Religion and politics mix – what matters is how they mix

This week in North Philly Notes, L. Felipe Mantilla, author of How Political Parties Mobilize Religion, writes about the rise of religious political parties.

A glance at global headlines suggests that religion is playing an ever-growing role in electoral politics. Islamist parties have become fixtures in Muslim-majority countries from Morocco to Indonesia, conservative Catholics are entrenched in Poland, Evangelicals flex their political muscles in Brazil, and Hindu nationalists are dominant across much of India. In all these settings, secularists often express fear that the political success of religious groups will threaten democratic institutions and endanger minorities.

My new book, How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey, aims to bring some nuance to the debates prompted by the rise of religious political parties. One of its main arguments is that religion often enters the electoral arena, but that it can do so in strikingly different ways. Religious mobilization by political parties is not monolithic, and secular laws and religious leaders can have a great deal of influence on how religious parties behave in practice.

In the United States, for example, the idea of a clear separation between church and state is embedded in American political tradition. Yet religion and partisanship are clearly intertwined. Candidates often speak publicly about faith, craft appeal to religious voters, and place their personal beliefs on public display. While churches risk losing their tax-exempt status if they engage in explicitly partisan activities, these restrictions are widely disregarded in practice. Given electoral laws that favor a two-party system, religious activists operate within broader coalitions rather than form their own party organizations. As a result, both Democrats and Republicans engage in religious mobilization.

Still, there is a great deal of diversity in how political parties engage with religion. Consider the contrast between the religious services attended by Donald Trump and Joseph Biden on the eve of the 2020 election. Biden sat at a pew in St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church and was treated like a regular parishioner; his presence was not mentioned in the sermon. Trump, attending an evangelical congregation in Las Vegas, was repeatedly praised and blessed, declared to be “lighting a bright light for God and for all those who believe in a good America, a noble America, a righteous America,” and was invited to speak to the congregation.

In my book, I argue that much of this difference can be explained by the contrasting patterns of religious organization among Evangelicals and Catholics. Individual leaders of Evangelical churches can benefit from the fervor and national visibility that brazen partisanship brings, even if their stances alienate most Americans and potentially antagonize elected officials. In contrast, the contemporary Catholic Church is a hierarchical, transnational organization, and as such is more wary of the potential costs of partisanship. Gaining a thousand devout converts by antagonizing millions is fine, perhaps even smart, if you are running a local church but makes little sense if you are leading a world religion.

These differences are not unique to the United States. In Peru’s recent elections, the absence of effective legal restrictions on religious partisanship created an opening for religious political mobilization. In that Catholic-majority country, it led some lay Catholics to launch campaigns based on appeals to religious values and identities. However, Catholic leaders largely withheld their blessing, preferring to make broad statements about the importance of electoral participation. In contrast, many clerics linked with Peru’s rapidly growing Evangelical minority engaged in openly partisan activities, such as praying with specific candidates and organizing events on their behalf.

My book also shows that changes in the rules and regulations governing elections can affect the mobilizing strategies used by religious parties. In 1950s Mexico, electoral rules that disadvantaged opposition parties drove away all but the most committed activists, many of whom were devout Catholics. This left opposition parties dependent on religious activists. As legal reforms gradually made it easier for challengers to gain seats, they began to attract more diverse supporters and the relative influence of religious activists waned. In Turkey in the 1970s, electoral laws gave a competitive edge to small parties. Religious activists took note and formed specialized organizations that catered exclusively to devout voters. However, when constitutional reforms made it harder for these organizations to gain seats in parliament, religious politicians reorganized and moderated their policy proposals to appeal to more mainstream voters. In both cases, religious activists responded strategically to incentives created by electoral laws.

In other words, it makes little sense to support or condemn religious political engagement in general. In democratic settings, religion and political parties are bound to interact. What matters is how political parties engage with religion, and that is something that can be shaped by legal reforms and religious leadership.

The News of New York City’s Death is Greatly Exaggerated

This week in North Philly Notes, Francois Pierre-Louis Jr. and Michael Alan Krasner, two of the coauthors of Immigrant Crossroads, write about immigrant groups in Queens, New York.

Since the advent of COVID-19 and the exodus of affluent New Yorkers to the suburbs, some people have predicted that New York will no longer be the city that never sleeps. Our book Immigrant Crossroads has shown the contrary, documenting and analyzing the many fascinating dynamics of community and political activism in this unique borough.

For immigrant families that had endured the four years of the Trump administration living away from their loved ones, the Biden presidency brings new hope and renewed optimism that what Queens was already showing to America will continue. That the vibrant growth exemplified by the borough of Queens and temporarily impeded will flourish again.

Since the 1990s Queens has become the urban epicenter for contemporary immigration—a place that boasts immigrants from 140 countries. While Manhattan drew millions of tourists and mega-rich condo buyers, the city’s four other Boroughs saw the influx of working- and middle-class newcomers from every continent. Places that used to be unattractive to developers and commercial interests suddenly became prime real estate and desired places for immigrants and the middle class to live. Queens led the way in this transformation from being an enclave dominated by the white working class to being perhaps the most diverse aggregation of human beings on the planet. Queens has become an epicenter of  immigrant striving, and activism, presenting an alternative to the nativist vision pursued by Trump’s  propagandists and enforcers.

