The Politics of Vulnerability

How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America: Today's Threat to Religion and Religious Freedom

Asma T. Uddin

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781643136622
• eBook ISBN: 9781643136639
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A religious liberty lawyer and acclaimed authorreveals the root of America's polarization inside the Muslim and evangelical Christian divide—and how it can be healed. Despite the dire consequences of America's cultural, political, and religious divisiveness, from increasing incivilityto discrimination and outright violence, few have been able to get to the core cause of this conflict. Even fewer have offered measures for reconcilliation. Now, in The Politics ofVulnerability, Asma Uddin, American-Muslim public intellectual, religious-liberties attorney, and activist, provides a unique perspective on the complex political and social factors contributing to the Muslim-Christian divide. Unlike other analysts, Uddin asks what underlying drivers cause otherwise good people to do—or believe—bad things? Why do people who value faith supportof measures that limit others, especially of Muslims', religious freedom and other rights?' Uddin humanizes a contentious relationship by fully embracing both sides as individuals driven by very human fears and anxieties. Many conservative Christians fear that the Left is dismantling traditional "Christian America" to replace it with an Islamized America, a conspiratorial theory that has given rise to an "evangelical persecution complex, " a politicizedvulnerability. Uddin reveals that Islamophobia and other aspects of the conservative Christian movement are interconnected. Where does hate come from and how can it be conquered? Only by addressing the underlying factors of this politics ofvulnerabilitycan we begin to heal the divide.

PART I

WHICH CHRISTIANS?

Chapter 1 Christian Nationalists ≠ Conservative White Evangelicals

“THERE ARE STILL HUGE SWATHS of American [Christians] who have never met a Muslim, as a common pattern.… The movement from ‘moral majority’ to ‘persecuted minority’ [has become] a norm or a pattern that is at play especially among evangelical Christians and others who have previously been hegemonically privileged and majority,” Josh Good said to me. He looked at me quizzically as I considered his statement.

“What is your best piece of practical advice for those who are working at this from a position of authentic religious faith, crossing over, not retreating to tribe, and deepening in their own tradition?”

It was a complex question. I took a deep breath. “As an American Muslim, belonging to an especially despised minority in the United States, my approach has always been to use logic—that is, use the language of religious freedom because you have to be able to connect to people’s self-interest… but white Protestants, while no longer a majority, are still very dominant as compared to other religious groups. So, it seems the approach there must be compassion… and creating spaces for conversation and actual personal bonding.”

Our other conversation partner, Daniel Harrell, spoke up, his eyes alight with excitement. “I’m thinking of a thing that happened recently in our church where we sponsored a Syrian refugee family, a devout Muslim family. [This is] to your point, Asma, of having people in our homes where we can get to know one another and find that in so many ways there are commonalities we share, like being humans who believe in God and whose faith shapes our life. [For us] just to take those small steps as individuals can go far, I think, in dispelling so much of the myth and mischaracterization that comes with how we understand other religions.”

The conversation was part of a podcast for Faith Angle Forum, a project that “aims to strengthen reporting and commentary on how religious believers, religious convictions, and religiously grounded moral arguments affect American politics and public life.” Harrell and Good are both conservative white evangelical Christians. Good works with pastors, evangelical seminaries, and Christian colleges, and directs a program at the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center. Harrell has been an evangelical pastor for most of his life, and in January 2020 he became the editor in chief of Christianity Today, the largest and most prominent evangelical magazine in the world.

They seem worlds apart from some of their coreligionists. In 2010, Dr. Robert Jeffress, head pastor at the nationally influential First Baptist Dallas, with a congregation thirteen thousand strong, declared that the truth about Islam [is that it] is a religion of oppression… Islam is an oppressive treater of women… and here is the deep, dark, dirty secret of Islam: it is a religion that promotes pedophilia… sex with children. It is an EVIL religion, it is an OPPRESSIVE religion, it is a VIOLENT religion, that has incited attacks around the world and attacks against our country, and for Christians, the worst thing about Islam is that it is a false religion that leads people away from God to spend an eternity in Hell.

