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      ‘This war is prophetically significant’: why US evangelical Christians support Israel

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      It didn’t take long for many evangelical Christian groups in America to show their support for Israel.Hours after Hamas attacked the country on 7 October, killing more than 1,400 people, Christians United for Israel, an evangelical lobbying group which claims to have more than 10 million members, posted a message to on X, formerly known as Twitter.“To the terrorists who have chosen this fight, hear this, what you do to Israel, god will do to you. Despite today’s weeping, joy will come because he [god] who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps,” CUFI, whose founder believes the presence of Jews in Israel is a precursor to Jesus Christ returning to Earth, wrote.Soon an “Evangelical statement in support of Israel” was issued by the ethics and religion liberty commission – an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination which has 45,000 churches in the US.In the statement, 2,000 evangelical leaders – not all were named – said they “fully support Israel’s right and duty to defend itself against further attack”. Little credence was given to the Palestinians who would soon find themselves under attack: more than 8,000 people in Gaza have now been killed by Israeli bombardments, according to Gaza’s health ministry .“While our theological perspectives on Israel and the Church may vary, we are unified in calling attacks against Jewish people especially troubling as they have been often targeted by their neighbors since God called them as His people in the days of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3),” the evangelical statement said.“In keeping with Christian Just War tradition, we also affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s right to respond against those who have initiated these attacks as Romans 13 grants governments the power to bear the sword against those who commit such evil acts against innocent life.”The more than 90 named signatories – four were women, the rest men – included the current president, and eight former presidents, of the Southern Baptist Convention, among other influential evangelicals.For people not immersed in evangelicalism – a conservative strand of Christianity which emphasises adherence to the Bible – the overt biblical references may have seemed unusual to hear in a geopolitical context.Romans 13 – the 13th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans in the New Testament – is essentially a lengthy treatise on the importance of submitting to bureaucracy, which states:“Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason.”For those more familiar with the evangelical world, the vehemence of the support has not been a surprise, given the importance to evangelicals of an Israel inhabited by Jewish people. One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.To that end, the issue of Israel and Palestine has dominated sermons at evangelical churches over the past two Sundays, said Daniel Hummel, a historian of American religion, and the author of Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and US-Israeli Relations.“The overwhelming theme has been: this war is prophetically significant, but no one is willing to really claim exactly how,” Hummel said.“And that’s been a long tradition of sort of hedging your bets and getting whatever you can in terms of sort of interest and eyeballs, by declaring that there’s something significant here, but once you start saying specific things and you’re sort of on the hook, it doesn’t turn out that way.”The rush to respond, and the statements in support of Israel, were not surprising to those aware of the deep feeling evangelicals have for Israel.Broadly speaking, some evangelicals believe that Jewish people returning to Israel following the 1917 ​​Balfour Declaration, a British statement which called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, was key to end times, when God will purge sinners and Jesus Christ will return.John Hagee, an evangelical pastor and influential founder of Christians United for Israel, explained the prophecy to TBN Networks in December 2022.“God is getting ready to defend Israel in such a supernatural way it’s going to take the breath out of the lungs of the dictators on planet Earth but we are living on the cusp of the greatest most supernatural series of events the world has ever seen ready or not.”Hagee said when Jewish people are present in Israel “the clock starts ticking” on the rapture.“What will come soon [is] the antichrist and his seven year empire that will be destroyed in the battle of armageddon. Then Jesus Christ will set up his throne in the city of Jerusalem. He will establish a kingdom that will never end,” Hagee said.Hagee, despite having a long history of antisemitism – he has suggested Jews brought persecution upon themselves by upsetting God and called Hitler a “half-breed Jew” – founded Christians United for Israel in 2006.Among other things, the group lobbied for the US embassy in Israel to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Donald Trump did in 2018, and is “committed to Israel’s strength, security and sovereignty”.The support of evangelical Christians – in 2015 the Pew Research Center estimated there were about 62 million in the US – for Israel can be split into different groups, Hummel said.While there are plenty of evangelicals who, like Hagee, adhere to the Israel-is-key-to-Jesus’-return theology, there are also those who believe in “blessings theology”, a less outlandish, more transactional approach to support for Israel.The blessings theology is based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis, where God told Abraham – who Hummel described as “the patriarch of the Jewish people” – that he would “bless those who bless you” and “curse those who curse you”.