Hollowed out by white flight, in the 1980s and 90s, New York City’s outer Boroughs have been revitalized with the influx of new immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Caribbean and Africa. Neighborhoods such as Flushing, Bayside, and Laurelton have emerged as the epicenter of New York City’s Asian American community. Within a decade, Flushing has become one of the city’s major commercial and banking center for the Asian community. Corona and Jackson Heights became destinations for those from Latin America, and Astoria became the home for Russians and Eastern Europeans and those from the Middle East. All across the borough of Queens, immigrants remade blighted neighborhoods into thriving communities.

As major economic developments took place, new forms of immigrant activism emerged in Queens’ other neighborhoods, a process that is remaking the social, cultural, economic, and political fabric of the city. Take the case of Corona, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Flushing where seventy-five percent of the residents are people of color. When the City announced in 2012, that it would give away portions of Flushing Meadows Park to private developers as a way to revitalize the local economy, a coalition of community-based groups and faith-based organizations created the Fairness Coalition of Queens to fight the Bloomberg administration’s economic development agenda. Forcing the cancellation of a sterile soccer stadium and other mega projects, the Fairness Coalition asserted its own power and priorities to call attention to the need for affordable housing and the checking of rampant  gentrification.

A similar pattern has developed in national immigration politics. Drawing on a heavily foreign-born population (One-in-two residents in Queens are foreign-born, ranking it second in the nation for percentage of foreign-born residents), activist Dreamer organizations have lobbied successfully for state legislation and led the fight for similar action from the federal government. Among the first set of actions by the Biden Administration are a rash of executive orders and a far-reaching legislative proposal to not only undo Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant policies but to usher in human pathways to immigrant inclusion.

Pioneering efforts on health care accessibility, an issue made salient by the Covid crisis also began in Queens where two city-wide immigrant advocacy organizations successfully organized to pass the Language Access in Pharmacies Act in 2009 and in 2012 mandating pharmacies provide comprehensive translation and interpretation services to patients with limited English proficiency.

As these examples suggest, the true impact of the recent surge of new immigrant groups is complex, contradicting partisan stereotypes and xenophobic pandering. Serious scholarship from varied disciplines reveals the richly textured contributions that resurgent nativism has sought to obliterate. Our volume demonstrates that being an Immigrant Crossroads has led New York City to flourish and suggests a path that the entire country would do well to consider following to revive the national motto, “Out of many, one.”

Social Distancing with Shakespeare

This week in North Philly Notes, Jeffrey Wilson, author of Shakespeare and Trump, writes about why people are cycling experiences with coronavirus through Shakespeare.

First came the meme to wash hands for the duration of Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot” speech.

Soon society was shutting down. “I’m worried about Covid-19 causing theatres to go dark,” tweeted theater-maker @MediocreDave on March 9, 2020. “Not because I’ll lose income, but because we’ll inevitably be subjected to opportunistic Shakespeare scholars making smug but superficial analogies to the playhouse closures of the late Elizabethan plague years.” That’ll be the end of that, I thought.

The next day, Slate ran a piece from Ben Cohen, “The Infectious Pestilence Did Reign: How the Plague Ravaged William Shakespeare’s World and Inspired his Work, from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth.” Two days later, Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith was historicizing appropriations of Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing scene for Penguin Books. Another two days, and The Atlantic ran Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s “Shakespeare Wrote His Best Works During a Plague.”

The content of these essays—Shakespeare born in plague, shuttered theaters prompting his poetry, Romeo and Juliet derailed by quarantine, playwrights sustained by wealthy patrons, disease threatening rival acting troupes, great art created in isolation—is not as fascinating as the questions raised by their method. Why are people cycling experiences with coronavirus through Shakespeare? What do we gain from comparisons between social distancing in Shakespeare’s time and in ours? How might our experiences with social distancing help us better understand Shakespeare’s? How can these examples help us think about academic work in 2020?

On March 14, @rosannecash caused a collective groan by tweeting, “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.”

Twitter did its thing. “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” wrote @sydneeisanelf. “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he masturbated incessantly,” said @emilynussbaum.

With doors shuttered, some theaters offered plays and programming online, free to the public, including Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theater, the Public Theater, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Then came pop-up performances like Patrick Stewart’s #ASonnetADay and The Two Gentleman of Verona on Zoom. What is the value of art in times of social distancing? How is social distancing changing the way art is done? Based on the analogy to Shakespeare, what might the art that comes out of coronavirus look like?

Academics followed suit. On March 23, Andy Kesson, Callan Davies, and Emma Whipday launched A Bit Lit, featuring open-access, of-the-moment interviews with early-modern literary scholars. What is the role of humanistic thought and conversation in times of social distancing? What is the importance—if any—of studying Shakespeare when society is in such turmoil?

Social distancing with Shakespeare soon became A Thing. Kathryn Harkup in The Telegraph on March 15; Andrew Dickson in The Guardian on March 22; James Shapiro on CNN on March 30. The genre was common enough to call for satire. On April 1, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wrote “What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague” for The New Yorker: “Day 25: Definitely too dark. Keep the mood light! No one wants to see a tragedy after a plague.”

Emma Smith tackled that tension with a straight face in the New York Times, arguing that “[Shakespeare’s] fictions reimagine the macro-narrative of epidemic as the micro-narrative of tragedy.” Is our experience with coronavirus tragic? What makes something tragic?

Elsewhere in the New York Times, Ian Wheeler cited Shakespeare to argue that, in America, “We need a better patronage system for artists.” In The New Yorker, James Shapiro lobbed Coriolanus-shaped bombs at the Trump administration: “The casual insults, the condescension, and the refusal to accept responsibility will be familiar to anyone who has lately tuned in to the daily White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic.”

