Liberal in an Evangelical World

An open letter to white evangelicals: We’re done with you.

By North Carolina Pastor John Pavlovitz

 Dear White Evangelicals,

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why: They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a Black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity. They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence.

They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him. And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him.

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles.

And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.

With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him, you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, and compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence.

And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency.

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.

They see that all you’re really interested in doing is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave these days; the grave of your very faith tradition.

Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness. You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation. You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness. You’ve lost the plot. And most of all you’ve lost your soul.

We must reframe the narratives/dialog.

The thing is, as I realized while talking through it: the entire science of economics uses language that frames it this way. We talk about prices going up in response to low supply or high demand as though it's a thing that happens spontaneously, on its own, like water evaporating in response to heat -- as opposed to what actually happens, which is that people who sell things make decisions to raise prices.

Frequently those decisions are solidly predictable, and are necessary (or perceived as such) in order to stay in business, but that doesn't make them any less conscious, active decisions. And so on for rents, wages, hirings/firings and the like.

Track and field club taught all new runners how to properly warm up, stretch, pace, etc. Its a process, and doing it properly takes 15-20 minutes to make sure your body is ready so you dont hurt yourself.

PE didnt do jack shit, they just said "go run a mile" so 70% of the fucking kids sprinted flat out the first lap and basically walked the other 3. Multiple people did it in boots or tennis shoes. I'm amazed more of them didnt pull a muscle or worse in the process.

most of the prominently nightmarish features of PE, such as running the mile or doing sit-ups, originate with the Presidential Fitness Test. This test, which president Eisenhower implemented in schools in 1956, was created after a different fitness test (the Kraus-Weber test) revealed that Americans were less fit than Europeans -- specifically the Swiss.

The difference between the Kraus-Weber test and the Presidential Fitness test is that the Presidential Fitness test was specifically designed to test military fitness. While the Kraus-Weber test measured total fitness by testing things like core strength and flexibility, the Presidential Fitness test doesn't really make much sense in the context of ordinary fitness -- only in the context of military fitness. Do you remember being tested on how far you could throw a softball? That test mimicked throwing grenades. And it's pretty easy to see why Eisenhower went this direction. In 1956, the Cold War was in full swing and WWII was barely in the rear-view mirror. There was a real possibility that we would be at war with parts of super-fit Europe in the near future. Eisenhower wanted the nation's children ready to fight in that war.

The main issue with the Presidential Fitness test is that, as pointed out above, it really doesn't teach kids how to stay fit or incorporate physical activity in their day-to-day lives. A soldier at war might need to run a mile with no warm-up, or perform a pull-up, but for the average middle-schooler? The tests were just kind of...pointless exercises in misery. You're only really good at the Presidential Fitness Test if you've been practicing the specific exercises tested. And what 12 year old child is doing pull-ups for fun and pleasure? So instead of inspiring America's children to train themselves into a super-fit army, it just humiliated kids who didn't perform well.

There's been a recent push for PE classes to focus more on life-long fitness (things like actually teaching kids to warm up, exposing them to different types of physical activity, etc). Unfortunately, the Presidential Fitness test has already done its damage. It continued to be used in schools until 2013. That's 60 years of teaching kids to associate physical activity with shame and dread. The idea of military PE classes is pretty much baked into our cultural memory, giving us all a background dread of physical activity. and guess what, eisinhower?? that's just going to make people less likely to be physically active!! Maybe if we're trying to emulate the fitness of the SWISS, we shouldn't have gone with MILITARY TRAINING FOR CHILDREN!!

hearing them break down ‘bad’ leftist ideas and i was just sitting there waiting for the bad part that didn’t come…and i’m like….yes? you should probably give free lunches to kids when their parents can’t afford to feed them dinner? why do you not want this?

trying to figure out politics was me just moving further to the left the more i learned about pretty much every single issue because of the traditional/catholic parts of my upbringing which is why i’m so baffled that so much of my family falls much more red than blue and i’ll probably never understand how that happened

Me: In what year?

Aunt: What?

Me: What year did you get your first apartment?

Aunt: 1973?

