It's impressive how she manages to be patronizing to Democrats and Evangelicals at the same time.

It's a contrast between people focused on consequences and those focused on aspiration. "Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes. When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become--what humans could and should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short."

So, evangelical voting is still motivated by 1) I might get rich, and 2) people should be punished. Interesting that this anthropologist spends so much time with these people and still comes up with a conclusion that could have been written by Amanda Marcotte.

2 is extremely correct.

The idea that democrats should spend any time reaching out specifically to evangelicals (rather than, say, middle class people, or whatever) is dumb. There will never be any getting past the babies and the homos.

It wasn't a bad book, but fairly shallow. I forgot that I kind of wanted to make Lee read it. The book didn't focus on politics much at all, as I recall.

(I haven't read the linked post yet. Sorry.)

Of course this tags me as an elitist but I'm thoroughly sick of the "If only you snooty liberals would spend more time at the Appleby's salad bar and try to understand the poor maligned evangelicals/conservatives." genre.

Right. that Todd Atkin is actually a swell guy, if only we uppity elites would try to understand him.

The article isn't really about how we should pander to evangelicals. It's trying to politely describe her anthropological approach to studying the idea that evangelicals hear the voice of God constantly.

1) I might get rich

Not that it isn't an all too common pattern, but I don't see how you get that from the article.

Applebee's doesn't have a salad bar, does it?

7: And that part was interesting, how people train themselves to hear God and move into more charismatic worship because I do think (in my own folk anthropology) there's a clear learning curve/peer pressure thing there. That was the reason I read it, though I think she's way undervaluing the impact of the black church on the development of the personal Jesus. Maybe that doesn't matter.

what humans could and should be, rather than who they are

not exactly a rare concept in the discourse of the political left* is it? In fact, I can think of many, many occasions on which we've been attacked specifically for believing in the perfectability of mankind and the possibility of a better future.

*mcmanus disclaimer: I know.

8: The "what kind of person they are trying to become" part, and the "problem with government is that it steps in when people fall short." I understand that it's supposed to be framed in terms of the principles by which you want to live your life, but framing it that way is just letting them deny the real, material questions that underlie their claimed beliefs.

I took it as a statement of eschatology.

6: Not all evangelicals/conservatives are Todd Akin.

Yet rare would be the evangelical who would not vote for him in that race.

15: I don't know about Missouri specifically, but many evangelical denominations have lots of Democrats. I'd assume the percentage drops if you limit to white evangelicals. Disproportionately Republican they may be, but there are still a large number of Democratic votes.

I think the quote in 2 misses a crucial fact: to many evangelicals everything is either of God or of Satan. There is no neutral ground. Choosing a political candidate based on any other consideration than his or her impact on the war between good and evil is conceding ground to the devil.

We're using different meanings of evangelical. I don't mean it as basically synonymous with protestant, but rather as descriptive of a certain kind of personal-relationship-with-God sort of religiosity (like Vineyard and InterVarsity in the article). I don't find it surprising the U.C.C., Disciples of Christ, and Episcopalians (to name the ones I'm most personally familiar with) count lots of Democrats among their numbers, but as denominations they aren't evangelical in that way.

Agreed about needing to specify white evangelicals for my point, though.

I realize that all Protestants were in that list, but even the Non-denominatoinal evalgelicals were 19% Democrat or lean Democrat. Same for 33% of the independent Baptists. I don't know how to categorize every denomination on the list, but I'm fairly confident of those two.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to classify my parents as evangelical (they're Southern Baptist), but they've always been registered Democrats and are increasingly reliable Democratic voters. I'm pretty sure their preacher is, too, though he doesn't talk much about politics. Not sure about their church more broadly.

The rest of my extended family, though... shudder.

Are independent Baptists the kind that live in the Northeast? Because many of them are not "evangelical" by whatever the entirely untheorized definition in my head is. But maybe I'm no-true-Scotsmanning them.

Eh, I'm talking from my own particular experiences with religion (albeit most of that in Missouri), so I grant it could definitely be that I just didn't and don't come into much contact with Democrat-voting evangelicals.

An anecdote (not meant to illustrate anything in particuular in this discussion): an old friend of mine got kicked out of her position as a very popular Sunday school teacher for the high school kids for being an open Obama supporter. She didn't bring it up in Sunday school, she just had an Obama sticker on her car.