These various ShakesTakes sift into terms developed in Shakespeare and Trump, my recent book about the surprising—and bizarre—relationship between the provincial English playwright and the billionaire President of the United States. There are the ShakesMemes. There are the Politicitations. And there is the Shaxtivism.

Above all, the Shakespearean gloss on social distancing shows the power—and pitfalls—of Public Shakespeare, where scholars eschew peer-reviewed academic writing in favor of public engagement.

I come not to bury Public Shakespeare, nor to praise it. I want to ask what it is, where it comes from, how it works, and why it elicits simultaneous enthusiasm and nausea. What is behind the push in some scholars to filter current events through Shakespeare? What is behind the tendency in others to get annoyed when they do?

Why are Shakespeareans suddenly authorities on everything—from presidential politics to social distancing? At a time when Donald Trump nonchalantly disclaims, “I’m not a doctor,” then proceeds to use his power and platform to promote hydroxychloroquine, why are Shakespeare scholars going widely outside their areas of expertise surrounding a 400-year-old English playwright to comment on current events?

Four points:

1. As an early-modern playwright who often represented medieval and ancient history, Shakespeare built into his texts the practice of engaging the present with the distant past.
2. As artworks that often have scholarly sources, yet are performed for a broad audience of mixed social backgrounds, Shakespeare’s plays have public engagement built into them.
3. The long tradition of modern-dress Shakespearean performance and adaptation provides a model for scholars looking to bring ideas that are old and artistic into conversation with current events.
4. At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, Public Shakespeare gives scholars a platform to illustrate the practicality and utility of our field.

There is tremendous energy right now behind public-facing ShakesWork with an ethical if not activist edge. There is also legitimate skepticism of that endeavor. As @ClearShakes wrote on April 12, “Guys, sometimes there just isn’t a Shakespeare play that’s relevant to our situation.”

But recognizing Public Shakespeare as more closely related to Shakespearean performance than Shakespearean scholarship helps us understand why, like any show that takes creative risks, some cheer and some hiss.

 

Temple University Press’s Annual Holiday Give and Get

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press suggest the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to read and receive this holiday season. 

 

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marking Director

Give: This year I’d give Nelson Diaz’s memoir Not from Here, Not from There because of its uplifting story as the first of many things—from first Latino to graduate from the Temple Law School to the first Latino judge in the state of Pennsylvania, and on and on.  This is a book for all of us who have dual status—American but also “other”—and a dare to dream of life’s many possibilities.

Get: It’s a bit late to give me a book that I’d want to read because I already have it.  Michelle Obama’s Becoming is another inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. Besides, I still haven’t gotten the book I asked Santa for last year—Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a survey of African American art from 1963-83.

Karen Baker, Financial Manager

Give: The Eagles Encyclopedia Champions Edition by Ray Didinger with Robert S. Lyons, all my family—Mom, Dad, brothers, and kids who are all die-hard Philly fans.

Get: I would like to receive Dog Shaming by Pascale Lemire because it looks so funny.

Sara Cohen, Editor

Give: This year, I’ll be giving Rebecca Yamin’s Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution to the history buffs in my life. It tells the story of 300 years of Philadelphia history through artifacts found in privies on the site of the Museum of the American Revolution through tons of gorgeous full color images. It’s also short which makes it an easy read and an affordable gift.

Get: I’m getting ready to move, so I hope that no one give me any holiday presents this year (just more to pack). Once I get settled, I’m hoping to read Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (I just read a great chapter on it by one of my authors) and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto.

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotions Manager

Give:  Color Me… Cherry & White. What better way to unwind than with a coloring book?  A great gift for kids and kids-at-heart.

Get: Becoming by Michelle Obama, an eagerly awaited memoir of a truly inspirational woman.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor in Chief

Give: I’m so thrilled to have Steven Davis’s In Defense of Public Lands on the list. This is an academically rigorous and powerfully written book that’s not afraid to take a stand. Davis offers the privatizers’ best arguments in a fair-minded way, then systematically dismantles them. This is engaged scholarship at its best, and there’s simply nothing else like it—you won’t find a more comprehensive and keenly argued overview of this vital and terrifyingly timely debate anywhere.

Get: I hope someone gives me Kathy Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. I believe this book is still understood to have been the most prescient work on political conditions which would eventually give us President Donald Trump. Maybe I’m not the only one still trying to figure this out?

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

Give:  Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968, edited by Mark Shiel. This book has all my Venn Diagrams overlapping—it’s about film, it’s about cities, and it’s about 1968. It’s also about protests and architecture. It’s the perfect gift for my cinephile friends, my urbanist friends, my activist friends, and anyone else who turned 50 in 1968 (or like the press will in 2019).

Get: Jonathan Coe’s Middle England. This is the third of Coe’s books about four friends that began with The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. The only problem with getting this book is that it will make me want to re-read the first two!

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and to me, that was never truer than in the alliance of Evangelicals with Republican candidate and now President Donald Trump.  How people dedicated to spreading the message of Christianity could support a man who is at best morally ambiguous seems incongruous. If you, too, are perplexed, as are many of my friends and family, the contributors to Paul Djupe and Ryan Claassen’s book The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition explain how and why this came to pass.

