The Politics of Evangelical Identity by Lydia Bean

Author:Lydia Bean [Bean, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691173702
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

Countercultural Conservatives

Framed as a spiritual drama, the abortion issue has come to define the boundaries of evangelical identity. This helps us understand why abortion has become a defining political issue, even for evangelicals who express more liberal attitudes on other issues. For example, Jonah and Julie, a Lifeway Assembly couple in their forties, were oriented toward the artistic community, and attracted to causes like multiculturalism and environmentalism. Julie was a lapsed Catholic as a young woman, until she joined the Peace Corps in Liberia, where she went through a personal crisis that brought her to the Pentecostal church. Jonah was raised in a Catholic Puerto Rican family, and was now a professional jazz percussionist.

Julie was homeschooling their four children, but she rejected many aspects of the conservative Protestant homeschooling culture as too “ethnocentric”: she wanted her kids to learn to be global citizens, rather than learn what she perceived as a whitewashed view of American history that didn’t talk about Native Americans or the black experience. Julie got angry when she came across a Christian history textbook that talked about South Africa and didn’t mention apartheid. To address these shortcomings, she drew on homeschooling resources from more progressive countercultural perspectives, as well as from conservative Protestant perspectives.21 Jonah and Julie also wanted their children to grow up to be good “stewards” of the earth, and wanted the church to take the lead on environmental issues.

The couple was also active in Buffalo’s arts community, which brought them into regular contact with people outside of the evangelical subculture. Jonah had made many gay and lesbian friends through his music, and he was concerned that the church didn’t know how to love gay people. At the same time, Jonah and Julie thought that homosexuality was morally wrong. They told me several poignant stories about how they negotiated this tension in their friendships, which had left them with the conviction that churches should not drive gay people away by focusing on homosexuality as a special sin. Jonah and Julie believed that if they could bring their gay and lesbian friends closer to God in a nonjudgmental way, the Holy Spirit would ultimately convict them.22 On the surface, Jonah and Julie seemed to embody a mix of liberal and conservative sensibilities: while they were morally traditional, they rejected anti-gay stereotypes and valued the environment, multiculturalism, and the arts.

But while Jonah and Julie were not stereotypical culture warriors, they still mapped their political identities in culture war terms. As Jonah put it: “We both have a strong pro-life stance…. I’m a conservative person. I’m a registered Republican but I have a lot of libertarian tendencies.” Though Julie identified as a political “Independent,” she leaned strongly toward the Republican Party. Throughout the interview, she consistently used the pronouns “I” and “we” to describe conservative or Republican ideas, and “they” to describe liberal or Democratic ideas. When I asked the couple to explain why they identified as political conservatives, they described the pro-life cause as a spiritual battle between Christians and hateful, left-wing activists.

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