Evangelicals: Beyond the 81 Percent with Bonnie Kristian | Episode 304

Hello, and welcome to Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. So, a question for some of you. How many of you are aware of AWANA? For those who don't know, that is an organization that's... The best way I can describe it is that it's kind of the scouts, but with Bible verses. I remember as a little kid wearing my uniform and working hard to learn the Bible verses that would help me advance in rank. And as my guest today states, it was an effective and very sneaky way to get kids to memorize Bible verses. And it worked, because I can still remember Bible verses I learned some 45 years ago. Now, Awana was a staple of American evangelical culture. And as many of you know, I was raised with one foot in the Black church and another in evangelical circles. That culture, evangelicalism, wasn't perfect, and I pretty much left it in my 20s as I began to come out as a gay man. But as a pastoral colleague once said to me, I'm still in some ways an evangelical. It never really left me. It's still a part of who I am, even though I am very much a part of mainline Protestantism. When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, evangelicals kind of were made themselves known in a big way in American culture. At that time, the wider culture seemed to look at them with curiosity. Now, 50 years later, the culture doesn't look at evangelicals in that same way. It's not with curiosity anymore. Instead, it's with contempt. The rise of Donald Trump and the rise of evangelicals voting for the president, have placed them under the microscope. That wider culture now wonders why such a community that seemingly was obsessed with morals would all of a sudden vote in such large numbers for a man that, in some ways didn't seem to have any. And so the end result now is that, American evangelicalism is viewed more with suspect. But is that picture of American evangelicalism clear? Is there more to the story than the fact that 81% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016? And is there anything good about American evangelicalism? In her new book, In Defense of Evangelicalism, Bonnie Christian argues that this movement actually has a lot of good in it. In the midst of a cottage industry that exposes all the faults of the movement, Christian thinks the question at hand is not whether evangelicalism has faults, because it does, but whether the accusations are fair, coherent, and a path to destruction or reform. So today, I'll talk with Bonnie Christen about the complicated picture of American evangelicalism. But first, a little bit about Bonnie. Until recently, she was a deputy editor at Christianity Today and is currently a fellow at Defense Priorities. Besides her current book, she's also the author of Untrustworthy, The Knowledge Crisis, Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community, and the book, A Flexible Faith, Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today. Her writing on religion, foreign policy, and the modern American right has been published in outlets such as the New York Times, The Week, USA Today, CNN, Political, Reason, and the Daily Beast. She is a graduate of Bethel Seminary, and she currently lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and three children. So with all of that, here is my conversation with Bonnie Christian about American evangelicalism. Well, Bonnie, thank you for joining me today. I wanted to start off by knowing a little bit about who you are, especially your faith background. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for having me. Let's see. So I grew up in church. My mom would have told you we were there every time the doors were open, and we were. I was a big fan of Awana as a child, which for those who don't know is like a, very regimented system of bribing children to learn Bible verses with like little trinkets and uh um, it is it is you know brazenly transactional in a way that i think really works for a lot of little kids um, let's see when i it's it does um i was in a wanna too so i get it i support it i think that it's you know i think it works um. When I got into high school, and I mostly went to Christian schools, not exclusively, but mostly, when I got into high school is when I really became more serious about my faith. I mean, you know, that's kind of the age where you start to think about these things. And I thought, you know, like, if I'm going to do this, I should probably approach it more seriously and really try to make it my own. And so that was like around the end of high school. Um and then after college i went through what i think would now be called, deconstruction maybe we didn't really use that term then and it didn't feel like a crisis in the way that i think many people speak about deconstruction now um it was more just like you know i'm an adult now, i sort of like the amped up version of the thoughts i had in high school of like you know i need to think through these things for myself and determine, am I persuaded by what I've been taught in the past? Do I think there's a better way to understand what scripture says on these matters? And so I thought through, you know, a number of issues about women in ministry and the authority of scripture and the nature of hell, and especially like violence and how Christians should relate to the state. And so most of the churches, we moved around a lot when I was a kid. And so I All of them were evangelical, and most of them were somewhere in the ballpark of Southern Baptist, theologically, not necessarily in the denomination. But around that time in my early 20s, when I was thinking things through. I was very put off by the God and country