Religious dysfunction

A column by David French reminds me that, even as the presidential election turns out to have been a squeaker where handfuls of voters in remote places swung the destiny of a nation (in fact more people voted for someone other than the electoral college winner than for him), there are larger communities of people to blame for the coming debacle. Linking to the Washington Post's analysis of exit polls, French - a repentant ex-evangelical - is horrified that white evangelicals supported the lying abuser by an even bigger margin than before - 82% to 2020's 76%. French is trying to make sense of white evangelicals' full-throated support for an incoming administration full of sexual predators, many of them (like the nominee for Secretary of Defense) evangelical themselves. He connects it to the reckoning their churches refused to have over systematic abuse of women and children in their churches and summer camps. Misogyny, he concludes ruefully, runs deep. Men's continued harm to others is regretted but ultimately accepted.

It's not just evangelicals, of course, who cast their votes for American carnage. Catholics voted the same way, but with a 20%, not a 65%, margin. The threat evangelicals' hypocrisy (and the self-contempt of their women) constitutes to the nation is magnified and compounded by their wildly disproportionate power in American politics. What to do? I follow several progressive evangelical and ex-evangelical folks, like Tripp Fuller and Diana Butler Bass, but it may be time to take off my religious studies cap and assert, as a Christian, that they are not.