Donald Trump's Losing White Evangelicals to Joe Biden

[WellPreserved]

One big difference in their priorities when voting is environmental protection.


In places like California, the environmental protection laws are extremely needed. The land would be ravaged without them and the air would be unbreathable. The animals live in filth and need people to stick up for them.

In places like Arkansas, many of those laws only hinder businesses that are typically much smaller (business wise, not land holdings) than farms in California, the animals can be grazing on open fields of grass instead of kept in small cages and fed only hay. The air is clean because there aren’t the same amount of humans grouped together in the same square mile, there isn’t an overflow of trash because there isn’t the same amount of people making the trash…



So in Arkansas, regardless of being a white evangelical, they don’t vote for more environmental protections, they vote for less.
In California, regardless of being a white evangelical, they vote for more environmental protections that are sometimes federally aimed.

Those chickens sure do need the wide open spaces and clean Arkansas air

I’m not even sure what the joke is here…

It’s squaring the image of a bucolic Arkansas with the fact that the largest agricultural commodity are broilers

[mommy_jules]

Those chickens sure do need the wide open spaces and clean Arkansas air

I’m not even sure what the joke is here…

It’s squaring the image of a bucolic Arkansas with the fact that the largest agricultural commodity are broilers

Owned by Big Poultry…

The poultry industry is the most concentrated sector in our food system, controlled by large corporations that rule the roost. The top four poultry firms in the U.S. – Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms – control nearly 60% of the market. That number indicates an extremely concentrated marketplace. To make matters worse, local markets are even more concentrated, which leaves most growers with only one or two companies to market to in their region.

https://www.farmaid.org/blog/fact-sheet ... -fairness/

[Slimshandy]

Those chickens sure do need the wide open spaces and clean Arkansas air

I’m not even sure what the joke is here…

It’s squaring the image of a bucolic Arkansas with the fact that the largest agricultural commodity are broilers

The animal most environmental advocates talk about having the largest effect on the environment is cows.
Farms raising cattle in California typically look different to a farm in Arkansas raising cattle.
Google “Arkansas Beef Farm” and click images.
Google “California Beef Farm” and click images.

You can laugh, joke, write off the actual worries of farmers as something you think are silly to even care about… but that won’t get you any closer to understanding a different point of view.

[WellPreserved]

I’m not even sure what the joke is here…

It’s squaring the image of a bucolic Arkansas with the fact that the largest agricultural commodity are broilers

The animal most environmental advocates talk about having the largest effect on the environment is cows.
Farms raising cattle in California typically look different to a farm in Arkansas raising cattle.
Google “Arkansas Beef Farm” and click images.
Google “California Beef Farm” and click images.

You can laugh, joke, write off the actual worries of farmers as something you think are silly to even care about… but that won’t get you any closer to understanding a different point of view.

I looked at images - about the same but variations in landscape and flora. Feedlots in Arkansas and California look about the same too. Here in Southwest Virginia, we have a similar cattle industry with most farm owners owning 50 or less head of cattle. We don’t have big feed lots here but we send cattle to Arkansas and Missouri which do. Environmentally feedlots are pretty bad but not nearly as bad as chicken farms.

[mommy_jules]

https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resour ... pollution/

https://www.cullmantribune.com/2019/06/ ... -lawsuits/

[Pjmm]

No makes perfect sense. That’s why I am asking y’all questions because I never heard of half of this stuff until Trump came along and I don’t have a lot of experience with predominantly white churches.

I have almost 60 years of "churchin'"!

I remember growing up every year was the "homecoming" service where most of the churches in my small town would gather together and have an all day service. Honestly, i hated the service (it was HOURS long) but gosh I loved the food! Currently, our minister is not allowed to sit at the table during the monthly Ecumenical meeting of community church leaders all because she's a woman and because the Episcopal church is seen as "the gay church" <sigh>.

Our Black evangelical church has been nothing but welcoming to me and my family (we're neighbors). Sure, my daughter got a side-eye from some of the women of the church when she introduced her "partner", lol. I'm not sure I would feel welcome in our local white evangelical churches despite having friends who I love who are white evangelicals.

I know I'm rambling but bottom line for me is that I've never seen such a division politically AND religiously in the US nor have I ever seen such a connection between religion and politics and it's really frightening to me. It used to be that a difference of beliefs would get you a side-eye from the church women. Now it's getting you threats and not just those of eternal damnation.

Oh my god. ME NEITHER. I was raised that nobody gets praised in church but God. They didn't even like other churches letting politicians come speak to the congregation during election time to get votes. I was shocked when I saw a local church choir singing MAGA and the pastor was obsessed with Trump. Everyone has different beliefs, but it has gotten to a dangerous extreme IMHO.

