Is that today's right-wing European populism or the right-wing European populism from decades ago? I don't really know as much about the history over there, but I would have guessed that the populism would stem from a much younger movement than that. (Or if the 50+ people today are the ones who started it, they would have been 30+ people back then...)

No, that's fairly recent. It's the profile of your typical online warrior and right-wing propagandist. Exceptions do apply of course.

It's certainly spreading to the younger populace, and actual violent extremists tend to be young. I remember reading a national security briefing on that, and your typical person of that ilk is in his early twenties, often unemployed and with a history of mental disorders or crime.

But the discourse is certainly spreading into the mainstream. In my country we had a secretary of a cabinet minister who managed to utter that "Europe needed a new crusade" for example. People often underestimate the influence of politicians, because though it might seem like politicians have a lesser influence - they are very much the ones who move the bar for acceptable parlance. I think that is the true danger that Trump poses for your country; a complete rejection of accountability and complete willingness to prey on xenophobia in the populace.

In a lot of European countries you see parties with clear fascist programmes, typically anti-globalization, pro closed-borders and anti-intellectualism gain more and more popularity, in many countries reaching enough of the popular vote to gain the cabinet / president / prime minister position in their respective countries. It is a very scary development for anyone with a passing understanding of history. Many countries are also changing their constitutions to reduce citizen rights when it comes to free speech and judicial rights, for example Poland and Hungary.

Um the quote I'm objecting to is "most christians who support trump". The statement is obviously false if you delete "who support trump", but my contention is it is still obviously false is you leave it in. I have no idea why you are looking at all Americans.

Ok? The statement I disagreed with said "most Christians who support trump". You then started talking about evangelicals, so I agreed to restrict to what polls as "Self identifying evangelicals". Now you say you are talking about all americans. Your pointing out that identifying evangelicals can be challenging and "self identifying" might be racially biased is granted (not that black evangelicals are voting trump in big numbers anyways). What sub-population would you like to discuss then? Because I don't think we have found one for which the author's statement is true yet. In fact, the poll data presented thus seems to suggest republican evangelicals - however polls measure that - "strongly support" trump in higher numbers than other groups!

Sure. Lot's of people, on both sides, quite correctly find SC to be important. But it is a few to many, depending on the poll, down the list of the most important issues. And at best it one of many others like economy, terrorism, immigration, guns, etc. Interpreting the author's "largely based on" as "this is just one important issue a little way down the list of the top issues this cohort cares about" seems ridiculous.

The author is trying, I think, to downplay the degree to which "christians who support trump" do so "strongly", and because of the dominant issues upon which he has run his campaign and has attracted so many republicans. Maybe "reluctantly supporting largely to do SC" is a nice fantasy that helps one think better of his fellow Christians. Of course, Trump is a uniquely polarizing person and undoubtably there is a number in the tens of millions of people who will reluctantly vote for him due a bunch of reasons, SC well up in that list. But it is a complete fantasy to suggest it deserves the word "most" or that it is "largely due" to a single mentioned factor.

Sure, I'll agree that I'm reading this into his position. Since he is explicitly arguing against strategic voting, I took him to be implicitly favoring the most common alternative. Maybe he has some other different view though.

I'm confused by this. There is a real disagreement between me and Crouch. My view is that voting is an collective action procedure to select the next president of the US. As such, when you make a decision as to whom to support or vote for, you should do so on the basis of your best judgement as to which vote leads to the best outcomes for the country or world. This means, among other things, acknowledging the fact that this is a collective action procedure, that you are not personally selecting a president, but rather cooperating with others in the selection. Crouch is suggesting that it is wrong for Christians engage in this kind of strategic voting because it can lead to them supporting very unchristian people like Trump, which looks bad for evangelicals.

I agree that it looks bad, which is why I suggested that evangelicals' inability to block Trump earlier in the cycle was a failure of leadership among evangelicals. But I don't agree with him telling people they should support/vote for a worse outcome because doing so sends a positive signal about Christianity. I assume this is what he is saying because if he doesn't think it is a worse outcome, then why is he condemning strategic voting?

