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Young Americans Leaving Church Over MAGA Ideology And Christian Nationalism

Young Americans Leaving Church Over MAGA Ideology And Christian Nationalism

In polls conducted in 2015 and 2022, the Barna Group asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: "It is becoming harder to find mature young Christians who want to become pastors."

In 2015, 69 percent agreed either "strongly" or "somewhat." In 2022, the number had increased to 75 percent.

Blogger Hemant Mehta analyzes these figures in a column published on his Friendly Atheist blog on September 8. And he cites far-right Christian nationalism and the MAGA movement as key reasons why so many young Americans have no desire to become pastors.

"It doesn't help that the most pressing social issues of our time put conservative Christians on the wrong side of the moral divide — to the point where even younger Christians often disagree with what their churches teach," Mehta argues. "Thirty-eight percent of white evangelicals under 35 support abortion rights compared to 16 percent of those over 65. Younger evangelicals are more likely to support marriage equality. In 2020, younger white evangelicals were less likely than their parents and grandparents to support Donald Trump and Republicans in general."

Mehta continues, "If older pastors are worried about politics dominating their churches, why would younger potential pastors want to run churches made up largely of MAGA cultists? Many of the most devout younger Christians can't even bring themselves to attend churches, much less consider managing them. Why would anyone growing up in a culture where white evangelical cruelty is the GOP's entire platform, and sexual abuse is routinely swept under the rug, and women are treated as second-class citizens, and immigrants are seen as disposable, want the stigma of pastoring a Christian church?"

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Christian

Why 'Christian' Nationalists Plan To Destroy The Federal Civil Service

Mainstream media outlets are ignoring Christian nationalism’s central role in a new conservative operation to ensure that a future Republican president implements “Schedule F,” a radical plan to eliminate job protections for federal workers who don’t share an extreme, right-wing ideology.

If successful, the effort could convert up to 20,000 career federal staff positions into political appointments, which usually top out at around 4,000, effectively gutting agencies of experts with decades of institutional knowledge. The order could theoretically expand to make hundreds of thousands of federal workers with union protections into at-will employees. That kind of “rightward move on the federal civil service is unheard of among Western democracies, and has only really reappeared as a policy goal in states with recent authoritarian backsliding, such as Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orban’s Hungary,” according to GovExec.

The man behind the push to make Schedule F a fait accompli under the next Republican president is Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and the founder of MAGA-aligned think tank the Center for Renewing America. Vought served as head of the Office of Management and Budget under former President Donald Trump, and oversaw a brief rollout of Schedule F in the final weeks of the administration.

As Media Matters has previously reported, Vought explicitly wants to draft an “army” of conservative activists with a “Biblical worldview” to staff the federal bureaucracy under the next Republican administration. Last September, Vought agreed with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s suggestion that there should be “ideological purity tests” to serve in the federal workforce, a position Trump has now adopted as well.

Vought also advocated for changes to congressional rules to target individual civil servants, potentially removing their funding or firing them, further demonstrating his desire to purge career staffers who don’t share his views. He is also advising House Republicans in the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, hoping to use the threat of default to slash funding for anti-poverty programs and add new work requirements to Medicaid.

Within the last several days, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News each covered aspects of this behind-the-scenes campaign, but omitted crucial details about Vought’s extreme ideology and the stakes of this looming fight. Although all three stories provided some valuable insights into Vought’s efforts, none included his open embrace of Christian nationalism in their coverage.

On April 20, the Timeswrote about conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation’s efforts to create a massive database of potential applicants to staff the next Republican-led executive branch, dubbed Project 2025. Vought’s think tank is one of Heritage’s partners, and he’s mentioned although not quoted at the end of the piece. (Vought was previously vice president at Heritage Action for America, the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm.)

The Times’ headline and subhead significantly downplayed the ambitions animating Project 2025.

Like the subheading, the body of the story analogizes the effort to a “right-wing LinkedIn,” and focuses on the difficulties of creating a single database that could satisfy the various potential Republican primary winners.

To the Times’ credit, the story eventually lays out the stakes of Schedule F, though not until the 11th and subsequent paragraphs.

Typically, a new president is allowed to replace around 4,000 “political appointees” — a revolving layer that sits atop the federal work force. Below the political layer lies a long-term work force of more than two million, who have strong employment protections meant to make it harder for a new president of a different political party to fire them. These protections, enshrined in law, established a civil service that is supposed to be apolitical — with federal officials accumulating subject matter and institutional expertise over long careers in the service of both Republican and Democratic presidents.

Mr. Trump wants to demolish that career civil service — or what he pejoratively calls “the deep state.” He has privately told allies that if he gets back into power he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 government officials that presidents are typically allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instrument in hand.

The Times then mentions Vought in its closing paragraphs, and although the piece describes him as working to “gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration,” it omits any mention of his theocratic views.

The Washington Post, similarly, offered some valuable contributions in its recent coverage of Trump and Vought’s emerging scheme. The Post’s April 21 headline warns of Trump’s “authoritarian vision for second term,” clearly foregrounding the gravity of the situation in a way the Times’ headline failed to do.

The piece also includes criticism from good government experts on the dangers of Schedule F, though it doesn’t mention that term specifically.

Some of Trump’s proposals for overhauling the merit-based civil service would require congressional action. The result could be to undermine the ability of professional public servants to reliably deliver government services without political interference, warned Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports federal workforce development.