(Jeffress’s voice reaches a crescendo, as if to signal to his audience that a great proclamation is coming)

And I believe as Christians and conservatives, it’s time to take off the gloves and stand up and tell the truth about this EVIL, EVIL religion!”

(The audience rises to its feet, offering Jeffress a standing ovation)

The hundreds of Christians filling Jeffress’s church that day appeared thoroughly excited by Jeffress’s passion and certainty that the 1.8 billion people around the world who are Muslim ascribe to an unequivocally evil religion. In 2015, Pastor Jeffress again gave them what they wanted: a Sunday sermon on how “Islam is a false religion and it is inspired by Satan himself.”

The following year, Jeffress became a mainstay of the Trump presidential campaign. He appeared at Trump’s rallies and declared that Christians who didn’t vote for Trump were “fools” motivated by pride rather than principle. Throughout Trump’s presidency, Jeffress called him a “Christian warrior,” and Trump rewarded Jeffress by naming him a member of his Evangelical Advisory Board and White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative. After the 2020 election, exit polls showed that 75% of white evangelicals voted for Trump.

For many Americans, Jeffress represents the 81 percent of white evangelicals who secured Trump’s election (nonwhite evangelicals lean Democratic). During Trump’s first term, his approval ratings among white evangelicals were twenty-five points higher than the national average. Jeffress’s statements are taken to reflect the sentiment of all of these voting evangelicals and American white evangelicalism broadly. But that sort of conflation overlooks the many white evangelicals who think and feel differently about their Muslim compatriots—for example, Daniel Harrell and Josh Good. Why and how are they different from white evangelicals like Jeffress?

One benefit of increased scrutiny is increased precision. As researchers and pollsters have scrutinized Trump’s evangelical base, some have insisted that it isn’t white evangelicalism but Christian nationalism that leads to divisive behavior. The researchers even distinguish between Americans with stronger and lesser degrees of affinity for Christian nationalism, and the unique role of religious commitment in tempering nationalist leanings.

I parse those differences below in order to understand the attitudes and experiences that separate the Jeffresses from the Harrells and Goods. I look at what makes some conservative white evangelicals warmer toward Muslims and other minorities, and what makes people gravitate toward one or the other attitude. And how does political group identity (which I sometimes call “political tribalism”) hinder potential for openness?

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IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE 2016 US presidential election, a study on the role of religion in US populism found that, across all religious groups, white evangelicals scored highest for “conservative populism.” They asserted their populism as a way of defending their “ethnic identity” and exhibited “anti-immigrant sentiment, nativism, ‘white power’ ideologies, and Islamophobia.”

As President Trump continued to focus on Muslims as one of the primary targets of his vitriol, pollsters zeroed in on the Islamophobia part of this populism. One set of polls measured Americans’ approval of Trump’s Executive Order 13769, which temporarily blocked individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Pew Research found that 76 percent of white evangelicals supported the ban, and the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) revealed that white evangelicals, in supporting the ban, stood apart from all other religious groups, Catholics, mainline Protestants, and religious minorities included. The numbers of white evangelicals supporting the ban had increased from when candidate Trump first announced the ban on the campaign trail: 55 percent supported it during the election, and 61 percent supported it when it was actually implemented. For every other religious group, the trend was in the opposite direction.

Pieces like Christian Science Monitor’s WHY EVANGELICALS ARE TRUMP’S STRONGEST TRAVEL-BAN SUPPORTERS and Christianity Today’s MOST WHITE EVANGELICALS DON’T BELIEVE MUSLIMS BELONG IN AMERICA noted that white evangelicals don’t just think Muslim immigrants are the problem—they also think American Muslims, and Islam generally, pose a threat to America’s Christian identity. A 2017 Pew poll found that two thirds of white evangelicals believe Islam is not part of mainstream American society and that it encourages violence more than other faiths. Seventy-two percent of white evangelicals—compared to 44 percent of Americans overall—saw a natural conflict between Islam and democracy. According to a 2017 Baylor University survey, 52 percent of white evangelicals said that Muslims want to limit their freedom.