“For the last couple of centuries this has been interpreted on individual terms. So you can accrue personal blessings by being good to the Jewish people, or by giving money, or touring Israel or things like that,” Hummel said.That also works on a national level, he said.“And so the crude way of doing this is a pastor will say something like: ‘Look at the Roman Empire and how they persecuted the Jews and Rome fell. Look at the British Empire and how the British didn’t treat the Jews well, and how they fell. Look at the Nazis and how they persecuted the Jews, and they fell.“And we, the Americans, don’t want to be the next Empire or the next great power to fall because we didn’t sufficiently bless the Jewish people.’”There are also those whose support is “more broadly American”, Hummel said: “There’s a deep cultural affinity that’s been built over decades and decades between the US and Israel all across the board.”Evangelicals make up an influential part of the Republican party base, and have a strong number in Congress. More than 100 members of the current Congress can be broadly identified as evangelical, and that was on display in recent days.Lee Fang, a journalist, recently asked congressmen and women whether their religion was important to their support for Israel, for the documentary “Praying for Armageddon”.“This entire matter is based upon the faith of our maker, our creator, but it’s also faith of a chosen people,” Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman from Texas and a Methodist, said.Fang asked Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee, about evangelical support.“They’re following the scripture, and what the scripture says about Israel: ‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed,’ they take it literal, and I’m one of those people,” Burchett said.In terms of the influence evangelicals might wield as the Israel-Hamas conflict continues, Hummel said there had been a “mixed record” on evangelicals’ political sway.Still, Trump has specifically said he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem “for the evangelicals”, while Hagee served as an adviser to the twice-impeached president.In the 2020 election, evangelical or born-again Christians made up 28% of the overall electorate, CNN reported, and three-quarters voted for Trump. Given that support for the Republican party, under GOP leadership evangelicals would have plenty of influence.“When there’s a Republican president they have a seat at the table it doesn’t mean the president’s going to do exactly what they want, but they’re the ones that the president’s listening to more than other interested parties on Israel,” Hummel said.With a presidential election looming, and with few signs that the Israeli conflict will ebb away any time soon, evangelicals could find themselves in a position of significant power in the near future. More

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      Losing Our Religion review: Trump and the crisis of US Christianity

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      Christianity and the “powers that be” have weathered two millennia, their relationship varying by time and place. Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross. Emperor Constantine converted. Henry VIII broke from Rome and founded the Church of England. In the US, the denominational divides of protestantism helped drive the revolution and provided fuel for the civil war.In his new book, the Rev Russell Moore opens a chapter, “Losing Our Authority: How the Truth Can Save”, with the words “Jesus Saves”, followed by a new historical tableau: January 6 and the threat Donald Trump and the mob posed to democracy and Mike Pence.“That the two messages, a gallows and ‘Jesus Saves’ could coexist is a sign of crisis for American Christianity,” Moore writes.Heading toward the Iowa caucus, Trump runs six points better among white evangelicals than overall. As for the devout Pence, a plurality of white evangelicals view him unfavorably.Moore is mindful of history, and the roles Christianity has played: “Parts of the church were wrong – satanically wrong – on issues of righteousness and justice, such as the Spanish Inquisition and the scourge of human slavery.” He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a publication founded by Billy Graham. Losing Our Religion offers a mixture of lament and hope. In places, its sadness is tinged with anger. In the south, the expression “losing my religion”, popularized by REM in a 1991 song, “conveys the moment when ‘politeness gives way to anger’,” Moore explains.Moore’s public and persistent opposition to the election of Trump set him apart from most white evangelicals and would lead to his departure from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).“The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking ‘foreigner’, who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again,” Moore wrote in spring 2016. “Regardless of the outcome in November, [Trump’s] campaign is forcing American Christians to grapple with some scary realities that will have implications for years to come.”He was prescient. Graham’s son, Franklin, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. At the time, Moore was president of the SBC ethics and religious liberty commission. His politics forced him to choose. He opted for Christ and his convictions. He joined a nondenominational church.His new book is subtitled “An Altar Call for Evangelical America” but it aims for a broader audience. It contains ample references to Scripture, but also to the journalist Tim Alberta, Jonathan Haidt of New York University, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, a liberal group.Of white evangelicals, Moore quotes Jones: “Their greatest temptation will be to wield what remaining political power they have as desperate corrective for their waning cultural influence.” Welcome to the culture wars, and to what Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic has called the coalition of restoration.Against the backdrop of rising Christian nationalism and January 6, Moore reads the writing on the wall. He is troubled by the shrinking gap between Christian nationalism and neo-paganism. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he observes. Moore found the presence of prayers in “‘Jesus’s name’ right next to a horn-wearing pagan shaman in the well of the evacuated United States Senate” disturbing, but not coincidental.The Magasphere and Twitterverse bolster Moore’s conclusions.“President Trump will be arrested during Lent – a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” Joseph McBride, a rightwing lawyer who represents several insurrectionists, tweeted last March. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the third day, so too will Donald Trump.”Caesar as deity. We’ve seen that movie before. McBride, however, did not stop there.Hours later, he tweeted: “JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”Three-in-10 adults in the US, meanwhile, are categorized as religious “nones”. Only 40% of Americans call themselves Protestant. The Wasp ascendancy has yielded to Sunday brunch and walks in the woods. “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost, they took the last train for the coast,” as Don MacLean sang. For some, Trump rallies present a variation of community and communion. A younger generation of evangelicals heads for the door. The numbers tell of a crisis of faith.“We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the “church itself” does not believe what the church teaches,” Moore laments.Predation, lust and greed are poor calling cards for religion. Unchecked abuse within the Catholic church left deep and lasting scars among those who needed God’s love most. Moore notes the Catholic church’s fall from grace in Ireland and posits that “born-again America” may be experiencing a similar backlash, as a powerful cultural institution lacking “credibility” seeks to “enforce its orthodoxies”.Against this backdrop, Catholicism’s boomlet among younger continental Europeans is noteworthy. Recently, hundreds of thousands converged on Lisbon to hear the Pope. The same demographic helps fuel the resurgence of the Spanish far right. Tethering the cross to the flag retains its appeal.That said, Jerry Falwell Jr’s posturing as Trump-booster and voyeur didn’t exactly jibe with Scripture. The ousted head of Liberty University, son of the founder of the Moral Majority, allegedly paid a pool boy to have sex with his wife as he watched.“What we are seeing now … is in many cases the shucking off of any pretense of hypocrisy for the outright embrace of immorality,” Moore writes.America barrels toward a Biden v Trump rematch. The former president is a professional defendant. The country and its religion sag and shudder. Moore prays for revival, even as he fears nostalgia.
      Losing Our Religion is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Pat Robertson obituary

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      Although the concept of separation of church and state is entrenched in the US constitution, the influence of churchmen in political affairs is an American tradition dating back to the colonial era. Indeed, modern media has made the voice of contemporary evangelists every bit as powerful as Cotton Mather’s sermons were to the early Puritans. Pat Robertson, who has died aged 93, rode the growth of cable television, and a shrewd sense of the economics of the business, to become the most overtly political, and arguably the most influential, of them all.When Robertson appeared on the front of Time magazine in 1986, the cover line read Gospel TV: Religion, Politics and Money. The melding of those three strands of his career was not always seamless, though in American fundamentalism, material wealth is usually seen as a visible sign of God’s blessing. Through his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), he progressed from televised faith healing to a serious run at the US presidency in 1988, and made a fortune in the process.Robertson started that campaign for the Republican nomination with a petition, and contributions, from 3 million viewers, and finished second in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of the then vice-president George HW Bush. But voters gave him little support in the Republican primaries, and Bush of course went on to the presidency.Robertson, who had handed control of CBN to his son Tim, then founded the Christian Coalition of America. Having failed to take over the Republican party, his “rainbow coalition” of fundamentalists would attempt to steer the party in its ideological direction.The coalition’s lobbying exerted immense influence, helping spearhead the right’s assault on President Bill Clinton, and provided both a fundraising and ideological template for Bush. Although the coalition was censured and fined for coordinating its campaigns directly with the Republican party, and for improper aid delivered to then-House majority leader Newt Gingrich and the Virginia senatorial candidate Oliver North, its success spurred on Robertson’s indulgence in another grand tradition of American evangelical preachers, the hubris that found him courting constant controversy, and frequent financial scandal.Controversy became inevitable with the shift from mainstream politics to the Christian Coalition. Preaching to the converted meant the restraints on expressing his true beliefs were lifted. The framework for those beliefs was set out in his 1991 bestseller The New World Order, an amalgam of historical conspiracy theories, which posited an alliance of Masons and Jewish bankers who controlled the world.Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. He predicted that the staging of “gay days” at Disney World would result in God’s retribution through earthquakes, tornados, terrorist bombings or meteors.Asked to be “nice” about rival Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians or Methodists, he said: “I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the antichrist.” He described leftwing academics as “racists, murderers, sexual deviants, and supporters of al-Qaida”.In 2005 he called for the assassination of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and explained Ariel Sharon’s 2006 stroke as God’s retribution for giving land back to Palestinians. He later apologised to Sharon’s family and claimed to have been misquoted.That followed Robertson’s standard pattern, of making wild accusations that pleased his core audience, then claiming to have been misquoted by an anti-Christian mainstream media. Most notoriously, on his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”. After the ensuing uproar, he claimed that due to a malfunctioning earpiece he had not actually heard what Falwell was saying when he agreed with it.Robertson came by his political ambitions naturally, being related through the family of his mother, Gladys (nee Willis), to two presidents, the Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, while his father, Willis Robertson, was a US Senator from Virginia, one of the conservative segregationist southern Democrats dubbed “Dixiecrats”. He was born in Lexington, Virginia, and christened Marion Robertson, but was nicknamed Pat, because his older brother, Willis Jr, would say “pat, pat, pat” while patting baby Marion’s cheeks.Pat was educated at two military academies: McDonogh, near Baltimore, and McCallie, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Washington and Lee University in his home town. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marines, but his claims to have seen combat with the First Marine Division in Korea came back to haunt him during his run for the presidential nomination.His Republican rival, Congressman Pete McCloskey, who had served with Robertson, said Robertson’s father had used influence to keep him out of combat, and that his primary responsibility had been to keep the officers’ clubs stocked with liquor. Robertson denounced this, and allegations by fellow Marines that he had consorted with prostitutes, as attempts to discredit him.Robertson returned home to gain a law degree in 1955 from Yale, but failed the bar exam. Soon afterwards, he was converted by the Dutch missionary Cornelius Vanderbreggen. By the time he was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1961, he had bought his first television station, in Portsmouth, Virginia, and established the Christian Broadcasting Network. He gave Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker their first break, doing a children’s programme, and started the breakfast-time show The 700 Club, its title taken from a fundraising drive for 700 subscribers.Robertson’s early success was based on televised faith healing. Critics pointed out that God seemed to speak through Robertson while taking programme cues from the director. His style, with fixed smile and narrow eyes, could seem almost a caricature of a snake-oil salesman, but its appeal was unquestionable, as CBN eventually claimed an audience in 180 countries. It functioned as a network of affiliated stations subscribing to its programming, but in 1977 Robertson started his own cable channel, CBN Cable, offering mainstream entertainment bookended by The 700 Club.Renamed the Family Channel, its profits eventually threatened CBN’s religious non-profit status, so Robertson set up International Family Entertainment, with himself and Tim as its heads, and sold the Family Channel to it. In 1992 he took IFE public, making $90m on the launch. In 1997, IFE sold the Family Channel to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network for $1.9bn. Fox has since sold it on to Disney, but as a condition of the original sale, the channel, now called Freeform, is still required to broadcast The 700 Club, hosted by Pat’s son Gordon, president of CBN, twice a day.Evangelists including Oral Roberts and Bob Jones had founded their own colleges, and Robertson’s television success spawned CBN University, now called Regent University, at the CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, the city where Robertson lived in a hilltop mansion with its own landing strip. On a number of occasions he credited his public prayers for steering hurricanes away from Virginia Beach, though he was unsuccessful with Hurricane Isabel in 2003.More controversial than Regent was his international humanitarian charity Operation Blessing. In 1994, it was claimed in his local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, that Robertson’s impassioned fundraising for Operation Blessing’s refugee airlift in Rwanda and Zaire was at least partly a cover for the use of his aircraft to transport diamond-mining equipment for the Robertson-owned African Development Corporation. A long investigation by Virginia’s Office of Consumer Affairs recommended Robertson be prosecuted for fraud, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Earley, brought no charges against him. The George W Bush administration made Operation Blessing the second-largest recipient of federal relief funds in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which was seen in some quarters as payback for Robertson’s support.In 2003, Robertson used The 700 Club as a platform to argue on behalf of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who had been indicted by the UN for war crimes. It emerged that Robertson had an investment in a Liberian gold mine, which he claimed was intended to help pay for Operation Blessing’s humanitarian efforts in the country, but which was allowed to go bankrupt after Taylor’s departure from office.Other business enterprises included the Ice Capades, a pyramid sales scheme, and a financial services venture with the Bank of Scotland, which was cancelled after Robertson called Scotland “a dark land overrun by homosexuals”. No matter how outrageous his statements, Robertson never alienated his core audience, and could count on the committed support of born-again Christians who felt the Lord spoke through him, and rewarded him for passing on his message, as did countless politicians hungry for his endorsement.He married Dede (Adelia) Elmer in 1954. She died in 2022 and Robertson is survived by their sons, Tim and Gordon, and daughters, Elizabeth and Ann, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. More

