JOURNAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE最新文献

Two decades ago, in the years on either side of the turn of the millennium, American evangelical culture (i.e., White evangelical culture) was at the apex of its cultural influence and demographic reach, and a certain sense of immanent Apocalypse or victorious revelation of a righteous new order was in the air. There was a sense that America had badly lost its way and that people of faith were being persecuted in this society now under the spell of secular humanism, but that revival was happening and the tide was turning. Since the 1970s, the evangelical subculture had coalesced within a coherent mediasphere that reflected the world back to them in the image of their faith, huge church complexes had sprouted up across suburbia, the Christian Right had given the silent majority a powerful political voice, and sophisticated parachurch organizations such as Focus on the Family were shaping public discourse around key moral ideas. Evangelical girls were embracing their God-given purity, evangelical men were discovering the divine truth of their wild-at-heart masculinity and evangelicals young and old were reveling in thrillers that dramatized the sense that the end of days was at hand and ultimate victory was imminent. A contract with America had been forged to return the nation to its truth, an evangelical president was in the White House leading a crusade against savage infidels who hated America for its freedom, and a Joshua Generation of homeschooled evangelical children had begun to emerge, to finish the blessed reconquest of their nation.

But over the past two decades, that sweet sense of immanent political, cultural, and eschatological triumph has soured. Geopolitical crusades bogged down, purity culture femininity and heroic Christian masculinity collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions in a changing culture, and instead of carrying the banner of cultural conquest the younger generation of White evangelicals have increasingly questioned their elders' priorities and the church itself. The narrative of national decline and evangelical resistance in the face of persecution and oppression had been powerfully mobilizing during the period when it was easy to believe that the decline would soon be reversed, but it acquired a different valence in the period when the dream of the restoration of a White Christian America started to seem less and less possible, at least within the framework of democratic politics and existing institutions. In the wake of America's first Black President, homosexual marriage becoming law of the land, the #MeToo, #ChurchToo, and Black Lives Matter movements, as well as the ascension of Donald Trump, members of the social and political formation Robert Jones calls “White Christian America” increasingly articulated their anxieties around declining influence in new formations of politicized faith structured not around church basement prayer groups, but around Fox News and Facebook, YouTube, Gab, Parler,

The American political Right's coalescence in the late 2010s and early 2020s around opposition to “wokeness”—especially in the form of what it understands as “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” (CRT/I)—is well known. Less well known is the story of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) aligning with the political Right in late 2020, turning away from its more measured response to CRT/I the year prior. This article will explore theological–traditional sources for anti-CRT/I activism in the SBC's Right wing, focusing particularly on how “Evangelical Worldview Theory” (EWT) provides a rhetorical structure that delegitimates critical theories that rely on the historical analysis of structural aspects of social phenomena such as race.

Since the late 2010s, the political Right in the United States has been forecasting apocalypse if CRT/I are allowed to form the “worldview” of public-school children. Parts of this story are well documented. In 2020, protests erupted over George Floyd's death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, the latest of several similar fatalities across America. These focused popular attention on critical questions of race and state authority. In response, many institutions, public and ecclesial, offered or required antiracism training as part of initiatives to increase awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI. Parts of the training that were designed to interrogate “Whiteness,” in particular, left some participants feeling alienated. The COVID-necessitated online modality of this training allowed those alienated to extract charged sound bites that were then exhibited in the Right-wing mediasphere as evidence of the nefarious anti-White true agenda of DEI training. Right-wing political activist Christopher Rufo was the most effective promulgator of DEI disinformation. He used Freedom of Information Act requests and an online tip line to gather this kind of decontextualized “evidence” and distributed his “findings” in sensationalized online news articles (Wallace-Wells, 2021). He appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show in September 2020, calling on then-President Trump to end race-conscious training within federal agencies. By month's end, Rufo was consulting on executive orders shutting down DEI training in federal agencies (2020a, Executive Order 13950) and commissioning a group to respond to “revisionist” versions of American history that had foregrounded evidence of pervasive and longstanding systemic racism in American society (2020b, Executive Order 13958). That fall, Google searches for CRT spiked for the first time.¹ In a 2021 interview, Rufo described the phrase's rhetorical power: “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, t