America’s Churches Are Now Polarized,
Too
In religion as in politics, the
legacy of Trumpism casts a long shadow.
By Francis Wilkinson
February 21, 2021, 8:00 AM EST
A prayer on Jan. 6.
A prayer on Jan. 6. Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images
North America
Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic
policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a
writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media
strategist.
On the first Sunday after the assault on the U.S. Capitol in
January, the Rev. Bill Corcoran stood before his socially distant parishioners
at St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church in suburban Chicago and finally,
unambiguously, crossed the line.
“Over the past four years,” he said, “I have failed you
by not speaking out when awful things were said and done.” He should have
spoken up, he said, about Donald Trump’s abuse of women, his contempt for
truth, his mocking of a disabled reporter, his denigration of political rivals,
his disrespect for the parents of a dead soldier.
As everyone in the pews understood, Corcoran’s mea culpa
implicated more than a lone parish priest. If Corcoran was wrong not to have
denounced Trump’s bad words and deeds, what of the parishioners who had
supported them, and then voted for more?
Reaction was swift. A dozen congregants walked out of
7:30 Mass, Corcoran told the Chicago Tribune. Nearly two dozen at 9:30. About
30 more at 11:30. Corcoran was “rattled” as he watched members of his flock
turn away, he told me in an email.
America’s 380,000 churches have long managed political
conflict. Issues such as abortion, capital punishment and government aid to the
poor all have a religious valence. But as political polarization has grown more
intense, the most sacred spaces have grown more vulnerable to it. Some churches
have turned to professional moderators
to help keep congregations together.
“I’ve been studying religion and religious congregations for
30 years,” said Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist at the University of Illinois
at Chicago and an author of numerous books on American religion. “This is a
level of conflict that I’ve never seen. What is different now? The conflict
is over entire worldviews —
politics, race, how we are to be in the world, and even what religion and faith
are for.”
***
The erosion of White
Christian power in a nation historically dominated by White Christian men
has posed new challenges. According to a Pew Research Survey released in
February, 58% of Republicans expect “White people” to lose influence under President
Joe Biden. In a January poll by the American Enterprise Institute, a
majority of Republicans agreed that “the
traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to
use force to save it.”
The insecurities of White Christian conservatives have
created a robust market for demagogy along with a rationale for political
extremism. Trump warned his followers time and again that if his political
opponents gained power, “You won’t have a country anymore.” Fox News builds its
nightly programming around the same message of fear and victimization.
Millions carry their grievances through the week, Sundays very much included.
Fear of racial and cultural change on the right has been met
with, and exacerbated by, moral revulsion on the left. Liberal churchgoers
found it inconceivable that Christians occupying adjacent pews had supported a
man who had spent a lifetime subverting Christian values and who ran his
campaign on racial aggression. Many deemed a vote for Trump not simply
wrongheaded, but unconscionable.
“The astonishment of the left at the election of Trump
produced high tension in churches in 2016 and 2017,” said Allen Hilton,
executive director of House United, a nonprofit he founded in 2016 to work on
bridging partisan divides. Churches soon became two-thirds of his clientele. “I
probably visit 30 churches a year,” Hilton said. The erosion of trust among
congregants after Trump’s election, he said, was “standard operating procedure
in those churches, whether they were left-leaning churches that had a few right
people, or right-leaning that had a few left people.”
Steve Bezner, senior pastor of Houston Northwest Church, a
Southern Baptist congregation in Houston, Texas, said the effects of partisan tribalism, intensified by
social media, are increasingly apparent in the feedback he gets from church
members on both sides of the divide. “Talking points become drivers of opinion
instead of Scripture,” he said in a telephone interview. “When I recently
preached a sermon in which I spoke about caring for the poor, there were a
couple comments made to me afterward about how that was pushing a ‘liberal
agenda.’ Obviously, caring for the poor is pretty central to the New
Testament.”
Lydia Bean is a sociologist and author of a book on
evangelical churches on each side of the U.S.-Canada border. She’s also a
Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for the Texas House of Representatives and a
member of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. At Broadway Baptist,
she said in a telephone interview, “most leaders in the church would say that
their goal is to be welcoming to both Republicans and Democrats.”
Trumpism’s aggression, however, is difficult to map onto
even the most pliable Christian moral framework. How do you christen a
policy of strategic sadism inflicted
on migrant and refugee children?
