The political and economic power of white evangelicals

Make Me Smart March 26, 2024 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello everyone, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal. Tuesday, the 26th of March is what my calendar says. Thanks for joining us on a Tuesday. It’s one show on topic, which is what we do around here. So, we’re going to talk in no particular order: religion, politics, American society, our national fabric, and now what happens, evangelical Christian voters, their support for the right side of the political spectrum, a bunch of other stuff.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, especially their support of Donald Trump, which has been a really key demographic in his rise to power and you know, in this upcoming election, and we’re here to talk with us about why evangelicals in particular, white evangelicals are still sticking with Trump is NPR’s national political correspondent, Sarah McCammon, who has a unique perspective on this. She, and we’ve talked about this before, like me, was raised in evangelical Christian environment, church schools, all the things, but later left it and she witnessed the relationship between Trump and white evangelicals, sort of as it was developing while she was reporting on the 2016 election. She’s written about her journey and the journey of a lot of other people sort of leaving the evangelical church in her new book, which is called, “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.” Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sarah McCammon 

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Kimberly Adams 

So, like I said, you and I have, and we’ve talked about this before, share that we both spent the entirety of our youth going to these pretty strict evangelical Christian schools. Very much raised in the church. And I wonder, how that journey has shaped who you are as a person, but also as a journalist?

Sarah McCammon 

Yeah, you know, I talk about growing up very much in a bubble. And this is true to greater and lesser extents for different evangelical kids, right? I mean, evangelicalism is such a big movement, and it encompasses a lot of things, and a lot of people. So, every experience is different. But I think what’s really true for a lot of people is that there is a subculture, you know, there’s shared media, books, magazines, and cultural references, and both theological and spiritual and political figures in many cases that the sort of the whole evangelical world is shaped by. And for me, you know, there was a big emphasis when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s on, of course, sharing our faith with other people. We had this belief that we had the truth, and we had to share it. And that for particularly, my predominantly white evangelical context had a very strong sort of political overtone that meant supporting conservative political candidates and policies. And I think we’ve really seen that come to fruition, you know, with Donald Trump over the last several years. So yes, it was a community I left behind in many ways. I think a lot of people who have had some kind of strict religious upbringing might be able to relate to trying to make sense of what that means to them as an adult. But then, when I covered the Trump campaign in 2016, I found myself really face-to-face with some of the same issues and themes and even people that I thought about a lot while I was growing up.

Kai Ryssdal 

So, here you are now on sort of on the other side if I can characterize your development, right? I heard you talking to Ayesha the other day about how you know you’re still religious, you still pray, but you’re not you know, of the evangelical movement. You’re now in this group called Exvangelicals. What are they? Who are they?

Sarah McCammon 

Yeah, it’s funny, you know, I’ve often said I didn’t call myself an evangelical when I was one. I just kind of realized as I was getting older that that was the term for the kind of Christian I was. You know, we, we just call ourselves Christians, and we were skeptical of other Christians that practiced and believed differently than we did quite frankly. And you know, Exvangelicals, not a term I ever would have, you know, consciously adopted, but when I heard it in 2016, while doing a story about the Trump campaign and about white evangelical women who were really grappling with the Access Hollywood video release. You know, the one where Trump talks about touching women inappropriately and really brags about it. I talked to some women who were, you know, committed evangelicals who were really struggling with that alignment between their churches and Donald Trump. And one of them said, you know, “I feel more like an Exvangelical. I don’t think the evangelical label fits.” And so, you know, I think that word holds a lot for a lot of people. Other people talk about this. There’s a sort of adjacent online term called deconstruction, which is sort of a word for rethinking and trying to make sense of any religious background and kind of see how it aligns with the person you want to be going forward.

Kimberly Adams 

With the understanding that the term evangelical is pretty broad. And you know, as you just said, and you say in the book, people may or may not use that for themselves. Can you talk about the political and economic power of evangelicals in the United States?