model of the George W. Bush years. And I was very troubled by that. And so when my husband and I moved to Minnesota, where you are, for me to go to seminary, we joined a church that at that point was unaffiliated but Anabaptist in its theology and then later joined Mennonite Church USA. Substantially because of that thinking around like the entanglement of church and state, or not church and state, but church and politics, right? Like we don't have an established church in this country. And so that was, I was there in that church for eight years. It was really meaningful and formative for me. And I still would describe myself as quite Anabaptist in my theology. But since we moved away from Minnesota, came to Pittsburgh, we ended up landing in an Anglican church, which I also greatly appreciate. I mean, the liturgy, the history, there's so much to love about that, and so much that I appreciate about the Anglican way of thinking about theology and thinking about the essentials versus the secondary issues. And the greater emphasis on history and the creeds and that sort of thing. So that's where I am now and expect to stay. And yeah, that's the short version. All right. Well, we wanted to talk about, the book that you've just written in defense of evangelicalism. And it's an interesting thing about, evangelicalism. I would consider myself, even though I'm now mainline Protestant, I grew up in, I would say, both the Black church and evangelical circles. So I always like to say that it really hasn't left me, even though I'm in more mainline circles. I've been fascinated over the years about how the wider culture has viewed evangelicalism. If we went back 50 years That was around the time that Jimmy Carter was running for president. There was a lot of talk about that, and it was more like an interesting curiosity. And if you kind of move into the 90s, It was kind of somewhat critical, but there was still almost an interesting curiosity there. I mean, I remember seeing articles about contemporary Christian music or the Promise Keepers and all that. And it seems like today that has changed. It's a little bit more darker talking about evangelicals. And so it seems like you're writing that book from. That milieu. And I'm kind of curious, what was it that led you to want to talk about this and to have a defense about evangelicalism at a time when it seems like everyone sees it in a very dark way? Yeah. I mean, so the answer for why to talk about it has kind of two aspects, like a personal one and a public one. The public one is that shift in the discourse that you're describing of, you know, you can go back 100 years and find some pretty unsharitable and unfair critique of people that we would now call evangelicals. But I think it's and even, you know, in the Bush era that I was just talking about, there was there was very much that dynamic. But I do think it has intensified in the last decade in a way that is distinct. And, you know, thinking back like to the Bush years, there was not like this cottage industry of books about just how terrible evangelicals are in the way that there is now. And the reasons for that shift, I think, are multitude. Obviously, the really big one, Donald Trump and the way that many white evangelicals voted for him. And that, you know, that's not to be downplayed, but I don't think it's the sole reason. I think that some of it is about increasing irreligiosity generally, right? There are many more people in this country who have grown up with no exposure to faith, no exposure to religion. And so it's just kind of like a foreign phenomenon to them in a way that it wasn't to most people in the past. And evangelicals tend to be distinctively, characteristically enthusiastic about our faith in a way that is going to make someone who isn't super familiar with how faith works, it might be more alarming and off-putting to them than other faith traditions would be. There have also been, you know, a number of high-profile evangelical scandals. I think that is part of it. I think part of it is, like, the changes to our media environment and the way that we all find out about those scandals in a way that in the past it might have been local news, right? I also think that a big part of it is the way that the broader culture has shifted on ethics of sex and gender. And that, you know, evangelicals staying with what they always believed has put us further from sort of the median American position on those issues. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why I think this dynamic has worsened, frankly. And some of those, like the scandals are about us and some of those are about just like America as a whole. But the fact of the matter is that the conversation is different than it used to be. Um, the personal reason is, you know, I talk about this in the book. Um, when I, when I was first speaking with my editor about, should I write this book? I had a lot of trepidation because like as a journalist, someone who has been writing about and to evangelicals for a long time, like I'm hyper aware of where that conversation is. Um, and I have critiqued evangelicals plenty of times myself. Um, I hope fairly, right? But I have, I've done, participated in that conversation. And I was reading this book for my church for a thing at my church by J.I. Packer an Anglican theologian and throughout the book he would talk about like you know I think x because I'm an evangelical or you know well as an evangelical I say y and I was reading it and I was having this response of like, why is he so happy about this and where are his qualifications and his explanations and like why is he not making sure that we know you know but he's the good kind, of evangelical And then