I don't know, counterfactuals are always difficult. But my view before this cycle was that Trump could never win the GOP nomination because if he ran the religious right wing of the party would rise up in opposition against him. The Mormons and Catholics kind of did do this, but the evangelicals did not. It's true that some leaders came out against him, but there was no coordinated serious condemnation of Trump by evangelical leaders.

It might be that I'm wrong in that the evangelical leaders don't actually have much influence over who evangelicals vote for, in which case they have different problems.

Really? What reason do evangelicals have for voting for Trump other than the supreme court and the awfulness of Hillary? What better reason for supporting Trump is available to sincere evangelicals?

It seems to me that either your understanding or the article is confused. On the one hand, he is pretty clearly primarily addressing and disagreeing with reluctant evangelical Trump supporters - calling their justification for supporting Trump a form of idolatry. But yet all the arguments you present for him are only relevant to the Jerry Falwell, Jr. - type enthusiastic supporters.

By the way, as a Canadian only recently settled in the swing state of Ohio, it has been quite a lot more fun talking american politics with my american friends than my old canadian ones

LOL -- whoops. Sorry about that.

Again, I don't think he's arguing against strategic voting. I think that's a strained reading of the article. I think he's arguing against the particulars of the way the calculation is playing out because of a misplaced emphasis in the calculation.

No, I don't think he's saying that at all. Consider what he wrote:

If were really criticizing strategy, then these phrases would be more like "strategy IS idolatry BECAUSE ..." So he's clearly indicating that there's a point at which strategy alone starts to falter.

There's a lot to say here. Mostly, I would suggest that it's a combination of the anti-intellectual thread of American Evangelicalism combined with Christian individualism that has created an environment that allowed Trump to rise to power. I think the vast majority of Christians would disagree with the following statement: "If my pastor told me to vote for X, I'd vote for X even if I disagree."

There is a type of failure of leadership, but it's got very little to do with the present issue and much more to do with the longer history of not engaging issues with the level of thoughtfulness that they ought to have used.

You're using two different types of calculations. Crouch's overall EV calculation has to do with the effectiveness of the gospel. The voting EV that you're thinking of has to do with the leadership of the US. It's entirely reasonable for those two calculations to lead to different conclusions because the things being measured are different. So the "worse" outcome for the US might still be the "better" outcome for Christianity.

Again, I think you're reading way too much into it if you think he's condemning it.

When you think of "Evangelical leaders" which ones are you thinking of? Evangelicalism is not a movement led by just a couple leaders. It's a very, very diverse collection of people with a diverse collection of perspectives. There are probably hundreds of thousands of independent churches that consider themselves to be "Evangelical."

So the logistic challenge of a "coordinated condemnation" is on the scale of something much larger than what can actually be created and managed due to the lack of infrastructure to support it.

Consider that even the Mormon church with all of its infrastructure and the level of control it has over its members, Utah still leans towards Trump.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...forecast/utah/

So I'm not sure what you can realistically expect from an extremely loose collection of unaffiliated churches and their leaders.

They do have their own problems, but that's a discussion for an entirely different thread.

I believe the bolded is the deep reason that Evangelicals are voting for Trump. But this is part of the remnant of the influence that Republicanism has had on Evangelicals over the last three decades or so. There's just a narrative that they've been fed for such a long time that they've wedded themselves to it and are having a hard time pulling the trigger on the divorce papers. The Supreme Court is just the rationalization.

No, I don't think either has to be the case. I can challenge someone who is reluctantly supporting Trump because they believe that the only chance of preserving a conservative majority on the Supreme Court is wrong to reach that conclusion because they're placing too much emphasis on the Supreme Court at the expense of other very important considerations, such as the effectiveness of one's ability to bear witness to the gospel. And I can challenge them to reconsider based on things like that without either rejecting strategic voting and accuse them of making the Supreme Court into an idol.

And I can also try to tamp down overtly enthusiastic support for Trump and defenses such as "locker room talk" as a means of overlooking obvious faults for the exact same reasons because it makes the rest of us look bad.

I spent 2 years in the military, 1 year on the sea and I played a fair bit of sports when I was younger - sure, it isn't the most experience with "locker room talk" - but I have never once heard heard anyone brag about advancing on a woman sexually without her consent.

