Baptist Blues.
“Not long ago, during Donald Trump’s presidency, white evangelical Christians had taken comfort in the idea that their interests carried weight at the highest levels in Washington, in conservative Supreme Court appointments and otherwise. Even if it had taken some rationalization for them to get behind a thrice-married former casino owner who botched basic religious conventions and was eventually indicted for his alleged role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star, the Trump years were good years for these Baptists.
”
“Since then, it seemed that everything else, quite literally, had gone to Hell. As nearly 13,000 delegates, known as messengers, arrived here recently for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and side events like that evening’s gathering — hosted by Liberty University in partnership with the Conservative Baptist Network, a more conservative group — it was an open question if they could do anything about it.
”
The Evangelical march into politics movement that began in the late 1970s still reverberates in the halls of government over 40s years later. There have been peaks in valleys in the influence this movement has had over American power brokers with the peak culminating in the early aughts with the George Bush presidency. He began to deliver what Donald Trump finished by nominating far right Supreme Court justices that wold overturn ‘Roe v. Wade’, long on the tops of the Evangelical wish list. This dramatic change in the composition of the Supreme Court has taken place amid the rapid secularization of America which many denominations, particularly mainline Protestant religions continue to grapple with.