I had to like notice that reaction myself and think about, you know, I'm publicly evangelical. Like there's no doubt about where I land in this. I went to an evangelical seminary. I work at Christianity Today. Why do I think that G.I. Packer should be maybe a little bit embarrassed? And so thinking through that and thinking like you know it's not that evangelicalism is perfect it's not that we should be exempt from critique but I do think that there's a real good here and that's why I'm still here and, If I feel that dissonance, I wanted to, between, you know, how evangelicalism is thought about in public and how I experience it, and millions of people in this country experience it every Sunday morning, in their sanctuaries, I thought, you know, that is worth getting into and understanding why we feel that dissonance and what is true. And so why defend it? I mean, it's basically, it's those goods I think that, you know, it is not a perfect tradition, again But it is a tradition that has real goods And that is worth preserving And that has things to offer the rest of the church The rest of the world, American society And I think it's worth saying so There's that verse in, I believe it's Romans About let what you know to be good be spoken of as evil, And I think that that's what I'm trying to do here, What do you think has happened in our culture that has made people have such a darker opinion of evangelicalism? It just seems like. I mean, one of the things that you talk about in the book, I think, is, actually talking to people who go to church, their local church, every Sunday. And so you give that image of the, I think as you said earlier, people who are just have their day-to-day lives. But that's not the image that we see in the media. The media, it's almost as if they're two different realities. Yeah. So why do we, what's kind of the root of that? You know, I think a big part of it is some of the history to which you've already alluded, where if we go back like 100 years, the people whom we would now call evangelicals. Had substantially retreated from the public square and they sort of had their own institutions and they were, you know, kind of in what we now call flyover country. Obviously, they weren't saying that then. They didn't have planes in the same way. But they had substantially retreated. And so then in the late 40s and the early 50s, some of them kind of consciously get together and they say, there's all this evil and suffering in the world. We think we have things to contribute here, like good things to say, ways to help people. We want to participate in American public life in a way that we haven't been. And they consciously rebranded themselves as, at that point, neo-evangelicals, and they eventually dropped the neo. And they started institutions like the National Association of Evangelicals, like Christianity Today, and they said, we're going to come back and we're going to be involved again. And so they did that. But for about 20 years thereafter, you know, like, it takes some time to get attention for something like that, right? And so from, like, the mid-50s to the mid-70s, that was happening, but it was not necessarily broaching the average person's thinking about their country. And so when Carter comes on the scene in 1976 and he's using words like evangelical and born again, to my understanding, journalists were, like, calling up pastors and saying, like, what is this now? Who are these people? And really introducing the label evangelical to the wider American public for the first time in a political context. And so since then, very often when the average American, especially the average American who's not themselves evangelical, hears that word, it is so often in a political setting. Not because it is a political label, but because that's just how the discourse is run. And then, you know, over time, it gets reified and reified and reified, particularly with things like how we do our political polling, where when a pollster asks you, who do you vote for? And then they say, are you an evangelical? And you answer yes or no. And that decides what you are. You know, it's a defensible way to ask. But it's a pretty crude measure. And it's a crude measure in both directions because we have clear evidence and have for a long time since before Trump, that people who are by no measure evangelical, people who are atheists or agnostics or Buddhist or Hindu will answer yes sometimes. And people who are by any measure evangelical will sometimes say no, because historically, the label evangelical was not necessarily widely used by the people in the pews. It was a term, the historian Tommy Kidd says, it was a term of journalists and scholars. And I talk about this in the book. My mother, who is an evangelical of more than four decades, when I told her I was writing this book, she was very excited for me. And she just had one question, and that was, what's an evangelical? I'm sure she'd heard the term, right? Like, she can't have never heard it. But she had not, you know, she would just tell you, I'm a Christian or I'm born again. She hadn't clocked that that applied to her. And I think that that's less common now than it used to be before the Internet. But it does still exist. And until relatively recently, I think it was much more common. And so even evangelicals themselves were not necessarily claiming the label, not necessarily realizing it applied to them. And so it sort of got presented just in this political space. And so then if you don't like what's happening with evangelicals politically, it becomes very easy, even without malice, to reduce evangelicalism to just bad votes. Hmm. Well, I mean, that leads to something that you talk about in