I've heard talk crude enough to make a lot of people wrinkle their noses, but there is a veeeeeery far road from that to boasting about non-consensual sexual encounters.

And that's the danger of Trumpisms... they move the bar for the acceptable. Now you have millions of people defending bragging about sexual harassment as "locker room talk". It was never "locker room talk", but now it might be when the creepies take it to their heart and come crawling out of the woodwork.

" They never dream the devil is about, not even if he has them by the collar" .

Goethe's Faust, Part 1, Auerbach's Tavern , line 2181-2

Same. I played Ice Hockey and Football and have spent plenty of time in locker rooms and my feeling that people who talk like that are not doing it because they're in a locker room, but because they are just people who talk and think like that, has been born out by my personal experiences. Unfortunately, the 'locker room' 'bit of banter' line is working and I think that's simply because Trump's character is virtually irrelevant to his core support, it's a protest vote. And that makes me wonder, didn't they see what happened in the uk during the EU vote?

Ditto for evangelicals, they don't care if he's Christian or not, he's the candidate who is very vocally promising to defend Christianity and put god back into America and that's what they want to hear.

What did happen in the UK during the EU vote?

World Magazine calls for Trump to stop running.

https://world.wng.org/2016/10/unfit_for_power

First tell me what are the chances that Roe vs Wade would be overturned if newly appointed judges meant anti Roes became the majority. (And, of course that figure would have to be multiplied by the chances that a Republican president could get those justices confirmed. [I realize that they are not independent events so its not exactly the product].)

I will withdraw some of my more cynical statements, I don't have a problem with the overall intention of the article. That being said, I do think the author is arguing against strategic voting, or at least its more thoroughgoing versions. Consider the article's thesis:

I think his view is not that Christians should ignore the actual effects of their voting, but rather that it is wrong to ally yourself with evil people, and Donald Trump is an evil person. Thus, even if it appears that doing the wrong thing (allying with Donald Trump by voting for him) will lead to better effects (i.e. the strategic argument of the Christians reluctantly supporting Trump), that it is better to trust in God and do what is right anyway.

You'll see this attitude sometimes praised in Christian literature. For instance, Corrie ten Boom tells a story of her sister, who refused to lie to protect some Jews she was hiding from the Nazis, and how those Jews were later saved, and Corrie wanders about how her sister can have so much faith.

This is the argument I disagree with - I don't think voting for someone should be regarded as more than its effects.

Look what happened here. The GOP nominee is the least friendly to evangelicals interests (as evangelicals) since I don't know long. He doesn't really care about abortion. He is probably pro-SSM and is definitely pro being gay-inclusive in the GOP. He is promoting leaders from what many evangelical leaders consider a heretical branch of Christianity. But yet this nominee was elected in part because the evangelical vote didn't particularly oppose him. This is just a clear loss for evangelical power and interests.

Insofar as evangelical leaders care about politics, they should have done what they could to stop this from happening. My observation is that they didn't. There was some opposition, but it wasn't unified and most evangelical voters didn't end up caring. Compared to eg the foreign policy wing of the GOP, which had early, unified, and histrionic opposition to Trump, evangelicals did very little.

It's possible that they couldn't stop it. I think this is false, but suppose it is true. That is its own failure of leadership. That means that evangelical leaders are unable to communicate to evangelical voters when a candidate is harmful to their own interests. Those are powerless leaders who should step aside for people who have a better connection to actual voters.

Ultimately though, the failure of evangelical leadership is that it isn't clear they really wanted to stop Trump. Sure, few were very excited about him, but mostly they just stayed on the sidelines when it mattered most.

Sure, I agree that's possible. I think it is a long-term mistake for the church to back worse candidates because they think it will look bad for them. If churches want to engage in politics, they should do so as relatively independent actors that can provide a check on the power of political elites. They should more readily be able to stand up to cultural pressure to support one over another candidate.

I think what Crouch is arguing for is that evangelicals should just stay home in this election. I think that is a reasonable conclusion, just don't like his reason.

