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      ‘Unbought and unbossed’: the incredible, historic story of Shirley Chisholm

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      Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, earlier this month to mark the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a turning point in the struggle for civil rights, the Rev Al Sharpton’s thoughts turned to an old mentor.Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman to serve in the US Congress and the first woman to seek the Democratic nomination for president. More than half a century later, Sharpton now stood with Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president.“I told her Mrs Chisholm – Mrs C as I called her – is smiling down on us,” Sharpton, 69, says by phone. “It’s a long road from her in ’68 to you on that bridge but we still got one more river to cross and that’s electing a woman president. When they do that then Mrs C can smile with that smile only she could have. She would be disappointed but not discouraged because she always believed you’ve got to keep fighting no matter how long it takes.”The story of Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972, smashing gender and race barriers and unsettling old school politicians, is told in Shirley, a film written and directed by John Ridley (an Oscar winner for his 12 Years a Slave screenplay) and starring Regina King, streaming on Netflix.Expect to hear more about the trailblazing politician, instantly recognisable for her puffy wigs and retro glasses, throughout this year, which marks the centenary of her birth. Among her evergreen quotations: “Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt”; “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair.”Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1924, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. Her mother was a seamstress and domestic worker, her father (a follower of Marcus Garvey) worked in a factory. She lived in Barbados from age five to nine with her maternal aunt and grandmother.She returned to Brooklyn in 1934 and excelled academically, graduating from Brooklyn College with honours in sociology and prizes for debating, and earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from Columbia University.Chisholm began her career as a teacher, advocating for better opportunities for minority students. Her outspoken passion for social justice led her to become involved in local politics and community activism. In the 1960s she served in the New York state assembly, where she fought for education reform, affordable housing and social welfare programmes.Sharpton first met her in 1968 when, as a 12- or 13-year-old boy preacher at a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn, he was supporting a friend of the bishop, James Farmer, in the election for New York’s 12th congressional district. “I went out and I met Shirley Chisholm, who was running against James Farmer, and she said, ‘Boy preacher, you’re on the wrong side.’ That’s how we started talking and she was very kind to me. In about two or three weeks, I switched sides.”Sharpton adds: “She was a very regal woman, an educator. She would always say, ‘Alfred, you’re not speaking proper English. Repeat that sentence!’ She was very formal but very much a grassroots person. She’d get on the corners and take the megaphone from me and she would draw her own crowd and she probably was one of the greatest underestimated orators of our time.”Using the slogan “unbought and unbossed”, Chisholm duly pulled off an upset victory, making history as the first African American woman elected to Congress. She declared: “Just wait, there may be some fireworks.”Washington was still dominated by white men who had grown up in the era of Jim Crow racial segregation. One of them harassed Chisholm every day about her making the same salary as him: “I can’t believe you’re making 42.5 like me.” Eventually she told him to vanish when he saw her enter the chamber.Historian Barbara Winslow, 78, founder of the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism,, says: “How was she treated? Well, the white southerners were absolutely repulsive and disgusting. One of her aides told us the story of she would go into a congressional meeting, and you’d sit all around and, when she would get up to leave, this one congressman had a bottle of Lysol and wiped off her chair.”Leaders of the House of Representatives relegated Chisholm to the agriculture committee, a position she condemned as irrelevant to an urban district such as hers. She was reassigned, first to the veterans affairs committee and eventually to the education and labour committees. During seven terms in Congress she championed legislation to improve the lives of marginalised communities, advocating for childcare, education and healthcare reform.View image in fullscreenIn 1972 Chisholm became the first African American woman to seek the nomination for president from a major political party. She announced: “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolises a new era in American political history.”It was always a long shot and she did not expect to win. But Shola Lynch, an award-winning film-maker whose directorial debut was the documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, understands why she did it.“Every time she went on a campus to speak, people would be like, Shirley Chisholm, you should be our president!” Lynch says. “She had defied odds twice to become something that nobody could imagine. So part of her was like, you know what? Let’s do it. That willingness to put yourself out there and to try and to go for it and to not limit yourself as a woman, as a Black woman, is an incredible example.“To have her in the documentary telling her own story, she becomes your relative, the aunt you wish you had who did the amazing thing you didn’t realise when you ignored her at Thanksgiving so many times because she had that weird fur on and then all of a sudden, you’re old enough to be like, hot diggity woman, you did that?!”With a coalition of students, women and minority groups serving as her campaign volunteers and a shoestring budget of $300,000, Chisholm entered a dozen state primaries and campaigned in several states in what became known as the “Chisholm Trail”. She seized the opportunity to rattle the status quo and advocate for issues such as gender and racial equality and economic justice.She also pushed into once unthinkable political territory. Winslow, author of Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change, says: “She was in the Florida Panhandle. It’s pretty conservative, to put in bluntly, and she’s campaigning in a town where there had been a very famous lynching. She writes later that she’s campaigning under a Confederate statue of men with a rifle and she has a good-sized crowd. This elderly Black man comes up to her afterwards and says, ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day.’”Chisholm had the backing of the Black Panther party and the civil rights stalwart Rosa Parks. But she faced opposition, resistance and scepticism as she took on white male rivals including George McGovern, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie. Black activists such as Jesse Jackson, John Conyers Jr and Julian Bond supported McGovern.Sharpton says: “I remember going with her to meetings where she would come out almost with tears in her eyes because Black men, Black elected officials that she had fought for, would not support her only because she was a woman. She would always say to me, ‘Alfred, we are fighting racism and misogyny.’ I couldn’t believe these are guys that would preach Black power and they had already made their deals with McGovern and others and wouldn’t support her.”Chisholm boycotted 1972’s National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, because it was dominated by men and the conveners could not decide whether to endorse her campaign.View image in fullscreenSharpton adds: “She was disappointed in a lot of the women’s groups and the Black groups that didn’t support her. I think that hurt her. I was more angry than she was because I felt as a kid that these guys and women’s groups weren’t who they said they were; this was my first exposure to the hypocrisy of a lot of them.“She would say, ‘Alfred, it is a scar but you have to learn to fight through your pain and keep going and keep going. She was determined to go ahead but I think it hurt her because she, in some cases, was as surprised as I was.”Chisholm alienated some Black voters when she visited Wallace, a governor of Alabama who had built his political career on racial segregation, in hospital as he recovered from an assassination attempt. It was a hugely controversial and divisive gesture.Congresswoman Barbara Lee, then a student president, Black Panther party volunteer and campaign organiser for Chisholm in California, was mortified. “I hated that,” she recalls by phone from Washington. “I was about ready to leave the campaign. Oh, my God, here I was, idealistic, young, first campaign, first time I registered to vote.“Got to know her, loved her dearly, loved her politics and then she goes to meet this segregationist who’s known as a racist who I couldn’t stand because of what he did to people in Alabama. Here he was running for president. I was furious. She took me to task and she used to shake her finger at me – she called me little girl – and she said you’ve got to stop and you have to be human.”Lee, 77, was later told by Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, what had happened in the hospital meeting. “Shirley Chisholm said, I’m a Christian, and she prayed with him. She was the one responsible for George Wallace in his wheelchair (he was paralysed) rolling down the middle of Dexter Avenue Baptist church [in Alabama] apologising to the Black community for his segregationist views and the harm he had done. Of course, that was much too little too late and an expedient political move. But he did it.”Chisholm herself did not regret the meeting, arguing that Wallace always spoke well of her and helped her rally support among southerners in Congress for a bill to extend federal minimum wage provisions to domestic workers.It was a lesson that Lee, who appears as a character in Shirley, took to heart in her own political career. “There were people like George Bush I’ve had to deal with. I disagreed with him on everything when I brought to him my legislation, and talked to him about global Aids and needing to do something, he signed the bills that I put forth that established the Pepfar programme and the Global Fund and all of those global initiatives and helped save 25 million lives. That’s because I worked with a rightwing Republican who I voted against and disagreed with on every policy he put forward. So she taught me a lot.”She arrived at the 1972 Democratic national convention with 152 delegates, more than Muskie or Humphrey. But McGovern had put together 1,729 delegates and claimed the nomination. He went on to lose in a landslide to President Richard Nixon. Chisholm went back to Congress and rose in leadership to become the secretary of the House Democratic Caucus.View image in fullscreenShe retired in 1983, noting that “moderate and liberal” members were “running for cover from the new right” in the era of Ronald Reagan. In addition, her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, had been injured in a car accident and needed extensive care (her first marriage, to Conrad Chisholm, ended in divorce in 1977 and she did not have children).Chisholm co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women, which represented the concerns of African American women, and taught politics and women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College in Atlanta. She also had fun. Lee – who helped the film-makers with historical research, visited the set and attended this week’s premiere in Los Angeles – recalls: “She was always dancing and she came to my mother’s 75th birthday party in Berkeley.“She and my mother danced with the young guys until 2am, closed the place down. I have pictures of her on the dancefloor. She was a fun-loving person. She was very sensitive, though, and she cried a lot in private but you would never know it because she was a very stern, very tough, very brilliant strong Black woman.”President Bill Clinton nominated Chisholm to be US ambassador to Jamaica but she declined due to ill health. She died aged 80 in 2005 at her home in Ormond Beach, Florida. Lee has since fought hard to preserve her legacy. She arranged for a portrait of Chisholm to be displayed at the US Capitol and is now working on the creation of a congressional gold medal in her honour.When Harris made her own bid for the White House in 2019, she paid tribute to Chisholm in her campaign speeches, slogans and colours. But she abandoned her run before the Iowa caucuses, meaning that America is still waiting for its first female president after nearly 250 years.Sharpton reflects: “She was very proud of her race and her gender and she in private would say that it always takes people in history to take us to the next step and, if I’ve got to take America to the next step for Blackness and Black America to the next step for misogyny, then let me be that vessel.“The thing that was always striking to me about Mrs C is she never saw herself in contemporary terms. She saw herself as historic and that’s how she would talk about it. She would tell me, ‘Don’t pay attention to tomorrow’s tabloids; think about what history will say about you, young man.’ That’s how she thought.”
      Shirley is now available on Netflix More

