From Trump's evangelicals to witches to Roy Moore: how religion shaped 2017

[Voltaire2]

And what to expect from 2018.
By Tara Isabella [email protected]@vox.com Dec 29, 2017, 9:00am EST

There’s little reason to be optimistic in 2018

When it comes to the rise of Christian nationalism and the increase in hate crimes alike, there’s little reason to believe anything will necessarily improve next year. Even if the Trump administration does collapse, there is little reason to be optimistic about how it will affect ethnoreligious minorities in America.

The greatest trick Christian nationalists — or their more explicit cousins to the right, white nationalists — have up their sleeve is to claim they are being persecuted. Central to the narrative of Christian nationalism in the White House, no less than the explicitly white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, is the idea that the “liberal media” and “PC police” have banded together to silence the “true” speakers of truth — a dynamic that, in the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, turns into a full-on war between good and evil (just consider how Roy Moore’s defenders compared him to Jesus during the last days of his campaign).

Trump and his evangelical advisers have been seeding this rhetoric into his presidency since the beginning. And if Trump’s administration does genuinely come under threat, according to the narrative Trump and his administration have established, his supporters are, at least implicitly, divinely bound to rise up and defend it.

More here: VOX

[PragmaticDem]

1. The Evangelicals wing of American Christianity showed their true colors.

[yallerdawg]

2. "But that's only part of the story."

But that’s only part of the story.

Studies released throughout the year by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reveal a number of demographic fault lines among evangelicals, largely along age and race. While seven out of 10 seniors identify as white Christian, that is true for just three in 10 young adults. Half of all new Southern Baptist churches — the largest evangelical group — are primarily nonwhite. There are now 6 million Hispanic evangelicals in America (many recent converts from Catholicism), and they represent a significant, powerful voting bloc, especially in states like Florida.

While polling data zeroing in on evangelicals of color is limited, we know that 58 percent of Protestants who did not identify as white evangelical (which would include, for example, black evangelicals and white mainline Protestants) voted for Trump — far less than 81. Overall, 74 percent of all nonwhite voters, regardless of religious identity, selected Hillary Clinton according to CNN exit polls; just 8 percent of black voters voted for Trump in 2016.

Younger evangelicals, furthermore, tend to be more socially liberal on traditional evangelical political hot-button issues like same-sex marriage.

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