18: I was an evangelical within your definition for a number of years. Given a debate between candidates defined solely on abortion,I would have voted pro-life. But bring in caring for the poor, the hungry, the sick, my evangelical values would have (still do!) compelled a liberal vote. And forcing me to think seriously about the actual women who seek abortions as legitimate human beings with legitimate decisions to make about their legitimate lives ultimately did change my mind on abortion, too.

21: I don't know how regional they are but it certainly isn't that all Baptists that live in the south are Southern Baptists and that those who don't live in the south are independent. I just figured that "non-denominational" and "independent" are good key words for getting the most evangelical churches.

The years since the rise of George W. Bush have seen many and a many "decadent cosmopolitan liberals ought to appreciate/study their evangelical masters" articles and books, from which I have taken, in general, the impression that evangelical Christians are not very interesting.

Thorn, attending services at African-American churches (specifically, churches in Harlem during the 1930s) influenced the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on church life and religion (and, I reckon, through his immeasurable influence, Protestant churches in the U.S. since WWII). On the other hand, I think a lot of the "I've got a personal Jesus and that means I look out for one guy's soul: mine!" stuff that conservative white religionists get all heated up about (cough "This next song's from our new album, 'Jesus Is My Boyfriend But We're Not Gay, Volume III' " cough) has other, less humane, Calvinist roots.

In my experience it's not that people think critically about their religious values and then vote Republican, but it's more of a tribal or identity marker, and any justification is after the fact, with "but what about abortion?" being the magical trump card that makes them more authentically religious than someone else. If what you care about is that identification, then a Democrat talking about faith is just a wolf in sheep's clothing. It's not all religious people, but there's definitely a mindset there that it's a mistake to think of as rationally founded.

it certainly isn't that all Baptists that live in the south are Southern Baptists

For one thing, a lot of Baptists living in the south are black, and not so many of them are Southern Baptists for obvious historical bigotry reasons. Looks like the National Baptist Convention includes a lot of them.

In this part of NC, most of the black Baptist churches (and the three liberal white Baptist churches, including the one I grew up in) belong to the American Baptist Convention.

25.2 Yep. I really liked how the intersection between religion and black women's spirituality/politics was covered in Melissa Harris-Perry's book. "If it weren't for Jesus, I'd have no support at all" is different from "Jesus and I sit down for coffee every day because we're cool like that," I think.

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that poor evangelicals (the kind who have storefront churches) IME vote differently from richer evangelicals (like the megachurch people this anthropologist studied, and while she thinks there was economic diversity it very clearly reinforced middle-class values) and some of this has to do with race (like all the Guatemalan immigrants who are evangelical are not going to be excited about Republican stuff as a matter of course).

richer evangelicals (like the megachurch people this anthropologist studied, and while she thinks there was economic diversity it very clearly reinforced middle-class values)

I think it's not a coincidence that she mentioned a guy who'd worked for InterVarsity, an organization based on college campuses, and the Vineyard, which from what I can tell seems particularly active in college-y areas. My own experiences also lead me to add the cult of Francis Schaeffer/L'Abri to this realm of influence, with its pretensions to being intellectual and its deep anti-abortion stance.

"Jesus and I sit down for coffee every day because we're cool like that...."

[Kierkegaard/coffee/danish joke not fully formed, but laughed at within.]

30: I mean, that's her focus so that's what she talked about. She started out at (if I remember correctly) the Vineyard church closest to the U of Chicago and then transferred her study to another one, also college-adjacent, in California.

In news of other library books I've read this year, Frank Schaeffer's memoir Sex, Mom & God had some good moments and more insight than the Talking to God book about why certain strands evangelicals believe what they do when it comes to politics and the rhetoric that drives it.

I could be proud of being so topical if I'd thought of the danish joke Flippanter did, which amuses me too. But the coffee thing is literally something the Vineyard members were encouraged to do, or to have date night with Jesus.

So apparently the "research" Akin is citing is drawn from Nazi extermination camp experiments? If so, why is this not everywhere?

T.M. Luhrmann did a popular book on psychiatry and the divide between psychodynamic clinicians and the purely biologically-based ones. It came out about 15 years ago. I liked it at the time.

or to have date night with Jesus.

Can you explain how that would work?

A big problem is that it's totally unclear what "evangelical Christian" means. "Actively political and right wing, obsessed with sexuality and repression, Protestant, and stupid" is usually what "secular liberals" (another annoying term) mean, but that leaves out huge portions of folks who are arguably "evangelical" even within the same denomination and sometimes within the same church.

