What I wish more people understood about American evangelicals
Plus: a jointly written novel, 3,000-year-old beer, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
What I wish more people understood about American evangelicals
About two months ago I ran across this headline at Politico: “Evangelicals hate Stormy Daniels but love Trump. Here’s why.” Huh, I remember thinking. I didn’t know we had any particular feeling about Stormy Daniels at all.
The piece went on to declare the former president the “the de facto leader of American evangelicalism” and to announce that “anyone who’s so much as set foot in an evangelical church over the last eight years knows that Christians don’t describe Trump as an unfortunate necessity, but a literal God-send,” among other big-if-true revelations. In fairness, the article does include some reasonable critiques from interviewer and interviewee alike. Unfortunately, they are placed alongside claims I find totally unrecognizable after a lifetime in evangelical churches.1
Which is to say: We’re back, baby! The general election is here, and Donald Trump is a presumptive nominee, set to debate President Biden this week, and that means it’s time to buckle down for four solid months of heaving deep sighs over half-informed religion reporting and, equally, the absolutely wild stuff self-identified evangelical Trump supporters say and do when they find themselves in the vicinity of a journalist.
Some of my work has included explaining evangelicals2 to the broader public, and I was recently commiserating with a writer friend who has done the same. Our conversation got me thinking about what I wish Americans outside evangelicalism understood about it, and if I had to settle on just one thing, it would be this: You don’t have to be scared of us.
And when I say “us,” I don’t just mean evangelicals like me who have graduate degrees and work in media. I mean the boomer grandpas who love to give themselves Fox News brainworms and the church ladies who homeschool their five kids and the preachers who insist on playing all the armed services theme songs in church on the Sunday before Memorial Day.
I know the pushback here: I’m excusing dangerous Christian nationalists who want to destroy our democracy and do a Handmaid’s Tale and make January 6th the new 4th of July. I promise I’m not doing that. I’m a Christian pacifist and a political libertarian. Big fan of the Constitution and the rule of law. Very into civil liberties and individual rights, which definitely includes not doing The Handmaid’s Tale.3 I support ordaining women to pastoral ministry and went to seminary myself, and I have thousands of words in print condemning what happened on January 6th. I vaccinate my kids, love to shop at Whole Foods, and subscribe to The New York Times. Should I continue, or is that enough?
My point is: I’m not saying you don’t need to be scared of evangelicals because I endorse every American evangelical’s political agenda or because I’ve never examined evangelical theology or because I have no critical distance from the subculture. I’m saying it because evangelicals are overwhelmingly normal people with normal (i.e. low) levels of political engagement and expertise who are attempting to apply often muddled ideas and conflicting impulses about the law, duty, and morality to fast-moving politics in a polarized two-party system. As incredible as it may seem from a vantage of sufficient political and cultural distance, they are trying to do the right thing.
Yes, evangelicals tend to talk about politics in religious terms. But it’s not a threat of theocracy; it’s because that’s the language they have to take the subject seriously. Yes, it’s absurd and disillusioning that they embraced Trump after all that stuff about character in the 90s. Yes, they’re outliers on abortion policy, sexual ethics, and affection for the GOP. Yes, they’re hypocritical and inconsistent and sometimes frustrating as all get-out.
And yes, you can find exceptions to what I’m saying here. You can find scheming political activists who have all the deviousness, sophistication, and malice of which the average evangelical is innocent. You can find pundits and leaders who absolutely know better. You can go nut picking, especially online, and turn up evangelicals whose politics and behavior are deeply abnormal, indefensible, and utterly disconnected from anything to do with the Christ they claim to serve.
All this is true, and nothing I’m saying here should be read as a qualification of my rejection of those exceptions. In evangelical terms, I believe those gross distortions and misuses of our faith are gravely sinful and grieve the Holy Spirit. Yet it’s also true that most evangelicals are just folks. Normal. Ordinary. Over-scheduled. Underpaid. Not sitting in church basements cackling and jeering about how much we hate Stormy Daniels or anyone else. Compatible with the American system.
They—we—are people you can have a country with, people who may annoy and anger you, but not people of whom you need to be afraid.
2. What I'm reading this week
The Scoop & Behind the Screen, by Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and more. I think I’ve previously mentioned another of these I found, The Floating Admiral, but this is a new acquisition. The plot work is, of course, not as careful as a single-author story would be, but it’s amusing.
3. A recommendation
Make cocktails with eggs, as so:
4. Recent work
The first post-post-9/11 election | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
“How to make 3,000-year-old beer,” by Alexander Nazaryan at The New York Times.
For base grains, he chose purple Egyptian barley and emmer wheat. Then he turned to the yeast. Much like Mr. Blackley, Mr. McDonnell wanted to use an ancient strain, not an ordinary commercial variety.
Here, he was fortunate again. In 2015, an Israeli team led by Itai Gutman, a veteran brewer living in Europe, had extracted yeastfrom an amphora found in Israel that had most likely been used by the Philistines for brewing around 850 B.C.
Yeast has a remarkable ability to lie dormant for exceptionally long periods of time. The billions of cells in a dormant colony “still talk to each other,” Mr. Gutman said. “They still have all those chemical signals between them. And they just wait. They say, ‘Now is not a good time to reproduce.’”
Mr. Gutman is the founder of Primer’s Yeast, a company that sells ancient strains of the microorganism. He argues that the difference between ancient yeast and the yeast found on a supermarket shelf is the difference between a wolf and a golden retriever. Commercial yeast creates a more predictable taste profile, whereas wild yeast came to be associated with what are now called “off flavors.”
“What they did is to take away a lot of the byproducts,” Mr. Gutman said. Traditional European breweries — like those run by Belgian monks hewing to centuries-old methods — retain the fruity signature of yeast in its untamed, lupine form, he said.
Read the rest here.
Especially the stuff about glossing over Samson’s sexual sins to celebrate his heroism. Every time I’ve encountered that story, Samson has been presented as a deeply tragic figure whose sinfulness ruined his own life and made things far worse for his people.
Obligatory note that I mostly, but not exclusively, mean white evangelicals here. One of the more enthusiastic evangelical Trump voters I know is an immigrant from Mexico.
Which, for the record, is a ridiculously heavy-handed satire that evinces great ignorance of how evangelicals actually think about sex, marriage, and babies. It’s not a warning for our time. It’s torture porn.
I know the point of your first item is to give your subs something unique and special, but as one of those subs: you should take that first item and give it the best/biggest/broadest treatment you can. Complicating the narrative about evangelicals *by* evangelicals will always be a vital need when polarization intensifies - which, as you said, we’re back!
You are so funny and correct! Thanks