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      The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faith | Ruth Braunstein

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      The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faithRuth BraunsteinSome sociologists believe that the rising number of non-religious Americans is a reaction against rightwing evangelicals. But that’s just part of the story What if I were to tell you that the following trends in American religion were all connected: rising numbers of people who are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) or identify as “spiritual but not religious”; a spike in positive attention to the “religious left”; the depoliticization of liberal religion; and the purification and radicalization of the religious right? As a sociologist who has studied American religion and politics for many years, I have often struggled to make sense of these dramatic but seemingly disconnected changes. I now believe they all can all be explained, at least in part, as products of a backlash to the religious right.Since the religious right rose to national prominence in the 1980s, the movement’s insertion of religion in public debate and uncompromising style of public discourse has alienated many non-adherents and members of the larger public. As its critics often note, the movement promotes policies – such as bans on same-sex marriage and abortion – that are viewed by growing numbers of Americans as intolerant and radical.In a 2002 article, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer argued that a significant trend in American religion – the skyrocketing number of people disaffiliating from religion – could be partly explained as a political backlash against the religious right. In the two decades since this article was published, a wealth of additional evidence has emerged to support its general argument. Sociologists Joseph O Baker and Buster G Smith summarize the sentiment driving this backlash: “If that’s what it means to be religious, then I’m not religious.”While pathbreaking, this research has been relatively narrow in its focus. This is because it has typically started with the puzzle of the rising “nones” and worked backward in search of a cause, landing on backlash against the religious right. I wondered what would happen if we flipped this question around, and started with the rise of the religious right and public concerns about its radicalism. We could then consider the varied ways that backlash against it has manifested, including but not limited to the rise of the “nones”.Backlash, after all, can take many forms. The kind of backlash that has led people to disavow religious affiliation in general is what I call a “broad” form of backlash. In this form, backlash against a radical form of religious expression leads people to distance themselves from all religion, including more moderate religious groups that are viewed as guilty by association with radicals. This is a common pattern within social movements, where moderates often worry that radicals will discredit their movement as a whole.But this is not the only plausible form that backlash can take. One can also imagine a narrower, more targeted, backlash against the religious right itself, in which people do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. Evidence of this form of backlash abounds. It can be found in rising numbers of people who identity as “spiritual but not religious”. These individuals are not rejecting religion altogether; they are embracing a new category of religiosity, one viewed as unpolluted by its association with radical conservative politics.‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?Read moreSimilarly, those who associate with the religious left do not discredit religion in general, but promote what they view as a more pluralistic form of public religious expression. Since Donald Trump was elected president with the support of religious conservatives, typically low-profile groups on the religious left received a surge of positive attention as observers saw in them a means of checking the power of the religious right. As a column by Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times: “Progressive Christians Arise! Hallelujah!”Finally, new research finds that people who are both religious and politically liberal are intentionally distancing themselves from the religious right by depoliticizing their public religious expression – a development worthy of much more attention.Finally, backlash is not a one-way street – the experience of being the object of political backlash has led to a counter-backlash among the conservative Christians who comprise the religious right. White evangelical Christians believe that they are being illegitimately persecuted and are increasingly invested in the boundary between the perceived morally righteous and their enemies. Religious conservatives not committed to Trump and the Republican party are being pushed out. Those who remain are not only deeply loyal to a shared political project, but less likely to encounter internal checks on radical ideas.Even as this group is shrinking by some measures, recent data suggests that growing numbers of nonreligious and non-Protestant Americans are adopting the label of “evangelical” – not as a statement of their religious identity, but as a statement of their political identity as rightwing Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. Together, these counter-backlashes seem to be driving this movement toward deeper political radicalism.Backlash against the religious right has had ripple effects far more widespread than previously recognized. These dynamics are effectively reshaping American religion and politics, and show no signs of stopping.