Well, consider this. The most evangelical aligned candidates during the primary were Huckabee, Carson, & Cruz. All three of them are now supporting Trump, and Huckabee and Carson were both very early in their support. On the other hand, Mormons have put forward their own independent candidate who has a real shot of winning Utah and their most prominent political leaders, such as Romney, Reid, Lee, Huntsman, most of the leadership in Utah, etc. have been some of the most fervent opposition to Trump.

My view is that it is the responsibility of the party elites to weed out unacceptable candidates like Trump either before or during the primary. It is too much to expect people that you've been training for their entire lives to be partisans to overcome that in the general. Thus, the entire Republican Party leadership failed this cycle. The GOP foreign policy elite signalled early on in clear terms that Trump was unacceptable. But they don't have much influence over actual voters, they only have influence over other elites.

For Trump in particular, given his personal history, evangelical leaders should have said no much earlier. I know that the evangelical community is fragmented and diverse, but there are still respected leaders and institutions like James Dobson, World Magazine and CT, politicians, etc. that could have said this earlier and didn't. I think evangelical leaders are particularly guilty here because because their role is less political and so they should have been the earliest to tell GOP leaders that they had lost their base. Probably they've mostly been radicalized along with their followers and so are unable to see the danger in a Trump.

How does that work? Your vote is private, right? Shouldn't you vote Trump and just not tell people who you are supporting? Also, this is a sunk cost at this point - their witness has already been compromised by Trump.

Sure, that's reasonable.

I think you're once again conflating two distinct views of the "effects" of a vote. Consider for a moment the idea of green investing. Your view is saying that the only thing that matters is the bottom line value of the investment and that you should invest in the thing that makes the most money regardless of what other impacts it might have. But others are saying that there's more to the whole investment concept than just financial returns.

So you are probably right that there's a true conflict between your position and the author's position, but it's not a conflict that's in any way unique to Christianity.

Okay.

Okay.

At this point, we once again run into the simple fact that the interests of Evangelicals is not uniform. The failure of Evangelicals to unite against Trump is not really any different from most other subsets of Republican primary voters to unite against Trump. Although it might have been true 20-30 years ago that Evangelicals were a singular voting bloc with shared interests, it's simply not true today.

Sure. And you can say the same about any other way you want to cut up the primary electorate.

Why?

Can you be precise about where you think he's arguing that? I don't get that conclusion at all.

Again, you're thinking of Evangelicals as a singular voting bloc with a particular set of interests. It's just not true anymore. And comparing Evangelicals to Mormons in terms of structure is just a ludicrous comparison.

Okay. This makes your political musings a bit fuzzy, though. You seem to be laying blame at the feet of the Republican elites, which really doesn't have that much to do with Evangelicals in particular.

Many leaders did. Here's a Fox News article from September 2015:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/...s-for-now.html

Also, most of Trump's early religious support came from prosperity gospel preachers, which is a particular subset of Christians (mostly viewed negatively by whatever might be considered "rank and file" Evangelicals):

http://time.com/donald-trump-prosperity-preachers/

So I find your analysis to be very strained and confused. At a certain level, it just reads more like frustration than it does a thoughtful analysis.

Again, I just don't think you're being accurate to history. I've shown you links going back to before the first primary of CT pushing back in no uncertain terms against Trump. And here's an article from World magazine from September 2015:

https://world.wng.org/2015/09/an_arrogant_blowhard

...

I suppose one *could* do that, but I don't see a reason why one *should* do that. The further you go, the more strange you sense of voting becomes.

Sure, it's been compromised. But that's no reason to keep going further.

Also, from CT posted yesterday:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gle...y-lifeway.html

Unsurprisingly, this is primarily a white Evangelical voter problem.

I don't think that is a good analogy for the disagreement between me and Crouch. He thinks that in some elections, even if you think that one candidate is preferable to the other, if they are sufficiently bad then even so you shouldn't support them or (presumably) vote for them. I think you should.