In 2018, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) Islamophobia Index found that while the majority of Americans (66 percent) agree that “the negative things politicians say regarding Muslims is harmful to our country,” white evangelicals were the group least likely to agree with this statement. In 2019, ISPU found that “white Evangelicals score the highest on the Islamophobia Index with as many as 44 percent holding unfavorable opinions about Muslims, which is twice as many as those who hold favorable opinions (20 percent).”

Empirical findings about white evangelicals are supported by anecdotal evidence—well beyond even Jeffress and his national pulpit. Kevin Singer and Chris Stackaruk founded Neighborly Faith while students at Wheaton College in Illinois, a standard-bearing institution for American evangelicalism. Chris told me that when they first started on the project, most people responded by talking “about Muslims with words like dark, liars, trapped, or conniving.” One person even told him he was stockpiling guns for the day that Muslims “come running up my lawn.”

Amassing ammunition is not as rare as it may sound; professor Michal Meulenberg, who teaches at several evangelical schools, told me stories of students and young people confiding in her that their dads had either joined a militia or started buying more guns out of fear of Muslims. One of them had said to his child that he was watching a mosque, preparing to attack if the mosque did “anything.” These students are in great anguish over this, and some, with a lot of conversation and sharing stories about their friendships with Muslims, have seen their relatives change in their attitude and behavior. For others, it has led to splits in family relationships.

The general posture toward Muslims is one of “aggression and antagonism,” writes Matthew Kaemingk, a professor at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear. Conservative religious liberty lawyer Luke Goodrich devotes an entire chapter to answering the question, Will Muslims Take Over? in Free to Believe, his 2019 book for an evangelical readership. Pastor Bob Roberts of the three-thousand-member Northwood Church, brings together evangelical and Muslim clergy to counteract evangelical animosity toward Muslims. In his YouTube video Why Evangelicals Hate Muslims: An Evangelical Minister’s Perspective, he says 57 percent of evangelicals have negative views of Muslims and “the only group that has a worse view is evangelical pastors.” In a March 2019 Foreign Policy piece, “America’s Islamophobia Is Forged at the Pulpit,” Chrissy Stroop said that her pastor told his congregation, “ ‘A good Muslim… should want to kill Christians and Jews.’ He insisted that this was the only conclusion possible from a serious reading of the Quran.”

Clearly, there is a widespread problem of anti-Muslim hostility among white evangelicals. But researchers Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry insist that pollsters and activists are wrong in focusing on evangelicalism as the culprit.

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ROBERT JEFFRESS: Our whole foundation as a society is freedom of expression and if I could just turn this…

LOU DOBBS: Sure.

JEFFRESS: I’d like to turn to this whole religious liberty idea and what the president is doing on that front. You know, a year ago he made a commitment at our religious freedom rally in Washington, D.C., and he said that he believed religious liberty is not a gift from government, it’s a gift from God. And now we see after a year, he is acting on that belief—you see what he is doing in helping Pastor Brunson in Turkey, and you see today the State Department issued its own Potomac Declaration calling for religious liberty around the world. And this is why evangelicals support this president… they care about this pro-religious liberty, pro-freedom platform of this great president.

In his book Twilight’s Last Gleaming: How America’s Last Days Can Be Your Best Days, Jeffress gives us a clue as to who he thinks American religious liberty is for. First, he states God’s position: “God apparently has no appreciation for the merits of religious diversity.” Jeffress then goes on to argue that protecting religious liberty for non-Christians constitutes idolatry:

I realize that suggesting God will curse the nation that sanctions the worship of other gods is anathema in today’s culture of diversity. We have been indoctrinated to believe that religious pluralism… is the great strength of our nation… But what we celebrate as diversity, God condemns as idolatry…

And it’s all tied to the United States as a nation that serves, through law and policy, [the Christian] God’s will:

Here is the bottom-line question: Has God changed His mind about idolatry? Has God concluded that the First Amendment should usurp the First Commandment?… If God is unchanging, then His attitude toward any nation that rejects Him and His Word is also unchanging, which makes America’s coming night inevitable.