Sarah McCammon 

So, it’s really the reason the subtitle of my book is “loving living and leaving the White Evangelical Church” is because it’s impossible to talk about that without talking about race. So, just to sort of boil it down. If you look at, for example, Black Christians and white Christians, Black evangelicals and white evangelicals. There are other types of evangelicals, but just to take those two categories, they vote very, very differently. Even though they may hold similar theological views, they tend to have very different political priorities. And you know, I think that is a manifestation of the fact that lived experience and also the long history that this country has and that the American church, frankly, has around racial division plays a big role in the way we see things as voters, and that includes Christian voters. So, race is a huge part of this conversation. White evangelicals have overwhelmingly voted for Republicans and overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. And I think what’s interesting about that is, you know, I covered of course, the 2016 campaign, and I so often heard, evangelical voters say, especially when we got around to the general election, “Look, I have a choice. I have a binary choice between someone who aligns with my policies that I may not be crazy about, but he supports my political positions, like opposition to abortion, or somebody who does not.” Well, fast forward to 2024 and looking at the exit polling from the Republican primaries this year, white evangelicals played a huge role once again, in making Trump the presumptive nominee even when they did have other alternatives. So, they seem to be, certainly not all but as you know, a majority is pretty enthusiastically behind Trump.

Kai Ryssdal 

For those who have not read your book, or Tim Alberta’s excellent book that came out six-ish months ago. Oh, God, what is it? Kingdom power and the glory about Trump and white evangelicals. Please, please, please explain how God fearing law abiding moral people like most, we assume, evangelicals are support a candidate who is none of those things?

Sarah McCammon 

Well, one thing I really tried to do is paint a picture of the fact that there is a long-standing sense among many American evangelicals that the country is in decline. That the country has moved away from a vision of a deeply Christian past and has fallen into secularism essentially. That’s a message that was communicated in my churches in my textbooks. In my book, I cite some of my Christian school textbooks that really paint this kind of glowing image of America as this specially chosen Christian nation. You know, rhetoric that seems to be on the ascent today. And so, Donald Trump tapped into that, you know, he courted evangelical leaders. He used messaging even, like, “Make America Great Again,” which I think evoke this idea that America was once in a better place, and it’s in decline. And so, in many ways, you know, I think there’s this misconception that Trump hijacked the evangelical movement, but in many ways, the groundwork for this alliance was laid a long time ago. And he did prioritize many of the policy issues that were important to evangelicals, chiefly opposition to abortion rights.

Kai Ryssdal 

So. Sorry, let me just jump into one more, Kimberly, and just follow up. This is a little bit like the episode we did where you were the expert and I was not, and here again now with you two are the experts, and I’m not. So, is the theory then that Trump is a flawed vessel, as are we all, and it’s his shortcomings are okay because we’re working toward a higher purpose here. Is that what it is? Kinda?

Sarah McCammon 

I think you summed it up pretty well, Kai. I mean, you know, one of the things I talked about is remembering as a teenager just how angry many in the evangelical movement were about former President Bill Clinton’s moral failings, and it’s been widely observed that the response of the evangelical movement to Trump’s own moral failings was very different. But I think that you know you put your finger on it. It’s really about the fact that Trump needed a movement to give him political power, and the evangelical movement needed to champion, and they found one another.

Kimberly Adams 

One of the things that really struck me as I was reading your book, just because it brought so many flashbacks, was you’re reading and including excerpts from those textbooks from Bob Jones University and from all of these different Christian publishing houses from the Christian universities. And I remember those textbooks that had, you know, different stories about that didn’t include evolution. We actually had a biology teacher at my school fired for letting the students read “The Origin of Species.” At my school, they taught that interracial dating was a sin and had all these reasonings for it. And what I thought was really striking, watching you lay that all out or reading you lay it all out, was just how big of an ecosystem this is, if you think about it. Literally multiple publishing houses, universities, entire economic systems built around this, and I don’t think people really appreciate the scale of it.

Sarah McCammon 

It’s a whole sort of separate intellectual universe. And, you know, one criticism I’ve heard from some within the evangelical world of this idea is like, well, you’re conflating fundamentalists and evangelicals. They’re two different groups. And, you know, scholars like to talk about the line between the two. And it’s a fair conversation to have. But the reality is, you know, and fundamentalist, just to quickly define those terms are generally more conservative, more rigid evangelicalism, is a little bit more sort of modern movement that comes out of fundamentalism. But the reality in my Christian school, in my church, in my evangelical college. It sounds like in your world, Kimberly, is that it’s a spectrum. And there’s a lot of interaction and cross pollination. And so, if you’re in an evangelical church, you may well be exposed to and influenced by people more on the fundamentalist end of the spectrum. Now, again, it’s a big movement. There’s a lot of variety and diversity within it. But in many, many Christian schools, even today, evolution is not taught. And it’s considered, I mean, as I write about, we were told that people believe in evolution because they want to deny God. And so, you know, it gave me sort of a very, very narrow view of what the world was like, and one that I had to sort of unpack as I grew up, which I think you did, too.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, and I want to ask because this has relevance to today because one of the other things you highlight is that shaping people with this worldview of anything that kind of goes against your narrative is against God. You explain that that has sort of repercussions in terms of how people now process politics?

Sarah McCammon 

I think it does. I mean, it gives authority figures, it gives trusted and accepted authority figures like pastors and evangelical political leaders a lot of power because it’s sort of you know, it’s difficult. If you’re told that certain ideas and certain, I guess intellectual authorities are out off limits, they’re sort of out of bounds. And you’re told you have to reject them because they contradict the teachings of your church. Well, it’s sort of set asides a whole universe of ideas that can’t come in and contradict a narrative, and I talked about how, you know, when Kellyanne Conway, the former adviser for President Trump, got on TV and talked about having alternative facts. It really reminded me of some of the ideas I heard growing up particularly around science that if there was a scientific fact that contradicted what we believed, well, we just went looking for our own facts.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, okay. So, bear with me on this one. My best friend in the world has three rules that he lives by. He’s way smarter than I am, so I generally try too as well. One is, you cannot give advice in the expectation into going to be taken. The second one is, never assume the rational actor in an opponent or person you’re having a discussion with. And number three, which is relevant here, is you cannot screw with people on their beliefs. And if that’s the case, which generally I find it to be in life, Sarah. Now what do we do? Right? When the world you describe as having come from and Kimberly you too a little bit as well. And now we’re at a crossroads for this republic. Now, what do we do?

Sarah McCammon 

Well, I think that’s why it’s important to have these conversations. You know, sometimes evangelicals are talked about as if they are a monolith. And the reality is that because in a movement, the reality is that in a movement that comprises so many people, there is variety, and there are people who, you know, think differently. And I think, you know, misinformation is a problem across the board. It doesn’t just affect evangelicals. I don’t want to give that impression. But there is some research I cited in my book that suggests that evangelicals are more susceptible to certain kinds of misinformation, and I think it’s something you know that I would love to see. I mean, I’m glad to see people from the community talking about it. And I think it’s important that those conversations continue if we’re going to sort of, you know, to have to have a democracy, in which we all make decisions together. We have to kind of agree on some basic facts as a starting point. And we may still disagree about the solutions, but it’s really important that we can come together around some basic facts.

Kimberly Adams 

I know the book explores a lot of the trauma of many people having to leave the church because, you know, they couldn’t morally take it anymore, or because they were queer, or because of racism and all these things. But I wonder. I don’t wonder. I feel like sometimes when the rest of us are talking about evangelicals, especially when it comes to politics, it misses some of the good in the community, particularly when it comes to sort of charitable works. And the earnestness and the heart that a lot of these folks are coming from. I say this, you know, like you, having spent most of my formative years around white evangelicals specifically. And how do you balance that? Like, how did you find it in your research people kind of striking that balance between the good in the church and the struggle that they were having?

Sarah McCammon 

Well, this is one of the things I talk about a lot. I mean, I think that, at least for myself, being raised in a community that spent a lot of time thinking and talking about how to live. You know, that was one of our chief concerns. How should we live on this earth? What is it? As we would describe it that God calls us to do with our time. How do we love other people? And, you know, we don’t always get that right, to be sure. But I think being concerned with those questions is really, really beautiful and really valuable. And I hope that I still am driven by a lot of those questions in my daily life. And also, I think, you know, one of the most meaningful things about being in a religious community is the community. And it’s something that, you know, people help each other, and they do, as you say, Kimberly, they help people outside the community. And this is something that we see from, you know, religious groups across the board. So, it’s funny, I did an event on Palm Sunday at a friend’s house in the afternoon, and she said, one of her guests said, “Is this an anti-religion thing? This is on Palm Sunday.” And we said, “Absolutely not,” you know, this is not anti-religion. Actually, it’s for everyone. And I think that people who think and care about religion will find it meaningful as well. It’s really about how to go about religion, and how to make sense of, you know, I think each of us, if we grow up with a religious background, have to do this maturing process of saying, “Okay, this is what I was given. What aligns with the person that I am today and what doesn’t?” And that doesn’t, you know, for many, many exvangelicals I talk to still have strong spiritual beliefs, still have a real affection for or are participants in Christian communities. They’ve just evolved and changed a bit from the way that they were raised.

Kimberly Adams 

There’s so much more in that book, and I highly encourage folks to read it. But thank you so much, Sarah McCammon. She’s the national political correspondent for NPR. Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah McCammon 

Thank you both.

Kai Ryssdal 

Sarah, thanks a bunch.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. And that book again, “The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.” You know, Sarah writes very well about sort of the white evangelical experience, but also talks in the book about how complicated it is for Black people in that environment, which I can obviously relate directly to. But growing up, I spent sort of Monday through Friday in this white evangelical school that was very, very conservative. And then Saturdays and Sundays in some sort of activity at my Missionary Baptist Black church with my family. And there were very different narratives. There was a lot of incongruency, I guess I could say. And I remember chatting with my dad once about just some of the narratives I was hearing in both places that just did not make sense to me. And my dad said to me, “Faith is God’s attempt to reach out to mankind, and religion is mankind’s attempt to make it palatable.”

Kai Ryssdal

Oh, yeah.

Kimberly Adams

And I’ve always felt like that is such a helpful framing for how I think about faith and religion. Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

You should write a book. I’m just saying. You think I’m kidding. I’m really not. I’m really not. We were talking. As I sat down in the studio, you were telling Sarah that she’s number one in your category. I’m telling you, there’s space there.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, I’m interested to hear from everybody else. Do you consider yourself an exvangelical? Or what are your own thoughts on religion and especially the role that religion is playing in politics today? We’d love to hear your thoughts. You can tell us about it at 508-827-6278, also known as 508-U-B-SMART. We will be right back.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right, the news. Kimberly Adams, go.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. I’m sure by now everyone has seen that terrible video of the bridge collapse in Baltimore. And I think the search and rescue is now shifted to a recovery for those poor folks who are still missing. But the discussion has already shifted to infrastructure in this country, which has been vastly underfunded for so long. And as the New York Times points out in a story this morning, this is not the only bridge collapse that we’ve experienced in recent years. You know, Interstate 95 in Philadelphia collapsed last summer. I think there was a bridge collapse in Minnesota a while back as well. And it is going to be incredibly expensive to repair this bridge. But, you know, obviously very few structures can survive a giant barge running into them. But I feel like this is going to make infrastructure even more of a topic in this upcoming election, as we recognize that so much is weak, so much is in need of repair. And who knows. We don’t know yet whether or not the bridge needed more support or anything like that. But we did, you know, we have the infrastructure law that actually passed despite, you know, many, many infrastructure weeks where nothing happened. But I do think this is a moment to think about how underfunded so much of America’s infrastructure is and whether or not this will be a motivation to do more about it. But I don’t know.

Kai Ryssdal 

One hopes. One hopes. One does not know, but one hopes. I love me a good Elon Musk unintended consequences story, and Bloomberg has a great one today. We’ve talked about Musk and the Starlink satellite system. The global internet system that he is putting up there through his company SpaceX and the national security and geopolitical uses to which he has put it to. Also, Ukraine and Gaza. Story in Bloomberg today. Oh, my goodness. I’m just going to read you this. “A Bloomberg News investigation identified wide-spending examples of Starlink kits being traded and activated illegally. Yemen, Sudan and other places. ‘It is deeply concerning,’ said Emma Shortis, as a senior researcher in international security affairs at the Australian Institute.” It’s amazeballs. Who possibly could have seen this coming? It’s like when the United States armed people inside Afghanistan, and then the Soviets invaded, right? And they use the weapons against the Soviets, but then the Taliban takes over and the weapons are being used against. Oh, come on. Sorry.

Kimberly Adams 

No one could have seen it coming. It would be impossible.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Anyway. It’s a great piece. Bloomberg investigations does good stuff. One guy. Richest man in the world with all this geopolitical oomph. That’s my news.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. All right. Well, that is it for the news. Let us move on to the mailbag.

Mailbag

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco, Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kimberly Adams 

So last week, I shared that my gardening philosophy is survival of the fittest. And shout out to the person on Mastodon who sent me the Thunderdome gif in response to that. So, the idea is that I will not bother with plants that will not survive, whether indoors or out. If you die, you don’t get planted again. The end. And we heard from many of you about your gardening strategies. And here’s one message we got.