This isn't really strategic voting, which mostly refers to making decisions in multi-way races (eg voting for Cruz even if you favored Kasich to stop Trump). Here the "strategy" really just refers to making an estimation among multiple candidates you don't support as to which would be less bad. You seem to think that I have some narrow requirements as to what you are allowed to use to come to this estimation, but I don't. If all you care about is the pr effects of voting on the church's public image, then yes, you should vote for Hillary if you think that has a higher EV return on that goal. My read of the article is that Crouch says you shouldn't because as a Christian you have duties that prevent you from voting for some candidates if they are sufficiently evil.

I've made another, substantive critique of Crouch as well, which is that I think it is a mistake for Christians to focus overmuch on the PR effects of their voting in making their decision as to whom to vote for. First, I think people probably systemically overestimate the actual importance of this effect - the campaigns are spending billions of dollars to convince you of this, but it is likely not that important. Second, I think this is a very slippery slope for Christians, who have a lot of unpopular beliefs. I think they are better served by embracing their difference from dominant culture.

This is just another way of saying I'm right. All sizeable political constituencies have varied and conflicting interests. They are only effective when they can organize behind a set of agreed upon policies or goals. For evangelicals, this has mostly been social issues like abortion and homosexuality, but also religion/state issues as well. If those policies or goals no longer unite evangelicals in a meaningful way politically and nothing has replaced them, that is a failure of evangelical leadership. It is their responsibility to know what actually matters or can be made to matter to evangelical voters and then convert that into a viable political platform. Whatever Trump is, I don't think that's what he is doing.

Trump is a broad failure in the Republican Party leadership, certainly not just limited to evangelicals. In fact, I would blame the Congressional leadership much more than them.

Sure. I take as his thesis this sentence near the beginning:

What are these constraints? Crouch never says explicitly, but they seem to mean that we shouldn't support Trump:

Here I take him to be saying that Christians who reluctantly support Trump based on idea that he would be less bad than Hillary are letting strategic considerations become idolatrous, that they are causing us to ally with an evil man and we should instead rely on God. He doesn't explicitly say that they shouldn't vote for Trump, but it does seem to imply it since he is addressing people who are reluctant rather than enthusiastic Trump supporters.

Three points.
1. Evangelical voters are increasing a singular voting bloc as they become increasingly loyal GOP voters. Why is this happening if their interests are so varied?
2. You seem to think there has been a change in the level of political organization available to evangelicals today compared to 30 years ago. Why? Has the evangelical church changed so much since then?
3. Yes, indeed, my critique of evangelicalism is probably structural, in that the structure of the Mormon church is better at organizing their members for political involvement. That's still a criticism of evangelical leadership.

I mean party elites in the broad sense in which people like Rush Limbaugh and Rick Warren are also party elites. In that sense, evangelicals are a particular faction in the GOP party elite.

Well, I am frustrated.

Nah, this isn't how it works. A faction of a party can only block a candidate if they unite in opposition. The evangelical wing was not united in opposition to Trump. Many prominent evangelical leaders were open and friendly to Trump. The fact that some evangelicals were diligent in their opposition to Trump is personally admirable but doesn't defeat the larger point of evangelical ineffectiveness.

We're going in circles. I think the analogy is spot on. I think you're giving a false presentation of Crouch's position.

You're just reading it in a strange way, and there seems to be no way for me to rid you of this reading of it. You keep narrowing the focus to calculation of EV based on a small subset of considerations rather than taking the larger set of considerations. You say you're not, but you are.

When weighing multiple considerations INCLUDING the impact of one's witness as a Christian, it is possible for a person to be so intrinsically evil that supporting that person has a negative impact on one's witness. But if you remove this aspect from consideration, it's completely plausible for that person to once again rise to the top. There's nothing unusual about this.

1) It's possible for Christians to overly weight it. Such is how it is when we do these things. We screw up the calculation. But that doesn't mean that one shouldn't warn people about possible errors in the calculation.

2) There are times to embrace the distinctiveness of Christianity when squaring off with the dominant culture. So you're right that there's a slippery slope. Except that squaring off with the culture about who you support isn't one of those things. Christianity's distinctiveness has very little to do with elections.

I'm with you right up to about here. I think the failure of Evangelical leadership was allowing those particular political goals to have risen to the level that they have in the first place. I believe that the religious right has had a significant negative impact on Evangelicalism.