That's why "fundies" is so much clearer.

35: From the book "Some Vineyard women had a regular "date night" with Jesus. They would serve a special dinner, set a place for him at the table, chat with him." A quick google gave me a lot of hits I'm sort of afraid to look into more, including Date Night with Jesus hair and makeup tutorials on youtube (by black women, but I don't think YT is targeting me because I look at other black hair tutorials)

Oh, like Elijah.

For example, while I'm not familiar with the group and so don't really know, I'd not be surprised at all if a significant minority of the Stanford Vineyard people she studied (who aren't fundies) vote for Obama.

38: "..set a place for him at the table.."

Does that mean actually serve him food?

Admittedly, Jews do pour Elijah a glass of wine, but that's just for Passover and only a glass of wine (usually the cheap stuff).

41: Some did and some didn't, as I recall. I think most did not and just pretended he was there. The point was to set a physical and mental space for him and then chat with him and listen for his answers.

(usually the cheap stuff)

No wonder the prophets were always in such a bad mood.

38 is insane. But please do click on the links and report back on what sort of hair is appropriate for a date with Jesus.

44: Ajay has a date tonight!

Jesus doesn't do dates, he just drops by. "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." Matthew xxv.13.

here, Ajay. She looks very sweet and genuine about it. The stills from her other hair videos make it look like she knows what she's doing on that front.

Further to 47, at 6:36 she is done getting ready and talks about why she's having a Date Night with Christ, if someone wants to hear a first-person account.

33: There are other sources for ev bio claims that the female body does fight unwanted pregnancy. Five seconds of googling got me this:

Preeclampsia and other pregnancy
complications as an adaptive response
to unfamiliar semen

However, in this case "unwanted" would be from the perspective of reproductive fitness, not the personal preferences of the woman. To say that it makes the problem go away is callous, because it's an extremely dangerous condition for the woman as well as the fetus.

And there's no particular reason to think that the evolved solution would satisfy a person's preferences better than a technological solution. Evolution is not kind, though people who want to believe in a benevolent god are motivated to think that it is.

When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become--what humans could and should be, rather than who they are.

Sounds like they'd be sympathetic to an openly transhumanist candidate. The problem is that circumstances are too hard for most people to deal with. Those defeatist liberals think we should deal with this by making circumstances easier, but the Transhumanist/Evangelical alliance wants to fix it by making everybody awesome.

Either that or the above description omits some crucial details.

31: I have infinite faith in your ability to make the joke.

46: And soundeth His horn from the driveway, for He preferreth not to bear thy father's glare at His Sandals or his "A thirty-three-year-old carpenter, huh? Spends a lot of time wandering around talking to poor people? Good choice, honey."

46: Wow, that sounds a lot more voyeuristic in this context.

Liberals spend more time engaging with the libertarian half of the Republican coalition than with the evangelical half, because libertarians can go to the same parties we do and laugh at the same cock jokes.

In fact, however, evangelicals actually ideologically closer to a lot of us than libertarians. For starters, evangelicals are not only capable of compassion, they actually believe compassion to be morally important. For libertarians, compassion is somewhere between an arbitrary preference and a sign of weakness.

It is harder to reach out to evangelicals, because we are separated by the culture war, and most of how we interact with other people is through culture. A left-wing man can't go to an evangelical party and bring his boyfriend. But evangelicals are actually people who struggle with moral issues and are trying to do good in the world. They aren't sociopaths or wanna be sociopaths, and that is a big point we have in common.

I also take it for granted that people like Grover Norquist or Paul Ryan, who claim to be both libertarians or objectivists and devout Christians are simply lying.

55: Are you sure you're not just assuming a level of logical coherence that many people don't have?

I'm not even sure 54.last is true. I've met many, many evangelical folks who are fine with individual gay friends but still think we're going to hell or whatever.

56: When you are dealing with smart political professionals, lying is the more parsimonious explanation.

54,57: My conclusion is that most people have a complete and total divide between their private-social life and public-political life. Being an asshole in one sphere or the other has almost zero bearing on whether you're an asshole in the other.

59: My new goal is to aim for both, to maximize asshole consistency.

