Well, the last time I published here, I decided to go a bit broader topic-wise and wrote an explainer on Young Earth Creationism. I then decided I was finally going to write about sexuality and gender; I summarily froze up for two years.
I still haven’t even drafted that post. It’s going to be hard to write!
The original structure of this blog – to follow along my schedule from my evangelical summer camp – helped give me something to grip onto; some way to chip away at the giant blob of topics I want to write about in a way that made them navigable.
I’ve talked my way out of so many posts because the mental conversation I experience – every post is essentially drafted to an imaginary skeptic and an imaginary evangelical – ends up spiraling again and again down to some fundamental issue, and I don’t know where to stop spiraling and start explaining.
So, in lieu of being able to solve everything all at once, I’m just going to run through some topics that have been on my mind, and we’ll see where we end up.
Why I’m Writing This Thing
The primary purpose of this blog, aside from helping me get my own former beliefs out of my head and put them somewhere, is, I think, to help explain the Evangelical mindset to people who are baffled by the arc of this country and the seemingly uncomfortable alliance of Christians with modern-day conservativism writ large, and do a little bit to explain how we ended up where we are now as a country & society.
The secondary purpose of this blog is to help a Christian who might be reading this hear themselves talk. I’m not here to say “can you believe this person?” to a non-Christian reader about a Christian one; I’m here to give a good-faith explanation as to the thought processes that leads a Christian to perpetrate harm while defining both “harm” and “perpetrate” differently than you might expect – defining them in a way that allows them to continue on their way at most mildly perturbed by the role of evangelicalism in society, or their role within it.
That thesis has been explicit for me but implicit in the actual blog, so I’m publishing it for both of us. As we speak, Project 2025 – largely a list of the exact conservative / libertarian grievances I was taught as a kid – is well on its way. Communities I’m a part of are terrified, losing jobs, losing access to care, and feeling tremendously vulnerable. The ideology pervasive in Project 2025 is explicitly, glaringly conservative & evangelical in nature, but it’s stupendously hard to draw clear lines of responsibility & impact from the evangelical church to the evangelical-aligned government.
Drawing Impossible Lines
It’s even harder – essentially impossible – to draw that line of responsibility down to the individual Christian. And I’m not talking about people swept up in explicit misinformation. I have an extended relative who posted the first Trump 2024 graphic I saw anywhere; I can’t speak to his perspective, and frankly, I think open Trump supporters are a vocal minority.
I’m much more interested in the Christian – in the church – that is ideologically aligned with the current administration, but quiet about it. The Christian who wouldn’t openly wear political paraphernalia, but votes identically in the booth, though they may never tell you what they do in there. The church which avoids explicit candidate endorsement, but speaks in implicit terms to a congregation that knows the score.
Quiet Support for Harm
Trump can’t even hold outdoor rallies (or even his inauguration) for fear of low turnout; vocal supporters of the current president are rare. White supremacist marches are measured in the dozens, not thousands, and are easily dwarfed by any number of marches (e.g.) for women or against police violence.
And yet, in a repeat of 2016, over 80% of white evangelical voters picked Trump, representing millions upon millions of voters. This administration is not an aberration but a logical next step to the same ideology that’s been picking up steam for decades – but Christians by and large don’t see themselves as participants in society, so much as spectators of a world they believe is doomed. They show up at church, not in the streets or at political rallies.
I really want to emphasize this: evangelicals either tacitly support or do not feel responsible for the actions of the people they vote into office. They do know, on some level, that the ideology & politics that they support result in what others would term harm, but have decided that the harm in question is either nonexistent (a consequence of the harmed populaces’ bad choices, say, or imperfect manmade systems) or necessary (a consequence of a fallen world and the necessary means one must take to protect oneself in it).
The harm, then – to immigrants, to the poor, to women, to LGBTQ people, to the marginalized of all stripes – they see not as a consequence of their ideology in action, but a generalized consequence of sin and an unavoidable reality of a fallen world quite literally (and temporarily) ruled by Satan.
Forgiveness ≠ Affirmation
Evangelicalism, fundamentally, is a faith of forgiveness. To forgive someone is to acknowledge and highlight one’s wrongdoing, and provide freedom from what would otherwise be a consequence. This, crucially, isn’t the same as telling someone that there was nothing wrong with them to begin with.
A relatively well-meaning evangelical – one that would be hard-pressed to, say, identify as a Trump supporter of any stripe – might “love the sinner, hate the sin” and affect a stance of forgiveness toward a person who has had sex outside of (heterosexual) wedlock, but they would never take the step to tell that person that their sexual choices were none of their business in the first place.
This well-meaning evangelical might even be part of a church that welcomes gay & trans people, but that is an ideological gulf away from affirming those people and telling them there is nothing wrong with their identity. The church that welcomes but does not affirm is seeking to forgive, which means necessarily that it is seeking to judge, and congratulating itself for not condemning.
Identity Politics As Identity
This is why identity politics such a powerful lever for the evangelical vote: because they believe in the existence of objective truth, to validate another belief is to invalidate their own. A sort of uncomfortable “well, you can’t legislate morality” viewpoint can allow an evangelical to tolerate a gay coworker or relative and allow them to, say, ignore that person’s identity so long as they don’t kiss their partner at the Thanksgiving table. A sort of “well, you can smoke weed, just don’t do it around me” viewpoint for other identities.
But the increased visibility of trans people and the normalization of pronouns took that elephant in the room and made it unavoidable. An evangelical can talk to a gay person without needing to acknowledge or validate that they are gay, but (speaking from experience) often will not (knowingly) use a trans person’s proper pronouns, because doing so is in itself active validation of that person’s identity.
And all of this is grounded in a very real fear of gay & trans people. We’ll talk more about this once I write that post – this one, I think, has run its course from topic to topic. Maybe that other post will happen soon now that I’m writing again.