      Ruth Braunstein is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide
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      ‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?

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      Thousands of Southern Baptists from across the US are heading to Tennessee this week to vote for their next president, a choice laced with tension that could push America’s largest evangelical Christian denomination even further to the right and potentially spark an exodus of Black pastors and congregations.Each of the three leading candidates for president presents a unique vision for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and will help guide the Protestant denomination through the thorny issues it currently faces – declining membership, deep divisions over acknowledging the existence of systemic racism and fresh accusations of mishandling sexual abuse allegations.The denomination, which is more socially conservative than the general American public on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, would become even more politically aligned with Republican party if it were to elect the Georgia pastor Mike Stone as its next president. On the other side, the Alabama pastor Ed Litton has called for more distance from politics, and has the support of prominent Black Southern Baptists, who are part of a minority group that has been crucial in shoring up the SBC’s dwindling membership. Landing somewhere between Litton and Stone is the seminary president Albert Mohler, a former “Never Trumper” who endorsed Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign.Barry Hankins, a historian at Baylor University who studies evangelicalism, said that the SBC seems to be going through an “identity crisis”.“There is a strong faction that wants to be in lock step with the culture wars of the Republican party and a smaller group that wants to maintain a more independent witness within American culture,” he said.Southern Baptist messengers, who represent their churches at the meeting, can only vote for the next president by being physically present on the convention floor. After last year’s meeting was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, more than 16,000 people plan to attend the 15-16 June conference at Nashville’s Music City Center, which would make the event the SBC’s biggest annual meeting in 25 years.The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 by pro-slavery Baptists in the south who believed it was moral for missionaries to own slaves. Despite this history, SBC missionary efforts since the 1950s have seen the number of Black churches in the denomination slowly increase, with a growth spurt after 1995, when the denomination apologized for condoning slavery and systemic racism.Today, 14 million members attend the SBC’s network of more than 47,000 churches. Though the number of Black churches in the SBC is still relatively small, reaching nearly 3,400 in 2020, the SBC has been so successful at planting churches in communities of color or recruiting existing non-white congregations that – even though the number of white churches is declining sharply – the denomination’s non-white churches have been growing.Jéan Ward, a 49-year-old Black Southern Baptist pastor and church planter from Atlanta, first joined the SBC about 10 years ago, attracted by its commitment to evangelization in urban areas. He told the Guardian that other church planting networks he had worked with didn’t give him the resources and autonomy he needed to start a successful church plant in the Atlanta communities he was seeking to reach.“I love the fact that within the Southern Baptist Convention, when it comes to mission, they hands down the work together with that, even though there are some variances that happen,” Ward said.However, the tensions emerging at the upcoming annual meeting suggest that some white Southern Baptists believe that acknowledging these new members’ views and life experiences threatens the SBC’s dominant culture – which is still overwhelmingly white and conservative.As white evangelical Protestants become increasingly tied to the Republican party, they have come to expect their churches to align with their political ideology. One of the issues that has been seized on by prominent conservative commentators and politicians – and will probably be a key issue for many of the messengers flocking to Nashville – is critical race theory (CRT), a lens through which scholars seek to understand how systemic racism persists despite the legal victories of the civil rights era.Donald Trump lashed out at CRT in a memo last September, ordering federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege. (Joe Biden rescinded that ban shortly after taking office.) More than 20 states have recently introduced or passed legislation to ban the teaching of CRT in public schools.At the last annual meeting, Southern Baptists addressed the theory by passing a resolution, a non-binding statement that acts as a powerful symbol.The statement on CRT, known as Resolution 9, affirmed that Southern Baptists seeking to address social ills don’t need to turn to anything but the Bible for guidance. At the same time, it stated that CRT can be a useful tool with which to analyze human experiences.The resolution acknowledging CRT’s usefulness prompted a backlash. Stone, the Georgia pastor running for president, has the endorsement of the Conservative Baptist Network, a group formed last year in response to concerns that the SBC is caving to “worldly ideologies” such as CRT.Stone has proposed a resolution for the annual meeting that unequivocally condemns CRT, calling the framework “neo-Marxist” and “incompatible with scripture”. He said earlier this year: “Our Lord isn’t woke.”Ward believes the rejection of CRT discounts the lived experiences of Black Americans who have had to work harder to achieve the same successes as their white cohorts. CRT isn’t creating new divisions, but pointing out those that already exist, the pastor said.