….white evangelicals as they stand now ARE unwinnable by the left. on the large scale (big name leadership) and the small scale (local congregations and social circles), ANYone insufficiently politically conservative is ostracized. fred clark refers to this as “farewelling.” if you are not sufficiently anti-gay or performatively anti-abortion, you are out. your membership of the tribe is revoked and you’re told you’re going to hell unless you repent. voting for a democrat is unacceptable. NOTHING is more important than a republican president who will appoint conservative judges to the supreme court, ostensibly to bring down roe v wade, in practice to continue judicial attacks on immigration and voting rights. if you don’t support those things, you’re told you’re no longer an evangelical, you lose funding/leadership positions/social support/all you rely on your faith group for (which is EVERYTHING).
i’ve seen it with major evangelical leaders going “too soft” on LGBT people who are fired after donors start pulling money from their organizations (CONSTANTLY), i’ve seen it with individual acquaintances like my friend’s parents who had their church elderships revoked and lost their entire social support network when they refused to publicly condemn and cut off their gay children.
until/unless white evangelicalism is COMPLETELY changed, THEY ARE NOT winnable. the whole faith identity, the biblical “literalism” hermeneutic, it’s all rooted in white supremacy and in group-out group politics going back to “christian” “biblical” defenses of american chattel slavery. the whole mess is poisoned and there are very few evangelicals who stay evangelical for long after they start openly questioning the anti-science, anti-LGBT, anti-women in leadership, “american means white and christian” worldview because of the vicious and personal attacks they face. the white evangelical “rural working class” churches in my home town had literal cutouts of george bush *in the sanctuary*. they’re not winnable.
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Lady Jace Of The Fae 