Get: Technically, I already got this (as a gift to myself), but I’m looking forward to sitting down with a pot of tea and Circe, by Madeline Miller. I love Greek mythology, and books about strong, independent, intelligent woman are always on my wish list. Circe has both covered.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America 50 Years After the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis. This year marked the 50^th anniversary of the Kerner Commission’s warning that the United States was headed toward two societies, “separate and unequal” and that “To continue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.” As Americans struggle more and more to find common ground, the keepers of the Kerner flame Fred Harris and Alan Curtis compile the top authorities on the most pressing urban issues and assemble a comprehensible compendium of what we know works: as reasonable a place to start as any in an unreasonable time.

Get: The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, by Merve Emre. I’m a millennial, and if there’s one thing millennials like, it’s taking quizzes to better label, sort, and categorize ourselves, proudly declaring the insights that we’d only discovered moments ago must now be immutably true. Luckily, if there are two things millennials like, the other is reading about how all our habits and values are harmful and wrong. This book tells how the mother-daughter team of Myers and Briggs created our national obsession with slapping four letters on who we are and how we operate and asks what it is we think we’re getting out of it?

Kate Nichols, Art Manager

Give: Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. This isn’t a first-time choice for me. Published by Temple University Press on behalf of the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research, Kalfou addresses the many issues and critical concerns that increasingly are plaguing our communities and institutions. The journal gives me a measure of hope in this very crazy time. As per the inscriptions in the beginning: kal ´fü—a Haitian Kreyòl word meaning “crossroads”—“This means that one must cultivate the art of recognizing significant communications, knowing what is truth and what is falsehood, or else the lessons of the crossroads—the point where doors open or close, where persons have to make decisions that may forever after affect their lives—will be lost.”—Robert Farris Thompson.

Get: Educated by Tara Westover. I keep hearing wonderful things about it.

Ashley Petrucci, Rights and Contracts Coordinator

Give: Who Will Speak for America? edited by Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin. Who Will Speak for America? draws upon the current political climate to advocate for change, which makes it a very timely piece that I think is important for everyone to read.  This would definitely be a book of great interest to several of my friends, who would enjoy reading about the various perspectives and reading through the various styles of the contributors to this edited collection.

Get: The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History edited by Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton. I may be a bit biased, since aspects of the supernatural were key components to my senior thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but this would be the book that I would most like to receive.  I’ve always enjoyed horror movies and studying the supernatural elements of folktales and stories (particularly from the Middle Ages), so I would love to sit down and read this book over the holidays.  A nightmare before Christmas, if you will.

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Manager

Give: Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, by Jamie Longazel. To quote the Preface, “This book contributes to an understanding of U.S. immi­gration politics in this tumultuous first decade and a half of the twenty-first century.” 

Get: Dreams and Nightmares: I Fled Alone to the United States When I Was Fourteen, by Liliana Velásquez.

Dave Wilson, Senior Production Manager

Give: Policing in Natural Disasters, by Terri M. Adams and Leigh R. Anderson, is inspired by the personal accounts of triumph and tragedy shared by first responders. The short- and long-term effects of these events on first responders—the very people society relies upon in the midst of a catastrophe—are often overlooked. This book opened my mind about the strength of these responders and the challenges they face while responding during times of crisis. I find it fascinating to weigh the dilemma: How do they take care of their own families first and risk neglecting their needs when the responders are required to place the needs of the people they serve first.

 

 

 

 

The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post an blog entry by Paul Djupe and Ryan Claassen, co-editors of The Evangelical Crackup?, from the blog Religion in Politics.

For academics who study American religion and politics, there has been no greater gift than the 2016 election. Rarely do we get the chance to see the strands pulled apart to reveal the true connections, but the conventional wisdom-breaking campaign of Donald Trump helped us bring some questions into sharper focus. In this post, we’d like to recap a few of the most interesting observations, from some of the top scholars working in (American) religion and politics today, from the volume we edited.

Honestly, we did not foresee that we would produce quite this book. The “?” in the title came later. If everything we thought we knew materialized, evangelicals might have taken a principled stand in rejection of the Republican nominee and his morally-challenged character. Instead, as the venerable scholar of evangelical politics, Clyde Wilcox, posted on Facebook (to the effect of), “I’ve been studying evangelicals for 30 years and don’t know them anymore.” That is a crackup in itself, but it is not the one we thought we would be writing about. Let’s turn to the top 11.

1. Evangelicals were on their own in the 2016 elections.

One of the most startling realizations of 2016 was that white evangelicals were willing to so warmly embrace a candidate with such a character deficit and dubious religious bona fides. One possible explanation is that white evangelicals were essentially left to their own devices, which Djupe and Calfano explore in Chapter 1. White evangelicals did not know many #NeverTrump evangelical leaders. Their clergy were not speaking out in large numbers and when they did they were perceived as Trump supporters. And evangelicals’ perceptions of elites were strongly colored by their immediate surroundings. The signs point to religious abdication in the 2016 election.

2. Evangelicals’ presence in the GOP activist ranks continues to grow.

Since the 1970s, religiously involved evangelicals have tripled their presence among Republican activists (at the national convention). They are the only religious group whose representation has increased markedly over time, though religiously engaged Catholics have increased their presence a bit too. So find Layman and Brockway in Chapter 2, characterizing evangelicals as the “life of the party.”

3. Evangelicals’ shift into the GOP from the 1960s on was driven by racial attitudes more than social issues like abortion.