“One of the worst things you can say to a person is, ‘I don’t see color,’” Ward said. “If you don’t see color, you don’t see my identity.”Ward, who is also the executive director of the African American Fellowship for the Georgia Baptist Convention, said an anti-CRT resolution could threaten the SBC’s recent success in recruiting existing Black churches into the fold and planting new churches in Black communities. Several prominent Black pastors have recently disaffiliated from the denomination over the issue. While Ward isn’t planning to leave if an anti-CRT resolution passes, he said a few Black pastors in Georgia are talking about doing just that.An anti-CRT resolution would mark “the beginning of the end of the SBC”, Ward warned. He also suggested that it could have repercussions outside the denomination.“I honestly believe this is a political move so that critical race theory can be killed on a national level,” Ward said. “If churches are saying CRT is ungodly and shouldn’t be adhered to, that then affects decision makers that lead corporations, who will then push it that way.”Mohler, president of Kentucky’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has shown a willingness to acknowledge historical racism, commissioning a report in 2018 documenting his seminary’s past ties to white supremacy and slavery. But the report didn’t include plans to rectify or collectively repent for the seminary’s racist past. Mohler has also spoken out against CRT, initiating a joint statement with five other SBC presidents last November that prohibited professors from teaching students about the theory. That statement from the seminary presidents – who are all white – drew heavy criticism from several Black Southern Baptist leaders.Litton, however, signed a statement last December acknowledging that systemic injustice is real and urging “collective repentance”. He has the support of Fred Luter, the SBC’s first and only Black president.Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist and the executive director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center, said he was hopeful that Southern Baptists would listen to the concerns of Black leaders at the annual meeting. Failing to do so could have serious consequences, he said.“I think if the SBC comes out with a resolution or a president seen as not listening to the concerns of African Americans, you may see a significant exodus of them from the convention,” Stetzer said.CRT is not the only issue likely to be debated at the convention. In May, another prominent figure in the denomination, Bible teacher Beth Moore, announced that she no longer considered herself Southern Baptist. For years, Moore had been calling out misogyny within SBC circles and advocating for survivors of sexual abuse. She has also faced backlash from fellow Baptists for preaching to mixed audiences of men and women.While Southern Baptists affirm that women have key roles to play in the church, the denomination’s core doctrinal statement insists that the Bible does not allow women to serve as pastors. The ban on female pastors was added in 2000, with Mohler’s support. This position was recently challenged by one of the largest SBC churches, California’s Saddleback Church, which ordained three women as staff pastors in May.Mohler, Stone and Litton all agree that the ordination of female pastors contradicts core Southern Baptist doctrine. Mohler even claimed women pastors are the reason for declining membership of liberal churches.“Liberal theology is the kiss of death for any church or denomination,” Mohler told Religion News Service in May. “Little remains but social justice activism and deferred maintenance.”Whether or not Saddleback will be disfellowshipped from the SBC for ordaining women remains up to messengers to the annual meeting, Mohler added.The problem of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up within the denomination has toppled several prominent leaders. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle documented hundreds of credible accusations against SBC pastors, Sunday school teachers, deacons, and church volunteers – some of whom eventually found jobs at different churches.Calls for accountability emerged again this year after letters written by Russell Moore, former head of the SBC’s public policy arm, were leaked online. (Russell Moore and Beth Moore are not related.)One letter suggested that the SBC’s executive committee, which runs the business of the convention, had resisted reforms and bullied an abuse survivor. Russell Moore specifically called out Stone, the committee’s chairman at the time, for delaying reforms in a closed-door meeting in May 2019. Russell Moore resigned from his position at the denomination’s public policy arm in May and appears to have left the SBC altogether.Stone, who says he is a survivor of sexual abuse himself, has called Moore’s accusations “slanderous”, “ungodly” and “outrageous”. On Thursday, leaked audio recordings from that meeting appeared to corroborate Russell Moore’s accusation that executive committee leaders prioritized the denomination’s image over abuse survivors’ concerns. In response to the leaks, the executive committee announced it had hired a firm to perform an independent review of its handling of sexual abuse issues. Some survivors are still concerned about whether the investigation will be truly independent from the executive committee’s control.Christa Brown, a longtime advocate for abuse survivors in Baptist circles, said she did not have faith in the SBC’s ability to address the issue.