Chapter Four: "The Right-Wing Populist Solution: Hunting Where the Ducks Are" (pp. 52-67);
Chapter Five: "Right-Wing Populism and White Evangelicals: Not Unifactorial, Not a Faustian Bargain" (pp. 68-72);
Chapter Six: "The Militarization of God, Manhood, and Politics: A Century in the Making" (pp. 73-93);
Chapter Seven: "White Evangelicals and Minorities: 'God Was the Original Segregationist'" (pp. 94-102);
Chapter Eight: White Evangelicals Not in the Ranks of the Right" (pp. 103-129);
"Concluding Thought" (pp. 130-135);
"Index" (pp. 136-140).
Now, in Pally's Chapter Three: "The American and Evangelical Duress" (pp. 42-51) in her 2022 book, she candidly says, "White evangelicals have decreased as a share of the population, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent in 2020 [when President Trump lost the election - thereby presumably enhancing the white evangelical sense of duress]. The median age of evangelicals is 56, making it the most aged religious group in America. '"A real visceral sense,' Robert Jones notes, "of loss of cultural dominance" has set in.' In 2020, 66 percent of white evangelicals felt that Christians face 'a lot' of discrimination in America" (p. 45).
Robert Jones is the author of the book The End of White Christian America (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
For further reading about white evangelicals, see Frances Fitzgerald's book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster, 2017).
Now, us-them contrasts, while sharply defined as contrasts, tend to be somewhat flexible in their uses. In Pally's Chapter Seven: "White Evangelicals and Minorities: 'God Was the Original Segregationist'" (pp. 94-102) in her 2022 book, she says, "Historically and today, white evangelical wariness has identified not only African-Americans as 'outsiders' [i.e., as outside their in-group], but the longstanding 'other' of refugees and new immigrants [in the United States]. In the nineteenth century, these included the Irish and other Catholics, the Chinese, those from southern and eastern Europe, Jews, Japanese, and Mexicans. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the focus has been on those from Latin America, Asia, and Muslim-dominated countries. Starting with the 1990 Gulf War, the identification of Islam (rather than Islamist extremism) as an agent of terrorism appeared in the preaching and politics of white evangelical leaders such as James Dobson, Oliver North, and Ted Haggard, founder of the influential New Life Church in Colorado Springs" (p. 98).
Now, in Pally's Chapter Eight: "White Evangelicals Not in the Ranks of the Right" in her 2022 book, she says, "At the time of the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, Ed Stetzer, professor at the Christian Wheaton College, condemned the riot and called for an evangelical 'reckoning': 'How did we get here? . . . A big part of this evangelical reckoning is a lot of people sold out their beliefs'" (p. 105; the ellipsis here is in Pally's text; Pally is quoting what Stetzer said in Rachel Martin's National Public Radio broadcast on January 13, 2021, titled "How Did We Get Here? A Call for an Evangelical Reckoning on Trump"). Pally borrows Stetzer's question as the subtitle of her 2022 book.
Now, because the us-them contrast that characterizes Trump's rhetoric tends to be used universally in American politics, I want to step back from American politics and discuss us-them contrasts in broader terms.
In the book Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (A Michael Glazer Book/ Liturgical Press, 2000), the American Jesuit theologian Donald L. Gelpi (1934-2011; Ph. D. in philosophy, Fordham University, 1970) contrasts the either/or dialectical imagination of American Protestantism with the both/and spirit of Roman Catholicism. Whatever else may be said about the both/and spirit of Roman Catholicism, the both/and spirit clearly would not lend itself for use by those in American politics today.
However, in Gelpi's extensive characterization of the either/or dialectical imagination (pp. 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224, 280, 281, and 282), he does not refer to Harvard's Perry Miller's extensive discussion of the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) in his massively researched book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1939; for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]). To the best of his ability, Miller (1905-1963) explained Ramus and Ramist logic. However, Miller ended up calling for someone to undertake a more thorough account of Ramus and Ramist logic.
Ramist logic had dominated the curriculum of Harvard College, which was founded in 1636 - and it had also dominated the curriculum at Cambridge University in England. When the 300th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College was approaching, scholars rediscovered Ramus and Ramist logic.
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