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      ‘Lincoln had something to say’: historians ponder lessons for the age of Trump

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      Asked what Abraham Lincoln might have to say to Americans in 2024, an election year in a country as divided as at any time since the civil war Lincoln won, the NPR host Steve Inskeep said the 16th president would advise that a big part of “building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong”.“One of the things that drew me to the topic of Lincoln was the present and the dilemmas and difficulties of democracy right now,” Inskeep said on Saturday, appearing in connection with his book Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, at the 27th Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.“I did feel like Lincoln had something to say,” Inskeep said, “and I’ve tried to express it. And it has to do with dealing with differences in a fractured society. And it has to do with building a political majority, which is a skill that I think some of us perhaps have forgotten, or we’re being told to forget.“And part of building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong. And hopefully you don’t believe they’re wrong on everything. But maybe out of 10 things, you think they’re very wrong about three things and can find some way to agree on some of the other seven and move forward and at least agree fundamentally on the idea that we have a constitution, we have a republic, we have a democracy. We have a system to mediate our differences. We have institutions and we should uphold them.”The 46th president, Joe Biden, has made Donald Trump’s threat to that constitution, republic and democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign.Trump, the 45th president, refused to admit defeat in 2020, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stop certification of that election. Despite that – and while facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to keep him off the ballot by constitutional means – he stormed to a third successive presidential nomination by the party that still calls itself the party of Lincoln.Three weeks short of the 159th anniversary of Lincoln’s death – he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s on 14 April 1865, Good Friday, and died the following morning – Inskeep and other historians gathered in the very same theatre. James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, now the basis for an Apple TV drama, was among those in the stalls.The event took place at the end of another tumultuous week in US politics, in which Trump railed against Democrats while struggling to pay a $454m bond in his New York civil fraud case; sought to have federal criminal charges over his election subversion dismissed; was accused by the White House of employing “unhinged antisemitic rhetoric”; called for the jailing of Liz Cheney, a conservative opponent; and stoked huge debate over what he meant when he predicted a “bloodbath” if Biden beat him again.View image in fullscreenAppealing to the better angels of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, Inskeep said Lincoln’s example, including his magnanimous approach to defeated Confederates after the civil war, might help voters decide not “to simply denounce, isolate or ostracise those we believe to be wrong.“It is an approach to political difference that I think is a little bit out of fashion now, but it is fundamentally what Lincoln did. It is fundamentally the reason we decided the civil war” and thereby ended slavery.Lincoln “understood that the north had the population, they had the economy, they had the advantages that become real in wartime, that eventually come to tell on the battlefield. And Lincoln had to keep enough people unified to have that political majority, and in order to have that majority win.“It’s a central message and matter for our time.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso appearing were Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument in Washington; Gordon Leidner, author of Abraham Lincoln and the Bible; George Rable, author of Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War; and Michael Zuckert, author of A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.As moderator, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, returned to a persistent theme of audience questions: how can Americans use Lincoln’s example today.Inskeep said: “Lincoln … understood that people would act in their self-interest but tried to harness that into something larger. And part of recognising that people have self-interest lay in trying to work out who that person was, which I feel is another thing we’re discouraged from doing.“We’re encouraged to speak our truth, which is great, because there’s lots of truths, lots of experiences that were suppressed and ignored and less so now. But the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand where they’re coming from. And an additional step for a politician, of course, is to appeal to them.”Rable, meanwhile, said voters could learn from viewing Lincoln not as some perfect figure from the past, but as a politician and leader with faults like any other.“Here you have a full-bodied human being” Rable said. “He has strengths, he has weaknesses. And I think [we should] look at leaders that way, rather than saying, ‘OK, this leader does this, I’m just going to dismiss him,’ or, ‘I’m going to believe everything that this leader says’.” More