I'm not convinced at all that the responsibility of Evangelical leadership is to maintain the voting bloc.

A few things.

1) He's addressing reluctant Trump supporters because he probably has little chance of influencing enthusiastic Trump supporters. That's just targeting an audience.

2) He's cautioning about a very particular type of strategic support. He's concerned with a certain type of narrow-minded calculation. Here's his explanation of idolatry:

Breaking it down one by one:

"In favor of causes we support" - I read this as being motivated for pet causes that are not entirely central to Christianity. For example, "We need a appoint a conservative Justice." Sure, that's something that has a meaningful impact on society. But how much do you focus on just this as opposed to other things? Because if you look at the broad range of issues that are actually important to Christianity, this just isn't that important. I don't read this as a general denial of caring about causes.

It's just warning of the classic bait-and-switch. You think you want this, but you're going to get something else. In this case, the logic is something like this: You think you're going to get a strong America by supporting Trump, but because of who Trump is as a leader, he's probably going to make decisions that bring about God's judgment which will continue the deterioration of America as a nation.

Again, the pursuit of power on the backs of the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed is likely to incur God's wrath. You might have temporary power, but it's going to crumble. We can call this a one-ply vs. two-ply calculation.

In this case, "earthly influence" is read contextually as "political influence." I will merely quote Jesus: "And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?"

So I think you're reading it with a different lens than the one that the author and his intended audience are reading it with.

You say "are increasingly a singular voting bloc" but that's not actually right. Among other things, you're probably missing a lot of the racial component of the Evangelical divide. Here's a Pew report from March:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...a-closer-look/



The data set isn't robust enough to say that X% of Evangelicals lean Republican, but it's strong enough to say that Evangelicals are quite far from uniformly Republican.

Yes, the Evangelical church has changed quite a bit. Where to even begin? Here are 4 things that come to mind in just a couple minutes of reflection:

1) American Evangelicalism was united under the Moral Majority, but the Moral Majority dissolved in the late 1980s.

2) The changing demographics of the US now have far more non-white Evangelicals than ever before.

3) The decreasing influence of organizations like Focus on the Family and Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson

4) The decreasing influence of Evangelical denominations and increasing prevalence of non-denominational and independent Evangelical churches.

Sure, you can criticize that, but that might just be a misalignment of what you think the goals are compared to what the goals actually are. Maybe Evangelical leadership has been actively trying not to tie themselves to political aspirations.

Okay, but I think you're once again narrowing the focus to only a subset of Evangelicalism and missing a big piece of it.

Why?

I think you're using a paradigm about Evangelicals that largely doesn't exist.

This might be the case, but that doesn't remove OrP's point. As in, rightly or wrongly, the ostensible goals of the evangelical leadership is abortion/homosexuality and to a lesser extent some church/state type issues. Against those goals, they have failed to galvanize against a candidate almost uniquely bad for those goals because of his appeal on immigration, terrorism, trade, and so forth, issues that are not "evangelical" ones at least not in a straight forward way. This failure remains true even if one believes that evangelical leadership shouldn't be promoting abortion and homosexuality issues, and instead should be pursuing Grace or whatever else.

What he seems to be saying is that Evangelical leaders failed to band together to stop Trump. You can call that an ostensible goal and that they failed to meet it. However, the question is whether is was an *actual* goal and not merely an ostensible goal.

I'd also ask you to be specific about who you think you're thinking about when you say "Evangelical leadership." My suspicion at this point is that it's an abstract label that doesn't actually refer to any specific persons.

Sure. You can declare a goal for someone else and then say that they failed to meet it, and that would be a "true failure" by that measure. But why should anyone care?

Ok. My general impression is that the evangelical community, whatever that might be, has put abortion and homosexuality at or near the top of the political goals list. And that YOU think it is a failure of "evangelical leadership", whomever that might be, that these political goals have risen as they have. When I think of the political zeitgeist, those issues are certainly front and center in a way that other plausibly christian issues - caring for the impoverished, say - just don't seem to be there*. I don't think this is a case, as you suggest, of me declaring a goal for them that isn't *actually* a goal.

