At the 2016 Southern Baptist Convention, messengers from churches across the nation approved a resolution calling for Americans to “discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.”
The speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, Philip Gunn, was there (full Baptist Press report here) as chair of the Southern Baptist Seminary board of trustees. He went home determined to help do something about his state’s flag. Mississippi’s new flag dropped the Confederate symbolism of the old, replaced by a magnolia blossom and the phrase “In God We Trust.”
This is clearly an example of a major evangelical institution using its clout — “power,” if you will.
This brings us — using a back door, I will admit — to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to listen to that), which focuses on the waves of coverage about Christians symbols and banners among participants in both the “Save America March” backing Donald Trump and the deadly riot outside and inside the U.S. Capitol. How did some F-bomb screaming rioters end up chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” while others nearby played loud Contemporary Christian Music?
The hook for this rather complicated podcast discussion with host Todd Wilken was one of those voice-from-on-high, magisterial New York Times passages — with zero attribution to sources — that speaks for the Acela Zone ruling elites. The double-decker headline proclaimed:
How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism
A potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war.
Are we talking about ALL Trump loyalists? Or is it simply MANY of them? Hold that thought, because we will return to it shortly.
But here is the key passage that needs to be read carefully, more than once:
The blend of cultural references, and the people who brought them, made clear a phenomenon that has been brewing for years now: that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America. Rather than completely separate strands of support, these groups have become increasingly blended together.
This potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among a wide swath of Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war, according to interviews. And many, who are swimming in falsehoods about the presidential election and now the riot itself, said the aftermath of Wednesday’s event has only fueled a deeper sense of victimhood and being misunderstood.
The key there is the reference to “evangelical power,” which is preceded — this is important — by the word “some.”
But let’s focus on the word “power,” a word that implies the work of institutions and leaders linked to them.
Let me be clear: No one can doubt, at this point, that QAnon and other heretical forms of pseudo-religious life (hello Q-shaman Jacob Chansley with your horns and white supremacist tattoos) have filtered through the dark WWW and into pews and some pulpits. GetReligion has offered posts on that topic for months (click here for must-read think piece by Joe Carter).
Yet anyone who studies “evangelicalism” — white or otherwise — knows that we are talking about a movement based on the work of powerful denominations (this includes megachurches), parachurch groups, publishers (and authors) and major colleges, universities and seminaries.
In a serious news feature built on sweeping claims of this kind, one would expect to see some kind of evidence of concrete, factual ties to people and institutions in that world.
Backing up: In the case of the Mississippi flag, it’s easy to move from Point A to Point B and then to Point C, a clear result in public life. This action doesn’t erase, of course, decades of Southern Baptist waffling, or worse, on racism.
Moving to 2021: There is no need to ignore the evidence that SOME Southern Baptists backed Trump with enthusiasm and that MANY chose him as the lesser of two evils. But we are looking for hard evidence of some kind of Point A, B, C sequence that puts Christians committing crimes inside the U.S. Capitol security zone while waving “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President” signs.
What we get in this New York Times piece is people from small, possibly independent, congregations with zero connections to institutions of evangelical power. This does not mean that they were not, somehow, part of new, informal networks of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians (see Julia Duin’s great work on the latter).
I am not saying that there isn’t a news story here. But it almost certainly means that these people are part of a smaller niche and are not, again, linked to or even influenced by power centers inside evangelicalism. For example, the Times team noted:
In a Facebook video shot in Washington on Monday night, Tennessee pastor Greg Locke referred to himself as part of the “black robe regiment,” a reference to American clergy who were active in the American Revolution. At a rally the next night, Mr. Locke preached to a crowd of Trump supporters in Freedom Plaza, predicting “not just a Great Awakening, but the greatest awakening that we have ever seen.”
OK, so who is Pastor Locke? Well he leads Global Vision Bible Church in Mt. Juliet, Tenn. He certainly has a social-media following (including news reporters), but he appears to be the leader of one of those independent churches that are so common across America. Where did he study? His website doesn’t say. What denomination does he represent, somehow? That isn’t clear either.
Or how about this face in the crowd?