Picking up Randall Balmer’s thread about the genesis of the Christian Right, Ryan Claassen compares the relative effects of abortion and racial attitudes on Republican voting across the critical time period of 1972 to the present. Of course support for Republicans is linked to abortion attitudes, but the shift over time would not have been so strong without racial conservatism. This provides strong evidence the engine of evangelical voting patterns is racially charged, which resonates with Balmer’s origin story of the Christian Right rooted in opposition to federal civil rights actions.

4. Republican platform language has become more religious and more strident in the last 2 decades.

Ever since the 1980 national convention, the Republican platform has called for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. But the shift in platform language was just beginning. As Kevin den Dulk describes in “the challenge of pluralism” (Chapter 4), Republicans have increasingly employed religious language and more particularistic religious language. In the near term, the strategy to reinforce the evangelical-Republican fusion makes sense, but in the medium to long term?

5. Evangelical political tolerance levels have been increasing as their minority status and educational attainment grow.

Even for their most disliked groups, like atheists and gay Americans, evangelicals have grown steadily more tolerant of their basic rights to participate in society. There’s a wonderful tension here between Andrew Lewis’ Chapter 5 findings and den Dulk’s Chapter 4. The explanation for the different approaches to pluralism are fairly obvious, tracking the incentives to elite party leaders versus followers, but would otherwise be out of reach if they were not side by side.

6. Young evangelicals are not much different than older ones and young evangelical liberals are in many ways dissimilar from other young liberals.

Prognosticators look to young evangelicals to ascertain the future of evangelical politics.  If the shared culture that made older evangelicals politically distinctive fails to unite young evangelicals in the same way, then the evangelical base of the Republican party may turn out to be the “house built on the sand” (Matthew 7:26).  In Chapter 8 Jeremy Castle examines young, liberal, evangelicals to see whether a crackup is underway.  He finds that, even among young evangelicals, liberal politics remain rare.  More importantly, he finds that evangelical culture continues to shape the attitudes and behavior of the liberal subculture within evangelicalism.  Accordingly, he concludes that the existence of young, liberal evangelicals does not signal that a crackup of the relationship between evangelicals and the Republican party is on the horizon.

7. Evangelical Latinos are a bridge to the Republican Party.

Latinos have shown a steady drift to the Democratic Party for decades, but the rise of evangelicalism among Latinos in and outside of the US raises questions about whether this trend will continue. It turns out, as Taylor, Gershon, and Pantoya find in Chapter 9, that Latino evangelical Protestants are distinctive – they are more Republican than other Latinos, but they are not as Republican as white evangelicals (see also Burge’s post on this question). For now, Latino evangelicals are a small portion of the population[1], but their numbers are growing – they are the group responsible for stemming the losses among the Southern Baptist Convention, for instance. It remains to be seen what the strident rhetoric and policies from Trump are doing to Latino evangelical support.

8. Evangelicals are not more insulated from disagreement than others.

Among the reasons given for why evangelicals’ politics are so distinctive is that they pray in an echo chamber – a disagreement-free zone. While it’s true that evangelicals have more church-based friends, they report disagreement in their core social networks at the same rate as other religious groups. Djupe, Neiheisel, and Sokhey find in Chapter 11 that, on average, their networks feature partisan disagreement among a quarter to a third of their discussion partners. This does not mean that they respond in the same ways to disagreement, but that question remains for another project – in fact, a related question is investigated in Chapter 12.

9. Evangelicals may have come to the Republican fold for the culture, but they stay for the economics.

McGauvran and Oldmixon dispel notions in Chapter 15 that evangelicals are not on board with free market economics of the Republican Party (putting aside Trump’s violation of that orthodoxy in terms of free trade). However, there is a good bit of nuance that is worth thinking about. Evangelicals have gained in socio-economic status in the last 40 years and income helps solidify evangelical support for conservative economic policies. Interestingly, so does more engagement in evangelical religious communities. There’s quite the research question hiding in plain sight for the researcher with congregational data.

10. Young evangelicals react more negatively to their parents than non-evangelicals.

Observers have focused a great deal of attention on young evangelicals, thinking that they cannot possibly share the same racially tinged politics as their parents and grandparents. Dan Cox, Robbie Jones and colleagues look for signs of better intergroup relations and find an interesting pattern. Young evangelicals feel less warmly toward the evangelical label when they are surrounded by fellow evangelicals in their social networks; on the other hand they embrace evangelicalism more when they do face diversity. This result does not portend a crackup within evangelicalism any time soon, though it is important to note that the analysis does not include former evangelicals – those who have left the faith tradition for whatever reason (and that list is likely to include political disagreement).

11. Evangelicals have consolidated or perhaps are demonstrating ‘ironic continuities’.

We were lucky to have Robert Wuthnow and John Green offer concluding comments on our guiding question and their conclusions do not differ except in shading. Wuthnow notes that while everything has changed since the 1980s, evangelicals have remained consistent in their Republican support. That fact pushes him to distinguish ‘political evangelicalism’ from the religious practice of ‘evangelicalism.’ Green is on the same page as far as identifying the consolidation of evangelicals at the core of the Republican Party, emphasizing their political fit and shared identity, but does not admit to sharing a sense of irony about it.