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      in US Politics

      One Way Back review: Christine Blasey Ford faces down Brett Kavanaugh again

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      In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Brett Kavanaugh, then an intermediate appellate judge nominated by Donald Trump to the US supreme court, sexually assaulted her 36 years earlier when they were high school students, fixtures of the suburban-DC country club set.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. He also professed his penchants for suds.“We drank beer … I liked beer,” the judge memorably told Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, at his Senate hearing. Pressed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota over whether he had ever blacked out because of drinking beer, Kavanaugh ratcheted up the heat. On SNL, Matt Damon memorialized the rabid performance. PJ, Squi, Handsy Hank and Gang-Bang Greg: all are now part of TV lore. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh anyway, 50-48, a party-line vote.Ford now returns to retell her story, in One Way Back: A Memoir. In essence, she dares Kavanaugh to sue her for defamation. Both know truth constitutes an absolute defense.Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person”, Ford writes. “The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.”Ensconced on the high court, Kavanaugh holds his peace.Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a faculty member of Stanford medical school. She is an avid surfer. Metallica is her favourite band. She invokes personal circumstance to explain why she delayed coming forward, electing not to bring her story to the attention of law enforcement as Kavanaugh rose in the Washington legal firmament.“Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything,” Ford writes, adding that this is “a sad, scary thing to admit”.From Kavanaugh’s clerkship to Anthony Kennedy, his immediate predecessor on the supreme court, to his time in the White House of George W Bush and on the US court of appeals, Ford stayed silent. Even with her explanation, the reader is left wondering why.Ford also sheds light on her own college days.“I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before, but now also explored MDMA, which helped me get outside of myself,” she writes, adding: “At the time, I just knew that they seemed to call bullshit on everything, including my self-esteem issues … I never got into anything harder, since cocaine didn’t help with my anxiety and heroin never crossed my path until I was out of college, and by that point I’d kind of missed the window of experimentation that heroin would have required.”Should any rightwingers seeking vengeance think of pouncing on such admissions, it should be noted that Trumpworld is littered with tales of drugs and alcohol. Consider the very public cases of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, and Ronny Jackson, the Trump White House physician turned congressman from Texas. The GOP likes to hound Hunter Biden, who has struggled with addiction. But he never held office.For Ford, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight took a heavy personal toll. There were threats on her person and family. There were wounds to her psyche. One day, she recalls, she stared at a construction site and imagined it to be a Lego set. “That’s so cool,” she thought. “I wish I was a construction worker. Perhaps people were right. Perhaps I was crazy.”Ford writes favorably of meeting Anita Hill, the staffer who in 1991 confronted Clarence Thomas over his alleged sexual harassment, stoking another epically nasty supreme court nomination fight. Like Kavanaugh, Thomas was confirmed. In 2019, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh fight, Hill told Ford time can help salve wounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFord’s politics shade left. In One Way Back, she records her satisfaction with the “blue wave” of 2018, “progressive wins” and in particular the victory in a New York House race that year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, praises One Way Back on its jacket. So does Hill.Kavanaugh is a consequential and controversial figure. In 2022, he cast his lot with four other conservatives in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to overturn Roe v Wade. Those five justices eviscerated the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy. In a separate concurrence, Kavanaugh said that in doing so the court had not undercut precedents protecting contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex unions. Other justices differed.The tremors of Dobbs reverberate across the political divide. In the 2022 midterms, a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize, thanks in part to Dobbs. In reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, voters have conferred legal protections for abortion rights.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s successors as House speaker are also subject to the whims of Republican zealots. Kevin McCarthy is no longer even a congressman. Mike Johnson holds the gavel by the narrowest of margins. In February, Democrats flipped the seat previously held by George Santos, the indicted fabulist. Postmortems found that abortion rights played an outsized role in that Republican defeat. The threat of a national abortion ban drove voters to the polls. For the moment, for Democrats, Dobbs is a gift that keeps on giving – thanks to Kavanaugh and co.“I’d like to believe we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in the years to come,” Ford writes.Maybe sooner than that.
      One Way Back: A Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan More

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      The Exvangelicals review: fine study of faith under fire in the age of Trump

