Don’t Tell Me It’s All About Abortion and Racism

I know, I know: you’re as sick of reading about white evangelical support for President Trump as I am. We keep seeing over and over again that white evangelicals are among Trump’s strongest supporters. But I can’t help it—this morning I came across another bit of evidence that evangelical Trumpism goes deeper than mere strategic considerations. This seems like more proof that some conservative evangelicals feel a much deeper connection to Trumpism than we might think.

Ham fake news tweet

Scientific evidence? …Fake News!

Smart people will give you good explanations for evangelical Trumpism. Some say white evangelicals support Trump because they are all racist. Others will explain that white evangelicals—even younger ones who are okay about LGBTQ rights—support Trump as a strategic move to fight abortion rights.

Those explanations are helpful, as far as they go. But this morning I stumbled across more evidence that confirms my ILYBYGTH hunch: White evangelicals–some of them, at least–don’t just stick with Trump for strategic reasons. They don’t cling to Trump because they like Trump’s racism.

For a lot of the most conservative white evangelicals, Trump isn’t just the least-worst option, he is a rare leader who really gets them.

Exhibit A: This morning, radical creationist leader Ken Ham tweeted out his disgust with mainstream science. As the fundamentalist faction of evangelicalism has done for a hundred years now, Ham protested against the basic assumptions of mainstream thinking. This morning, Ham objected to new findings that might explain the story of Noah’s Ark and the flood.

When scientists wonder if a new discovery of shipwrecks could help explain widespread myths about global flooding, Ham counters that such thinking is clearly ignorant. The real story of Noah Ark and the flood, Ham explains, is in the Book of Genesis.

There’s nothing new about that part of Ham’s argument. Ham’s Trumpish conclusion, however, is telling. As Ham explains,

the author of this article says there was a Flood in Noah’s day as the Bible records, but then the author either didn’t read or totally rejects the details of the account that make it clear Noah’s Flood was global–covering the entire globe. This article is more fake news. [Emphasis added.]

There you have it, folks! “Fake news.” For the most conservative members of the white evangelical network, Trump’s approach to reality matches their own. For decades, fundamentalists have warned that mainstream ideas about sexuality and science were balderdash. Radical creationists like Ken Ham and his mentors have scrambled to prove that the “evidence” of mainstream science can be dismissed.

When Trump stumbled into power, fundamentalists liked more than just Trump’s anti-abortion stance. They liked more than just his support for white racism. In addition to all that, Trump’s vision of reality resonates deeply with white fundamentalists. For them just as much as Trump, the ability to dismiss evidence as “fake news” is deeply satisfying.

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I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

Another week come and gone–here are some ILYBYGTH-themes headlines you might have missed:

Should colleges ban the laptop?

Trump Trump Trump! More news this week from the land of Lord Dampnut:

Reza Aslan and Lawrence Krauss go head to head: Is religion a good thing?

Could the Museum of the Bible have thwarted Roy Moore-philia? George Weigel connects the dots at National Review.Bart reading bible

Why do school reformers charge in without thinking first? Curmudgucrat Peter Greene offers an explanation.

If Roy Moore wins his election, he still won’t be the worst senator Alabama has ever sent to Washington.

Let’s segregate our schools better, from Rann Miller at Salon.

Is this a “Sputnik moment” for civics education? Robert Pondiscio and Andrew Tripodo make the case at Flypaper.

How did we get the bajillion-dollar Bible Museum? At IHE, Scott McLemee reviews Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby.

From the Creation-Museum-watching Trollingers: How does the Bible relate to creationism and vice versa?

The Evangelical Vote: ABT

Who will conservative evangelicals vote for? Over the past forty years, it has become a common assumption that the “Religious Right” can make or break a presidential campaign. Among some evangelical pollsters and opinion-makers, a new “ABT” attitude—anyone but Trump—seems to be emerging.

For lots of WORLD's evangelical insiders, it's ABT...

For lots of WORLD’s evangelical insiders, it’s ABT…

Thomas Kidd of Baylor University made his position clear. “I will not support Trump under any circumstances,” Professor Kidd wrote,

and I would use what little influence I have to stop him from being elected president. If that means that Hillary Clinton or another Democrat gets elected by default, I am fine with that.

Russell Moore, too, the public face of the Southern Baptist Convention, denounced Trump in no uncertain terms:

We should also count the cost of following Donald Trump. To do so would mean that we’ve decided to join the other side of the culture war, that image and celebrity and money and power and social Darwinist “winning” trump the conservation of moral principles and a just society.

At evangelical WORLD Magazine, J.C. Derrick recently defended his survey of evangelical attitudes. The WORLD poll, Derrick explained, does not sample randomly from the population. It picks 103 people who have substantial claim to the label “evangelical insiders.” Who do THEY think should be president?

Ann Coulter accused the WORLD survey of being an anti-Trump set-up. Only Trump, Coulter fumed, displayed “real Christian courage.”

WORLD’s evangelical insiders disagreed. These days, they prefer Marco Rubio. Most telling, more than a third of respondents said they would either vote Democrat or stay away from the polls if Trump were the GOP candidate.

