So...I've been binging GMS videos lately. Very, VERY good channel. Very good work done. Very thought provoking as we can see from recent articles I've posted. And here's another I wanna do based on this video.
So...my own response is more focused on the broader evangelical movement, rather than just TP USA, as TP USA stems from that movement. I'm not gonna lie. The origins of the evangelical Christian movement are racist. There's a metric crapton of history I've learned since leaving about this and the link and origins of modern evangelical conservatism stemming from literal racism is pretty much common knowledge by this point.
I also dont deny that a lot of evangelicals even today are blatantly racist. Let's face it, they are.
BUT....I do wanna push back somewhat based on my own experiences. When I went to Christian school in the 2000s, I honestly had no idea about ANY of this. And quite frankly, these ideas were not taught to us this way. Quite frankly, the history I was taught seems a bit whitewashed, if you'll excuse the term, and revisionist, but the goals, as they were explained to me, was more about other social liberalism, and not about race. Their big issues were with engel v vitale, which established a precedent that enforced a stricter separation of church and state in government run institutions like schools, and with precedents like Roe v. Wade.
Maybe, back in the day, abortion wasnt the big issue. I dont deny that, but being born in the 1980s and not really exposed to this stuff until the 2000s (even my own home church was significantly more liberal and would probably fall more on the moderate/liberal side of the aisle, although this was never explicitly stated), this is how it was taught to me. Again, maybe it's revisionist, but yeah.
Everyone in my school would vehemently deny being racist. If anything, racism was a secular position, stemming from darwinism and pseudoscience related to that. We were taught hitler was an atheist and a socialist, that the communists were atheists, and atheism was the source of much evil in the modern world. Rather, humans were made in the image of god, and skin color doesnt matter. We had black students in my school, latino students, asian students, etc. It was pretty well integrated, even if majority white.
I will admit, there were undercurrents of more latent racism, as was common with these politics. My own family at the time was pretty anti immigration and had...relatively trumpy views. Even they didn't accept like hardcore biological racism, it was more a cultural thing. And that's how it was viewed in school too. Like there would be the talk of black fathers mentioned in the video. There really is the idea that a lot of minorities dont really practice christian morals and their lives would be better if they did. That Johnson welfare policies enabled this stuff by giving people money to live sinful lifestyles in the name of compassion, blah blah blah. They were obviously big on the protestant work ethic, the nuclear family, and while these are very white coded things, they were framed as being God's law to apply to all humans.
They made active attempts to evangelize to tribes in the third world. They seemed to focus on them because they believed that for the end times to happen, they had to make Jesus known to the whole world. Like, yeah, there were evangelistic efforts made to like secular europe too, but they already know jesus and are harder to persuade. They seemed interested in preaching to the third world, even when dangerous. Like ya know rambo 4 and the missionaries? Yeah, that was my school's evangelism in a nutshell. of course people should reach out to people in their own lives as well, like we should preach to everyone, but yeah, I literally had classmates whose families did missionary work overseas. And they seemed more successful than GMS's video on this seems to indicate, of course they probably showed only the successes and none of the failures.
With all of this said, I don't deny the movement's origins in racism, or even that a lot of people still believe it. But it is dog whistle politics, and not everyone hears that dog whistle. Especially us younger generations. I just really want to emphasize this. Like there is a bit of nuance in these communities that I feel like these videos miss. The conservative movement is racist, but it also has non racists in it too, or people who have latent racist views more akin to archie bunker or carlos mencia, rather than like, hard line grand wizard of KKK stuff. Ya know? It's kinda why I underestimated the threat when trump became popular. I was like, come on, sure they have some racist and xenophobic views but they arent like that far gone...right?....right?
....Fudge.
But seriously, I honestly thought the white supremacist stuff was like a tiny minority of the community. Even when studying the white nationalist movements in college in that class on terrorism I took, I still thought, okay, but this is just a couple percent of the population, right?
It's honestly taken me well into the trump era, to kinda realize the problem is as bad and pervasive as the left acts like it is. I guess charlottesville was the first inkling, and I started noticing it a bit more than more as rhetoric escalated during trump's first term, but I didn't realize these guys were THIS psycho and dangerous until like January 6th. I mean, I knew that they wanted to implement abortion restrictions and deport illegal immigrants, but I thought the institutional core of the GOP wasnt this extreme, and that even if there are some crazy people out there, not all of them, or even most of them are this bad. And I honestly thought, in the 2010s, they were losing power, and that if Trump won in 2016, he would basically just end up destroying the GOP so bad it would be the end of their generational coalition. There's still hope the second term can do that, but yeah, we're basically at the gates of hell right now and in danger of descending into fascism before americans reach a tipping point to reject and abandon this stuff for good.
So yeah. I just wanted to say that. Especially as my 20th reunion for high school is coming up. I dont plan on going, but I did think about how things would go if I did. And I do wanna acknowledge that I dont honestly think that anyone from my class are bad people. Even if I think that many of them are horribly misguided, I understand that they mean well. And I do wanna make that clear. You can be brainwashed AF and still be somewhat of a good person. It's only when these ideas are imposed on others that I really have a problem with them. People keep that stuff in their own communities of voluntary participants and it's just...whatever. I just dont want that stuff to be the blueprint for governance in this country. And that's why I come out swinging so hard against that stuff.
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