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      Sarah McCammon’s new book about “exvangelicals” like herself is a powerful memoir of her complicated journey away from Christian fundamentalism. Because she experienced it from the inside, she is also able to give the rest of us one of the best explanations I have ever read of how so many Americans became part of the non-reality-based cult that remains so stubbornly addicted to the insanities of Donald Trump.Brought up by rigorous evangelicals equally opposed to abortion and in favor of corporal punishment of their children, McCammon grew up inside a religious bubble supposedly designed to protect everyone within it from the evils of a secular world.Now 43 and national political correspondent for NPR, she was born at the dawn of the Reagan administration, which also marked the beginning of the alliance between religious extremism and the Republican party.The number of Americans who identified as evangelical or born again peaked in 2004, when it reached 30%. McCammon’s parents, though, came of age at the height of the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution. Like millions of others who felt unhinged by the chaos, they cast aside the “love ethos” of their youth, replacing “drug culture and anti-war protests” with “praise choruses” and the teachings of religious reactionaries such as James Dobson.The McCammons took Dobson’s teachings very seriously, especially his book Dare to Discipline, which taught them to spank babies as young as 15 months and to use “a small switch or belt” which should be seen by the child as an “object of love rather than an instrument of punishment”.As the historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has explained, McCammon’s generation grew up during the creation of “a massive industry of self-reinforcing Christian media and organizations” and a media network that functioned “less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals … maintained their own identity.” Or as DL Mayfield, another writer born into an evangelical family, put it: “Being born into white evangelicalism as marketers were figuring out how to package and sell Christian nationalism … was really bad timing.”The literal interpretation of the Bible McCammon grew up with of course required the rejection of evolution. Everything, including “our understanding of basic scientific facts” had to be “subordinated to this vision of scripture”. By pulling their children out of public schools, parents could guarantee that “they could graduate from high school without ever taking a course on evolution or sex ed” and then move “seamlessly to a four-year Christian college with the same philosophy”.View image in fullscreenEvolution had been invented by scientists so they could reject God’s authority and construct “a world … where they were free to pursue their sinful lusts and selfish desires. What other motive could the there be” for dismissing the story of Adam and Eve?The real-world consequences of this indoctrination include a Republican party blithely unconcerned with the effects of global warming. As Jocelyn Howard, an exvangelical interviewed by McCammon, observes: “When you’re taught that science is basically a fairytale … then why would you care if the world is burning around us … The world around us doesn’t matter, because this is all going to burn like in Revelations anyway.”By distancing so many evangelicals from mainstream thought, their leaders created “a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories that can be nearly impossible to eradicate”. As Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center told FiveThirtyEight: “People of faith believe there is a divine plan – that there are forces of good and forces of evil … QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.”Part of the time, McCammon manages to remember her youth with humor, particularly in a passage describing a discussion of the meaning of “oral sex” with her mother, inspired by the release of Ken Starr’s report about Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House.“I think,” said the author’s mother, “if you have Jesus, you don’t need oral sex.”McCammon can’t remember how she responded but she has been “telling that story for decades when people ask me to describe my childhood”.The first cracks in her evangelical faith began when she spent a semester as a Senate page and befriended a fellow page who was a Muslim.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Do you believe that because I’m Muslim I’m going to hell?” he asked.“Suddenly,” McCammon writes, “everything that felt wrong about the belief system I had been told to promote crystalized in my mind. All she could muster in response to his question was, ‘I don’t know. I think it’s between you and god.’”By the time she graduated from college, McCammon “was exhausted from trying to get my brain to conform to the contours of the supposed truth I‘d been taught. Why did certain types of knowledge seem forbidden, and why were only our experts to be trusted?”Her solution was to choose a career in journalism: “I craved a space to ask questions about the way the world really was, and the freedom to take in new sources of information. Journalism required that: it honored the process of seeking truth and demanded the consideration of multiple points of view.”This book is an elegant testament to how well McCammon has learned her craft. The hopeful message she leaves us with is that her own journey is being replicated by millions of others in her generation, many finally convinced to abandon their faith because of the racism and xenophobia embraced by evangelicals’ newest and most unlikely savior: Trump.Since 2006, evangelical Protestants have experienced “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” among Americans, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, shrinking from 23% in 2006 to 14% in 2020. In November, we will learn if that is enough to keep democracy alive.
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      in US Politics

      Among the exvangelicals: Sarah McCammon on faith, Trump and leaving the churches behind

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      For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.As a national political correspondent for NPR, McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white evangelical churches.McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield, Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while reporting similar processes experienced by others.For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical support.McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of knew that world.It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his character?”As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while demonising migrants, Muslims and more.For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts” familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution, ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other positions at odds with mainstream thought.View image in fullscreenMcCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in, becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and anticipated some debates that would come up.“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s generation were telling their stories too.Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer Blake Chastain launched a podcast under the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share and connect.But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church. It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”In the finished book, McCammon’s parents are quoted, one striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about LGBTQ+ rights.“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything, factually …skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I don’t think my experiences are unique.”McCammon’s grandfather was surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon was writing.She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”View image in fullscreenMcCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing, she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”, through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and does.Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says “there are kind of three audiences for this book.“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story, because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the details are different.“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots of different people with lots of different experiences.“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have gone astray.“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways, it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a lot of us are doing.’”
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      ‘Everything is possible’: a worrying new book explores the danger of disinformation