the book, and it's the one that the media talks about a lot. And that was, of course, the 81%. And that was from the 2016 election for Donald Trump. And that has kind of lived on and, it seems like it has made it sound like well it paints a lot of it does a lot of work but I think it seems like you when you write about that in the book that, it's a lot more nuanced than people are giving it and so can you kind of explain a little bit about that yeah and I go into a lot more detail about this with the book with, I mean, especially with numbers, you know, that's hard to convey verbally. You got to kind of have them hold still on the page. So, I mean, I would say I would approach this in two respects. The first respect is there are ways in which that number itself is misleading. Like it is very commonly presented as 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. That's actually not true. 81% of white evangelical votes went for Donald Trump, but about 40% of white evangelicals voted for no one in 2016. And when you factor that in, the votes for no one and the votes for Trump and the votes for someone else, votes for Trump are actually slightly a minority position. That's an enormously different picture, right? Now, those 40% who didn't vote, those are not all principled abstainers by any stretch, but that is a much more complicated picture. And there are other ways in which looking at that number in statistical context, and again, and I go through this in the book, you know, it is not quite, as stark and unsettling as, you know, and I'm opposed to the president, President Trump as well, but it's not as stark and unsettling as it is if you just hear, especially that misleading presentation, that it was 81% of all white evangelicals. But, and the reason why I only spend like a page or two on those kinds of details, numerical context in the book, is that even if you know all that, and that's helpful and good to know, we're still dealing with, you know, widespread votes for Donald Trump among white evangelicals. And I think you still have to deal with that, and you can't just sort of like dodge it with the numerical context. And so I think the single most important thing that I can say there is, well, two things. One is that I think that there is a big difference between someone who is, a figure with a lot of authority and influence and power and knowledge and someone like someone whose full time job is to comment on politics and public life, endorsing Trump and, you know, like Joe in the pew next to you deciding this is this. I guess this is who I'm going to vote for. These are not the same things. And like scripture is very clear about this. Like in James, it says that not all of you should teach because those who teach will be judged more harshly, held to a higher account. And so I do think that there is a big difference between, for instance, someone like James Dobson, who in the 1990s was doing the character counts thing about Bill Clinton, saying how can someone who cannot be faithful to his wife run the country, and then pivoting to Donald Trump and saying, well, he's a baby Christian. I have no patience for that. I don't think that that is the same as, again, Joe in the pew, who spends three minutes on his vote, you know. As far as Joe in the pew, I think that there are absolutely evangelicals who are enthusiastic about Trump. That is real. I think that there are also many, many evangelicals who come to vote for Trump, in three steps. And I talk about this in greater length in the book, but step one is they feel they have a duty to vote. This is not distinctive to evangelicals. This is a very standard American opinion. Number two, they want to vote for a major party because they understand how our system works. They understand third party and independents just can't win in the electoral system that we have. And, you know, you can make a case for a third party protest vote, but a lot of people, and frankly, I'm one of them, want to vote for a viable candidate. Where I differ from this incidentally is that I don't feel a duty to vote if the candidates are all intolerable to me. But so duty to vote has to be a major party. And then number three, they're pro-life. And that's not always going to be the first issue that is going to come up when you say to them, what are the issues that concern you for this election? Like everyone else, they're probably going to say things like the economy and immigration and national security. But it's a baseline issue. It's a hurdle that has to be cleared before any candidate can get their support. And when you add those three things together, given where the Democratic Party is on abortion these days... They're going to vote for the Republican. They're going to vote for the Republican, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's literally anyone. And you can see this in every single presidential election of this century. Eight in 10 white evangelical votes go to the Republican candidate. And that is why. And I, you know, that is not the decision that I have made when I voted. I abstain. But I think it's a coherent decision. I think it's a morally defensible decision. I also think it's a very small part of these people's lives. Like, that is not the way they are spending the bulk of their time and energy and care. And those proportions matter also. Brought up a few times the kind of Joe in the pew. And I think that that's always interesting because I don't think we think about the regular person in the pew. We think about the talking heads, the leaders. And I guess this is more of a media question. Why do you think that the media doesn't focus on Joe in the pew? He's boring. I mean, in all sincerity. Look, I