We look at ways our COVID-19 year changed American society.
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This week’s episode: How the pandemic changed us ([link removed])
Racial justice, police accountability, mutual aid, climate activism, warp-speed vaccines – we look at ways our COVID-19 year changed American society.
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Illustration by Jess Suttner
** How the Christian right helped foment insurrection
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When supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the crowd was full of people sporting Confederate flags, QAnon shirts and Make America Great Again hats. But there were also a lot of Christian symbols in the crowd ([link removed]) : Rioters hauled a giant wooden cross in front of the Capitol; others carried Bibles and wore crusader-like crosses. Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and White House adviser, the Florida televangelist Paula White, spoke to the crowd, calling on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour.”
Journalist Sarah Posner has reported on the religious right for years and is the author of the book “Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump ([link removed]) .” For Reveal, she reported on how right-wing evangelicals fostered the violent Jan. 6 insurrection ([link removed]) . She talked to Reveal host Al Letson on the episode “A transfer of power.” ([link removed])
Al Letson: Evangelicals have supported Trump because of his stand on abortion and for making good on his promise to put conservative justices on the Supreme Court. But many people wonder what else do evangelical Christians have in common with Trump?
Sarah Posner: Well, they're both hostile to democracy and democratic values. Trump campaigned for president running on a platform of antagonism toward democratic institutions and democratic values. This is what the religious right likes about Trump. Evangelicalism has been pervaded by this sort of magical-thinking prosperity gospel, the idea that God wants you to be rich. The idea that God will make you rich if you give money to a televangelist, if you sow a seed, that you'll get a supernatural return on your investment. Even if it means aligning with a figure like Donald Trump, who has many, many, many moral failings – it doesn't matter because they've convinced themselves that God might use an unlikely figure like Trump to carry out his purposes. Which in their view are restoring a White Christian America that has been lost to political correctness or other social changes that have taken place that they feel are an infringement on their rights or on their prominence in American public
life.
Letson: You said something that's really interesting, but I don't feel like we talk about it enough out loud. You said "White Christian America." Now, this is really wrapped up in race as well. Like their view, it really is wrapped around the idea of White America as well.
Posner: Yes. Evangelicals talk often about the need to restore Christian America or that America was founded as a Christian nation and that liberals have ruined that with their various policies that go against what they believe is God's intention for a Christian America. So they more frequently point to things like LGBTQ rights, which they claim infringe on their religious freedom, or abortion, which they believe is a sin for which God will punish America. But when you look at the history of the modern religious right, the founding of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s – which is really the movement that we're talking about here, the linkage of White evangelicalism with the Republican Party – they were motivated not by their opposition to abortion, but rather by what school desegregation meant for their private Christian schools. So there's a lot of racial grievance that's wrapped up in the formation of the religious right from the late 1970s, early 1980s. And Donald Trump knew exactly
how to tap into that.
Letson: What's going to happen in the long term with evangelicals? Are these grievances that Trump has stirred up going to fade away?
Posner: I am afraid not because they've been brainwashed with these false narratives about voter fraud. I fear that they're only going to become more angry and more aggrieved, feeling like the president that they believed was anointed by God to restore the Christian nation, Donald Trump, had the election stolen from him. So I fear that their grievances will become even more accentuated.
Read the story: How the Christian right helped foment the insurrection ([link removed])
Listen to the podcast: A transfer of power ([link removed])
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“Our nation is so divided that we failed to respond to this pandemic effectively. We had all the resources and knowledge to do it, and we didn't do it, right? I think the lesson of COVID-19 is that we need to rebuild our democracy from the ground up or we won't be able to overcome the many challenges we face in the 21st century.”
– Neal Gorenflo, executive director of the nonprofit Shareable ([link removed]) , on the importance of mutual aid
Listen to the podcast: How the pandemic changed us ([link removed])
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Photo by Brian Palmer
** In the Field
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Black History Month reading and listening list
February is Black History Month, a perfect time to dig deep into Reveal’s reporting on structural racism in the United States.
Year of return ([link removed]) : This episode reflects on how the legacy of slavery has reverberated through the generations to the present. It features an interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times reporter who conceived of the brilliant The 1619 Project ([link removed]) .
Remembering a White supremacist coup: ([link removed]) In 1898, White supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, lead a coup to unseat democratically elected Black leaders. This episode explores how the Wilmington coup provided a blueprint for the Jim Crow South and continues to influence issues of race to this day.
Kept Out: ([link removed]) Reveal’s investigation into modern-day redlining found that 50 years after the federal Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in lending, African Americans and Latinos continue to be routinely denied conventional mortgage loans at rates far higher than their White counterparts.
Confederate monuments topple in Richmond, Virginia: ([link removed]) Photographer Brian Palmer has spent years documenting Confederate monuments. In this photo essay, he explores how the monuments construct a myth around the Confederacy – and what happens when the monuments fall.
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** Reveal Recommends
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Missa Perron leads Reveal’s membership program. Every time you donate, picture this face smiling.
Listening: I am inadvertently listening to “The History of Rome ([link removed]) “ because I live in a 400-square-foot cottage with someone who is listening to it. As for what I’m intentionally listening to, I love our friends over at Radio Ambulante ([link removed]) .
Reading: “The Warmth of Other Suns ([link removed]) ” by Isabel Wilkerson is helping fill in egregious gaps in my understanding of the history of the Great Migration.
Watching: I’ve been finding great comfort in the whimsy and imagination of Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli ([link removed]) classics like “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Ponyo” and “Spirited Away.”
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Do you have feedback for Reveal? Send it over! This newsletter was written by Sarah Mirk (mailto:
[email protected]?subject=Weekly%20Reveal%20feedback) , who will share your thoughts with the team.
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