These days college students have a reputation for being incurious about and intolerant of the worldviews and arguments of those with whom they disagree. I’m sad to say that some of these charges are accurate, and I do what little I can to persuade my students that they ought to listen to the views of those with whom they disagree even when they regard those views as bigoted, unenlightened, or tiresomely liberal. It’s possible, I say, that their conviction about what constitutes the obvious answer to every question might be misplaced or that they might discover that people they believe to be wrong have interesting or useful ideas to offer. However, even though I believe that too many college students are losing interest in all but the prescribed views, my students still ask me interesting questions, and some of those questions relate to intersections of US politics, Christianity, race, and sexuality.
For example, my students ask me how it could be that people who identify as Christian could elect to the presidency and continue to support someone as apparently ambitiously unchristian in his words, perspectives, and behavior as Donald Trump. I tell them there are many ways to conceptualize a response to this question that take into account the institutional stakes of the presidential election (otherwise known as the Supreme Court); the demands of party politics and political movement strategy; the logic of the conjoining of political and theological conservatism; as well as many other political and historical factors we might discover in our investigations. I say that it matters who leads Christian organizations at any particular moment as well as how members of these groups and conservative believers more generally have been primed and socialized to think about politics, the government, and particular issues.
Referring to legal, social, and political changes that have left my students puzzled about why anyone cares enough about same-sex sexuality to want to harm those who engage in it, my students ask me what the Christian conservative movement wants now. This is an excellent question, which requires me to consult what I have learned about the Christian right over many years of diligent study of the movement’s rhetoric and political goals. My best short response to this question is that Christian conservatives want to restore the stigma and the absence of legal protections associated with same-sex identity and sexuality in the America of the 1950s. Such people should, they believe, hide, isolate themselves, live in fear, and generally “suffer unto themselves that recompense of their error which [is] meet.” Vice President Pence clearly believes this. And even though President Trump has unsuccessfully appealed to LGBTQ people for support, he’s promised Christian conservatives who placed him in the White House that he will do something about the persistent problem of religious liberty in the US encountering the boundary of gender and sexual minority citizens asserting their rights. Given Trump’s aggressive assault on political norms and institutions, Christian conservatives are becoming anxious that Trump hasn’t yet delivered on this promise.
My students also ask me how Christian conservatives, the majority of whom voted for Trump, reconcile their choice with the enthusiasm of white supremacists for their candidate. In one sense this one’s easy: they don’t. Not yet, at least. That is, the majority of Christian conservatives and their movement’s leaders have studiously avoided noticing the unprecedented mobilization of Nazis, denizens of the “alt right”, and other white nationalists who support Trump. Instead, they are preoccupied with protecting Trump from the “deep state,” an Obama-led “shadow government,” and even a global witchcraft attack. The silence from Christian conservatives about public displays of racism and antisemitism is so apparent that I consider it possible that Christian right elites might be calculating how much racism and antisemitism to tolerate as the cost of restricting and rolling back reproductive and LGBTQ rights. To his credit, conservative columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has relentlessly called attention to the hateful, racist, white-supremacist dimensions of Trump’s campaign and administration.
The apostasy of Gerson and other figures on the conservative right clarifies that none of us can afford to talk only with those who agree with us on every issue. Old and middle-aged people, millennials, people of color, white people, atheists, believers of all faiths, people born in the US, people who’ve adopted the US, the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and dissenters within Trump’s party: we can’t afford to hold out for ideological purity or deplatform everyone who disagrees with us. We all need as much help as we can get to move the mountain before us.