mean, I'm in the media. There is a you know people will often say to us like well why don't you report on nice things like why don't you cover the good stuff and, you know at any like good and principled media outlet you're making decisions you know based on more than just what gets attention but frankly part of it is you don't click on the good stuff, people will tell you till they're blue in the face that they want to read nice normal news and then their revealed preference based on what they click and what they pay for is they do not. They want to read, you know, the saying is, if it bleeds, it leads. It is the fact that like the characteristic of news is to report on the unusual things. That's what makes it news. It's like, here's an odd thing. Here's a strange thing. Here's something that surprised us. You know, me getting up and going to work is not news because I do it every single day. Right. And so I think that is a big factor. Obviously, another big factor is famous people are famous and it's easy to see what they're doing and they're loud and they're making a lot of noise. I think something that is, You know, when I distinguish between these prominent figures and sort of the median, normal evangelical experience in America, sometimes people want to say like, well, okay, but those are the leaders of your movement. So doesn't it mean something that they rose to the top? And yeah, it does mean something and that's worth talking about. But consumption of their work is not necessarily uncritical consumption, right? Like, I remember I was speaking with a theologian about, I think it was John Eldridge's Wild at Heart book about masculinity that was enormously bestselling in, I want to say, the late 90s or the early 2000s. And he said, like, yeah, we did read that book. I was in, like, a men's Bible study with it. And we mostly didn't like it. We all bought a copy and we talked about it. And we said, like, there's some good stuff in here, but largely we rejected it. But you don't see that in the sales numbers. You just see that they all bought a copy. And so I think that the situation is just more complicated here than what is so frequently portrayed. One of the things that I've heard a lot in the wider culture when we talk about, evangelicalism is the word white that almost always comes before evangelical. Mm-hmm. and. I think that it's interesting because I think I've always kind of seen, at least American evangelicalism is a lot more diverse than we. And increasingly so. Yeah. And so what is the fixation with just white evangelicalism, and then making it sound like that's the entire movement? Yeah. It kind of seems like it almost erases anyone that isn't white. Yeah. So there's a few things going on here. One is about the polling that I mentioned earlier. Not only is the way that political pollsters typically handle deciding he's evangelical just that up, down, yes or no, but also commonly if someone is in a historic black church, that gets automatically sorted out. And so they're not counted in with evangelicals, even if, and the political scientist Ryan Burridge recently published on Substack some really remarkable figures about the commonalities of faith and practice between the historic black churches and white evangelicals, like just in lockstep on one measure after another. I think it is fair in many, many cases to say that the black church traditions are just as evangelical as the white evangelicals are. Though obviously I understand why they may not want that label. But yeah, so part of it is that it's distinguished in the data. And so we think about ourselves separately. Part of it, I think, frankly, is that if you look at evangelical votes overall, and you include Black evangelicals and Hispanic evangelicals and Asian American evangelicals, you're going to come up with something much less striking than the 81%. You're going to come up with a much more politically diverse movement. And even though in many cases, you know, all the convictions are the same, the pro-life conviction is even the same. People are just coming to different opinions about different conclusions about what that how that translates in the ballot box. So I think that that part of it is it's just not as interesting of a narrative. It's not as easy to paint evangelicalism with such a broad brush if you account for what evangelicals of color are doing with their politics. You know, in my book And this was part of out of the desire Not to sort of dodge, The issue of contention, you know, There are many evangelicals of color in America. There are evangelicals around the world who are in like a totally different political conversation than we are. I did not want to just point to those people and sort of say like, but look at our friends over here. I felt like I had to address like the white evangelicals because that is the question. And, you know, book after book has the subtitle of like how white evangelicals did XYZ bad thing. There was a there was a conversation about my book recently where people were saying like but are we are we unintentionally centering white evangelicals, i was not in this conversation but if i had been i would have said no, i deliberately centered it because that is the conversation that is being had like book after book has said here's the problem with white evangelicals and so that was the the charge to which i had to respond um, that they have been centered and not by accident. And I think it's because you would have to have a very different conversation if you spoke about evangelicals as a whole. And I understand why they're separated, but very often we are in the pews next to one another. And so I would like us to be together as in fact, we are on Sunday morning. Yeah. And I think the one of the things that I was fascinated in the book is your talk about evangelicals and race. And having kind of grown up in that background, understanding it's a nuanced take. And I think just the take about Billy Graham was fascinating. That he was both someone that I think... Was willing to kind of buck the trend in some ways, which was important as a man who grew up in the South, but also didn't always go as far as I think we all would agree he should have. But I think it's interesting that you note in the book, he also regretted that he didn't go as far. Yeah. So I just thought it was interesting about that. Yeah, Graham is a really interesting figure in this regard. And I didn't really know much of that history about him personally before I researched for the book. I think he grew up in apparently a really explicitly racist home in the South. And by the time he did start speaking up against segregation, he was quite famous and had quite a lot to lose by doing it. Um, and at the same time, the most striking thing was, uh, like at the time that Martin Luther King was writing a letter from a Birmingham jail about the white moderate saying, slow down, slow down. He was talking to the New York Times saying, I think people need to slow down. Like he, he, in that moment, epitomized the white moderate. Um, and yeah, he did, he did regret that later in public repeatedly. And I think Graham is such an interesting figure for contemporary evangelicalism. And I think in that, in a way, he really does encapsulate a lot of where we've been on race, of race. Like the awfulness of the history is there, right? He's one generation removed from that disgusting racism. He's trying to do better. He doesn't always get it right. Sometimes he's too late and he regrets and he can't go back and fix that. But you do see a trajectory. And I think that that's often what we see. And I think the progress has been too slow. And it's fair to say that. I also think it is real and it's necessary to say that as well. You mentioned earlier that there is a kind of what you would say is a cottage industry. And a lot of when people talk about your book, it's almost always kind of contrasted with Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Cobes-Dumez. And so... I'm kind of curious why, what is the result of this? Why do you think that this cottage industry has kind of come up? What is its usefulness, but how is it, how do you think it's also hurting the conversation? Yeah, I see a few things there. One is I think that there is an audience for people outside, but commonly adjacent to or formerly inside evangelicalism, right? There are people who have left evangelicalism, and in many cases, like, they left under bad circumstances, and they are interested in reading other people's accounts of similar experiences. You know, that's a very normal thing to want to have that kind of verification that what you saw or experienced, someone else saw the same thing. I think that's a real part of it. I think another real part of it, and Kristen Dumais has spoken about this herself, is there's an enormous evangelical audience for these books. And she has spoken repeatedly that she has received such a warm reception from conservative, white, complementarian, evangelical men that they have again and again invited her on their podcasts and they have gone out on a limb to defend her work. They have recommended it. They have, you know, basically said, what can we learn from this? And obviously, you know, I have seen people be terrible to her online. Like that is not the evangelicals be terrible to her online. That is not the only response she's gotten, but there is an enormous evangelical appetite for critique of evangelicals. And some of that, I think, is not a good thing. Some of that, I think, is sort of like. The unquestioned... Shame, an unquestioned version of the shame and embarrassment that I detected in myself reading J.I. Packer. Some of it, though, I think is a good thing. Some of it I think is like a very characteristically evangelical and Protestant desire to say, like, I want to repent if I'm doing something wrong. Like, I want to know how I can be more Christ-like and how I can move away from these bad things, right? Some of that I think is quite good. And in fact, I see that that, like that positive response is a real challenge to the relentlessly negative narrative about evangelicals that we get in some of these books, because there are many evangelicals who are so demonstrably eager for that narrative. The third thing I would say, though, is one critique of evangelicals that I'm very willing to levy and have levied many times is we are not the greatest to teaching church history. Especially anything between like the early church and the Reformation. That's just like a big blurry gap for many of us. And so I think that there has been a pattern, particularly in just like the political and social and religious upheaval of this past decade, of people coming to one of these books, especially the history books. And that's their first meaningful exposure to evils in church history you know like they're probably aware of the crusades but like they don't know that much and especially evils within their own branch of the church right like maybe they know that the catholics were burning protestants in in the reformation right but, but they don't know what protestants have gotten up to since and if that's your first encounter, I can imagine that being radically unsettling and that it would become really integral to your understanding of your faith and maybe even your identity. And then you have a real attachment to that work, and understandably so. And that might make it