Tuesday, December 24, 2019

When Are White Evangelicals Going to Speak Out Against White Evangelical on White Evangelical Crime?


via GIPHY

Turns out some evangelicals are, in fact, being persecuted for their beliefs...by other evangelicals:
As the political clamor caused by a top Christian magazine’s call to remove President Donald Trump from office continues to reverberate, more than 100 conservative evangelicals closed ranks further around Trump on Sunday....

The letter to the magazine’s president sent on Sunday also included a veiled warning that Christianity Today could lose readership or advertising revenue as a result of the editorial, which cites Trump’s impeachment last week.

Citing Galli’s past characterization of himself as an “elite” evangelical, the letter’s authors told Dalrymple that “it’s up to your publication to decide whether or not your magazine intends to be a voice of evangelicals like those represented by the signatories below, and it is up to us and those Evangelicals like us to decide if we should subscribe to, advertise in and read your publication online and in print, but historically, we have been your readers.”
Okay, it's not really persecution. But it is clearly an attempt to pressure Christianity Today into repudiating its own editorial. Boy, that campus PC is out of control.

The letter underscores two things: 1) white evangelicals are an authoritarian cult of personality (and the personality ain't Jesus), with 2) no tolerance for any deviation. Which makes it especially interesting to see what isn't considered deviation.

For example, when right-wing nutjob preacher Rick Wiles described impeachment as a Jew coup ("President Trump is surrounded by a rabid pack of seditious, treacherous Jews who are intent on overthrowing the votes of millions of Christians who elected him in 2016”), there wasn't any letter from 100 white evangelical luminaries. True, there were Twitter condemnations from Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Samuel Rodriguez, and Mike Huckabee...haha, just kidding. I mean, it's hard to prove a negative and all that, but I have done some looking and I haven't seen any condemnation of Wiles' anti-Semitism from any of the top conservative evangelicals.

So. Acceptable deviation: flat-out, no dogwhistle, shouting-the-quiet-part anti-Semitism. Unacceptable deviation: denying the divinity of Trump. Any questions?

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