"The Day Christians Changed America" by George Barna

It was a Sunday, shortly after Donald Trump had locked up the Republican nomination for President. We bumped into some good friends at a local restaurant. We’d known them from church and our local community for almost 25 years, and they were both well attuned to local politics.

What do we do, we asked? Whom can we vote for? Both major parties were putting forward problematic candidates. And the minor parties – the guy in favor of legalizing marijuana and the Green candidate somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders – offered no alternatives.

Our friends didn’t immediately offer advice. What they said was this: “You may to think about what you know you can expect versus what you simply don’t know.”

As it turns out, we weren’t the only people of our generation and faith having serious problems with all of the presidential candidates. In The Day Christians Changed America, George Barna points out that people who fit our demographic were having the same reactions to the candidates. It wasn’t the “evangelical” group that the news media is so fond of referring to. It was a group identified after extensive research.

Barna calls this group “SAGEcons” – spiritually active, governance engaged conservatives. They’re partially a subset of “evangelicals,” but they’re also a subset of Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and other faith traditions. They tend to live largely but not exclusively in the South and Midwest, and they tend to be of the Baby Boom generation and older. They tend to have been married to the same spouse for decades. They have grandchildren. They generally tend not to participate in opinion polls. And what they believed was happening was the collapse of American culture (in fact, they likely still believe this is happening).

Historically, says Barna, this group largely voted for Republican presidential candidates, even though they’re weren’t completely thrilled with either John McCain or Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 elections. They are tens of millions strong, but (again) they are not all what the media consider as “the evangelicals.” Barna says that a Republican presidential candidate can’t win with them alone, but also can’t win without them. And Trump had to get their votes.

This SAGEcon group ended up voting for Donald Trump in the national election, but it did not vote for Trump in the primaries. The primary preferences were candidates like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and especially Ben Carson. Trump was not an option.

Until he was the Republican choice. Barna describes in detail what happened to eventually bring the SAGEcon Christians into support for Trump. One event was a meeting at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, when Trump spoke with more than 1,000 Christian leaders. Another was the selection of Mike Pence as his running mate. And there were others. What was critical was this group’s understanding of what happened during the eight years of the Obama Administration, and what was likely to happen with his designated successor, Hillary Clinton.

George Barna

A vast majority of the SAGEcons voted for Trump, but not all of them did. A fraction voted for Clinton. Others didn’t vote. But most went for Trump, fully understanding that he was a seriously flawed candidate.

Barna was founder of the Barna Research Group in 1984 and focused its work on the intersection of faith and culture. He’s also been a pollster in three presidential campaigns. He currently is the executive director of the American Culture and Faith Institute, a division of United in Purpose, and president of Metaformation, a faith development organization. Barna is also the author of numerous books on faith, culture, and politics. He graduated summa cum laude from Boston College, received two master’s degrees from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. degree from Dallas Baptist University. He and his family live in California.

The Day Christians Changed America is based on Barna’s own extensive research and experience in American politics. It’s not the traditional news media understanding of politics, but then this was one election when the news media and the opinion polls were consistently wrong. The book is written especially for the SAGEcon group it talks about; Barna uses the language of faith that this group will understand immediately but others might not.

But it is an important contribution to understanding what happened in the 2016 election.

Top photograph by Elliott Stallion via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Window into Poetry and Change with Jane Hirshfield

Poetry, the poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield reminds us, was born in need. “We read or write poems because we need them,” she writes in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. “The first poems were work songs, love songs, war songs, lullabies, prayers – rituals meant to carry assistance.”

Hirshfield is the author of eight poetry collections: Alaya (1982); Of Gravity & Angels (1988); The October Palace (1994); The Lives of the Heart (1997); Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001); After (2006); Come, Thief (2011); and The Beauty (2105). She is also a poetry translator, editor of anthologies, and the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and other collections of essays. She’s received enough recognitions and honors to fill two or three articles; see her entry at the Poetry Foundation.

It was coincidence that I was reading Hirshfield’s Ten Windows at the time of the election. Published in 2015, the book is a collection of 10 essays on poetry. The subtitle, “How Great Poems Transform the World,” is somewhat misleading; the essays do not directly address that subject. Indirectly, however, they do. The essays are just subtler about it.

Like poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

American Jesus

It’s been a difficult time for friends on Facebook. And beyond.