These are just a few of the nuggets that appear in The Evangelical Crackup. You can also find work on religious authority (Ryan Burge), the spread of ‘In God We Trust’ mottos (Tobin Grant and Joshua Mitchell), new measurement schemes for evangelicals (Tobin Grant and David Searcy), the distribution of the Christian Right and Left in the states (Kim Conger), in addition to a sustained treatment of Christian conservative legal organizations at the heart of so many current and enduring disputes (Dan Bennett). Djupe taught these chapters while they were in press and really enjoyed the conversation across chapters. The ability to talk about the development of the movement’s connections to the GOP and the near comprehensive examination of evangelicals across units of analysis certainly belie easy assumptions about evangelicals, but also offer a compendium of findings that should be of interest to researchers as well.

Paul A. Djupe, Denison University Political Science, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog (see his list of posts). Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

Ryan L. Claassen, Kent State University Political Science, is author of Godless Democrats and Pious Republicans (2015) and author and coauthor of numerous political science articles. Further information about his work can be found at his website.

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Notes

1. In the 2016 CCES, those with an Hispanic identity constitute just over 7% of the sample (4747/64600) and 570-630 of them (depending on the measurement strategy) are evangelical – 12.6% of Latinos and about 1% of the total sample.

An Open Letter of Love to Kim Jong-un

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost Look, a White! author George Yancy’s recent opinionator column from the New York Times blog, a “love” letter he penned with David Kyuman Kim to Chairman Kim Jong-un.

Dear Chairman Kim Jong-un,

We are certain that you will find this letter of love surprising.

We offer it to you in the final days of President Trump’s trip to Asia, when the rhetoric of war, hatred and mass violence has reached a fever pitch. It speaks of the urgent need for mutual love between our two countries, the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

We write you as two American citizens — an African-American and a Korean-American — considered “men of color” in our own country, who have suffered with our people under the history of America’s white racist violence, yet who still dare to love. Just as we have faith in our fragile and imperfect American democratic experiment, we have faith that you believe in something far more courageous than words of war.

Our aim is to meet you in the spirit of a resolute conviction that you are a human being who is worthy of being loved by us and that we are human beings worthy of being loved by you. It is quite simple, really, and yet so hard for so many to see: that we, North Koreans and Americans, are brothers and sisters. That straighforward yet existentially urgent statement is what is necessary during this time of crisis between our nations.

George Yancy: We stand with our brothers and sisters in North Korea who may feel as we do, wanting to know us, possibly to love us, but who have not been given the opportunity because of your regime. Clearly, our political leaders in the United States have failed to reach across this ever growing and dangerous divide and say, “Yes, we love the people of North Korea, and we recognize the humanity of Kim Jong-un.” And of course, you and your country’s officials have failed to do this as well.

In this letter of love, we refuse to speak of “fire and fury.” Instead, we speak of love, life and our globally shared humanity. We refuse to believe that there is “no choice”; we reject the language and morally unacceptable and inept threat to “totally destroy North Korea”; we reject the violent discourse and imagery of being “locked and loaded.” And we believe that a dialogue, especially one rooted in the language and spirit of love, is not a waste of time. Shared love is our deliverance from hatred.

We know that love is dangerous, because it requires facing one’s own brokenness and vulnerability. Yet both of our nations are morally broken, imperfect. So we speak with the impassioned words of Mahatma Gandhi: “I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings.”

This letter fervently asks more from you and from the United States. The writer James Baldwin, one of our most prophetic voices, wrote: “One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself — that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.” Neither of our nations has much to give the other because each has failed to risk itself. And it is out of our collective and respective cowardice — our refusal to risk, to love and to combat our mutual cynicism — that this letter of love arises. It serves as an intervention as we face the potential horrors of unspeakable mass death. We stand with our brother Martin Luther King Jr., who refused “to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation.”

There are many here in the United States who will say that this letter is absurd, useless, even treasonous. Well, if love is treasonous, then we take joy in it. We revel in speaking out against hatred; inhumanity; divisiveness; discourse mired in immature name-calling; ugly, disparaging remarks; talk of destruction and obliteration; and the potential of miscalculation and nuclear conflagration. We prefer to stand on the “treasonous” side of Jesus, who dared to love.

We are traitors to those who reject mutual respect and who believe that there is no place for love as a binding force greater than mutual bullying and provocation. We are traitors to our country’s divisive rhetoric, filled with militarism, hatred, blood lust and warmongering, just as we stand opposed to yours, which threatens not only us, but also your neighbors — that is, your own brothers and sisters, and even your own people. As men of color, we know the semblance of that threat from within our own country.

To hate requires so little; to love requires doing what may feel impossible, because it means to lay down the sword and stretch out your hands, your arms, your hearts, to each other. Many will also criticize us, saying that love is too simplistic, that the problem between North Korea and the United States is too ideologically and geopolitically complicated. Those people fail to imagine with their hearts. Dr. King said: “We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” And Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, another prophetic American voice of love, asked us, “How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt.”

That kind of love refuses to hate, it refuses to believe that we are “enemies” by birth. We are brothers and sisters born of a common humanity. We believe in a love that remembers the humanity that binds us together, that opens us to hear the other’s voice, the other’s mourning. Then again, perhaps Baldwin was correct, “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.” Yet we believe that reciprocal love can take us to that place together and heal our wounds.

David Kyuman Kim: These feel like especially loveless times. We write from the conviction that the values of a love-driven politics can transform how we engage each other not only as nations but also as human beings. Which is to say, a love-driven politics insists that we seek compassion, generosity, kindness, forgiveness and mercy for each other as much as we do for ourselves.

