An Interview with Dr. Marcia Pally, author of White Evangelicals and Right-Wing Populism: How Did We Get Here?

Today, I’m bringing you an interview I conducted with Dr. Marcia Pally, about her new book, White Evangelicals and Right-Wing Populism: How Did We Get Here?. Dr. Pally teaches at New York University, at Fordham University, and held the Mercator Guest Professorship in the theology department at Humboldt University-Berlin, where she is an annual guest professor.

It’s an insightful book that gets to the heart of these issues, continuing to pull back the curtain on the relationship between white evangelicals, Trump, and right-wing populism. Here’s what sociologist Philip Gorski had to say about Pally’s book:

"Trumpism and evangelicalism might seem like strange bed fellows. But Pally shows it’s a match made in heaven. Far from a mere marriage of convenience, the confluence of right-wing populism and conservative evangelicalism is a matter of cultural and political affinities with deep roots in American history."
--Philip Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, Yale University

[Note: I’ve edited this interview for length and clarity.]

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RJ: How do we see the interaction between white evangelical Protestants and Right-wing populism today?

MP: Right-wing populism and the white evangelical role in it is right in front of us in recent national news. Most recently, the House hearings on the January 6th Capitol Building riot have highlighted the planned, intended violence and the conflation of Christianity with a right-wing political agenda. Signs at the riot blared, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.”

The central populist strategy has been to target an allegedly corrupt government and cast those who disagree with a right-wing agenda connected to that allegation as "outsiders." But the question is: Why is populism persuasive to these white conservative Christians?

RJ: Was there a definitive historical milestone that placed white evangelicals on this path, or were there fundamental attributes of white evangelical culture that made this populist turn nearly inevitable?

MP: Let’s begin with what populism is: a response to way-of-life status loss and economic duresses that offers solutions via “us-them” frameworks. These frameworks identify “us” and “them” by drawing from historical and cultural notions of society (who’s in, who’s out) and government (its proper size and role). In the US., the traditional “thems” since the colonial era have been a national government (versus state and local government) and “outsiders,” framed particularly as minorities and new immigrants.

Some of the evangelical duress is what other Americans face: underemployment, rapid changes in technology, gender roles and demographics, and fear of status loss or downward mobility. But there are anxieties particular to white evangelicals--as you’ve described it in your own writing, a “visceral sense of the loss of cultural dominance”—as they see themselves more and more distant from an increasingly multicultural, socially liberal society.

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Some of this is real. White evangelicals have declined from 23 percent of the population in 2006 to 14 percent today. Their median age is 56, making it the oldest major religious group in the country. More than 1.1 million have left the Southern Baptist Convention in the last three years. And it translates to a sense of persecution: In 2020, PRRI found that 66 percent of white evangelicals felt that Christians face “a lot” of discrimination.

Called “dominant group victimhood,” these reactions are often sharpest for middle status groups whose position in society has become less secure. This sort of duress also fuels “us-them” thinking. The usual focus on one’s own group shifts self-protectively to constraining an “other” thought to be the source of duress. “The more stressful the situation,” psychiatrist Vamik Volkan writes, “the more neighbor groups become preoccupied with each other.”

Under accumulating stresses, white evangelical historical and theological commitments to community have been distorted by an “us-them” shift—from community to my-community-against-“outsiders.” The walloping irony of populism is that the very anti-authoritarianism and community building that contributed much to American vibrancy and that are bequeathed to evangelicals by history and doctrine may under distress turn to an exclusionary, us-them defense.

As you’ve documented in White Too Long and in your research at PRRI, white evangelicals score high on nativism and racism.

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It’s a common response to duress and often tragic. The solutions found in us-them shifts are based on the distortions that duress itself prods. And no good solutions come from this cycle. The original duresses remain, ultimately harming the distressed communities and to prodding new rounds of us-them anger.

RJ: At the end of your book, you also point to white evangelicals who have not joined the ranks of right-wing populists. What is distinctive about this group compared to the vast majority of white evangelical Protestants? How have they taken a different fork in the road?

MP: In short, it’s captured in what many have called “kingdom ethics” or what ethicist David Gushee calls “Christian humanism.” This approach emphasizes engagement with “the common human intellectual enterprise” (science, history, etc.); understanding Christianity as “for humans (and the creation), not mainly about protecting Christian doctrinal purity, ideology, or the church’s self-interest”; critical distance from earthly powers; a priority for the poor, and acknowledgment that Jesus held women as his close followers. Practically speaking, this worldview entails a critique of “small-government” neglect of the needy and of white evangelical adhesion to the political right.

In my chapter on white evangelicals not on the right, I discuss their effort to support Obama in 2008 and stop Trump in 2016 and 2020 through organizations like Not Our Faith, Christians Against Christian Nationalism, and Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden, founded by Jerushah Duford, Billy Graham’s granddaughter. I look at work done by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, We Vote Values, and by women like Beth Moore, Jen Hatmaker, and Beth Allison Barr who combat racism and sexism in the church. And I look at evangelicals who since the 1970s have been working for Christian hospitality, inclusion, opportunity for the needy, and environmental protection.

The subtitle of my book is “How Did We Get Here.” We can’t address white evangelical politics until we understand its roots. That’s where its tenacity and power lie.