1. "Trump’s white evangelical approval slips, Pew finds, but 82 percent still likely to vote for him"
White evangelicals remain the religious group most supportive of the president, with 72 percent saying they approve of the way Trump is handling his job, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. That is a decline of seven percentage points from March, when Trump saw his highest level of support from the group since his election, the survey showed.
If the election were held today, 82 percent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump or lean toward voting for him, while 17 percent would support Democrat Joe Biden, according to the Pew survey.
2. "White Supremacist Ideas Have Historical Roots In U.S. Christianity"
The rejection of a "social gospel" remains popular among those conservative evangelicals today who see advocating for Black Lives Matter or immigrant rights as political activities. It is an argument with roots extending back to the theology of Thornwell and like-minded religion scholars of the 19th century.
"What, then, is the Church?" Thornwell asked in his 1851 Report on Slavery. "It is not, as we fear too many regard it, a moral institute of universal good whose business it is to wage war upon every form of human ill, whether social, civil, political or moral."
Such pronouncements have made Thornwell popular among "orthodox" Christian theologians who rebel against liberal interpretations of the church's mission in the modern world. Once his pronouncements on slavery and race are disregarded, Thornwell's theological views still resonate.
3. The Unofficial Racism Consultants to the White Evangelical World: Behind every white pastor’s statement about racial reconciliation is a Black colleague’s late-night tracked changes.
Certain kinds of political activism are widely accepted in the evangelical world. “We’ll have sanctity-of-life Sunday, speaking about the great evil of abortion—which I’m on board with, amen,” Pinckney said. But “that same clarity seems very complicated when it comes to issues of race.” When he was at a lunch with a black friend and a white pastor, says Maina Mwaura, a Southern Baptist–trained minister who has consulted for Christian organizations such as Promise Keepers and Barna, the white pastor refused to listen to the friend’s views on what he saw as the president’s racist comments. The white pastor said he will vote for Trump because he opposes abortion rights, which effectively ended the conversation. “The pro-life agenda is used as a weapon to shut down everything else, including race,” Mwaura told me.
