The hierarchy of evils among White American evangelicals used to be something like this:
- Commies
- Racial integration (tie for first place)
- Rock and Roll, dancing, fun in general (remember, music inspired by Negro music is the Devil’s music, so Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, etc are all horribly evil)
- Evolutionists, Papists, and others striking at the foundation of good morals and right thinking.
- All other sinners, including sexual sinners.
As rock and roll took over the music landscape of White America in the 50’s and 60’s, this led to the creation of a White evangelical subculture, with its own record companies, its own book stores, and its own very carefully sanitized music. People living inside the subculture quickly learned that they had to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length if they wanted their children to grow up to be good little evangelicals just like their parents. Being evangelical meant you were against fun and good music and did not approve of sciencey things, but it didn’t have much relevance to your politics, and evangelicals did not look to their pastor to tell them how to vote.
Enter the late 60’s- early 70’s and the sea change where the Democratic party (formerly the party of the White South as well as of labour unions and the less well off) decided to tie its fate to civil rights and legal equality for all Americans regardless of race. Suddenly it became very relevant to a lot of evangelicals what party you voted for. And around the same time, a small group of popular evangelical preachers and opinion influencers started telling their flocks all about all the evil things in the world they should be scared of. A list of evil things that started looking rather like anything and everything the Democratic party stood for.
The new list of sinners started to look like:
- Baby Murderers
- Satanists
- Perverts
Womenselfish sluts who use birth control, work outside the home, and/or don’t act like doormats to the men in their lives.- Commies, leftists, and liberals in general
As immortalized in the following quote spoken by Pat Robertson:
“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
(Being against integration and being OK with racism was still in there and still fairly high on the list, but nobody talked about them anymore except in dog whistle form.)
Things did not go quite as planned - the world supply of commies suddenly imploded, and the satanic cults that were supposed to be everywhere, busily murdering babies and having perverted sex with children in day care centres, failed to have any credible evidence for their existence. Which left the sinners list with, basically, liberals, feminist baby murderers, and queers (and, written in invisible ink, integration and equality for non whites).
Note that the new sinner list is defined in terms of people or groups that White evangelicals are supposed to hate and fear. It’s first and foremost about getting your TV viewing or newsletter reading flock upset and angry and riled up, then telling them that their financial and political support will help fight against these evils, provided they stay inside the bubble, listen to the right sermons, and donate to the correct (and always Right) preachers and causes and politicians. Gays have kindly continued to have parades every year, which the televangelists and the newsletter money raisers turn into an annual Two Minutes Hate, guaranteed to bring in lots of donations. Women continue to wear shoes (and hold down jobs!) and abortion clinics continue to provide services to women who don’t want to be pregnant, and that again gets turned into a Two Minutes Hate. Muslims in America tend to not be out, loud, and proud, especially not in the areas that are the backbone of the white evangelical community, so while evangelicals definitely hate them, they don’t hate them with a Two Minutes Hate level of insanity.
Today, after decades of being told that God wanted them to vote Republican because Democrats are in favour of all kinds of Horrible Evil, we have the current state of affairs. As long as you toe the party line vis a vis abortion and the horrid threat posed to all good things by the existence of Teh Gay, you get a pass on all kinds of other illegal, unethical, and immoral behaviour (poster child: Trump himself). Even the horrors of Islam pales in comparison to the evils of Baby Murder and teh Gay. Fail to condemn both of those thoroughly enough and you can get booted out of the subcultural bubble in jig time. Normally, nothing else will get you expelled, although failing to be right wing enough (say, by actually ministering to the poor) might cause your anti-gay and anti-baby killing membership cards to be scrutinized very carefully.