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      You might not have heard of Rosanne Boyland. She made the 10-hour drive from Kennesaw, Georgia, to Washington on 5 January 2021. The next day, the 34-year-old died after losing consciousness in the crush of a mob of Donald Trump supporters as it surged against US Capitol police. She would never have been there, her sister said later, “if it weren’t for all the misinformation”.The tragedy opens Barbara McQuade’s new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. The NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst explores how the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth has been weaponised to consolidate power in the hands of the few, undermine legal structures and drive voters such as Boyland. It is both cause and symptom of the US’s corrosive polarisation.A former national security prosecutor, McQuade has seen the threat of disinformation evolve from al-Qaida to Islamic State to cyber-attacks from Russia. Teaching at the University of Michigan Law School, where she is a professor, she had her students study special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on 2016 election interference by Russia.“I was fascinated by the details of accounts that were created by Russian operatives with names like Blacktivist or Heart of Texas posing as grassroots activists on the right or the left or various groups, and then taking very divisive stands on various issues just in an effort to sow discord,” McQuade, 59, says in an interview in the lobby of a Washington hotel.It was then Trump’s bogus “stop the steal” movement in 2020, based on the big lie of widespread voter fraud rejected in more than 60 lawsuits and by his own attorney general, that inspired her to write the book. It considers lessons learned ahead of a potential repeat in 2024 as the US braces for a Joe Biden v Trump rematch.“We will definitely get interference from foreign adversaries, including Russia and probably China, North Korea, maybe Iran, but there is a domestic part of this now where we are already hearing Donald Trump talk about how voting by mail is unreliable and laying the groundwork so that, if and when he loses, and there are more Democrats who have voted by mail than Republicans, he will have credibility.View image in fullscreen“He will say: ‘See, I won the election and then it all flipped for me. It was fraud.’ The same strategy that he used in in 2020. I don’t know if he’ll have new strategies but ‘stop the steal’ was a classic disinformation influence campaign based on no evidence whatsoever.”Trump commentary falls into categories. Some stop short of drawing comparisons with Adolf Hitler, perhaps wary of Godwin’s law, which holds that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. Others dive in, arguing that some aspects of Trump’s authoritarianism, nativism and charisma do evoke the Nazi tyrant in enlightening ways.McQuade goes there with an “authoritarian playbook” charting a brief history of disinformation from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Jair Bolsonaro and Trump and noting the tactics: demonising the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts and stoking violence.She elaborates: “Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that there are two things that are essential to effective propaganda. One was a very simple repeatable message because when people hear a message repeated again and again – and start hearing it from different sources – they begin to believe it to be true.“The other is that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. All of us are guilty of white lies from time to time that we might say out of kindness. My sister might say your hair looks fine when she means anything but, or my husband might say to me, no, dear, that dress doesn’t make you look fat.“They’re saying these things out of kindness, even though they might be technically lying. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, most people would not ever imagine that anyone could have the audacity to lie about something that is so significant – he was talking about the role of Jewish people in society, for example.“But here the big lie for Trump was that the election has been stolen because people say: ‘How could you possibly pull that off? It’s so ridiculous.’ That’s part of what gives it its credibility and he knows that so I worry we’re going to begin to hear that again, and there are a significant number of Americans who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. There will always be people who are manipulated by those strategies.”Now the history of the January 6 insurrection itself is being rewritten, with the rioters recast as “patriots” and, if tried and imprisoned, as “hostages” whom Trump is promising to pardon if elected. Opinion polls show that more than a third of Americans believe that Biden’s election was illegitimate; Republicans are more sympathetic to the US Capitol rioters now than they were in 2021.McQuade says with some dismay: “They assaulted people, they brought weapons, they broke windows, they spread faeces on the walls of the temple of democracy, they carried Confederate flags in there. Now to refer to it as legitimate political discourse or ordinary tourist activity, and then to refer to people who have been arrested, charged and imprisoned for their crimes as hostages, is absolutely a brand of disinformation. I’m curious to see how many people will continue to fall for that in this election.”View image in fullscreenTrump svengali Steve Bannon, an arch election denier and vaccine conspiracy theorist, once memorably declared that the real opposition was the media and the way to deal with them was to “flood the zone with shit”. This brings to mind the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. McQuade cites the Russian author and journalist Peter Pomerantsev on “the fog of unknowability”.She explains: “Everything is possible and nothing matters, and so everything’s PR because people begin to doubt the very existence of truth. One day Putin might say the missiles were shot by Ukraine; the next day the missiles were shot by Russia; the next day the missiles were shot by Nato.“People don’t know what to think and consistency doesn’t matter. In fact, inconsistency is part of the point, because first people become angry and then they become cynical and then finally they become numb and disengaged from politics altogether and so that’s a very dangerous place for democracy.“The other thing that people think in Russia is that truth is for suckers: you should just get what you can while you can and everybody is corrupt, which is one of the things that causes Donald Trump to constantly be suggesting that the Bidens are corrupt – if everybody is corrupt, then it gives you permission to overlook Donald Trump’s corruption, right?“‘Well, they’re all corrupt. Who knows what to believe? All these investigations are themselves weaponised and corrupt so I might as well look for someone who is strong, who will advance my values despite all of his corruption.’ This normalisation of corruption is something that is part of it all as well.”How has it come to this? McQuade, who was born in Detroit and lives Ann Arbor, Michigan, identifies three central causes. First, the delivery mechanism of disinformation has changed. For centuries, the deceiver had to rely on word of mouth or leaflets or planting a false story, perhaps in a foreign newspaper, in the hope that someone would pick it up and pass it on. Now someone can spread a lie at the push of a button.“Social media is a wonderful tool and can connect us to people all over the world in wonderful ways, but can also be used as a weapon when people want to and so it has been a really efficient vehicle for delivering disinformation,” says the author. “They’re completely unaccountable and we have ceded all of our power on social media to a handful of young bro billionaires, whose interest, of course, is in their own profits, not in the social good.”Second, we are living through the worst political divisions in America since the 1861-1865 civil war. McQuade reckons it began with the combative, attention-grabbing Republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and has grown as parties concentrate on turning out their bases rather than finding common ground. With elections framed as an existential struggle between good and evil, voters demand political purity. “If my tribe says X then I say X too, even if I don’t believe X to be true.”Third, there is anxiety about a changing world: the climate crisis, refugees and border security, economic shifts with potential job losses. It is fertile soil for demagogues who promise that they alone can fix it. “We have leaders who want to use that to stoke fear because they perceive that that will be in their own political interest to attract those voters who are concerned about those changes and attract them into their own fold.“It’s a combination of those three things that Donald Trump has exploited in this country like no one we’ve ever seen. I don’t think that he’s necessarily a political genius, but I do think he’s a conman and a marketing genius who knows how to sell things. He’s a huckster and he has taken advantage of this moment for personal and political gain.”The huckster’s rise nearly a decade ago caught the media off guard. The old and laudable rules of balance, impartiality and not editorialising no longer seemed to work when one candidate was so blatantly mendacious. The New York Times newspaper broke the seal in 2016 with the headline: Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent. But as another election looms, McQuade worries that journalists have still not figured out how to cover him.“That which is novel is always newsworthy, that which is controversial is always newsworthy, and so they present those things. But in an effort to present both sides of a story and in a tradition of not calling people liars, they have allowed Donald Trump and his supporters to manipulate them and play them. They’ll just say he made a statement that is not backed up by evidence; say he’s lying! You gotta say it out loud.”View image in fullscreenBut Attack from Within is not a letter of surrender or obituary of America. McQuade offers solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalising doxxing (the act of revealing identifying information about someone online) and considering a ban on online anonymous accounts.The former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan urges politicians to get ahead of the curve of artificial intelligence. “I hope that our Congress can do something which we failed to do with social media, which is get ahead of it, because if it can put things in place before they create havoc, it’s much easier than trying to react after the fact.”Individual citizens, she says, can gain skills be critical consumers of social media. “We can educate ourselves and take responsibility by doing things like, when we read an article, don’t rely just on the headline; we should actually read the article before we forward it to someone else.“We should look for second sources of a story; if there’s an outrageous story, someone else will be reporting it. If there is data in a story, we should look at that data. How big was the sample set? Was it a sample of three or a sample of 3m? That makes a difference. Were the results of this study a causation or just coincidence with an outcome? We need to do that.”McQuade also calls for increasing media literacy in schools and a revival of teaching civics rather than focusing on test scores. “Civics education is important for all of us, because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”
      Attack from Within is out now More