But it remains a failure no matter how you cut it. Even if you believe these issues are not *actual* goals that they have failed to galvanize against a candidate who is antithetical to these goals, it isn't as if Trump well represents basically any evangelical "goal" I could imagine. If anything, it is a far larger loss to evangelicals to have supported a man symbolizing gluttony and lust opposed to humility and charity, for instance.


* at the level of national politics that is. Don't mean to negate the wide amount of excellent community work many churches do.

I'm not really interested in arguing exegesis with you. I think your reading is plausible enough, although I think it is not correct. If all Crouch is saying is that Christians who reluctantly support Trump are making a strategic mistake, then I probably agree with him. ITT I am instead in directing my arguments against the common viewpoint that you shouldn't vote for a lesser evil candidate.

I disagree with both bolded sentences. Presidential elections are probably as much broad-based introspection about the country's nature as we get, and a religion with a distinct moral code like Evangelical Christianity should want to be a part of that.

As for political distinctiveness, perhaps not Christianity as a whole, but American evangelicals are highly visible and distinctive in their engagement in the public sphere. They are a highly disciplined and active voting bloc with, formerly at least, clear policy goals.

I should emphasize that my view is that this was a failure of leadership, not necessarily a failure by leadership. Much of your response here has been to point out that the nature of Evangelical Christianity has changed such that the older style of leadership that was effective early on is obsolete. Maybe so. But that just speaks to mistakes made earlier or to structural flaws in the Evangelical ecclesiastical model.

However, you seem to suggest a more radical claim here, that the entire model of engagement that Evangelicals have followed in the last fifty years has been a mistake. Please expand on this - is it the methods chosen or the ends sought after that you think was negative?

My view is that the political power of most social groups in electoral politics is tied to how much money and how many voters they can bring to the table. Evangelical leaders gained political power because they told party leaders that if they supported certain issue positions or ran as Christians then Evangelicals would vote for them, and they did (the causal story is much murkier though). If Evangelical leaders can no longer tell this to politicians, these politicians no longer have an incentive to support those positions or be Christian. Thus, insofar as Evangelical leaders are going to have political power, Evangelicals leadership needs to maintain their voting bloc.

My view is that it is better for Evangelical leaders to have political power, but it sounds like you disagree.

Wrong data. We are not talking about registered voters, because no one cares about that, but actual voters. Here is the breakdown over the last few elections:



Notice that the GOP candidate has had an almost 4 to 1 advantage among born-again/evangelical voters for the last 3 years. Now, as you say, race is a complicating factor here because many of these surveys (such as this one) only count white evangelicals. But that just means that the coalition is racial as well as religious.

(1) and (3) are about changes in religious political institutions, the very thing we are trying to explain (why does Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson have less influence?). So that doesn't help. Since non-white evangelicals are presumably much less likely to have supported Trump during the primary, I highly doubt (2) was a change blocking unified opposition to Trump. (4) is interesting. I don't know enough to really comment, so can you point me to something on this?

No, my claim is stronger. I think it should be a goal of Evangelical leaders to have real political power. Insofar as they don't I think they are doing a disservice to both their faith community and the country as a whole.

Yeah, this is probably somewhat true. When I say "Evangelical" I mean Evangelical voters, and that probably tilts towards an older and whiter segment of Evangelicalism.

I've never cared about anything in politics as much as I've cared about Donald Trump losing this election, and as an observer only of GOP politics, it was very frustrating to watch the slow destruction of their party through a lack of political foresight and courage on the part of their leaders and voters.

I get it, partisanship is really powerful, and I might fail that test as well. But it is like running a relay race in the Olympics and watching the anchor drop the baton at the end. Very frustrating.

This comes out of my experience in NYC politics. Union endorsements still matter to voters, but only if they are unified. Otherwise they just cancel out (with a couple exceptions). It's possible it doesn't work like this for Evangelicals I guess.

Fair enough. I don't argue against this. I think sitting out the election is an error.