We had an election four years ago, but I don’t remember the preponderance of political posts in 2012. Perhaps it’s because the election was more of a foregone conclusion then (or it became foregone much earlier than this one). Perhaps everyone, of all political stripes, believes there far more at stake.

My Facebook friends represent just about every political persuasion: Democratic, Republican, Independent, Socialist (I can’t think of any Communists, or any who are willing to admit to it). And those labels are general and often vague. Republicans, for example, can include the so-called “alt Right,” supporters of Donald Trump, #NeverTrump, temporary Democrats because they’re voting against Trump. Democrats can include Hillary supporters, Bernie Sanders supporters (and those two groups are not the same), disaffected Millennials, the Progressive Left, traditional liberal, and others.

Just about everyone is expressing their opinion. And that’s good, in one way. We live in a country of free speech and free expression, at least for the foreseeable future.

What seems different to me this election cycle is the level of hysteria and the level of what I can only called authoritarianism. And it’s particularly notable for the Christian community, which (among my Facebook friends) runs the gamut from left to right.

I have one Facebook friend who is borderline hysterical at the thought of Donald Trump being elected. I’m not exaggerating. Post after post is filled with exclamation points, capital letters, attacking people who disagree. She runs a business, which depends upon good will. Over and over again she says she doesn’t care.

I have another Facebook friend who is an authoritarian juggernaut. Any post or comment that even slightly disagrees with his posts is instantly countered. (One of the campaigns is actually employing people to do this on Twitter and Facebook, but this individual is doing it on his own.) If he can’t address a concern, he changes the subject and talks about something else.

Everyone has what’s called confirmation bias – we think people whose position we agree with are wise and right, and those who disagree with our position are not wise, often stupid, biased, and prejudiced. My experience with my Christian friends on Facebook has largely been like my non-Christian friends. I’m hard-pressed to see a difference.

I can’t be a Christian and vote for Trump. I can’t be a Christian and vote for Clinton. A Christian can only for Evan McMullin or you’re a heretic. Or the only choice is Gary Johnson. (No one seems to mention Jill Stein of the Green Party very much.)

What I think we’re doing here is bowing down to our American Jesus.

Patriot Jesus believes the Constitution shares equal place with the Bible. America is the new Israel, and it’s being destroyed by globalists (that includes the Clintons, the Bush family, President Obama, Mitt Romney, neocon Republicans, corporate CEOs, and a few others).

Cosmopolitan Jesus has nothing but disdain for Patriot Jesus. Cosmopolitan Jesus knows he’s smarter, more informed, more intelligent, wiser, and certainly more deserving of governing than most of the idiots who call themselves Americans.

Social Warrior Jesus is going to correct every wrong of humanity in less than a generation, even those things that the vast majority of people don’t believe are wrong. He wants revolution, and he wants it now. If people object, then they’ll deservedly be categorized into hate groups. They should have their voting rights taken away anyway.

Bipolar Jesus is decidedly uncomfortable with all of these permutations. He behaves one way at church and the world’s way the rest of the time, because that’s how you have to deal with the world. And he knows how things work at work, and what business is really like, so that’s how you have to behave to survive and succeed.

There’s Atheist Jesus – who believes in redemption through things like science; there’s Green Jesus, who knows that the protection of the environment is absolutely critical for humanity’s salvation. And there’s likely half a dozen more variations of American Jesus.

But are any of them real? Or are they only cultural? The hysteria and anxiety we as Christians are experiencing and expressing is an indication of just how much the culture has captured the church.

Jesus had his own versions of Palestine Yahweh and Palestine Messiah. He had rich people who disdained him and everything he stood for. He had legalists who would rather see people starve than break a religious law. He had zealots who wanted to overthrow the Romans, and do it now. He had people who talked a good game but what he was saying was really only appropriate for the synagogue, not daily life.

His response to all of them was invariably the same. He showed kindness, compassion, charity, encouragement, hope, and love. A couple of times he became really angry, and turned over the tables of the moneychangers and read the hypocrites the riot act. Even then we might call his actions “tough love.”

Jesus didn’t get in people’s faces and shout hysterically. Nor did he try to show them how superior his understanding and intellect were.

Instead, he showed love.

Top photograph by Circe Denyer via Public Domain Pictures. Middle photograph by Kai Stachowiak via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.