Maybe that's why Biden is picking up some white evangelists. My mother isn't an evangelist, but she's conservative and she hates Trump. While she's personally pro-life she doesn't agree with the extreme pro-life views of DeSantis and others. Politically speaking she's pro-choice with reservations. I consider myself agnostic but the idea some evangelists call Christ's teachings "weak" is absurd to me. Think what you want about Jesus he was tortured and died horrifically for what he preached. These aren't the teachings of a weak man. There has to be everyday Church goers and pastors out there who are disgusted by where the fanatical Christian right is going.

[mommy_jules]

I think people need to understand what evangelical means theologically and historically to understand what is going on here. Evangelical has a theological meaning but it is still rather broad definition spanning a plethora of denominations across the globe. So you are going to get a wide spectrum of varying beliefs from Presbyterian to Pentecostal to Baptist to Lutheran to non-denominational so on and so forth. At the same time evangelical has been a voting bloc for a long time, it has also been conflated with the Moral Majority, Christian Right, etc. so much so that it’s not only a theological term but a ideology, political term, etc. Since 2016, there has been outspoken evangelical opposition to Trump and Trumpism. It might not be on everyone’s radar, because if you aren’t part of this world then why do you care, right? and quite frankly they aren’t the loudest or shocking, so they probably are not that interesting. However, they are still there, and they’ve been consistent in speaking out, and they are getting the attention of those outside of their sphere and other evangelicals are listening as well. They still don’t have the ears of the majority because they’ve been branded as “wolves in sheep clothing”.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/ ... vangelical

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbe ... cal-heart/

Christians must take ownership and responsibility for their culture and society, and they cannot wash their hands of it. Furthermore, when the culture of their own making, evangelicalism, becomes an unruly child, they cannot simply disown and disinherit it, release it into the wild, and exonerate themselves of blame. Yet, some evangelical leaders have seemingly done so with the unruly child of evangelicalism, which has led us to the crisis of the evangelical heart.

Since the 2016 Presidential election cycle, we have seen increasing rhetoric from leading intellectual evangelical spokespersons that absolves themselves of responsibility for the problem child of evangelicalism, the Christian culture they had been tasked to steward. While many tactics have been employed to do this, a common one is to argue that the evangelical coalition has fractured and fragmented. The cultural fragments they perceive as unsightly are those parts that they jettison. These thinkers perceive themselves as remnant stewards of genuine true Christianity, a past cherished idea and vision that flourished for a time but is now diminishing in its influence. Rather than collaborating across the spectrum of evangelicals to cure its distemper, these folks have attempted to hold the ground at the center until they retreat into the safe ghettos of conservative, confessional affiliations.

[Della]

"Trump — despite being a thrice-married former New York developer, and despite his many legal entanglements — has long maintained strong support from Christian conservatives. According to a recent CBS News poll, Trump is winning the support of 77 percent of evangelical voters. Evangelicals have praised him for, among other things, appointing three conservative jurists to the Supreme Court, his outspoken support for Israel and his embracing of cultural battles."

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/1 ... p-00146170


Evangelicals are a conservative bloc of the Hispanic electorate that is “more involved than ever” in the elections, said evangelical Pastor Samuel Rodríguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), which touts itself as the largest Hispanic Christian organization worldwide with over 40,000 churches in the United States alone.

“Evangelical Latinos this year are going to vote like no other year," Rodríguez said. The security of the country and the economy, parental rights, the free expression of religion and the rights of Christians are the issues that are mobilizing them the most in this election cycle.

"In the U.S., around 10 million Hispanics identify as evangelical or Protestant and “approximately three in ten Hispanic Republicans (28%) consider themselves evangelical Protestants,” according to the most recent figures from the Pew Research Center."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/la ... rcna142735

[Della]

Those chickens sure do need the wide open spaces and clean Arkansas air

I’m not even sure what the joke is here…

It’s squaring the image of a bucolic Arkansas with the fact that the largest agricultural commodity are broilers

Speaking of Arkansas...

"I know a lot of folks with deep roots all over this state, and we live here because we love it here. But many of us are not doing well at all. We have major problems with respect to rural health care, education and economic growth. We rank poorly in all those categories. The cumulative result is de-evolutionary."

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024 ... ing-ground

[Slimshandy]

I’m not even sure what the joke is here…

It’s squaring the image of a bucolic Arkansas with the fact that the largest agricultural commodity are broilers

Speaking of Arkansas...

"I know a lot of folks with deep roots all over this state, and we live here because we love it here. But many of us are not doing well at all. We have major problems with respect to rural health care, education and economic growth. We rank poorly in all those categories. The cumulative result is de-evolutionary."

https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2024 ... ing-ground

This is exactly why Arkansans embraced “Make America Great Again”


You’re finally seeing.