“It just made it really apparent that there’s not a shared
moral worldview between those who support and those who oppose Trump,” Bean
said. “Either separating children from their families is wrong or it’s not.
But, all of a sudden, that’s supposed to be something that we agree to disagree
on in the congregation? I don’t think so.”
***
The spread of political extremism has brought tensions even
to solidly conservative congregations. Battles over face masks and in-person
services became proxies for deeper struggles.
“There are pastors who are exhausted,” said Russell Moore,
president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern
Baptist Convention. Moore cited the case of a pastor “who doesn’t engage in any
political talk at all but simply offered a prayer for President Biden, as we’re
commanded to do in the Bible, to pray for our leaders. And a woman started
yelling at him from the congregation that Biden is not president, that it was a
stolen election and so forth.”
Propaganda and
violent fantasies pervade MAGA culture. The pathological miasma of QAnon, in which Trump is portrayed
as a kind of Muscle Jesus with superhero accents, ends with the mass
execution of perfidious Democrats. “I write a newsletter every Monday,”
Moore told me. One week, “I was responding to more questions than I could count
from people saying, ‘What do I do with family members who have embraced
conspiracy theories and are into QAnon and so forth.’ So even in places
where that’s not affecting the church, it’s still affecting the larger
ecosystem where these people live.”
Much discussion of religion in the Trump era focused on his
devoted following of White evangelical conservatives. Serial business
failure and manic self-indulgence were recast
for evangelical audiences as crucibles by which Trump was tempered by an
affirming God. The lacerating news media and Russia-obsessed Democrats
played the role of Pontius Pilate to Trump’s divinely sanctioned savior.
Yet Trump’s appeal was never confined to evangelical
conservatives. And it persisted even after his months-long attempt to overthrow
the government culminated in a violent cataclysm. “At the end of the year, following
the riots at the U.S. Capitol, White mainline Protestants reported nearly
identical favorability levels for Trump (41%) and Biden (44%),” noted Robert
Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, in an email.
The attack on the Capitol pushed some congregations to draw
a line, just as Father Corcoran finally did. At Lydia Bean’s Baptist Church in
Fort Worth, “We issued a statement against the insurrection and defending
democracy and the results of the election,” she said. “That was a big step for
us. We hadn’t made that kind of public statement before.”
Since the attempted coup, said Allen Hilton, the executive
director of House United, he has seen an “increased opening” for discussions
among Democrats and Republicans in churches. “Conversations right now are
actually pretty productive,” he said. He likened many Republican churchgoers to
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, whose partisanship is unshaken but
who has distanced himself from Trump and disavowed the violent fantasies of QAnon.
“People don’t like to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ or ‘I’m wrong,’ but I think what we’ve
seen in McConnell, for instance, has happened with a lot of people in churches:
‘I voted for a guy thinking that he couldn’t do this level of harm.’”
Julie Boler is an executive with Braver Angels, a nonprofit
founded in the wake of the 2016 election with a goal of de-polarizing civic
life. The group recently ran an election-related program called With Malice
Toward None, which was designed to foster community dialogue, empathy and
cohesion. “We had a total of 400 organizations that signed on,” she said in a
telephone interview, “and more than half of those were churches.”
I asked Boler how her group fosters comity in churches that
include members who cling to conspiracy theories about the “stolen election”
and the instigators of the Jan. 6 rioters. “There have been discussions in the
workshops and debates that we’ve had, where that has really come to a head,”
she told me. “People on the left are more inclined to say, ‘We can’t even
have this conversation if you don’t agree with this factual situation.’”
Boler says that, despite obvious difficulties, it’s better
to keep the reality-challenged
engaged in discussion than to reject them. Using a moderated, structured
curriculum, Braver Angels tries to steer dialogue in the direction of reasoned
disagreement. “We just made a decision,” she said. “We’re not going to reject
new members who have doubts about the election.”
Sojourners, a pillar of the American religious left that was
founded during the Vietnam War, is working on its own curriculum to address
polarization in churches. “The church should be one of the few places where you
can bring together people of very different ideological perspectives and
political leanings, and be able to create a space for civil dialogue that’s
rooted in core Christian principles and values,” said Sojourners President Adam
Taylor. “Part of the reason we have been developing this curriculum is we
realized that many clergy and pastors don’t have the training, tools or
experience doing that.”
Politics, for many clergy, is perilous terrain, and they
expend substantial creativity avoiding it. To counter polarization, however,
programs designed to foster conversations must confront the narrative of White Christian victimhood and loss.