Seriously, most evangelical/literalist/whatever Christians I know have not thought things through, don't know as many Bible stories as I do, certainly can't read any of the original languages or talk about translation issues with any meaning. I know AWB's experience is different, but we're not dealing with people who have a coherent worldview because they're content with not having a coherent worldview, which I think is true for just about everybody. Except Asshole Me. Hooray!

talk about translation issues with any meaning

There's a Chick publication about assholes who think translation helps anyone better understand the word of God which is certainly not to be found in Ancient Greek, thank you. PS: You're going to hell.

Or as Akin would have it: Your going to hell.

I am occasionally given Chick tracts by door-to-door types.

I'm sure I am going to hell, and honestly Lee sometimes grapples with whether to believe that I am. And this is someone who loves me and thinks I'm just about the best person ever, which is why she finds it sort of baffling that I'm not a Christian.

I had to out myself to Nia the other night as not being a Christian, because I'll supervise/lead bedtime prayers for her and Mara but she was bemused about why I wouldn't do my own prayers. After I told her I didn't pray, she asked the next night why I didn't. Once I told her that I don't pray because I don't believe in her God, she asked why not and I told her that it's because believing wouldn't answer all my questions. Her grandma seems to handle us being gay, though I'm not sure she fully knows we are, but I wonder what it will be like when she hears I'm an atheist. I haven't had to do this with any other kid and the fallout could be bad. Oh well. It's not something I'm willing to lie about.

64: It is the best, Thorn, you would love it. (Not hell. I mean, maybe? But.) The cognitive dissonance of a text existing in both an original language and a translation is so great that a straightlaced young seminary student hurls himself into a life of drugs and longhair, before accepting the KJV as his personal savior.

65: I have seen that outcome happen to a lot of my fellow Greek students even without the translation problem even coming into it, so I'm a little skeptical about the causality. Is that an assholish enough response? Seriously, I'll google for it. Sounds hilarious.

I do bring my Greek NT with me when I go to church, so that at least I'm working on something productive when I'm there. I figure knitting or sewing would be rude, tempting as it is.

A friend is a liberal priest who has spent a lot of time visiting fairly conservative evangelical churches to talk about climate change. He is very optimistic about getting the message to much of that audience (except in places that are deeply tied to the energy industry, like coal country). Anyhow, 54 gets it right. Capital, the Koch Brothers, and their cockfaced Internet friends the libertarians are the real enemy, at least for me.

OMG. Here it is. Just the cover and description, unfortunately.

I do bring my Greek NT with me when I go to church

I found the Aramaic version used as a basis for that. Should I tell somebody?

54 and 67: How do you square all that with conservative evangelical* views on women and their place in the world? That's a stumbling block that I just can't get around.

*Not all of them, I'm sure it's possible to be a conservative evangelical and have progressive views about women.

68: Preview and plot summary.

70: Yeah, this is where I end up.

71: Oh, yay!

I mean who cares if that college professor contradicts your belief? Then why not go and just leave that college and look for a college who will teach you what is right.

Or, since you evidently already know what is right, why bother at all?

to maximize asshole consistency

Can Kegel exercises help with that?

I think a lot of evangelical women are looking for ways to have public roles and leadership roles in their community while still being nominally subservient.

In general, right now I feel like a conversation with an evangelical about gender roles will be more productive than a conversation with a libertarian about the role of the free market. On the other hand, this might simply be a product of my personal history. Right now, I'm really burned out on one conversation, and am looking for another.

70 -- I'm not excusing horrible views about women or saying we shouldn't fight hard against them. But in the short, medium, and long terms I am much more confident in our team's victory on those issues than I am on the economic ones. The story of the past 40 or so years is plausibly victory to victory on cultural issues and defeat to defeat on the economic ones. Basically I think we're winning the culture war in a rout (and the conservative Christians certainly agree) and so the main battlefront is economic.

As a practical matter, most folks will vote automatically with their tribe no matter what, but you might be able to pull off a few "evangelicals" on things like climate change, immigration, mortgage relief, economic stimulus, etc.

Things I haven't thought about in ages: I remember once when I was a kid asking my mom about whether different translations of the Bible could say different things. She explained that God would never allow someone to mistranslate the Bible. So, um, I guess that's the evangelical line?

She should have told you about that time a bunch of different people went off alone to translate the Bible into Latin and when they got back together they had all translated it exactly the same.

77: She left out the no-true-Scotsman aspect, I think - God doesn't allow anyone whose translation of the Bible we accept to mistranslate the Bible.

That Chick website told me that the Septuagint was made up by Catholics.

