So much fear and anger directed at so few

Last updated on: March 26, 2022 at 11:23 am by Fred Clark

So much fear and anger directed at so few 2022-03-26T11:23:12-04:00 Fred Clark

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• Molly Olmstead has a good conversation with Daniel Silliman about “Investigating Sexual Harassment in an Evangelical Christian Newsroom.” That’s about Silliman’s impressive report, published by Christianity Today itself, “Sexual Harassment Went Unchecked at Christianity Today.” (We discussed that here recently.) Olmstead’s Slate piece pushes forward the substance of Silliman’s report while also focusing on the challenge of trying to report on your own workplace.

• Here’s another report on another item we discussed here recently, from RNS: “$100 million media campaign depicts human side of Jesus in outreach to skeptics.”

I’m not skeptical about Jesus, but I’m extremely skeptical about $100 million media campaigns.

Adelle M. Banks’ report includes a detail that wasn’t included in the earlier report on this media campaign from Christianity Today: “Partners who have joined the initiative include the Luis Palau Association, the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today magazine.”

Banks notes that:

The campaign is far from the first effort to meld media and mission to introduce or reintroduce people to the Christian faith. In the 1970s, Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru) distributed thousands of “I Found It” bumper stickers and featured the same slogan on billboards. The catchphrase “The family that prays together stays together” was spread by the Rev. Patrick Peyton, a Roman Catholic priest who produced the “Family Theater” weekly radio series in the mid-20th century.

I’d also mention the biggest and best of the bunch — the “Homefront” ads produced and aired by the Latter Day Saints for more than 40 years (that’s a New Yorker link, free-article limits may apply).

Those ads were fiercely wholesome appeals for basic decency. They were also — like this “He Gets Us” monstrosity — originally intended to address an “image problem” by changing consumers’ brand-association. Here’s one of their producers: “Before Homefront began airing, when we did surveys asking people, when you hear the word ‘Mormon,’ what comes to mind, the answers were Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, polygamists, racists. Those were the top four answers. After seven, eight, nine years of Homefront airing, when you asked the same question, the No. 1 answer was always family.”

That’s what the NAE and CT seem to be hoping for from this new campaign: a change of image that introduces new, positive brand-associations to eclipse all of the disastrously negative associations causing an “image problem” for white evangelicalism.

But what if it’s not merely an “image problem”? What if the young people now leaving evangelicalism in droves (always “in droves”) are leaving because of substance, not because of “image”?

Because they are. And because they’re not wrong about that substance, or wrong about leaving.

• Far-right Republican Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks is bluntly accusing the former guy of sedition: “President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency.”

The fact that Brooks is not bright enough to realize that he’s testifying to high crimes by TFG doesn’t change the fact that that’s what he’s doing.

• For a look at where Brooks and the rest of the GOP are headed, check out the latest from MAGA Freak Show candidate Bianca Gracia.

Gracia, former president of Latinos For Trump, triumphantly declared her victory in January in the upcoming race for a Texas state senate seat. The senate seat, she said, was her “rightful place” and she had been assured by God that it already belonged to her. This was her message to white evangelical Texas voters: “If you do not show up, then you will be held accountable because I have been appointed and assigned for this position and God is testing you all. I don’t have anything else to say to you other than that. So, you’re going to either have to show up and show out, or you’re going to have to deal with it with the Lord.”

Well, those white evangelical voters showed up in the four-way Republican primary, but 93% of them showed up for someone else and Gracia came in dead last. Gracia sees this in the only way her MAGA-logic allows: As evidence of electoral fraud by evil people in open rebellion against God Himself.

So here’s a snapshot of the unintended consequences of the GOP’s strategy of firing up its base by refusing to accept the legitimacy of any electoral defeat. Republicans were sure that would boost turn-out in general elections, but they hadn’t considered what it would mean for every contested primary within the party. This is gonna get ugly and, considering the personalities and ideologies involved, probably violent.

• Here’s Utah Gov. Spencer Cox suggesting a different, better potential future for his Republican Party. This is from Cox’s statement vetoing a proposed law to ban trans students from playing school sports:

Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live. And all the research shows that even a little acceptance and connection can reduce suicidality significantly. For that reason, as much as any other, I have taken this action in the hope that we can continue to work together and find a better way. If a veto override occurs, I hope we can work to find ways to show these four kids that we love them and they have a place in our state.

That vetoed (for now) Utah law is only one of nearly 240 anti-LGBT bills introduced by Republican legislators so far in 2022, most of them targeting trans people. “Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.”

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