I was surprised to see a story in the Seattle Times about evangelicals saying ‘we repent’ about racism, mainly because the writer isn’t known for her coverage of people of faith and the newspaper hasn’t exactly been burning the midnight oil on religion news.
Especially anything having to do with evangelicals.
So I was surprised to see how this story hit up a lot of the major players in the region on this issue. It’s as if someone in the newsroom discovered a long-disused Rolodex of religion sources and actually used it. In the five years I’ve lived here and been reading the Times regularly, I’ve never seen any of these folks — black or white — quoted before.
...
Northwest University, by the way, is affiliated with the Assemblies of God, which makes it Pentecostal as well as evangelical — an important distinction. Whereas there is some debate over whether the Assemblies of God is one of the more integrated of the American denominations, this RNS story says its younger members are extremely diverse — which fits with the movement’s history.
Not all groups that are identified as Pentecostal could be considered evangelical, Oneness Pentecostals, for instance (those that deny the doctrine of the Trinity) would "probably" never qualify as "evangelical", for instance, as the term has been historically or conventionally understood (unless we go with a very loose definition I heard from a German friend in my school days in which "evangelical" is anything that's not Lutheran and not Catholic but low church Protestant).
Duin mentions something that I've been thinking about, tracking as I have post-MHC shifts in the A29 and former Resurgence Training Center orbit:
Bellevue Pres, as the locals call it, is a huge evangelical crossroads. Bellevue, the home of Bill Gates, the world’s second-richest man, is very well-to-do and where a lot of the white flight from semi-socialist Seattle has gone.
While many churches often advocate social justice, white evangelicals are better known for opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. They consequently voted in overwhelming numbers for President Donald Trump even as he was giving succor to white nationalists by calling Mexican immigrants rapists. While evangelical churches and schools sometimes engaged in “racial reconciliation,” they did not generally offer searing indictments of racism or advance deep societal changes.
That second sentence is grossly unfair in that it implies that evangelicals approved of Trump’s rhetoric.
Many evangelicals didn’t vote for Trump because of his views on Mexicans; they voted for him because the alternative, Hillary Clinton, was (in their minds) worse. Tmatt has written about this again and again. Read both of those GetReligion posts.
I agree. It's been interesting to see African American pastors in the Acts 29 scene such as Eric Mason and Jevon Washington comment on the systemic problems associated with white racist policies. I've thought about blogging a little bit on that topic and haven't gotten around to it because music and musicology has been more the direction I've been writing.
I can think of an evangelical who did not vote for either Trump or Clinton, who thought Trump's nomination was in itself a disaster for the GOP and who also thought "I'm with her" was one of the most disastrously entitled and condescending campaign slogans of the last fifty years, not that anyone has to care who that evangelical is, but Duin's point is taken, lump sum takes on evangelicalism since 2016 have become too easy.
Duin highlights a point that jumps out in the Shapiro piece, women weren't quoted, and also points out that without religion beat reporters insightful articles on religion in the Puget Sound region remain, and will remain, rare.
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