Religion was almost invisible during the presidential campaign, and yet it is the missing piece in understanding Mr. Trump’s victory. The Christian right worked largely under the national media’s radar this year, but it helped deliver the presidency to a thrice-married mogul who bragged about groping women and has been accused by multiple women of actually doing it.
They were willing to forgive Mr. Trump’s personal transgressions because he stoked their fears that a Hillary Clinton administration would take away their religious liberties, use their tax dollars to fund late-term abortions at home and abroad, and expand the rights of gay and transgender people, political analysts said. Mr. Trump warned at rallies and at conservative Christian gatherings that he alone was their last hope to protect them against a changing culture, using the refrain, “This is your last chance.”
Now that he has won, evangelical leaders say they are confident Mr. Trump will deliver on the political promises he made to them. These include appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court, defunding Planned Parenthood, protecting businesses that refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings and rescinding the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for birth control.
And with Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, an evangelical with a record of legislating against abortion and same-sex marriage, as vice president, Christian leaders say they feel reassured they will have access to the White House and a seat at the table.
I wrote about this in a comment at Pharyngula, because all kinds of people have been writing some less than stellar pieces about rural white Americans. A lot of people attempting to parse rural America don’t live in it. I do. I’m in a very tiny town in nDakota. This is what I wrote in that comment:
I live rural. One thing you often hear from people is “oh, I don’t understand that stuff”, so they go with confirmation bias. This is very clear when it comes to something like climate change. The rest of it can simply be explained by good old conservatism, the preserving of the colonial, Christian, white status quo. A lot of people who live rural are older, conservative, and fearful. They don’t approve of women being able to obtain abortions; they still think single women having sex is scandalous, and they don’t think it’s okay for them to pay for their contraception. They understand healthcare, but are terrified of “creeping socialism”, so they are against ACA. They aren’t terribly keen on that feminism stuff, and anything queer they find very unsettling, set their lips in a straight line and shake their heads. Most won’t come out and say anything nasty, but the “that’s unnatural” vibe is very strong. They don’t think it’s okay for queer people to marry, and they are easily scared by propaganda about transgender people using a public lav.
It is true, to an extent, that rural farmers feel isolated and ignored, but that’s not why they voted for Trump. They aren’t so stupid as to not understand that a one percenter doesn’t give a shit about them, but they think he’ll keep the conservative status quo.
I’ll add to this that to a large extent, in rural areas, you have people who will simply buy, lock, stock, and barrel, whatever the hell they hear on Fox. It seldom bothers them that all those screaming pundits who are pandering to fear don’t actually believe what they spout, but are happy enough to get rich off all those who swallow the shit whole. There are more resources than ever, when it comes to finding out whether or not a fear is legitimate; it’s easier than ever to educate yourself and learn, but in spite of that, most older rural people stay very insular on the internet, too. They might email, they might have an account at Facebook, but to them, the rest of the ‘net is as bewildering and just as frightening as the ‘real’ world. They yearn for those imaginary good old days, they want their 1950s back, when people of colour knew their place and those uppity women were properly punished if they had sex.
Christians have a great capacity for hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. In a matter of a few short decades, they’ve gone from denouncing politicians who couldn’t keep their pants zipped, and other activities they considered immoral. That doesn’t matter anymore. What matters now is the ends justifying the means. Oh, when a raging pundit gets caught with his pants around his ankles while swallowing fistfuls of illegal drugs? Eh, we should pray for the poor man. Bill Clinton gets a blow job? Pretty sure most people remember the conservative Christian outrage on that on. Trump is a sexual predator, a rapist, and a cheater, but white Christians don’t seem terribly concerned about that. Nor are they terribly concerned about the amount of boys who are grabbing girls by the crotch, claiming it’s okay because the Prez said so. Those Christian values are amazingly elastic, they expand and contract to either cover something unacceptable, or to exclude anything or anyone disapproved of by them.
As recently as five years ago, Christians were far more judgmental of politicians accused of transgressions in their personal lives. Now, in the era of Mr. Trump, there is more tolerance, especially among evangelicals, according to a study by Mr. Jones’s institute. The group often called “values voters” was not dissuaded by headlines about Mr. Trump sexually harassing women, lying, refusing to pay taxes or stiffing contractors.
“Trump has really changed their entire political ethic. It’s moved from a principled basis to more of a utilitarian ethic, where the ends justify the means,” Mr. Jones said.
