On Religion Dispatches former evangelical Chrissy Stroop addresses the changing power of the evangelical narrative:
Evangelicals also understand the power of narrative, which is why they’re so concerned with controlling the stories the public hears not only about themselves, but also about those of us who leave evangelicalism and tell the truth about how it has harmed us, criticizing evangelical theology as well as the racism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ animus, and culture-warring politics that theology bolsters. As evangelicals’ own story of engaging politically out of serious concerns about morality and “sincerely held religious beliefs” has lost influence with the public because of the transparent hypocrisy they displayed through the Trump years, space has opened up for a shift in the national discussion that includes a sympathetic hearing for ex-evangelical stories and perspectives. Shifting the national conversation, as elite evangelicals and right-wing political strategists are well aware, lays the groundwork for shifts in politics and policy.
That’s what’s really at stake here. The possibility of a more equitable America, one that affords full rights to members of the groups that evangelicals tend to ‘other’ and disparage, is the last thing the vast majority of white evangelicals, who have a pathological need to feel superior to others, want. Here’s hoping the fairer journalistic approach to evangelicals we’ve seen in recent months, which bolsters civil society and democracy instead of undermining it through the normalization of extremism, will continue.
A narrative, which Stroop observes is a story and one of the strongest ways to teach each other, is necessarily part fiction: at its best, a simplification of often complex situations in order to highlight the moral lesson which is presumably being presented.
When critics of a narrative, whether they’re prominent figures such as former evangelicals, or absolutely obscure such as myself, point out inconvenient facts, we’re trying to falsify the narrative. Whether it’s through absurd conclusions such as a requirement to attempt surgical procedures that have not yet been invented, or the January 6th insurrection itself, these facts are the cracks in the narrative – facts that, we think, will falsify that narrative.
And the persistent and overwhelming evangelical support of President Trump in the face of a level of mendacity hardly seen on the American political scene is one of the biggest boulders breaking that story. As I’ve told readers & friends, the evangelicals have brought this on themselves: abandoning important principles in response to relentless messages concerning dubious moral assertions and constitutional rights, and their own endangerment in a culture of emigres.
They are, in fact, in danger: brought on by their own hypocrisy and poor reasoning skills.
Stroop thinks the narrative is beginning to slip from the evangelicals fingers. If the 20-somethings continue not to join the evangelicals, I think Stroop will have been proven right. As that generation has the least invested, they are the most likely to make honest judgments and follow through on them.
