Even though Roy Moore hasn’t yet conceded the Senatorial election in Alabama, the results are pretty clear. He lost. Even President Trump, his biggest cheerleader in the last couple of weeks, has congratulated his opponent, Doug Jones, on his hard-fought victory.
Now the analysis cycle is in full motion. The women’s vote was key – it was the mirror opposite of the men’s vote, but more women voted than men. Democrats are emphasizing the historic nature of the election. It’s been a quarter century since any Democrat has won statewide office, and an aggregate of polls still had Moore leading right up until Election Day. Republicans, on the other hand, are taking the “nothing to see here” approach, insisting that the unique circumstances of this election make it impossible to draw any conclusions about larger trends.
There is a critical aspect of this election that is under-appreciated by the secular media. Alabama is one of the most churched states in the country, and Roy Moore ran aggressively as a champion of conservative Christian values. His campaign rallies were like revival meetings. He regularly invoked the name of God and called on Alabamians to “stand up for the Lord” by voting for him. He deflected charges of sexual molestation earlier in his life by characterizing them as veiled attacks on his faith. His campaign was presented as a crusade of good against evil, a courageous effort to fight back against the persecution of the Christian faith. The reason he hasn’t yet conceded is because he must “wait on God,” as he told supporters last night. I guess he means that the apparent result of the election is only a temptation not to put our trust in God, who will eventually intervene to see that his favored candidate, Mr. Moore, wins.
Moore framed this election as a referendum on Christianity. To his great surprise, I’m sure, a bi-partisan coalition of Christians banded together to repudiate him and elect Jones.
Leading this coalition were African-American Christians. Blacks make up 26% of the population in Alabama, but accounted for 30% of the electorate on Tuesday. The “Black Belt,” a string of contiguous counties running east to west across the middle of the state, always goes Democrat, but in this election, they ran up huge lopsided margins and historically high vote totals. (More blacks in Alabama voted for Jones than for Barack Obama.)
Black churches were energized in this election, but not so much for Doug Jones, a fairly unremarkable candidate who didn’t relate any better to black communities than most other white politicians. They were energized by the debate over the nature of the Christian faith. Pastor Mike McBride summed it up this way: “All these evangelicals who claim to have a corner on Jesus – the black church stood up and said that the true Jesus of liberation and justice will always overpower the Jesus of dominance and racial hierarchy and division.” Those are not just liberal talking points. They speak to the heavy history of Christianity in the Deep South.
White Southern evangelicalism is rooted in the defense of slavery as a God-ordained institution. It has traditionally emphasized a hierarchical view of human relationships. Led by the Southern Baptist Convention, white Southern evangelicals have publicly repented of their collective sin of racism, but have continued to press a patriarchal theology of marriage and family and a nationalistic approach to politics that rejects multiculturalism and discriminates in subtle ways against people of color.
Moore represented a cartoonish version of this tradition and brought its worst characteristics into the full light of day. He basically challenged all Alabamians to declare their loyalty. He got a referendum on Christianity, but not the way he wanted. It was not a vote for or against the Christian faith, but on what Christianity represents.
The heavy turnout among black Christians was buttressed by a significant number of white Christians (many of whom are rock-rib Republicans) who simply refused to endorse Moore’s misogynistic, racist, paternalistic version of their faith. The razor-thin margin shows that Alabama is divided, but that’s not all bad. We now know that a Deep South state like Alabama can’t be painted with one broad-brush stroke. For one thing, the black church has a loud voice. For another, black Christians, as they have done before, became the conscience of Christians across the state who refused to sacrifice principle for the sake of power.
Might something similar be happening elsewhere in America? The national media still regularly make the mistake of using the term “Christian” to apply to one version of Christianity that has developed a lot of political muscle in the last 40 years. But today, that expression of the faith is losing its position of dominance. Its share of the population has declined precipitously in the last decade. And now, other Christian voices are being taken seriously. Even within the conservative evangelical world, young men and women are raising hard questions about why their parents have ignored – or even contributed to – social injustices while allowing Christianity to be nakedly identified with one political party.
I wouldn’t say yesterday’s election is a “turning point.” But I do wonder if it was a moment within a larger “turning” of American Christianity. A kind of cleansing (or reckoning, depending on your point of view) is happening. Roy Moore says we should “wait on God.” I don’t disagree. “Waiting” is, after all, one of the watchwords of the Advent season. But what we are waiting for is bigger than any election. We may, in fact, be passing through the first stages of a complete transformation of the church that will not be at all to Moore’s liking.
©2017 by J. Mark Lawson
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