Our president was elected to represent our people, but he has not represented the best of us. He has instead chosen to display only our basest traits. While he is not the first president to speak and act with hubris and arrogance, he has chosen belligerence over diplomacy, bullying over accord, insult over care. He represents a strand and strain of the American experiment that stubbornly holds on to the misguided notion that we are a nation of destiny and superiority, strengthened on legacies of white supremacy and rapacious capitalism. He has exacted those misguided ideals by treating you with disrespect and disregard, all the while belittling you as a leader of your own people, and you, in turn have done the same.

As a Korean-American, I have to acknowledge you both as one of my people and very much not of my people. My mother’s family is from North Korea, and so in some very real ways, you and I are of common stock. But a land does not make for family. If anything, you and your father have shown how land and nation can destroy families and traumatize them for generations. You are the leader of a nation whose people have suffered at the service of a political vision. At what cost has your loyalty to power come to your people, let alone to your humanity?

My mother’s family fled North Korea because of the forces of war that are all too similar to the enmities that are threatening us today. And it was the consequences of the Korean War and the havoc it wreaked on my people in South Korea that eventually drove my family to the United States. And through this migration and growing up in white-supremacist America, I was transformed from our common stock to a Korean-American dedicated to the ways of love.

Indeed, as a Korean brother I have been forged by my inheritance from Christianity and Confucianism. This means that my witness to you is born of traditions of love and ethical responsibility. Among the very real and central challenges of radical love is to adhere to the moral mandate to love our neighbors and enemies as we would love ourselves. This is especially challenging at a moment in which love has been hard to find and discern. For those of us who lament the ascendancy of our current president, we have had to learn how to love ourselves once again.

We write you today not only because of what you are hearing from us — the United States — but, more important, because of all the crucial things you are not hearing. As defenders of civil rights against racism, we come from a tradition not well represented or well understood, yet one that has transformed the course of our nation’s history and the lives and legacies of peoples across the globe.

This is the tradition of radical love most powerfully and persuasively articulated and represented by Martin Luther King Jr. This is a tradition that insists that love has the power to bind us together in a common purpose, that love gives us the confidence and courage to stand up to injustice and suffering. It is a tradition that holds us accountable not simply to ourselves but to a vision of human existence that insists that we can be with one another, hold one another up, and fortify one another’s humanity in what Dr. King called “the beloved community.”

We reach out to you from this tradition that holds the value of speaking truth to power with love. This is a calling. It is our vocation. We have no choice but to strive to live up to the examples of Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, of activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Grace Lee Boggs. These heroic figures have been exceptions to the insidious rule of an American legacy of white supremacy and imperialism that has left the least among us in utter despair. This tradition of radical love is an American tradition, even though it has drawn deeply and powerfully from people like Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh.

We come to you as citizens of an America not yet fully realized, one that insists that the ways of love can be the ways of democracy, that the challenge of loving one’s neighbors and enemies is fundamentally a call for freedom and justice and hope. We write to you with love and an appeal for forgiveness and mercy because history and our lot demand this of us. And our hope is that it will demand the same of our fellow citizens.

Wishing you peace and love,

David Kyuman Kim and George Yancy

David Kyuman Kim is a professor of religious studies and American studies at Connecticut College and the author of “Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics.”

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University, the author of “Black Bodies, White Gazes” and “On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis,” and co-editor of “Pursuing Trayvon Martin” and “Our Black Sons Matter.”

Research Libraries, University Presses Oppose Trump’s Immigration Order

This week in North Philly Notes, we report the American Research Libraries and Association of American University Presses’ statement opposing President Trump’s Immigration Order

January 30, 2017—President Trump’s recent executive order temporarily barring entry into the US by individuals from seven countries is contrary to the values held by libraries and presses, and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) stand unequivocally opposed to this immigration ban.

The order blocks some members of our communities as well as students, researchers, authors, faculty, and their families from entering or returning to the United States if they are currently abroad or leave the country, even if they hold the required visas. The ban will diminish the valuable contributions made to our institutions and to society by individuals from the affected countries. This discriminatory order will deeply impact the ability of our communities to foster dialogue, promote diversity, enrich understanding, advance the progress of intellectual discovery, and ensure preservation of our cultural heritage.

The work we do—particularly the books we publish and collect—illuminates the past and sheds new light on current conversations; informed by this work we believe that the rationale for the ban both ignores history and places assumptions ahead of facts. More importantly, this decision will greatly harm some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. The United States should not turn its back on refugees who are fleeing their war-torn homes and have already endured long, extensive screening procedures in the relocation process.

Finally, while temporary, the ban will have a long-term chilling effect on free academic inquiry. This order sends a clear message to researchers, scholars, authors, and students that the United States is not an open and welcoming place in which to live and study, conduct research, write, and hold or attend conferences and symposia. The ban will disrupt and undermine international academic collaboration in the sciences, the humanities, technology, and global health.

ARL and AAUP have longstanding histories of and commitments to diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice. As social institutions, research libraries, archives, and university presses strive to be welcoming havens for all members of our communities and work hard to be inclusive in our hiring, collections, books and publications, services, and environments. The immigration ban in its current form is antithetical to notions of intellectual freedom and free inquiry fundamental to the missions of libraries and presses. By serving as inclusive communities, research libraries, archives, and university presses have deeply benefited from the contributions of students, faculty, staff, and scholars of all backgrounds and citizenships.

ARL and AAUP support all members of their communities and all students, researchers, authors, and faculty who are impacted by this executive order. The two associations urge President Trump to rescind this order and urge Congress to intervene on behalf of those affected by the immigration ban.

