If I continue my Meetinghouse broadcast (and I address that “if” below), I intend to take up this theme: “God and Country: The Crusade to Take Over America.”
What I mean by such a statement is this: Rather than address a fresh subject each week (in print and on the air), I plan to take this one theme—the crusade of the Christian Right, or of the White Evangelical Movement, to win the Culture War by seizing political power and reverse what they describe as the moral and religious collapse of the United States.
This grass roots movement is the most consequential religious dynamic in the country and is certain to last several more decades. It just may succeed before it runs out of steam; and who knows what that will mean.
I trace this movement to the Brown vs Board of Education decision of 1954. Then, the federal government had to send troops to enforce a decision unpopular in some quarters of the country. It was this use of federal power to enforce what some considered an attack upon their way of life that sparked a seven-decade campaign to undermine the authority and power of the federal government.
The Supreme Court was soon identified as the epicenter of this attack on Christian America. For the last six-plus decades, people have heard the call to elect presidents who would appoint justices to the Court who would quit doing what that Court did: establish rights and freedoms not heretofore affirmed.
Like the right to attend a public school without sitting through a reading from a religion’s sacred book and hearing a prayer from that same religious tradition. That was 1963.
Like the right to marry across racial lines. That was 1967.
Like the right to marry a person of your own gender. That was 2015.
This legal reversal of positions widely affirmed and practiced in the United States was interpreted by some as a sustained attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular. It signaled (they thought) the rise to prominence of a cultural mood indifferent to religion and hostile to Christianity.
To combat this trend, the Christian Right (led by the Moral Majority of Jerry Falwell) entered into collaboration with the Republican Party (led by Ronald Reagan). Together, they sought political power in order to interrupt this pattern of legal decisions and cultural directions. Reagan famously said, “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”
The election of a black man as President in 2008 galvanized an under-the-radar movement to reassert white power at all levels of government. The election of Donald Trump mobilized millions in the same direction, fired by his blatant appeals to religion, whiteness, and the transformation of the Supreme Court.
Religious leaders of white Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions within Christianity were effusive in their praise of Trump, seeing him as a messianic-like person on a divine mission to restore moral order to the United States.
What started as a resistance and morphed into a movement has now exploded into a full-blown crusade whose purpose is, frankly, to “make American great again.” They want to elect other Trumpesque leaders with a similar commitment to public preference of conservative kinds of Christianity, to remake of the federal courts into the legal wing of their movement, and to de-emphasize the rights and privileges of immigrants, refugees, secularists, gays, and other minority groups.
This is a crusade to seize political power for the purpose of restoring privilege to white Christian America. It is the most consequential religious movement of our time.
I want to research it, write about it in this newsletter, and talk about it on my weekly broadcast. If I continue all of it, given everything else that demands my attention. That “everything else” includes a small congregation in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a troubled family soon to be scattered in three states and two countries, and (most recently) a demand that I vacate immediately my sold-to-another condo.
Plus: the need to raise money to support The Meetinghouse: airtime, equipment, materials (including the books I review and the coffee I gift), travel, honoraria for those who assist me (including, hopefully, student interns), and a little more just to pay myself a dollar or two!
That’s a lot, clearly; and my ability and stamina to handle all of it is yet in doubt. So, I solicit your encouragement, your financial support, your prayers, and your words of wisdom on how to do all this.
Oh, did I mention that I have a manuscript ready for the publisher? It is a memoir of launching and leading the Academy of Preachers. I call it The Great Amen. It describes the amazing people and the momentous episodes that made that decade of gospel work (2008-2018) such a delight.
(December 2021)
