All posts tagged Elad Nehorai

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

President’s Day is no excuse. ILYBYGTH-themed stories kept comin fast and furious this week. Here are a few that got our attention:

Who was the deadliest dictator? Hitler? Stalin? Ian Johnson makes the case for Mao, at NYRB.

Illinois joins the club: It will change its Common-Core tests, at CT.

The intellectual history of the anti-Christian alt-right at First Things.

What’s right with school choice? Rick Hess defends charters, vouchers, and individual savings accounts. Bart reading bible

How do public schools change their religious habits? It often requires outside involvement, as with this AU case against a Louisiana district.

Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis dis-invited from a university, at ABC.

Is it fair to call radical creationism “hate speech?” Right here at ILYBYGTH.

Former 700 Club producer says Sorry, America. At R&P.

What does Queen Betsy think? Secretary Devos assesses her first year, at NYT.

What do you hear in Orthodox synagogues these days? “[T]alking points that you could find on David Duke’s Twitter feed.” Elad Nehorai on the rise of white nationalism among Orthodox communities, at Forward.

Does this mess up our understanding of Trumpism? At ILYBYGTH.

Still too soon to tell: What blew up the Maine in 1898? At ThoughtCo.

Why go to an evangelical college? For a lot of students, it’s still all about a ring by spring. CT reviews a new book about evangelical courtship on campus.

Homosexuality and the apocalypse: An interview with H.G. Cocks at RD.

Trump budget cuts money for teacher training, at ThinkProgress.

What do tech-fueled ed reformers get wrong? Peter Greene on Bill Gates’s stubborn arrogance.

Why evangelical K-12 schools lobbied in favor of the new tax law, at CT.

Who Still Loves Trump? Not Just the Usual Suspects

I thought I understood why so many white evangelicals supported Trump. New information about other conservative Trumpists has me wondering about it all over again.

First and foremost, we need to remember that political opinions are always a mish-mash. Some conservative white evangelicals might support Trump for hard-nosed political reasons, such as control of the Supreme Court. Others might simply revile Hillary Clinton so much that they’d support anyone else. Noting all those caveats, I thought the single biggest reason for white evangelical support for Trump was the hat.

Is it the hat? Or something more?

As I’m arguing in my new book, conservative white evangelicals have long felt a sense of usurpation. They have felt kicked out of the elite universities that they themselves founded. They have felt kicked out of mainstream science organizations. They have felt kicked out of mainstream cultural attitudes about sex and behavior.

When candidate Trump promised to “Make America Great Again,” the promise carried a particularly heavy appeal for some conservative white evangelicals. They had long thought that America had gone to the dogs, that it had kicked God out of its classrooms and off its TV screens. The idea of restoring America to a mythic golden-age past has enormous appeal among some conservative white evangelicals.

This week, I’m catching up with old news about another conservative religious group that has similarly fond feelings for Trump, but none of the same unique history in this country. Orthodox Judaism has not had the same sense of proprietary ownership over public space in these United States, but apparently the Orthodox community is even fonder of Trumpism than white evangelicals are.

At Forward, Elad Nehorai explores the curious fondness for white nationalism and Trumpism among the American Orthodox community. As he points out, Trump’s support seem to be falling among white evangelicals. At least as of December, Pew found white evangelical Trump fans had dropped to 61%. Among the Orthodox, though, support for Trump jumped to 71%, as of last September.

What gives?

Nehorai argues that some of his co-religionists have been so utterly disgusted by liberal politics they are willing to embrace any alternative. As one Orthodox writer offered, if he had to choose between Antifa and the Klan he’d take the latter. Nehorai concluded, for some Orthodox thinkers,