 

Books of critical importance in the era of Trump from Temple University Press

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase books of importance in the era of Trump.

Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania
Jamie Longazel
Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton, Pennsylvania’s controversial Illegal Immigration Relief Act as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide and conquer politics, making important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.

The Gendered Executive: A Comparative Analysis of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Chief Executives
Edited by Janet M. Martin and MaryAnne Borrelli
A critical examination of national executives, focusing on matters of identity, representation, and power. The editors and contributors address the impact of female executives through political mobilization and participation, policy- and decision-making, and institutional change.

The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements
Edited by Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke
With a Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
The Great Refusal provides an analysis of contemporary social movements around the world—such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy movement—with particular reference to Marcuse’s revolutionary concept.

Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto
Eric Tang
Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of Cambodian refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in New York City’s “hyperghetto.”

Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants; Race, Gender, and Immigration Politics in the Age of Security
Anna Sampaio
Winner! American Political Science Association’s Latino Politics Best Book Prize, 2016
Immigration politics has been significantly altered by the advent of America’s war on terror and the proliferation of security measures. Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants examines how these processes are racialized and gendered and how they impose inequitable burdens on Latina/o immigrants.

Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City
Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage
Examining how racial solidarity and whiteness were created and maintained, the authors provide an intriguing analysis of the experiences and memories of whites who lived in Chicago neighborhoods experiencing racial change during the 1950s through the 1980s.

Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice
Ryan Patrick Murphy
Situating the flight attendant union movement in the history of debates about family and work, Ryan Patrick Murphy offers an economic and a cultural analysis to show how the workplace has been the primary venue to enact feminist and LGBTQ politics.

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
Revised and Expanded Edition
George Lipsitz
In this unflinching look at white supremacy, Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes. He analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture, and identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege.

Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness
George Yancy
Foreword by Naomi Zack
Look, a White! returns the problem of whiteness to white people. Prompted by Eric Holder’s charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, Yancy identifies the ways white power and privilege operate.

Lou Barletta: Burdensome, Illegal, Alien

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post Undocumented Fears author Jamie Longazel’s recent essay from the Huffington Post about Lou Barletta. 

Donald Trump is reportedly considering Congressman Lou Barletta to serve as his Secretary of Labor.

A Trump supporter from the beginning, Barletta made a national name for himself as mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, when he spearheaded the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA) in 2006. Riding the wave of popularity generated from his hard-line anti-immigrant stance, he went on to unseat longtime Democratic incumbent Paul Kanjorski in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This potential appointment does not surprise me given Barletta’s loyalty to Trump and the political similarities the two share. However, as someone who grew up in Hazleton and spent the last decade studying the politics surrounding the IIRA, I am deeply concerned.

As I chronicle in my book, Undocumented Fears, Barletta pushed the IIRA without any evidence to support his anti-immigrant claims. He suggested undocumented immigrants were wreaking havoc on his city – committing crimes, draining resources, and the like. I show how in reality it was economic policies favoring the wealthy that were responsible for Hazleton’s decline.

Like Trump, Barletta has elevated demagoguery over truth. “I don’t need numbers,” he boasted when confronted with the reality that undocumented immigrants did not increase crime in Hazleton. At the same time he has masked how his own political decisions have done more harm than good for his constituents, including some of his most ardent supporters.

Although there was no evidence to support his claim that “illegal aliens in our city create an economic burden that threatens our quality of life,” there is plenty of evidence of Barletta burdening city resources. Back in 2001, as mayor, he gave his blessing to local developers seeking to implement a state-level corporate welfare initiative that provided exploitative multinational companies with massive tax breaks. Some enjoyed a moratorium on all taxes for a dozen years. Hazleton today provides a clear example of how a city cannot provide its residents with adequate services when its largest employers do not pay their fair share.

More directly, Barletta took advantage of the system for his own benefit by dragging his exclusionary law through a years-long appeal process. While increasing his political capital by refusing to “back down,” he ignored clear pronouncements that this would cost the city immensely. Indeed, it has. Hazleton – which operates on an annual budget of less than $10 million – now owes $1.4 million in legal fees. As the Editorial Board of the local newspaper, the Citizen’s Voice so appropriately put it, “[T]he residents of Hazleton will have to consider [this] an involuntary contribution to [Barletta’s] campaign war chest.”

Silencing critics who sought to add complexity to the debate, Barletta regularly uttered the simplistic, faux-populist line “illegal is illegal.” The hypocrisy of this was in full view as he reacted to the court’s determination that the IIRA illegally overstepped federal authority and violated the Equal Protection Clause, unleashing Trump-like criticisms of judges, immigrant rights groups, and musings about a rigged system.

Because he hails from a hardscrabble former coalmining town, Barletta may look the part as potential Secretary of Labor. Hazleton, after all, has one of the richest histories of labor organizing you will find.

But we shouldn’t let that fool us. Lou Barletta’s pro-corporate / anti-immigrant stance is alien to the working class legacy of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Coal Region. He has more in common with the barons of the mining era than he does with the miners, enabling exploitation more than protecting us from it. What should worry us most is how he has followed in the footsteps of the coal barons, using ethnic stereotyping to pit working people against one another.

It is true Barletta and Trump are both widely popular in Hazleton at the moment. But after sifting through Lou Barletta’s record, I can say with confidence that he does not represent the interests of the working class people living in Hazleton today, despite posturing as though he does. Unfortunately, laborers across the country may soon find out that he does not represent theirs, either.