The hypocrisy there is absolutely stunning, but Christians excel at justifying the most awful and evil actions. They are quite comfortable with evil, and being evil, because they always think it’s okay if they do it. It’s only wrong if those others do it. Yes, Christians have marched fascism into power, and like fascists before, they have all the justifications in the world why it’s the right thing to do. In order to get their way, in order to be in control of other people, they have joined arms with the very worst of white supremacists. As evil blossoms in this lost country, white Christians will continue to justify the flames even as they are being consumed by them.
Two sources here: Religious Right Believes Donald Trump Will Deliver on His Promises and The Rage of White, Christian America.
Recommended Reading: What happens in the US doesn’t stay in the US.
And with that, I am officially out of spoons. Whatever I had, disintegrated.
For what it’s worth, I like your postmortem a lot. Like, top 2.
Thanks, Shiv. I needed that. I might need some whisky in my tea later on, too. Maybe more than one.
*hugs*
I’m wondering about how much of this is a vicious spiral:
Queer people, liberal people, everybody who doesn’t fit traditional white christianity moves away as soon as they can (understandably), leaving the Christians in their own bubble. We know that often hatred against a group is strongest where that group isn’t particularly large and little personal contact exists (of course it does, but I guess there’s a lot of closeted people of all kinds there.
Giliell:
Yes, it’s always a problem with rural life, a lack of exposure, and yes, lots of closeted people. I’ve met atheists here who don’t live rural, they live in one of the cities, and they are very frightened about being open. That fear increases by magnitudes of order, depending on what you’re in the closet about.
Location has a lot to do with things as well. nDakota has a reputation for niceness which is taken seriously, so most people here will be polite, but that has no impact on some very vicious internal attitudes. Lately, with the influx of workers, and some refugees, even the rigidly set nDakota Nice is disintegrating in many areas. Rick sees that a *lot* in Dickinson, where he works. People are getting more and more outspoken about their bigotry.
I’ll add to this that to a large extent, in rural areas, you have people who will simply buy, lock, stock, and barrel, whatever the hell they hear on Fox
Sure, because that’s how they learn to absorb and accept information in church. Political authoritarianism and religious authoritarianism share a common behavioral origin.
Those Christian values are amazingly elastic, they expand and contract to either cover something unacceptable, or to exclude anything or anyone disapproved of by them.
I think you’re edging on a mistake a lot of progressives, skeptics, and atheists make about authoritarians: it has nothing at all to do with their values. The values they profess are simply what they’re being told they profess at that time -- they don’t actually have values: they value the idea of having values; they are receptacles for whatever their masters want at the time. If it was temple priestesses and sacrificing babies to moloch, they’d be just as happy as if it’s shutting planned parenthood and sending their kids off to endless wars.
That’s an exceptionally grim view of humanity but it’s factually consistent with how the religious and authoritarians actually behave in the real world. Once you understand that they don’t have any beliefs at all -- they just believe what they are told they believe (and they believe that wholeheartedly) basically, they’re like robots that you can hit ctrl-alt-del and a little window pops up you can enter what you want them to be all excited about.
Marcus:
I don’t buy that in its entirety. The subject is not that black and white, despite how much some people want it to be. And no, I don’t think I’m edging on any mistake. The majority of people I’m familiar with are not unthinking, in spite of their devout beliefs, and they do have personal values, and ethics, just as I do. They are more swayed by those they consider to be in authority, they are more prone to unquestioning belief, yes. And yes, all the evangelical leaders, they are absolutely full of shit, and they will do whatever is necessary to retain their riches and their power.
Plenty of Christians have disagreed with this or that church teaching; plenty of them have disagreed with their pastor or other leadership. The problem here and now is that the power of colonial white christianity is seriously on the wane, and that drove the particular impetus to grab power at any cost. That’s where all the justifications come in.
In particular, older white Christians who are rural are great believers in tradition. I grew up with a lot of that shit myself. They have what they feel are traditional values, ones which are passed down, generation to generation. Naturally, change is looked at askance, specifically, societal change. Tech changes are generally embraced, but not so when it comes to social changes, which are almost always looked upon as radical at first. It takes a good number of years for such a change to become basically accepted. As we are finding now, the changes wrought by civil rights have never fully took, and people are taking advantage of that now, and taking advantage of the white wall to push things along. I know people where I live, who do not, in any way, think that acts of bigotry are acceptable, and they will seriously disapprove of much of what’s happening, and would most likely intervene if they saw an ugly action taking place. They still voted for Trump because of the reasons I outlined, fear of losing (white) Christianity, and being devoutly anti-abortion, among other things.
