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ABSTRACT
Among the most oft-cited statistics from the 2016 presidential election is that 81 percent of self-identified evangelicals voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Scholars and pundits maintain this overwhelming support meant born-again Christians overlooked Trump’s well-documented character flaws to elect a leader who would appoint pro-life judges and otherwise agitate against a perceived progressive agenda. This essay challenges understanding evangelicals as electorally transactional and forwards a new rhetorical theory of active-passivism. This theory maintains that evangelicals justified their support for Trump (and the GOP more broadly) through a narrative that emphasizes voting but de-emphasizes what happens once a candidate takes office. Some evangelical women, beginning with the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape, have begun to resist this narrative of obfuscating blame for harmful outcomes. By practicing new modes of republican motherhood that affirm scripture but also approve of women speaking out against injustice in the public sphere, evangelical leaders such as Beth Moore have begun to enact new modes of citizenship with the potential to join with other marginalized voices in the United States to create progressive change.
Notes
1 Michael Tackett, “White Evangelical Women, Core Supporters of Trump, Begin Tiptoeing Away,” New York Times, March 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/11/us/politics/white-evangelical-women-trump.html.
2 Miriam Jordan and Ron Nixon, “Trump Administration Threatens Jail and Separating Children from Parents for Those Who Illegally Cross Southwest Border,” New York Times, May 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/us/politics/homeland-security-prosecute-undocumented-immigrants.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer.
3 Elizabeth Dias, “Beto O’Rourke May Benefit from an Unlikely Support Group: White Evangelical Women,” New York Times, October 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/us/politics/texas-beto-orourke-evangelicals-women.html.
4 This article derives from a larger book project, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling in the Time of Donald J. Trump. To complete that research, I listened to nearly 200 sermons during the years of the financial crisis and recovery (2008–2012) and in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. My intent was to study the language and narratives of contemporary American evangelicalism as it relates to political and economic issues. I aimed to understand how American megachurch pastors deploy and circulate this language to their congregations along with a larger audience online. In so doing, I discovered a narrative pattern across the United States where pastors emphasized concepts such as the Protestant work ethic; American exceptionalism; personal responsibility; living in the world but not of it; and more. Stephanie A. Martin, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2021), forthcoming.
5 Martin, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump.
6 Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). John D. Wilsey, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (Kindle Edition), (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2015). Also see: John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Kindle Edition) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018); John Fea Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011).
7 Todd Mullins, “Decision 2016,” Christ Fellowship Church, November 6, 2016, YouTube Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVvrALCSK2c.
8 Martin, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump.
9 Christine J. Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns (Kindle Edition) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 18.
10 Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Still the Best Candidate’: Some Evangelicals Still Back Trump Despite Lewd Video,” Washington Post, October 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/08/still-the-best-candidate-some-evangelicals-still-back-trump-despite-lewd-video/?utm_term=.529548647bae
11 “‘We’re All Sinners’: Jerry Falwell Jr Defends Donald Trump after Video of Lewd Remarks,” Washington Post, October 10, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/10/jerry-falwell-jr-the-gop-establishment-could-be-behind-donald-trump-video-leak/.
12 Women are typically excluded from the pulpit inside evangelicalism, as part of complementarian theology that emphasizes wifely submission. This theology stems from Paul’s writing in 1 Timothy 2:11–12, which holds that men lead and women serve; men dictate and women submit. For an excellent examination of how some women have subverted this teaching and found their way to leading churches, see: Roxanne Mountford, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces / Roxanne Mountford (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).
13 Katelyn Beaty, “Why Evangelical Women Leaders Don’t Talk About Politics,” Religion & Politics, December 19, 2017, https://religionandpolitics.org/2017/12/19/why-evangelical-women-leaders-dont-talk-about-politics/.
14 Emma Green, “The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Taking on the Evangelical Political Machine,” The Atlantic, October 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/beth-moore-bible-study/568288/.
15 Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM), Twitter Post, October 9, 2016, https://twitter.com/bethmoorelpm/status/785119502769852418?lang=en. Also see: Green, “The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Taking on the Evangelical Political Machine.”
16 Green, “The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Taking on the Evangelical Political Machine.”
17 Jen Hatmaker (@JenHatmaker), Twitter Post, October 11, 2016, https://twitter.com/jenhatmaker/status/785849362207440899?lang=en. Rachel Held Evans, Facebook Post, October 9, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/rachelheldevans.page/posts/christians-please-hear-me-donald-trump-will-not-be-a-champion-for-the-unborn-tha/10154273265129442/.
18 Kate Shellnut, “Women’s March Sets out to Exclude 40 Percent of American Women,” Christianity Today, https://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2017/january/womens-march-sets-out-to-exclude-40-percent-of-american-wom.html (accessed January 9, 2019).
19 Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
20 For example, Linda Kerber writes about Hannah Hickok Smith, who was multilingual, took up Hebrew at age 70, and was devoted to abolition. Her daughters “doggedly retranslated the King James Bible into each language” they knew. They believed supporting abolition and supporting women’s suffrage naturally went together. Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 84–86.
21 Randall Herbert Balmer, Evangelicalism in America (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 101.
22 See for example: Eric Miller, “Phyllis Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom: Liberty, Liberation, and the Equal Rights Amendment,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (2015), https://msupress.org/9781684300549/rhetoric-and-public-affairs-18-no-2/. Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). Frances FitzGerald, “Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority,” in The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).
23 Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Southern Baptist Leader’s Advice to Abused Women Sends Leaders Scrambling to Respond,” Washington Post, May 2, 2018; Bailey, “Southern Baptist Seminary Drops Bombshell: Why Paige Patterson Was Fired,” Washington Post, June 1, 2018; “Legitimate Rape vs. Serious Abuse,” The Baptist Blogger, April 28, 2018, https://baptist-blogger.com/2018/04/28/legitimate-rape-vs-serious-abuse/.
24 Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM), Twitter Post, April 28, 2018, https://twitter.com/BethMooreLPM/status/990417498607468544.
25 Beth Moore, “A Letter to My Brothers,” The LPM Blog, May 3, 2018, https://blog.lproof.org/2018/05/a-letter-to-my-brothers.html.
26 Moore, “A Letter to My Brothers.”
27 Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM), Twitter Post, May 3, 2018, https://twitter.com/BethMooreLPM/status/992035713079267328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E992095135671316480&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fentry%2Ffemale-preacher-speaks-up-about-misogyny-shes-faced-in-evangelical-circles_us_5aeb7f33e4b0c4f193207bb2.
28 Green, “The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Taking on the Evangelical Political Machine.”
29 I draw here on Linda Kintz’ idea of rhetorical resonance, a kind of crossover between constituencies; places where ideas and narratives get “linked together by feelings aroused and organized” in similar ways. Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 6.