“The juxtaposition of nice-sounding talk with a lack of any care or action feels duplicitous and lessens any possibility of trust,” Brown said. “It is yet another way of being re-victimized and exploited.”In a statement, Ronnie Floyd, the committee’s current president, said: “The Convention was – and still is – divided over methods of response to sexual abuse. However, the SBC is not divided on the priority of caring for abuse survivors and protecting the vulnerable in our churches.”Stetzer believes the election, resolutions and motions that emerge from this year’s annual meeting will determine the SBC’s future. He said it was important for Southern Baptists to wade through these tough issues of race and abuse before concentrating on the church’s ultimate mission – evangelism.“You have to deal with the bad before you can get to the things we want to focus on,” he said. “We have to address issues of abuse and poor leadership and simultaneously choose a path that enables us to hear out concerns about CRT while listening to the voices of African American leaders.” More

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      Why did white evangelicals vote for Trump? Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      Jonathan Freedland is joined by Lerone Martin of Washington University, to discuss how America’s strictest Christians came to back Donald Trump. Now that Trump is on his way out, where does that leave his Christian backers?

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      In 2016, white evangelical Christians were all in for Donald Trump. No voting bloc was more committed to him. In that year he got 81% of the white evangelical vote. And they stood by him again in 2020. Last month his support among that group was 75%. Down a bit, but still huge. So, how come? Jonathan Freedland puts this to Lerone Martin, associate professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Let us know what you think of the podcast: send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Will Jerry Falwell Jr’s fall from grace end his influence over Trump voters?

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      “Every human being is a sinner. We’re all imperfect, we’re all flawed, and we’re redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ.”When Jerry Falwell Jr, the US evangelical leader, president of the country’s premier conservative Christian university and close associate of Donald Trump, told me this in his spacious office in Lynchburg, Virginia, almost two years ago, it was in response to a question about the morality of the US president.But after a turbulent week in which his status as a figurehead for the Christian right crashed and burned, Falwell may be reflecting on his own flaws and imperfections, and hoping redemption will not be too long coming.The tawdry end to his career as president of Liberty University, with its $1m-plus annual salary and use of a private jet, could also mean his influence on the political choices of white evangelicals in the US is over just weeks before a knife-edge presidential election.The essential elements of his downfall are disputed but they centre on his wife’s adultery, his alleged voyeurism, her lover’s alleged attempts at extortion, and an Instagram photograph of Falwell’s unzipped trousers. At its heart, he says, was “a fatal attraction-type situation” – a reference to the 1987 Oscar-nominated psychosexual thriller starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close.On Sunday evening, Falwell issued a 1,200-word statement to the Washington Examiner, revealing that he had experienced depression and extreme weight loss as a result of alleged threats by his wife’s lover to expose their affair unless money was handed over.It was a pre-emptive strike. Falwell knew that Giancarlo Granda, a former pool attendant with whom the Falwells set up a business, was poised to go public over his relationship with Falwell’s wife, Becki.In an explosive interview with Reuters news agency, published on Monday, Granda said: “Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room.” The encounters, over a six-year period, allegedly took place “multiple times a year” in hotels in New York and Miami, and the Falwells’ home in Virginia.Granda was a 20-year-old pool attendant at a Miami hotel when he met the Falwells in 2012. Without naming him, Falwell said in his statement: “During a vacation over eight years ago, Becki and I met an ambitious young man who was working at our hotel and was saving up his money to go to school … We were impressed by his initiative in suggesting a local real estate opportunity.“My family members eventually made an investment in a local property, included him in the deal because he could play an active role in managing it, and became close with him and his family.”That closeness extended to an “inappropriate personal relationship” between Becki and “this person”, said Falwell; “something in which I was not involved”. He was distressed at learning of the affair but “Becki and I forgave each other”. More