The Overview (Tuesday, January 11)
January 6, one year later; the slow but steady transformation of conservatism; and an insightful interview with an evangelical climate scientist
Following a semester-long hiatus, I’m pleased to be back with regular installments of The Overview.
Politically, the coming year promises to be an eventual one. The 2022 midterm elections are less than 10 months away, and if history is any indication, Republicans will likely take control of at least one chamber of Congress. If it’s the House, any investigations into the January 6, 2021 violence at the U.S. Capitol will almost certainly end; if it’s the Senate, President Biden will see the frenzied pace of his judicial appointments grind to a halt.
And this is to say nothing of the Biden administration’s legislative agenda, which would effectively be DOA under divided government
This year will be eventful for me, too. After the Spring semester ends I’ll have several months for uninterrupted work on my book manuscript, which is owed to my publisher at the end of the year. In March I’ll be presenting research on public support for religious freedom, as part of a symposium sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies. I’ll be speaking in my university’s chapel in April, on Numbers 21. And in June I’m helping to coordinate the first Christians in Political Science meeting since 2018, to be held at Colorado Christian University.
Oh, and there’s the whole “being a father and husband and friend” thing. Can’t forget that.
Best to get on with it, then. Thanks, as always, for reading. Here’s the Tuesday, January 11 edition of The Overview:
(1) Over at Time, sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead reflect on the lessons of January 6. They argue that that day’s violence is best explained not as a partisan protest, but as a Christian nationalist uprising. And things may be getting worse:
For several years we’ve measured Christian nationalist ideology by asking Americans a series of questions like whether they believe the government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation, or whether they reject the separation of church and state, or whether they think America’s success is part of God’s plan. We call those who score roughly in the top 20% of our scale “Ambassadors” of Christian nationalism. They are the true believers. That is around 30 million adults. And our recent findings suggest they’re growing more accepting of the insurrection on January 6th.
In February 2021, we asked Americans for their thoughts about the Capitol riots. Then we queried those same Americans seven months later in August to see how their views shifted. Within that time, the percentage of white Ambassadors who felt the rioters should be prosecuted dropped over 22 points from 76.3% to 54.2%. Even more striking, the percentage of white Ambassadors who said they stood on the side of the rioters doubled from 13.6% to over 27%.
More:
Just as disturbing, white Christian nationalists are also isolating themselves within more homogenous social groups. New experimental research shows that the more right-wing Americans isolate themselves within communities who only share their moral worldviews, the more they express radical intentions and a willingness to fight or die for their group. Add to this the fact that white Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism are not only increasingly getting their news from certain platforms and right-wing news sources but they are believing the narratives being shared.
I wouldn’t characterize the January 6 violence as driven primarily by white Christian nationalists. There’s an element of overlap there, for sure, and there was plenty of religious language and symbols present that day. But I think partisanship and politics played a more central role in facilitating what happened at the Capitol, especially given the construction of Trump’s most fervent coalition.
That said, the fact that Christians were there in any discernible numbers at all is a major cause for concern. Russell Moore, writing for Christianity Today, references the prevalence of “emergency” thinking in too many Christian communities, and how this thinking can lead to a rejection of what it means to be Christian in the first place:
This kind of emergency, we’re told, can’t worry about constitutional norms or about Christian character. The reasoning goes that the Sermon on the Mount isn’t a suicide pact and the way of Jesus only works with enemies more reasonable than these, like, I suppose, the Roman empire that crucified the one who gave us such teaching.
Such is the sign not of a post-Christian culture but of a post-Christian Christianity, not of a secularizing society but of a paganizing church.
Yes, January 6 struck at a major element of American government — namely, the peaceful transfer of power. But for Christians, it exemplified the temptation of earthly power when hope is seemingly lost. This is the temptation Jesus victoriously rejected when He went to the cross. As Christians living in a post-Christian culture, we have a real opportunity to show Jesus to an increasingly skeptical society. Let’s not waste it.
(2) Writing for The Week, Bonnie Kristian offers a reflection on the evolution of American conservatism over the past two decades. Kristian grew up in this world, coming of age during the George W. Bush era, making the transformation from Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” to Trump’s “America First” all the more stark. She writes:
It may be tempting for those outside the right to dismiss this evolution as irrelevant if the presidential votes are the same regardless. That would be a mistake. As French conservative Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote for The Week in 2017, "[i]f you didn't like the Christian right, you'll really hate the post-Christian right," because "the Christian gospel's relentless focus on the intrinsic dignity of every human being, and on Christ's focus on the outcast and the outsider, at least can put a brake" on racism and other types of identitarianism.
Kristian looks at economic, foreign policy, and cultural issues through this lens of an evolved conservatism, highlighting just how much the party of Reagan and Bush has changed in so short a time. Hers is an accessible and timely portrayal of a party and movement that has moved just as much as (if not more than) its primary counterpart on the left.
(3) In the New York Times, David Marchese interviews climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe. In addition to her positions as chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy and political scientist at Texas Tech, Hayhoe is also an evangelical Christian. The whole interview is fascinating, primarily because it doesn’t focus so much on climate science as it does on what historian Mark Noll once called “the scandal of the evangelical mind.” Consider this from Hayhoe, elaborating on Alan Jacobs’ observation that evangelical churches are not properly catechizing their members:
People might show up for one hour on a Sunday morning, and half of that is singing, and there’s some entertaining talking because they want to keep people coming in the door because that’s how you fill the coffers. Churches are not teaching and people are spending hours and hours on cultural and political content and that is what is informing our beliefs.
Relatedly, she says,
Nowadays something like 40 percent of people who self-identify as evangelicals don’t go to church. They go to the church of Facebook or Fox News or whatever media outlet they get their information from. So their statement of faith is written primarily by political ideology and only a distant second by theology.
This siloing, where people are continually isolated from broader communities in terms of information acquisition, is a problem far exceeding any policy debate — say, how our society responds to climate change. For Christians, as we spend less and less time being formed by our church communities and more and more time being formed by, say, social media, something is bound to break.
(4) Finally, my friend Andrew Lewis and I recently published research on the Christian legal movement, COVID-19, and the continued polarization of religious freedom. Our argument?
We argue that while these church-state conflicts are perfectly suited to draw Christian legal groups into battle, there is a good deal of diversity within the CLM in terms of groups’ responses to regulations stemming from the pandemic. At the same time, we suggest that some of this movement’s public arguments have the potential to exacerbate culture wars rhetoric over religious freedom, continuing to polarize this topic with damaging consequences not only for public health, but also for the prospect of robust protections for free exercise in the years to come.
You can read the whole thing here, in a special issue of Fides et Libertas from the International Religious Liberty Association.