it the best way to characterize Tarrant’s ideological narrative? I will argue below that the answer is “no” to both questions.

To the question of defining Christian nationalism, there is a helpful body of academic research in political science and the social sciences relevant to this. The lead researchers in one study argue that “the conservative strain [of American civil religion] views America as holding a unique covenant with God, which requires it to be protected from outsiders and those who would do it harm. We refer to these ideas more generally as Christian nationalism.” Contrary to Balaji’s assertions in his second essay, Christian nationalism is religious, and it incorporates theological elements. This results in perceptions of “divinely anointed” Christian ingroup members vs. “theologically condemned” outgroup members like Muslims. This fusion of religious and national identities is noteworthy among white American evangelicals, where being Christian is very important to being truly American. This was the Christian nationalism that was a significant factor for white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016.

By contrast there are other forms of nationalism. The type associated with white supremacy, sometimes called white nationalism, is concerned with ethnocentrism and the superiority of the white race. Both white nationalism and Christian nationalism have shared concerns about “cultural displacement,” and involve prejudice toward immigrant populations, sometimes seen as “invaders,” manifested in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes. But these two forms of nationalism, even with some shared fears, are not the same thing. So Balaji does not define Christian nationalism correctly and conflates it with other forms of nationalism.

To the second question, what type of nationalism did Tarrant espouse? Before his attacks, Tarrant posted a 74-page document on the internet. According to J.M. Berger, an expert in online extremism, Tarrant’s manifesto is “clearly a statement of ideology,” described as white nationalist, and the author “is a white supremacist, and anti-immigration and anti-Muslim.” There is no indication in Berger’s analysis that Tarrant included statements that would characterize his ideology as a form of Christian nationalism.

If Christian nationalism is not the proper way to understand Tarrant’s nationalism, but instead a form of white supremacist nationalism is more accurate, where did the major anti-immigrant influences come from? According to Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Sarah Wildman at Foreign Policy, Tarrant draws upon the work of Renaud Camus, a French anti-immigration writer. They note that while Tarrant was in France at a mall watching immigrant “invaders,” the idea came to him to use violence against nonwhites. Polakow-Suransky and Wildman quote from Tarrant’s manifesto illustrating the emotional impact this had on the soon-to-be mass murderer: “I found my emotions swinging between fuming rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of France, the pessimism of the french [sic] people, the loss of culture and identity and the farce of the political solutions offered.”

It would seem that Balaji has identified the wrong type of nationalism in connection with the New Zealand terrorism. White nationalism provided the ideological narrative, not Christian nationalism.

In the interests of full disclosure, I identify as a Christian. But my disagreement and critique of Balaji’s thesis should not be interpreted as a failure to accept criticism of those in my religious tradition. For the last four years I have been pursuing a grant from the Louisville Institute that has brought social psychology into conversation with American evangelical theologies of opposition to religious others, particularly Muslims. Among the contributing factors, our research indicates that Christian nationalism is a significant predictor of negative attitudes toward Muslims. I accept this, and advocate strategies to counter this narrative so as to foster more positive forms of multifaith interaction.

Christians have behaved badly, and pursued violence toward others, in the name of their religion. That’s beyond dispute. But whether Christian nationalism was the ideological narrative underlying New Zealand’s attacks, that’s another question. And it’s one that I think Balaji misidentified. If we misdiagnose the challenges we face we will create inappropriate strategies to counter them, and possibly foster even more tensions between Christians and Muslims.

***

Murali Balaji responds:

Following my first and second pieces in Religion Dispatches, several evangelical leaders have offered thoughtful critiques of my position that the New Zealand terrorist (whom I will not name) is a white Christian nationalist.

John Morehead writes in his response that I mislabeled anti-immigrant white nationalism as “Christian nationalism,” asserting that “White nationalism provided the ideological narrative, not Christian nationalism.”

I respectfully disagree.

For starters, I emphasized that a white Christian nationalist doesn’t necessarily have to be “religious” in the traditional sense. I would argue that Donald Trump and Mike Pence are both white Christian nationalists, though the former hardly has any attachment to the actual theology of Christianity.

In this regard, white Christian nationalists draw upon and reference a pure white Christian ideal—one that arguably never existed anywhere. If we reference Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, the white Christian ideal becomes an affinity that helps to build a collective identity.

The terrorist’s manifesto also makes reference to Pope Urban II and the First Crusade, implying that he fancied himself part of a holy war against Muslims and other invaders. While Morehead’s argument seeks to clearly distinguish between white nationalism and Christian nationalism, the terrorist’s own words seem to undercut this attempt.

“We are coming for Constantinople and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city,” the terrorist wrote in his manifesto. That’s not subtle in its call for Christian supremacy and destruction of Islam.

I sympathize with Morehead’s position, but the terrorist seems to make both implicit and explicit references to a dream that many white Christian nationalists share: a return to white Christian dominance over its non-white, non-Christian others.