I lot of people do not understand just how massive of an issue abortion is to such people, and how much it drove voting. I was at the book store in Bismarck last week, and saw a car pull in and park with the license plate ‘prolyfe’. That’s how much it matters in rural white America. Trump promised the repeal of Roe v Wade, and while there was most likely a fair amount of skepticism over that promise, it was their one and only chance, and they took it.
I wonder how much farming, which is dependent on weather and other “Acts of God” shapes the thinking of the rural people whose livelihood depends on it, perhaps on a partly unconscious level. If angering the god would make all the hard work go wasted, I’d imagine straying from the “tried and true” path may not be very attractive.
Re: 7 & 8
I wonder if the problem is that they tend to define their values according to their in-group, rather than the other way around. They start with a group of “people who are like me” and then accept whatever values are prominent in that group. When there’s a conflict between personal values and group values, the group wins out.
Caine
Thinking about it I wondered if it’s also how this affects the two sides differently: For anti.choicers abortions is an issue every day, as it happens every day. A straight sexually active cis woman* may get through her entire life without ever having to worry about it. It only becomes as important issue when the shit hits the fan.
When I was 21 I lived in Ireland for a year. I didn’t worry about the fact that they would probably let me die from an ectopic pregnancy. Because how big was that risk? I didn’t even think about it. It wasn’t a risk I willingly took, just something I didn’t care about. I guess that’s the thing with many women.
*I suppose that trans men who are still capable of conceiving are more aware of this as are lesbians who know that straight dudes are a threat.
Giliell:
I didn’t either, until I needed one. Even then, it wasn’t an issue, there wasn’t the slightest fuss or trouble about getting a termination. After it was done, and finally getting an IUD, it was right back to not thinking about it again. It’s like any other medical procedure, you don’t go around obsessing about until or unless you need that procedure. For the anti-choice crowd, it’s everything except a private medical procedure.
“They aren’t terribly keen on that feminism stuff”
This can even goes for the supposed liberal North Dakotans. I mentioned before having grown up in Slope county. Men, of course, were supposed to be the head of the household and, if it was perceived that he wasn’t, the “joke” was that “she wears the pants in the family!” Gotta love that North Dakota passive aggressiveness as this “joke” was meant as a way to backhandedly insult the husband. (Oh, and, of course, you absolutely do not gotta love it.)
Also, for Giliell @4. I moved away. I’ve also become much more liberal than my supposedly liberal parents that I barely keep in touch anymore. I think much of the problem for my parents is they don’t have anyone there to call them out on their racist and bigoted attitudes because the vast majority of the population is worst than they are!
I do think exposure can help. I remember coming home from college realizing I was an atheist and told my family. That didn’t go over too well at first. And I backed away from the a-word for about half a dozen years until I got to read Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” and retook the label. Now, my dad is open about being an atheist himself. I think it just took some exposure to someone else who was willing to say, “Yeah, this is all bullshit” to gain his own confidence in speaking out. (I’m sure many here know of the Asch conformity studies.)
On a side note, my dad grew up Catholic, but he got fed up with the hypocrisy of the Catholic church, maybe even before I was born. So my family never went to church and I didn’t grow up with the religious indoctrination. I couldn’t start believing that nonsense as an adult.
By now I have a plan. I know what I need to do and where I need to go*. Probably because by now I know that I cannot go through another pregnancy without coming totally apart and that I cannot raise another child without burying my last bit of professional ambition.
I have no intention about ruining everything we all worked for so hard and then have a child who’ll have to live with that burden. I also have occasional nightmares in which I’m pregnant and unable to get an abortion and everybody’s totally excited about a baby and nobody understands that I’m desperate.
*Mandatory “pro-life” counselling. Because obviously some stranger knows better than me what I want and can do.
Leo @ 13:
Oh, that’s still popular here, but it’s graduated to pussy whipped these days.
Giliell:
I’m relieved to hear it. Christ, all these anti-choice asses need to go away, and figure out that a person’s medical decisions are not their business. They are plague across the earth.
“Religion was almost invisible during the presidential campaign”
huh!?
busterggi:
It was, actually. There was one brief spate of pandering to evangelicals, but outside of that, Trump didn’t focus on or talk about religion, which is unusual in an election, to say the least.