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      Book bans in US schools and libraries surged to record highs in 2023

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      More books were banned in 2023 in US schools and libraries than any other year for which records have been kept, the American Library Association (ALA) reported on Thursday.Many of the books were targeted because they related to issues of LGBTQ+ communities or race, though the list was broad, including commonly taught novels such as Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.The group documented 4,240 unique book titles targeted for censorship in 2023, which was more than the previous two years combined: 2,571 in 2022 and 1,651 in 2021. There was a 65% spike in 2023 over 2022.It also recorded 1,247 documented demands to ban various library books, teaching materials, and other resources last year.Emily Drabinski, the ALA president, called book bans “an attack on our freedom to read”.“The books being targeted again focus on LGBTQ+ and people of color,” she said.“Our communities and our country are stronger because of diversity. Libraries that reflect their communities’ diversity promote learning and empathy that some people want to hide or eliminate.”The number of titles targeted for censorship also increased. The amount rose by 92% in public libraries and 11% at schools.ALA said it will release the list of most commonly targeted books in April but some of the most challenged book titles in 2022 were Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.The book ban movement has grown in recent years across the US, particularly in Republican-led states, as religious-political activism gains strength.Seventeen states saw attempts to ban more than 100 books: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.“Libraries are vital institutions to each and every community in this country, and library professionals, who have dedicated their lives to protecting our right to read, are facing threats to their employment and well-being,” Drabinski said. More

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      The downwinders: New Mexicans sickened by atomic bomb testing fight for compensation

