Evangelical Maintenance of Whiteness, Jesus, and Trump

• In Event: 2431 - Religion, Politics, and American Civil Society

Abstract

To understand contemporary evangelical politics, we must understand how evangelicals feel they are doing in the social world, and how they feel the social world is doing. In this article, I argue that these feelings are intimately tied to notions of, and protections of, whiteness. I draw on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at a predominantly white evangelical mega-church leading up to the presidential election and during Trump’s first year in office. I find that Lakeview church encourages conversations around race within the church, but these conversations are individualistic in their approach, and relegated to the “outside” world. Whiteness is established and normalized through discourses of individualistic and loving approaches to everyone that mask, ignore, and dismiss larger structural issues, and, in some cases, place blame for issues related to race on already marginalized communities. I argue that we can apply the concept of the white spatial imaginary (Lipsitz) to provide analytical leverage that help us better understand the relationship between evangelicals, support for Trump, and their desire to reinforce and uphold norms of whiteness, specifically through the use of the concept of the “spectacle”: raced moments that both attract attention and provided misdirection from the larger structural inequalities at play in the world outside of the white church. This work highlights the ways in which evangelicals reconcile historical white nationalist tendencies with the need to now reach across racial lines, yet continue to justify and make sense of conservative political beliefs during the process.

Author

• Sarah H. Diefendorf, University of Utah