Me: Hmmm. Looks like that would be $1755 in 2021 money.

Aunt: *seems to go through seven emotions at once*

Me: What year did you start college?

Uncle: 1968?

Me: So if you scale up $1.60 to 2021 dollars that would be $11.94 and the current federal minimum wage is $7.25

Uncle: Bu-

Me: And it seems like from a quick google search the median rent in 1970 was $108 and today that would be $722 but this same chart tells me that the actual median rent in 2020 was $1,100.

Suggestion from Mike Brennan: when someone tells you we must have voter ID, reply along the following lines:

It’s hard to figure out that you might be interested in plumbing as a career when you’ve spent twelve years learning how to pass multiple choice tests and having ceramics and band as the only available electives.

This is one place where I actually WILL do the generational thing and say that Millennials and Gen Z got completely fucked in a way that older generations didn’t.

Watch this video!

Here are some highlights from the video:

On Gerrymandering: 

Ott (Estonia): “Well, now when you tell me what gerrymandering is then this sounds like cheating.”

Linda (UK): “That’s illegal. I’m sorry, firstly, gerrymandering needs to be illegal.”

Dan (Australia): ”In Australia, redistricting is done by an independent commission, not done by the politicians who won those districts, so it is a lot fairer.”

On Voter Registration

Ott (Estonia): “What is voter registration? I mean, I know what it is, but I understand, why do you have this kind of thing? 

Olga (Germany): ”In Germany, you don’t need to register yourself for the vote.”

Ott (Estonia): “In Estonia, voter registration is automatic.”

Hridaya (India): “I actually had somebody who is an election officer come over to my house and help me out with my process of voter registration, and mind you, this is in a country of 1.3 billion people.”

On Voter Purging

Linda (UK): ”Come on. No one thinks of a word ‘purge’ and thinks of anything positive. We have seen the ‘Purge’ films.” 

Clara (Italy): “Georgia likely removed nearly 200,000 from voter rolls wrongfully? How?”

Olga (Germany): ”I can’t imagine for this to happen in Germany.”

Nikita (New Zealand): “Nope, you don’t get to vote. Nope, you don’t get to vote either. Nope.”

On Making Voting Inconvenient

Ott (Estonia): “To me, it sounds like 19th century to be honest.”

Olga (Germany): “What I really appreciate about Germany is it’s so easy for you to go and vote. It’s on a Sunday. It’s on a free day.”

Hridaya (India): “In India, it’s actually illegal to keep your employees from voting.”

Dan (Australia): “So in Australia, we have this thing called a ‘democracy sausage.’ You take a selfie with your democracy sausage. You haven’t voted in Australia unless you’ve gotten your democracy sausage.”

Ott (Estonia): “In the last Estonian parliamentary elections, I think I cast my vote during breakfast. I have this identity card. I insert it into a computer reader, pick my candidate, and cast my vote.”

Jezza (New Zealand): “It took me two minutes.”

Ott (Estonia): “Approximately a minute.”

Linda (UK): “Five minutes.”

Hridaya (India): “Five to seven minutes.” 

Olga (Germany): “Five to 10.”

Dan (Australia) “Ten minutes.”

Linda (UK): “Wait, wait, wait, it took him the amount of time it will take for me to fly from the U.K., from London to New York.”

Hridaya (India): “This feels like the opposite of easy to vote.”

Ott (Estonia): “This is not acceptable. It’s just not acceptable in a democratic country, I think.”

Linda (UK): “I’ll say 80 percent, just because they’ve haven’t been doing too well recently with everything else.”

 Linda (UK): “64 percent.”

 Nikita (New Zealand): “Yeah, that’s not good.”

 Sibs (South Africa): “That’s almost half of the Americans have no voice.”

 Hridaya (India): “It’s like you want to stop people from voting.” 

Sibs (South Africa): “Why is that so?”

American democracy is broken.

Republicans in particular seem to want to make it hard for many Americans to vote.

Unfortunately, the conservative justices appointed by Republicans frequently uphold these kinds of voter suppression tactics.

We have to fix our democracy.

Voting Blue right now is the best chance we have to do so.

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