Jeffress encapsulates what Whitehead and Perry have found to be the real problem in American religious polarization: Christian nationalism. The two sociology professors draw on national survey data and in-depth interviews to answer the questions, Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a ban on Muslims entering the United States? And why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Their answer, again, is Christian nationalism.

“Christian nationalism is a cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life,” the researchers write. The “Christianity” of Christian nationalism is not just about religion; it also “includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.” It is centered on America as a Christian nation and seeks to preserve that Christian character through self-identity, interpretations of US history, “sacred symbols, cherished values, and public policies.”

Importantly, Christian nationalism is not the same thing as racism. Whitehead and Perry say that it is false to claim that “Christian nationalism is ‘really just about racism when you get down to it.’ ” They found that a member of a racial minority who holds certain Christian nationalist beliefs will have a stronger racial justice orientation than a white American with Christian nationalist beliefs. What matters is the “intersection of race and Christian nationalism.”

Christian nationalism is also distinct from the theological tradition known as evangelicalism, which requires a belief in biblical inerrancy and the importance of evangelism, or sharing the Christian faith with others. According to Whitehead and Perry, while “[r]oughly half of evangelicals… embrace Christian nationalism to some degree,” Christian nationalism “should not be thought of as synonymous with ‘evangelicalism’ or even ‘white evangelicalism’ ”: “Stated simply: being an evangelical, or even a white evangelical as pollsters often define that category, tells us almost nothing about a person’s social attitudes or behavior once Christian nationalism has been considered.”

Researchers Allyson F. Shortle and Ronald Keith Gaddie agree that white evangelicalism and Christian nationalism are not one and the same, but they do intersect. Studies on religion in political behavior often start with the three Bs: religious belonging, belief, and behavior. Belonging is about religious affiliation; belief is about your religious worldview; and behavior is about religious practice. Shortle and Gaddie’s study found that “evangelical belonging plays a secondary role in shaping out-group attitudes, while the belief that America is a divinely inspired nation lends a superior explanation of prejudicial attitudes in America.”

They explain the distinction this way: Even though religion plays a big role in the lives of both evangelicals and Christian nationalists, when it comes to the question of which Americans are offered rights and liberties and which ones aren’t, what matters is how one defines “nationhood” or “American identity.” Shortle and Gaddie measured the level to which individuals conflated their religious and national identities by having them respond to prompts like “America holds a special place in God’s plan”; “God has chosen this nation to lead the world”; “the United States was founded as a Christian nation”; and “it is important to preserve the nation’s religious heritage.” The people they classified as Christians nationalists were those who defined America as a divinely inspired nation specifically meant to be a home for Christians.

Shortle and Gaddie then tested for how responses to the four prompts related to attitudes about Muslims. They found that Christian nationalism was positively and significantly related to anti-Muslim sentiment. It was as clear as Jeffress’s text: “God will curse the nation that sanctions the worship of other gods.”

Christian nationalism, as a fusion of faith and patriotism, conflates American identity and religious identity so that Muslims are not true citizens deserving of protection. Most Americans like to think of America as rooted in civic, not ethnic, identity, but Christian nationalists promote a vision of America as a nation closely tied to a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and history. In this paradigm, Muslims not only have a different religion but because they are conflated with terrorists and widely perceived as ethnically nonwhite they are, as sociologist Ruth Braunstein explains, simultaneously “non-American (outsiders), anti-American (enemies), and un-American (others).”

This explains why Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric was so effective on white evangelicals like Jeffress. Trump reflected back to them their idea of Islam as the antithesis of Christian and American identities. As Yale sociologist ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: Which Christians?
• Part II: The In-Group Threat
• Part III: The Out-Group Attack
• Part IV: How to Heal the Tribal Divide
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright