Politics and Religion

It's Thanksgiving at Deeper Stories, and it's going to get ugly.

It happened on Facebook, and I went through it live on Twitter, baring my soul to 30k followers, all the bitterness and all the work of adjusting my entire worldview. I’ve had no intention of doing that here, but nonetheless, this is a moment I once again need to speak up.

If you don’t want that, no one’s forcing you to read this. I’m a progressive and voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary, if that tells you anything. This is your opportunity to get out now.

Last chance.

Okay. Here we go.

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

It’s still strange to be able to boldly claim myself a progressive with a history of voting for Bernie in the primary and Biden in the general back in 2020. You see, I voted Republican from 1992 to 2012, and there’s a really good chance I’d be Republican to this day if the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump hadn’t opened my eyes.

It’s a long path to get to where I am from where I’ve been.

As detailed by Politico, the Moral Majority (1979-1989) formed not because of the issues they trumpeted but over the issue of segregation. You can see the impact of the Moral Majority on the 1980 election in this Harvard Study. By the time I was in youth groups in the 1980’s, we believed Evangelical Christians has always been against abortion, but in reality:

In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

— Politico article

Abortion was a Catholic issue, not an Evangelical Christian one. Then in 1976, born-again, Evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter became president, and the events of his presidency and the response of America’s religious leaders have shaped the political landscape ever since.

Since 1970, evangelical colleges had been fighting the push to integrate their schools or lose their tax-exempt status. According to the article, Bob Jones University told the IRS in 1970 they they would “not admit African Americans”. By 1975, they’d capitulated enough to admit married Black students, to help prevent the possibility of white students becoming impregnated by Black students. That did not appease the IRS.

Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School was also under pressure, and that infuriated him. This was the cause that rallied together the Moral Majority, which ushered in the Christian vote for the Republican Ronald Regan. They couched their language in terms of abortion, homosexuality, and the Equal Rights Agenda, but the one true cause behind it all was racism and white superiority.

The Evangelical Church bought in completely, and that was only cemented by the fear-mongering throughout the 80’s AIDS crisis. The Republican Party was said to be the home of conservative Christian values, and the Democrats were said to be godless degenerates.

I became a Republican and listened to Rush Limbaugh on my way to work at a placement for emotionally disturbed teenagers in the Angeles Forest, and in 1996, I had a religious experience when my brakes failed as I came down the hairpin turns that lead out of the mountains.

In 2000, I became an ordained pastor in a famous world-wide Evangelical family of churches and moved from California back to the deep south for the work of church planting. I believed the concern of abortion overruled everything. It never occurred to me that our only political interest was in using the violence of the state against the sins of others. Not the sins we committed, of course. Just theirs. Because somehow that was holy and just. It never occurred to me that there could be another righteous opinion on abortion. If I’d wavered in that commitment or hesitated in my answer, I’d never have been ordained.

Then in 2016, Trump became the candidate. I was slow to awaken, even then. I only came down hard against him when the Access Hollywood Tapes were revealed, and even then, in the general election, I cast a protest vote for some conservative no-chance party. The entire time, I admitted to myself I could only do so because I knew there was no chance of Hillary Clinton winning the state. Somehow, I still saw Hillary Clinton as the greater threat.

I was still a conservative and a Never-Trump Republican, but then I saw a change slowly sweep over my church. Trump emboldened us to racism and homophobia. We became a refuge FROM liberal and progressive thought, a place where bigots felt comfortable and encouraged.

The day came when my friend, the head pastor, said something from the pulpit that told me I was alone in my struggle against this wave, and in 2019, I left.

For a year, I kept silent, but as the elections approached, I knew I had to say something in a way that people would hear, and that meant Facebook. I tried to be as gentle as I could:

When I learn a friend supports Donald Trump, it breaks my heart.

The response that came is infamous among all who know me. Cousins and church members who agree with me offered quiet support, from the shadows where it’s safe. Meanwhile, the vocal majority made their position clear, every Christian is supporting Donald Trump. If you’re not for Donald Trump, you’re not saved.

I labeled myself as a “former conservative” for a while. Eventually, I accepted the term liberal. I voted for Bernie, and I reevaluated everything, because everything I knew, I only knew through that conservative worldview.

Abortion was the hardest. Then Republicans began drafting their first bills, and it was terrifying. It was everything we’d always been promised it wouldn’t be. At that point, I said, “I’d rather leave the issue of abortion with a woman and her doctor rather than with the Republican party.”

And not long after that, I learned the truth for why the Evangelical Church votes the way it does. Like so much else in this country, it’s rooted in racism and white superiority.

How do I feel about it all now? I’ve healed. The bitterness is largely gone, but the hard truth remains. Everything the Republican Party has come to stand for is a lie. The concept that there is a spiritual justification for any of this is also a lie, and there’s a fundamental problem with the church embracing a lie. Where is its witness? Why should the world believe anything the church says when the world can clearly see the evil of Donald Trump but the church is blind? Trump would have no power without the church. None. All those alt-right forces he’s emboldened would still be cringing in the shadows if weren’t for the church. When a Christian claims to have the truth of eternal life, why should anyone ever believe?

I believe in Jesus Christ. I have no faith in the church.

That’s my story, aspects of it, anyway.

How does any of this impact me as a writer? In every way, actually. This is who I am and that seeps through into everything I write, and being free of the constraints of the church, I ask my questions in ways they wouldn’t approve. If they would approve, I’ve done something wrong.

There’s a book that I thought would never see the light of day. It’s an exercise is breaking every taboo I could, just to shatter what felt like a lingering and hypocritical puritanism. My time here, however, has encouraged me to set it free. It’s currently being released, chapter-by-chapter, to paid subscribers. You can find it under the Bonus tab on the website’s menu.

What message do I want to extend? Beyond church members who need to shake themselves free of the Republican delusion, there is another group I want to encourage. Young voters expected a bigger difference between the two parties and are especially broken over what’s happened to the people of Gaza. You’re right, both parties are far too conservative, but we’ve reached the crisis where we are because the Republican Party saw its doom. They cannot survive without destroying our democracy. We cannot turn the nation in the way you want it to go if that happens. We may lose the ability to change at all, ever again.

Change comes much too slow, but if allowed, it does come. We were and are changing, but the other side is fighting that change with everything it has.

We cannot let this slide-toward-fascism continue through our failure to act. The alt-right control of the Republican party must be voted down while a vote still means anything at all.

P.S. — if as a conservative, you’ve read this far, I want to challenge you to see what I’ve seen. Hold up every conservative issue and judge it through the lens of “is this clinging to a failing white supremacy?”

For you to understand that question, you need to understand what white supremacy means. I’m not asking if you hate anyone. I’m not asking if you’re racist. I’m not asking about white hoods and secret meetings.

For a long time, the only opinion that mattered was that of the white, heterosexual, cisgendered, Christian male. That’s no longer the case, and every time someone cries against something being “woke,” that’s what they’re upset about. Other opinions matter, and every derogatory use of the word “woke” is a cry over the dwindling power of the legacy of white supremacy.

The neighborhoods people grew up in the twentieth century (and that set the standard of living for entire generations) was based on home loans that only passed through the Congress under the provision that Black people could not apply. Where they lived was dictated. Who could appear in TV, movies, or comic books was restricted. It isn’t just history that says Bruce Wayne is white and Peter Parker is straight, it’s white supremacy. There was no other choice. You didn’t grow up with gay people? White supremacy. The trans issue came as a surprise to you? White supremacy.

You can still get bigoted laws passed in this country. We’ve seen that on the state level, but largely the conservative effort has been to preserve the legacy of white supremacy wherever they can. The attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is an example of this. Striking down affirmative action is an example. Protests over inclusion in media or experiments in how old IP characters are portrayed is another. The cries over history and heritage are an attempt to exclude others from aspects of our culture they were officially banned from fifty years ago.

The existence of others is not a political issue. It’s a reality.

P.P.S. — Agree to disagree, but if you think you’re from a time in America when people took care of themselves and didn’t get hound-outs from the government, you’ve bought into a myth. Big government projects were the norm until the 1960’s when, coincidentally, you could no longer disqualify Black people from participating in government programs. One last racist jab, if they had to slit everybody’s throat to keep a Black man from eating, that’s what they were going to do. But coming up after that doesn’t mean you had no assistance. All that inequity and injustice was baked into your house, your neighborhood, your schools, and your daddy’s job—a residual-paying handout to whoever-we-agree-to-call-white at the expense of the Black man. The only person to ever say they made it on their own in our modern America is going to have to be a minority. The rest of us were breast fed every step of the way.

Ready for More:

I’ll lift my voice when it’s needed, but if you’re looking for ongoing progressive news and encouragement on Substack, allow me to recommend

People Power United

and

Empowering Progressive Writers

.

Okay, I’ve spoken up and said what I needed to say. If you need to unsubscribe, I’ll understand.