Ouch.

Similar stories emerge from another evangelical poll from the National Association of Evangelicals. NAE leaders were not in agreement about whom they thought best represented their values, but they seem heading toward the ABT camp. As the NAE report put it,

Trump did not perform well in the NAE poll with some leaders specifically noting ‘Not Trump’ or ‘Anyone but Donald Trump.’

With primaries and caucuses just around the corner, I wonder if this sort of evangelical ABT will catch on among conservatives.

The Real Reason Trump Hates the Education Department

It wasn’t hard to predict. As I argued a few months back in the pages of Time Magazine, this round of GOP primaries would be full of threats to the Education Department. In a recent interview, front-runner Donald Trump made the usual accusations. But I wonder if there is another, more obvious reason why conservatives like to take potshots at the Ed Dept.

Don't trust anyone under 37...

Don’t trust anyone under 37…

In his recent interview with Chris Wallace, Trump made the usual conservative noises: The Ed Department is trying to replace local control of schools with control by “Washington bureaucrats.” Trump blasted competitor Jeb Bush as supporting the sinister Common Core. Trump’s solution? Get rid of the Education Department entirely. It is home to egregious “waste, fraud, and abuse.” [You can find Trump’s education comments starting just before the five-minute mark in the video clip.]

Since its birth, the Education Department has been the target of conservative ire. President Reagan wanted it gone. In the run-up to 2012, the Ed Dept was one of the targets Rick Perry could remember.

As I’ve argued in my recent book, things weren’t always this way. Attacking federal influence in education only became the default “conservative” position in the late 1930s or early 1940s. At that time, conservatives horrified by New Deal growth lambasted any exertion of federal influence. Before then, however, influential conservatives eagerly embraced the possibilities of federal control over education. Such control, conservative leaders in the 1920s insisted, could force new immigrants to become Anglicized and “Americanized” at a faster clip. Such control, conservatives hoped, could cram traditional values down the throats of leftist teachers nationwide.

Only after the New Deal equated federal power with progressive politics–in the minds of many conservative activists, at least–did “Big Education” come to be equated with “Left-wing Influence.”

I wonder, though, if there’s a simpler psychological reason why today’s conservatives hate the Ed Dept. The department is a novelty. As education nerds are well aware, the Ed Dept recently celebrated its thirty-sixth birthday.  36!  It was created only in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter.

So here’s my hunch: Conservatives have many reasons to promise to cut the Education Department. In The Donald’s case, he can use the Common Core to attack rival Jeb Bush. He can appeal to voters’ sense of distrust of “Washington bureaucrats.” He can make it look as if he has concrete plans to slim government and eliminate waste.

But he also can imagine a time without such a department. Indeed, neither he nor anyone else of a certain age needs to imagine it at all. The Education Department is so brand-spankin new that conservatives have no trouble concluding that we will get by just fine without it.

Why The Donald?

There’s not much that conservative and progressive intellectuals can agree on. But one thing unites thinkers across the culture-war divide these days: Why do so many people like Donald Trump? Fred Barnes at the conservative Weekly Standard visited a focus group of Trump fans to find out. Maybe the answer lies deep in the heart of American culture and history.

What's to like?

What’s to like?

For those of you who are just emerging from under your summer rocks, Trump has grabbed everyone’s attention with his successes in recent presidential polls. He has uttered outlandish statements, calling Mexicans rapists, implying that women reporters can’t handle the job, and ridiculing John McCain’s war record.

Conservative pundits have scrambled to distance themselves—and conservatism itself—from Trump’s brand of schlock.  Erick Erickson disinvited The Donald from a GOP debate.  George Will has denounced “[e]very sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon.”  Crunchy conservative Rod Dreher has scratched his head in bemusement as he’s watched the emergence of “Trumpenstein Monster.”  As Barnes asks, what is it about Trump that attracts people?

The twenty-nine assembled fans like more than Trump’s policies. They like Trump. As Barnes puts it,

Their tie to him is almost mystical. He’s a kind of political savior, someone who says what they think.

Will such Trumpies stick with the Donald all the way? Of the assembled group, most said they’d stick with Trump if he ran for president as head of a third party. They viewed Trump as a non-politician, someone who tells it like it is regardless of the consequences.

Maybe it isn’t so difficult to understand Trump’s attraction. People on both sides of the political spectrum have always rooted for brash, in-your-face candidates. Those who know their history can’t help but think of Huey Long, the governor, senator, and sometime presidential candidate from Louisiana. Long’s antics put The Donald’s to shame. Has Trump ever gotten beat-up in the bathroom of a bar for attempting to urinate between the legs of another gentleman? Has Trump ever greeted a foreign ambassador wearing nothing but silk pajamas?

Trumping Trump

Trumping Trump

The more outlandish the behavior, the more people like it. The more offensive the ideas, the more people respect them.

Does Trump stand a chance at becoming president? I’ll say it: No. This sort of behavior plays well in primaries, but in the end, Americans still prefer boring presidents.