difficult for you to hear the kind of pushback that I'm doing in my book and saying, like, look, I think that it's important that we know this history. Also, that history alone is a very incomplete picture and is, you know, perhaps the author is drawing conclusions that are far too broad and sweeping and not supported by the evidence. And so I want to say. You know, we need to be reading some of these works with a bigger grain of salt, and we need to be better about teaching church history in its full, in its completeness with warts and all. When we look at kind of how, one of the things that I kept thinking about as I was reading this book is, what is the, what could be the end result if you're kind of painting this very dark picture of a group of people? Not really understanding kind of the complexities and all of that. And again, maybe for me, being African-American, I am always aware of the dangers of prejudice, of judging a group of people. What do you think is the result of, I mean, are there kind of, are we kind of heading to a not so good end if we're just kind of saying, well, these people are all this and they're destroying the nation and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I think so. It's not an original point by now to say, you know, like our country is so polarized. We have increasing animosity for each other. Now, I do think that that storyline, that narrative can be overblown and that at the local, personal level, typically we are still able to deal with each other, right? Like we can behave ourselves. I think what you see online and what you see in the headlines, for most of us, we're not in those kind of conflicts day to day with our friends and loved ones. And that's good. But, you know, there's a lot of research at this point. There's a book called The Big Sort, which I've not read, but that and related work about how, you know, we're increasingly not hanging out with, not living near, not working with people who think differently from us, especially on politics. Not marrying across party lines. And so I think as we become more irreligious as a country. People who have never had any personal experience with faith, maybe they've never even met an evangelical in any meaningful way. And this was a big part of why I wanted to interview and profile just like normal evangelicals in the book for that kind of reader who is coming to it, you know, maybe sincerely curious to be able to sort of introduce them to someone whom they may not be able to meet in real life because of where they live. Like, maybe legitimately there are no evangelicals in their, like, circles. And so I think it's important that we know one another and know that people are different from the frightening headlines. And, you know, I'm always really wary of, like, catastrophizing and saying, like, well, we're going to do a civil war if we don't speak better about each other. I don't actually think that that's a risk. But I do think, you know, we can have—as bad as it is right now, we can get to, like, a crueler and angrier and more divided public life. And I don't want us to go there. Yeah. I mean, I think—. It's also that we don't really pay attention to other people who are different from us. And the thing that keeps coming to mind is what happened here earlier this year with Operation Metro Surge. Being, of course, in mainline churches, there was a lot of activity and everything. But I think people don't realize, and this is because I kind of follow a lot of different things, There were a lot of evangelical churches that were doing things that were trying to help refugees and help people. I mean, they were not all just sitting there saying, yeah, go after, you know, supporting ICE. But we don't hear that story enough. And I think we need to hear that more because that might change people's perception that the story is not so simple. Yeah. I mean, especially among Christians, I think, you know, we may well reach the conclusion we're not going to worship together on Sundays, right? Because we have different beliefs about things. That doesn't mean we should be speaking ill of one another and like believing the worst possible version. C.S. Lewis has a line somewhere about, you know, if you hear that your enemy has done something terrible and then you hear the next day, like, oh, actually, it wasn't so bad. Bad like you should not cling to the worst version out of like the pleasure of thinking that this person is the worst and you were right to hate them like you should be relieved that actually you know even they are not are better than i thought um and i think we need to have that that mindset about, one another especially within the church but in american society as a whole we should be eager to learn that someone was better than we thought. Where do you think, I mean, I guess one thing that I have is, being that I grew up in evangelical backgrounds, I'm not part of that anymore, but I'm here, but I still have kind of ties to that. But what message would you want to give to more mainline Protestants about, evangelicals and what, because I think, at least in the circles that I am, we have a certain view. It is not always positive. What message would you want to give to them to help us to have a broader picture of evangelicalism? Yeah. A few things. One I would say is, look, the theological divisions are real and not to be downplayed. And, you know, those are very serious matters. And I hope that, you know, I don't think that for evangelicals and mainline Protestants to have a good relationship, I don't think that should ever require us to downplay those differences, right? We need to be able to recognize them and discuss them, you know, hopefully calmly and