Yes, we should want to be a part of it. But what type of part? I'll once again point out that Jesus was not at all pleased with the Pharisees precisely because they were trying to create laws to regulate behavior because they thought it was God-honoring to legally compel behaviors. And this is exactly how Evangelical Christianity has approached the matter. There's very little Biblical support for trying to approach the culture in this manner.

They had been. They aren't now.

At least in the present tense, it's a mix of both. I think methods (such as claiming religious liberty to oppress the freedom of others) are bad. I think the ends (particularly the Islamophobic ones) are bad.

I don't object in general to the engagement of Christians in politics, nor do I object in general to Christians being politicians. I do object to Christians voting in politics as a proxy for an expression of their faith, and I object to Christians being content with considering politicians who give mere lip service to faith as being faithful Christians.

I don't object to Christians in the 1970s having the fight against abortion. I do object to Christians in the 2000s and 2010s focusing on overturning Roe v. Wade. (In the 1980s-1990s... I don't know. There's a tipping point at which you need to decide that you've lost this particular battle and it's a wasted effort to try to keep fighting it. And certainly this is an example of a pet issue that has become far bigger than it should be. Strategically, Evangelicals should have shifted to creating better support networks for women considering abortion and establishing better adoption networks about 30 years ago.)

I'm just giving a super-scattered overview and leaving a lot of disorganized thoughts behind.

I think the Evangelical leaders of the 1980s and 1990s lost power because they got too focused maintaining political power. They became focused on a particular sub-bloc that happened to be the largest and strongest at the time (and still have control over that bloc) while failing to recognize the changes that were happening. They stopped being Evangelical leaders because they stopped speaking for the broad range of Evangelicals.

My view is that between two equally competent politicians, it would be better to select the Evangelical. But between a competent non-Evangelical politician and an incompetent Evangelical politician, I'd take the competent one.

Sure. If you want to say "Evangelicals" and mean only "white Evangelicals" then I guess I don't have much more to say.

I've addressed this above. They became too focused on a particular sub-constituency that's been slowly getting older, smaller in number, and less influential.

That's merely demographics. Whites are still the largest group. They're just not as dominant. If you were looking for a group of Evangelicals to block Trump, you would have needed white Evangelicals.

Here's a CT article from 2015:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/eds...ost-recen.html



Here's an article from 2014 that has a telling statistic:

http://www.outreachmagazine.com/feat...n-america.html

This one is from 2010:

http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/con...file-2010.html

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I agree that this should be a goal. But that doesn't mean selecting bad leaders just because they claim to be Evangelicals. And that's kind of what has been happening for a while.

Those are good reasons to be frustrated. I believe two-party politics are at their best for everyone when both parties are strong. And the utter incompetence of the GOP in the last decade has definitely been a disappointment.

I think organizationally, it's a very different ball of wax. Unions have numbers in the hundreds of thousands to low millions. A huge church is only 10,000 people. The average church is probably only a few hundred.

People voted to leave the EU despite a 'Leave' campaign that was constantly being pulled up for lies and deceit and the cynical manipulation of statistics, that was run by people who couldn't be trusted and who blatantly had ulterior motives (and were some of the most unpopular politicians in the UK), because they saw it a way to protest against the system and express their anger with 'how things are'. As many as 6% of Brexit voters now regret that vote and multiple studies have shown incredible ignorance of the actual issues, on both sides. Brexit was about emotion, not rational argument.

I think that the same thing is happening with Trump.

From the article.

If there is a god, he's responsible for Trump. It would be ironic if, through some version of the The Problem of Evil, some people lost their faith because of Trump, but I can't help feeling that the opposite will be true, that the 'it's a test of our faith' clause will kick in. Maybe the Democrats should be pushing the line that Trump is the Devil, I bet that would actually work. Sometimes I can't believe that we're discussing a 1st world nation. This is like something from one of the many theocracies that Americans love to disparage so much.

Thats one narrative, for sure. Theres also the narrative that people voted to leave the EU despite a "remain" campaign that was constantly being pulled up for lies and deceit and the cynical manipulation of statistics, as well as fear mongering.

I am not sure what you mean by "ulterior motives" of course they had motives for wanting to leave the EU, same as the remainers had motives ( ulterior or otherwise) for wanting to remain.