Grace

My name is Grace, and I’m calling from Alexandria, Virginia. We joke that our philosophy of vegetable gardening in the summer is shock and awe. We just throw a jungle into the outdoor vegetable bed till it grows uncontrollably. And a third of it goes to the squirrels and birds and deer. A third of it probably drops off rotten because we can’t reach it. And a third of it goes to us and our neighbors, and we still have too much.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s a pretty great way to garden. I don’t hate that.

Kimberly Adams 

I love it. My neighbors call me Farmer Kimberly because usually sometime in July and August, I’m offloading veggies like you would not believe. It’s too many things.

Kai Ryssdal 

Wow. I mean, that’s impressive. We put a couple of tomato plants in every summer, and inevitably they get over watered, and they get swollen and gross. And anyway, whenever we’re not farmers in my family.

Kimberly Adams 

See, this is why you go with like cherry tomatoes or spoon tomatoes, which the birds love.

Kai Ryssdal

What are spoon tomatoes?

Kimberly Adams

They’re like teeny tiny. They’re like the size of blueberries. The birds love them, and they are cool in salads. But you know, picking each one individually gets annoying, and then they fall down and then they keep growing back every year. And it’s like, invasion of spoon tomatoes.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right, one more. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about boycotts and how they don’t often impact companies’ bottom line. We got this.

Eileen

Hi. This is Eileen in Portland. I guess I feel like they work if the company changes their policy. You might like their product, and if they change their policy, and it’s not a hit on their bottom line from your boycott, I still win. And I get to still consume the product I liked. Thanks.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, consumers have power, right? That’s the thing. Consumers have power. And we often don’t think we do, but we do.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I mean, that’s what the guest was saying. It’s like, shame is actually a stronger motivator than the impact on their bottom line.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. All right. Last thing. Before we go as we do this week’s answer to the Make Me Smart question. What is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about? This week’s answer comes to us from Neil King Jr. He has a memoir out. It’s probably I don’t know, eight or 10 months ago, it came out. We had him on the program. We had him on Marketplace. It’s out in hardcover now, I think. I think he went paperback then to hardcover. Anyway, it’s got a new cover on it. “American Ramble” is the title. “A Walk of Memory and Renewal” by Neil King, Jr. Here it is.

Neil King Jr.

In the early spring of 2021, I walked out the door of my house nine blocks east of the US Capitol and walked over a month, 330 miles to New York City. The whole point of the walk, which then became a book I wrote, was to pay attention to the land, to the people, to the stories along the way, the richness of the whole history and really get to know it in a micro way. When I came home a month later, and I looked closely at the block that I had lived on in Washington DC for 20 years. There were people I didn’t know their names at the end of the block. Most of its residents I never knew anything about. So, the richness of the walk to New York had drawn out in me a subtler understanding of all the things I didn’t know that were so familiar to me, but not properly understood. Right under my nose.

Kai Ryssdal 

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I really, really enjoyed it. It’s a pretty quick read. Neil is a is a survivor of some kind of throat cancer, esophageal something. I don’t know, as you can tell in his vocal cords. And this walk sort of sprang out of that and about after January 6. Anyway, it’s called “American Ramble.” Highly recommend.

Kimberly Adams 

I want to read that. I read another book years and years ago about a woman who sort of sold everything in her life and just went on a walk for peace, as she called it, and went back and forth across the country a couple of times with like, just the clothes on her back. I’ll have to look that up and we can put it in the show notes. But I don’t know why I was just thinking the other day about this type of story about people walking long distances because I was reading in a story about the situation at the border. And it was just sort of mentioned in passing, how people are walking hundreds of miles to get to the US border. And it struck me how differently we talk about different types of journeys, you know. Hundreds of miles within the United States with intention. You can kind of get food when you need to. You can stop when you need to, versus the journey that these folks are making, you know, out of desperation. And there’s no larger point there. It just strikes me that in distance, we’re talking about similar journeys, but the experience is so much different. But that is it for us today. We would love to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. Our number is 508-827-6278, also known as 508-U-B-SMART.

Kai Ryssdal 

Little late today, Jay.

Kimberly Adams 

Jay, sneak it in.

Kai Ryssdal 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program is engineered by Jay Siebold. Charlton Thorp is going to mix it down later. Our intern is Thalia Menchaca.

Kimberly Adams 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital. And Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager is Neal Scarbrough. Peace Pilgrim.

Kai Ryssdal

Oh, is that what’s called?

Kimberly Adams

Yeah. And she walked more than 25,000 miles on a personal pilgrimage for peace. Mildred Lisette Norman.