charitably. I also think that sometimes I find out-of-date ideas about what evangelicals think and do outside of evangelicalism. And for instance, even while I was researching the book, I was surprised to learn that young earth six-day creation, like in the last 6,000 to 10,000 years, is no longer a majority perspective among American evangelicals. I think that was surprising to me I think that would probably be surprising to many mainliners and I think it's important to actually know what is real and make artists form our opinions based on that the last thing that I would say though is. I mentioned earlier, like, one thing that I love about my Anglican church now is, like, the liturgy and the history. And part of what I mean by the history is, like, our sanctuary is gorgeous and, you know, it's over 100 years old. It is beautiful. And evangelicals famously have a certain affection for, like, the square box. And i think you know if you are in a mainline setting and you have that history and that beauty and that aesthetic wealth um. I absolutely understand how you would look at evangelicals with our boxes and think like this is worse like this is so obviously worse how how can i not think that this is worse um, and i would say like you know in a real sense i agree with you i do think the plain box is worse than the beautiful sanctuary I worship in. And I would say, I think it is too easy for those of us who really care about that kind of thing to put too much moral weight on it and too much spiritual weight on it. Not that aesthetics do not matter, they do. But that is not sufficient reason to think ill of fellow Christians and, You know, I've been surprised to find, I wrote in the book while talking about this, I wrote, you know, that tackiness is not a sin. And evangelical taste does run towards tackiness. That is true. But tackiness is not a sin. And there are many, many old evangelical church ladies whose houses are so tacky. And they love Jesus and know scripture and help people like so much more than I do and so much more than so many people do. And so, like, who am I to say, you know, oh, you have precious moments. I guess your faith sucks. Like, we just can't, like, we just can't conflate those two things. And you can think that their tackiness is ugly and tacky and still, like, love and recognize and appreciate their faith. I so remember precious moments. Oh i will say on the subject of precious moments um matthew milner he's a art professor at week college did you see this article he wrote about this no i didn't okay so apparently, somewhere in the midwest and it's escaping me where right now ohio or illinois somewhere around there, there is a precious moments chapel and it is, imagine like the sistine chapel but it's precious moments like it's all painted, and it's all precious moments and and it's like fine craftsmanship but it's all precious moments and he went there and he wrote an article i believe it was from mockingbird press which is like a little um i think mostly mainline christian magazine yeah um, and he wrote about his experience of it and it's actually like quite a lovely moving article and he had quite a and he is a serious art historian, no one can accuse him of having poor taste and diminishing the value of good art. But he was like, you know what? There's actually something I really love and appreciate about this and the faithfulness that's being displayed here and the conversation he had with one of the caretakers of it and the history under which it was made. And I'm going to be honest, if I went to the Precious Moments Chapel, I don't know that I could muster that same response, but I think that there's something really good and right about like the way that as an artist, he reflected about it. Well, I'm going to have to find that article. Yeah, it's a good read. I do a lot of stuff or read a lot of stuff from Mockingbird. Okay, so you'll find it. Yeah. So if people want to know more about you, I know you have a Substack and you, write for Christianity Today. Where should they find you? Yeah, the Substack is the big one, the easiest one. It's just bonniechristian.substack.com, Christian with a K. And I am on Twitter still, but like not that much. Substack is the main place to go. Yeah twitter is not that not a profitable place to, spend too much time i would like to delete my account but they've changed it so that if you're not logged in there's a lot of stuff you can't see and sometimes i have to see stuff to like write about it so i'm still there okay yeah, well bonnie thank you for for this conversation um and i think this is a great book to read um thank you So being, growing up as a, being trained as a journalist, I kind of love those type of books that kind of have that journalistic style. So I kind of eat those up. So thank you and hope to have you back here again sometime. Yes. Talk a little bit more. That would be great. Thank you so much, Dennis. You're welcome. As usual, I always like to know what your thoughts are on the episode. Feel free to send me an email to dennis at churchandmaine.org. And I will put links in the show notes to Bonnie's book. Also, again, if you always want to know more about this podcast, the past episodes, or donate, check us out at churchandmaine.org. You can visit churchandmaine.suset.com to read related articles. I do post these episodes, usually about a week after they appear on the main site. If you want to donate, you can donate to the Substack. It's $5 a month, $60 a year. Remember to rate or review this episode on your favorite podcast app, and I hope that you will do that. That helps others find the podcast. And with all of that, that is it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.