“Even amid our current moment of reckoning and enlivened
consciences around issues of racial justice, the role that White
Christianity has played in granting moral legitimacy to White supremacy has
largely escaped scrutiny,” said Robert Jones of PRRI when I interviewed him
last summer about his searing book, “White Too Long: The Legacy of White
Supremacy in American Christianity.”
Can churches succeed with “courageous conversations” that
confront unreality? It’s not like a debate about the morality of abortion,
where even the most extreme positions are generally comprehensible and follow
their own moral logic. To believe that Trump won the 2020 election is to
wage war on reason itself.
Julie Boler ominously noted that the conflicts of 2016 look
like “a cakewalk compared to where we are now.” But there are also bright
spots. Younger evangelicals are less
beholden to their elders’ cultural and racial obsessions. “These are
people,” Russell Moore said, “who were formed theologically in a time when they
never considered themselves to be part of a cultural majority in the United
States.” Unlike many of their parents, they don’t equate the end of
White Christian dominance with the end of America.
***
Community is central to Christianity. Paul compares the
church to a body; cut off one part and the entire entity is wounded.
“Christianity succeeded where the Hellenistic and late classical philosophies
had failed,” wrote political theorist Sheldon Wolin, “because it put forward a
new and powerful idea of community which recalled men to a life of meaningful
participation.”
In his influential best-selling book, “The Purpose Driven
Church,” the 1995 publication of which preceded his influential best-selling
book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” evangelical pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback
Church in California advised church builders to market church as a family, and
use relationships as the fuel to make it grow. “Christianity is not
philosophy,” Warren writes, “it’s relationship.”
Warren is a genius at church building. According to the
Saddleback website, “more than 200,000 church leaders from around the world
have been trained in Saddleback’s purpose-driven philosophy.” In a January
email to church members, Warren, who strives to hover above partisan politics,
delivered what reads like a warning: “Unity is the soul of fellowship,” he
wrote. “If you destroy a church’s unity, you rip the heart out of the body of
Christ.”
Churches have confronted polarization before (in addition to
a few centuries of sectarian violence). McCarthyism, a demagogic force to which
Trumpism bears significant resemblance, makes an interesting case study.
As Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his minions cut a
swath through America, assassinating characters and destroying careers, some
churches felt compelled to take sides. The Presbyterian Church USA came out in
opposition to McCarthyism in 1953. It was not a risk-free move. House
Un-American Activities Committee Chairman Harold Velde, an Illinois Republican,
announced that year that clergy and church organizations were fair game for
investigations. Republican Representative Donald Jackson of California,
deploying trademark McCarthyite style, sneered that a Methodist bishop worked for
the church on Sundays and for communists the other six days of the week.
Many American churches were forced to grapple with McCarthy.
But they did not defeat him. They couldn’t. What crushed McCarthy was the political
establishment that he had bullied and manipulated. His fellow
Republicans were the driving force behind his censure by the U.S. Senate in a
bipartisan humiliation in 1954. Disgraced, McCarthy died three years later.
McCarthyism withered.
By contrast, at every juncture, the bulk of the
Republican Party has excused Trump’s outrages and crimes. Some Republicans
compete to be the most demagogic replica of his viciousness. Trumpism is still
very much at large — in the GOP, in the Congress, in the land, in the pews.
In the version of his sermon printed in the church bulletin,
as the nation was still coming to grips with Trump’s attempted coup, Father
Corcoran said:
The only way forward, is to go forward differently. I want
to say that men cannot grab and abuse women; that serving our nation is noble;
that personal sacrifice is often necessary; that we cannot bully anyone —
disabled or able-bodied; that the truth and facts matter; and that we do
not settle things through violence. By going forward in such a manner, we live
out the grace of our own baptism.
Simple truths, plainly spoken, have power. And while scores
of parishioners walked out on his sermon, Corcoran told me that he subsequently
received more than 1,000 calls, letters and emails — more than 9 in 10
supportive.
With help from professional moderators and talented leaders,
churches may be able to keep angry, divided congregants from becoming bitter,
permanent enemies. But they are ultimately ill-equipped to demolish the
cultural myths and political potency of Trumpism. It will take politics to do
that — specifically White conservative
politics. The antidote will have to come from the source of the poison.
Until then, churches must muddle through as best they can. The beloved
community, once again, will have to wait.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net
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