Oren Orr, 31, an arborist from Robbinsville, N.C., where he goes to Santeetlah Baptist Church, rented a car to drive to Washington. He carried his American flag right up below the officers on the bleachers, and his wife had a Christian flag. Mr. Trump could be the last president to believe in Jesus, he said. …
Mr. Orr said he brought a baton and a Taser to Washington but did not get them out. “I know the Lord has my back no matter what happens,” he said.
OK, what do we know about the Santeetlah Baptist Church? Well, it’s hard to say — since this small-town church in the hills is so small that it doesn’t even have a website. I cannot even find a Facebook page.
Disturbing? Of course. A major link to evangelical power structures? I would say, “No.”
Again, I am not saying that conspiracy theory disciples and even QAnon backers are not a painful presence in many evangelical flocks these days. I’ve written about that in an “On Religion” column.
But we are looking for evidence of links between evangelical power centers and, in the Times equation, the “most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump.”
Let’s end with two other Big Ideas to contemplate.
First: Who are the evangelicals who support or do not support Trump ( focusing on the 2016 election)? Once again, please ponder this typology I have posted several times here at GetReligion.
(1) Many evangelicals supported Trump from the get-go. For them, Trump is great and everything is going GREAT.
(2) Other evangelicals may have supported Trump early on, but they have always seen him as a flawed leader — but the best available. They see him as complicated and evolving and are willing to keep their criticisms PRIVATE.
(3) There are evangelicals who moved into Trump's tent when it became obvious he would win the GOP nomination. They think he is flawed, but they trust him to – at least – protect their interests, primarily on First Amendment issues.
(4) Then there are the lesser-of-two-evils Trump evangelicals who went his way in the general election, because they could not back Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. They believe Trump's team has done some good, mixed with quite a bit of bad, especially on race and immigration. They think religious conservatives must be willing to criticize Trump — in public.
(5) There are evangelicals who never backed Trump and they never will. Many voted for third-party candidates. They welcome seeing what will happen when Trump team people are put under oath and asked hard questions. … However, they are willing to admit that Trump has done some good, even if in their heart of hearts they'd rather be working with President Mike Pence.
(6) Folks on the evangelical left simply say, "No Trump, ever." Anything he touches is bad and must be rejected. Most voted for Clinton and may have yearned for Bernie Sanders.
Yes, in the national election (all together now), 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, but about half of them were voting against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. They were in typology camps (2), (3) and (4), above.
Second: During the January 6th madness, there were actually four groups of people on or near the National Mall whose actions will be examined by law officials and then courts. Some — not all — news reports haven’t been clear about this. These four groups were:
(1) The 8,000 or so who attended the legal Save America rally in support of Trump efforts to flip the election.
(2) The large number of people who then marched to the U.S. Capitol in a legal protest of the Electoral College proceedings inside — staying outside the security boundary. Number? Unknown.
(3) Marchers who illegally entered the security fence and gathered around the Capitol. Number? Some have estimated 1,500.
(4) Rioters — many armed — who violently pressed forward and attacked police, crashed through windows and doors and then committed crimes inside the U.S. Capitol. Some of them (social-media evidence emerging) clearly had plans to commit crimes such as kidnapping and possibly murder (Hang Mike Pence!). Some may have wanted to steal the Electoral College ballots. Pipe bombs are not used in legal protests.
Were there many evangelicals and Pentecostal believers in camps 1 and 2? Obviously, there were.
Is that a story? Yes. Were they linked directly to powerful evangelical institutions and networks? That’s certainly worth investigating. Let’s look for digital links into Southern Baptist institutions, maybe the Assemblies of God and strategic zip codes in Dallas, Nashville, Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids and Wheaton. This could find some QAnon folks, for example. This would be disturbing and, many would say, heretical.
But that is not the same as finding “evangelical power” linked to the illegal January 6th acts in camps 3 and 4. Evidence is emerging (the flood of digital material is amazing) that some of these crimes were planned in advance. That’s conspiracy. There will be trials. Some attackers will go to prison.
But let’s return to a journalism question: Will the court-worthy evidence back the claims of this New York Times report about displays of evangelical power? For that matter, does the factual material presented in this New York Times support the vague, sweeping claims that ended up in print in America’s most powerful newspaper?
Just asking.
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FIRST IMAGE: Screenshot drawn from social media posts built on CNN coverage.