80: Jews, Catholics, whatever.

I have no problems with Evangelicals. I just avoid them.

Fascinating. Luhrmann is notorious in the Pagan community for insulting us, not so much in her book as in articles she wrote afterward. Her next book was about Parsis, and I thought she was pretty condescending. Then she studied shrinks, and the book is filled with awed accounts of how good they are at reading people. Now she's studied Christians and says "through the process of this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God." Be interesting to see her attitude toward whoever she studies next.

She explained that God would never allow someone to mistranslate the Bible.

Um, yes he would.

Luhrmann gave a talk to our department, and I think the consensus was her work was pretty shallow. Anyways, her demographic is not so much "middle class" as "Silicon Valley." Her parishioners don't think about failure because they're very successful themselves. IIRC, they're also the type white, fairly well educated UMC evangelicals who avoid the sin and damnation and hellfire and mortification of the flesh parts and more the "I've done right so Jesus loves me, and if I keep doing right, I'll continue to be rewarded" type of evangelicals. They tend to trend Republican on economic issues too, just like most wealthy white men. There was an article in the New Yorker about 10ish years ago on a different but similar congregation which did a good job explaining how these types differed from other types of evangelicals.

My guess is, if you didn't meet them in church, you'd have no idea these people are religious, and if you work for a larger corporation, many of them might be your coworkers. If I can draw on some of my relatives, who are similarly U(M)C, suburban, and non-denominational evangelicals, these sorts of evangelicals drink, have fun (in a mainstream way), are not openly racist, homophobic, or sexist, and avoid talking about politics and religion with their relatives. Getting them to vote Democratic is difficult, however, mostly because even if they weren't religious they'd still be Republicans.

84: nice one chris. I was just about to cite the Wicked, Unrighteous, Treacle, Discharge and Standing Fishes Bibles. But I wasn't aware of the Owl Bible, which has a misprint making 1 Peter 3:5 read, "For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their owl husbands."

We did some work (at work) for the anniversary of the KJV Bible. Including lots of nice pictures of the annotated version the people putting it together were using.*

Some of the stuff is touring the US:

http://anonym.to/?http://www.manifoldgreatness.org/index.php/dates-for-the-manifold-greatness-traveling-exhibition

* 'FFS! Smiting. Again!' etc

What's striking here:

http://anonym.to/http://www.manifoldgreatness.org/index.php/making/compare-translations/

is where the KJV translations differ from the Bishop's Bible, the prose is consistently more elegant. e.g. the 23rd psalm, or Isaiah 60.

I dunno, "Give us today our supersubstantial bread" is pretty good. I am imagining bagels, or what used to happen when my brother tried to do wholemeal rolls.

Good Lord, the blog is being trolled by ancient Steely Dan albums.

God wouldn't allow that.

Jesus Loves Me, But He Can't Stand You

I don't even have a Steely Dan album, but I sometimes want to hear one. Not enough to buy one or, even worse, spent time with somebody who is a real fan.

I THOUGHT THAT WAS A HIGHLY RELEVANT AND EVEN ENTERTAINING COMMENT MYSELF.

93: That's the ticket.

Having relayed the Owl Bible to my colleagues, I am now receiving emails from them with things like "a taste of his owl medicine" and "To thine owl self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man". I am tempted to get them on to unfogged.

Will Halford send me to jail?

That is, if I clink the link in 95.

96: That kind of workplace needs to be put on the list in the other thread and then the rest of us can all wish we were in one.

"And they buried him in his owl sepulchres, which he had made for himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the apothecaries' art: and they made a very great burning for him."

Moby don't lose that number,
You don't want to call nobody else.

TL came to Cambridge a few years back. I thought she was really smart and interesting, so there. Perhaps she's different in front of different audiences. I was in any case biased because I have to read so much of the "haw haw, you think it's god when you hear voices, you deluded moron" style of atheism. She is thoroughly interesting on the ways in which quiet voices -- fairly easily distinguishable from schizophrenic hallucinations -- are fairly common, and how evangelicals learn to cultivate them.

But in my experience even politically crazy evangelicals can be compassionate. I used to know a woman who had been Francis Schaeffer's secretary at L'Abri, but she spent her life patiently and realistically trying to help junkie prostitutes. My aunt is, frankly, batshit crazy in a way I find viscerally disturbing. She writes, or wrote, book reviews for "Prophecy Today". But she still is capable of charity and consideration.