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      Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández watched Oppenheimer – a top winner at Sunday’s Academy Awards and Christopher Nolan’s treatment on the physicist who guided testing of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico – months ago.And soon after the scene where Cillian Murphy, as J Robert Oppenheimer, peered through safety goggles in a fortified shed at the huge mushroom cloud, the New Mexico Democrat realized “the untold story” lay on the cutting room floor.“We see nothing on the impact the bomb had on people living in northern New Mexico,” Fernández said. “There’s no way [Manhattan Project physicists] could not have been aware of the radiation’s impact on the communities downwind of the Trinity bomb site.”As a 17th-generation descendant of Mexicans who became New Mexicans, Fernández, 65, speaks of “people living off the land, hanging their clothes, coated with [radioactive] ash, chickens picking in the yard, the lingering effects of what fell onto the ground and crops and was absorbed by animals and people” – for decades to come after the testing of the bomb.Fernández was awakened to the vast reach of the radiation after winning her congressional seat in 2020, meeting constituents and befriending Tina Cordova, the leader of “downwinders” – survivors and descendants of multigenerational illnesses discovered well after the 1945 Trinity bomb.View image in fullscreenCordova, who earned a master’s degree in biology before becoming the owner of an Albuquerque roofing company, is a survivor of thyroid cancer. Her 24-year-old niece has also grappled with the same condition – and is a fifth-generation family member afflicted with one form of cancer or another.Cordova is the protagonist of Lois Lipman’s award-winning documentary, First We Bombed New Mexico, which also played a role in Fernández’s grasp of bomb-related injustices.Cordova was not yet born when radioactive ash settled across a vast area of the state’s western desert. But her father, Anastacio Cordova, was four at the time, living in Tularosa, a farming village 45 miles from the bomb site. The genetic line of cancers began with him.In sharing the details of her family’s plight, Cordova said: “I sensed a level of sadness in [Fernández]. She said she had lost family members but didn’t go into detail.”A non-smoker, Anastacio had part of his tongue removed at 61, before treatment for the spread of cancer necessitating “high levels of radiation in his head and neck”, Cordova said.“All his teeth had to be extracted,” she said. “Then he got prostate cancer. Eight years after the primary oral cancer he had a second primary lesion on his tongue. The doctor said they could remove the tumor but he couldn’t have any more radiation because in the first bout with cancer he had been treated with the maximum amount of radiation.”Cordova’s father died in 2013 after nine years of illness and repeat trips to Houston’s MD Anderson cancer center.Listening to the stories of Cordova and other downwinders indeed had resonance for Fernández, the congresswoman said. Her mother came from Colonias, a village in Guadalupe county “within the concentric circles of people exposed to radiation”.“I am not a downwinder,” Fernández said. “I will not be a claimant” – if pending legislation for survivors, which she has co-sponsored, passes Congress. “These people are part of who I am.“My maternal grandmother died of leukemia blood cancer. My mother, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer. Both were in their 70s.”Her maternal grandfather also died of cancer.She made it a point to say that there was no speculation among her relatives at the time that their illnesses stemmed from the nuclear bomb in New Mexico. But she made clear that their pasts – combined with that of people like Cordova – made her realize “we’ve never as a nation apologized to the people of New Mexico”.And Fernández, a graduate of Yale and Stanford law school who worked as a public interest attorney before Congress, is working to fix that.Her efforts come in the form of fighting for passage of a bill first filed by Ben Ray Lujan, Fernandez’s congressional predecessor who was elected to the US Senate in 2020. The now expanded legislative proposal seeks financial compensation – reparations – for downwinders, a category that also extends to Nevadans afflicted from later nuclear testing, victims of uranium pollution in Utah and Missouri, and workers from several other states exposed to radiation from the nuclear testing infrastructure, long cloaked in secrecy.View image in fullscreenFernández is quick to invoke a surreal scene from First We Bombed New Mexico to discuss the legislation: “Little girls dancing around in the ash, tasting it on their tongues, thinking it was summer snow” – in the early aftermath of the bomb testing.But it’s now more than just the film that is catalyzing support for providing downwinders with long-due compensation after losing so many loved ones to nuclear fallout disease patterns.The compensation bill championed by Lujan in the Senate and Fernández in the House has earned backing across the political aisle from Missouri’s far-right US senator Josh Hawley.Hawley joined Lujan and Fernández’s ranks last summer after an investigation by the Missouri Independent, MuckRock and the Associated Press uncovered rare cancers as well as autoimmune disorders among St Louis workers who processed uranium used in early stages of the Manhattan Project at the heart of Oppenheimer. There was radioactive waste found in lakes and creeks and groundwater pollution at sites in St Louis county yet to be cleaned.The bill co-sponsored by Hawley – who gave a clenched fist salute to supporters of former president Donald Trump before they staged the January 6 Capitol attack – is likely one of the few political issues on which the Missouri Republican is likely to agree with the Joe Biden White House.View image in fullscreenBiden, too, endorsed the compensation bill which on Thursday passed the Senate 69-31 with a broad bipartisan vote. The measure now goes to the House.Fernández stressed the coalition is “not questioning the US’s decision to pursue the bomb and nuclear power as part of national security” to end the second world war. But, she said: “We need for victims of that national priority to receive compensation for what they and their families suffered.”A sequence in First We Bombed New Mexico poignantly conveys that point.The former US senator Tom Udall tells Tina Cordova’s group how moved he was to have heard their stories. The film cuts to grainy footage of Tom’s father, Steward Udall, as the US’s secretary of the interior in the 1960s. With a catch in the throat, the elder Udall shows outrage about disease-stricken uranium miners in Utah – then says cynically: “No matter how much they have lied or what harm they may have done, you cannot sue the government.“As one Atomic Energy Commission official I knew in the [early 1960s] said, ‘Well, if we admit now that we have not told them the truth, they won’t believe anything we said.’”First We Bombed New Mexico has a private screening for members of Congress. It will be shown at 7pm on 26 March at the Environmental film festival on the American University’s campus in Washington, with Cordova and Lipman taking questions. More