“He is proposing changes that would create the world that he is objecting to,” Stier said. “It does have real-time consequences in terms of undermining public trust in our government. That’s a real problem because trust in government is a core part of our democracy.”

The article quotes Vought and mentions CRA, but, like the Times’ piece, doesn’t include mention of his Christian nationalist beliefs. Instead, readers learn about Vought’s sense of his own centrality in the larger movement.

“I guarantee the stuff we’re putting forward is not going to get thrown in the trash,” said Vought, who contributed the transition project’s chapter on exercising authority through the Executive Office of the President, akin to a playbook for a White House chief of staff. Some of Vought’s ideas have found their way into Trump’s proposals, such as a recent announcement on bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission under White House supervision.

“There’s a glove of power needed to beat back the administrative state or deep state,” he said, “and if you’re not willing to put your hand in that glove you will fail, regardless of how much credibility you have with the base.”

The piece has much to recommend it as a big-picture overview of Trump’s goals for a second term, but readers would immensely benefit from a clearer understanding of Vought’s ideology, not just his proximity to power.

Like the Times and the Post, NBC’s coverage of this topic had some strong aspects to it. Both the headline and the subheading of NBC’s April 26 piece makes clear that this is a labor protection story in addition to a story about overseeing policy.

NBC also quotes Max Stier, the good government expert cited by the Post. But Vought is the centerpiece.

“I think Schedule F is basically doctrine now on the right,” said Russ Vought, an architect of Schedule F when he was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. “So I think one that sits in that position does not have an ability to not do this, not unlike any other governing philosophy” widely embraced by conservatives.

“Schedule F is getting to the point where I cannot see anyone who runs on the Republican side who doesn’t put this into play,” Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank, continued.

Vought’s analysis may very well be accurate, which makes it all the more important for readers to understand his overt ideology and stated goals. Instead, all of the relevant context is outsourced to Stier, and Vought’s Christian nationalism again went unmentioned.

Although Vought speaks of reining in the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy, the reality is that his goal is to unleash the power of the federal government against his enemies. Christian nationalism is incompatible with secular, multicultural democracy, and any coverage of Schedule F needs to make that clear.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Republican 'Mom' Protects Kids, Unless They're Poor Enough For Factory Work

To hear her tell it, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is among the world’s biggest Christians, although her definition might differ from yours or mine. Also, a world-class “mom,” to use the word she employs almost as frequently to describe herself.

“Just folks,” as we say down South.

So recently, Ma Sanders signed a law voiding restrictions on factory jobs for 14- and 15-year-old children. “The Youth Hiring Act of 2023,” they called it. No longer do ninth-graders need a certificate from the Division of Labor to work in paper mills, slaughterhouses or chicken-processing plants. Indeed, the state no longer has to verify the ages of job applicants at all.

“The governor believes protecting kids is most important,” Sanders’ office told NPR, “but this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.”

What palpable nonsense. Needless to say, none of the three children residing in the Arkansas governor’s mansion will be working the night shift at your friendly neighborhood abattoir and coming home missing fingers or with animal blood in their hair.

This isn’t about the white, suburban kids Sanders gathers around her for photo ops. She recently signed a bill funneling state money to private school vouchers, surrounded by a crowd of children without a single Black or brown face in evidence, lest anybody fail to get the message.

Local enthusiasm for the youth hiring bill has been muted. An official with the Diocese of Little Rock told the Arkansas Catholic that the old law had been anything but onerous; it was a simple one-page application filed by employers and signed by parents or guardians.“

The work certificate,” he explained, “provided some safeguards for these minors by requiring proof of age, a description of the work and work schedule, and written consent of the parent or guardian.”

The Catholic Church is concerned partly because of Pope Francis’ oft-stated concern for the exploitation of children, and because those most affected by the new law will be immigrants from Central America — and mostly Catholics. Many have migrated north on their own and are sending money home to El Salvador and Honduras.

Even local business organizations displayed little interest in repealing worker protections. “A solution looking for a problem,” is how the president of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce described it.

Indeed, the law’s sponsor told Arkansas Business that its impetus came not from local businesses but from an outfit called the Foundation for Government Accountability, a “think tank” located — naturally enough — in Florida. Nor is Arkansas leading the pack in rolling back child labor laws to the New Deal era. Republican-led legislatures across the Midwest are dialing back workplace regulations even as the Biden administration seeks to enforce federal standards.

Minnesota would let 16-year-olds work in the construction trades. Iowa would not only let 14-year-olds work in meat-packing plants, but would shield employers from responsibility if they got hurt or even died on the job.

It’s not just southern and midwestern red states, either. An extensive, eye-opening report by Hannah Dreier of The New York Times documented what she called “a new economy of exploitation.”

“Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers,” Dreier writes, “are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country ... This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.”

Nor are these violations occurring only in remote, rural places: “The Times found child labor in the American supply chains of many major brands and retailers ... including Ford, General Motors, J. Crew and Walmart, as well as their suppliers.”

Teenagers may not work as efficiently as adults, and they get injured at much higher rates. But non-English speakers desperate to make their way will work for next to nothing. Easily bullied and sexually exploited, they won’t be joining labor unions, either, which contributes to keeping wages down and working conditions poor for adult employees, too.

Don’t like it here? You can be replaced by somebody who’s 14.

So, we regress, as the Sarah Huckabee Sanderses of the world “protect” children from drag queens, critical race theory and other largely chimerical threats in the name of “liberty.”

In his Esquire blog, Charles Pierce summed it all up in the words of Nebraska social worker Grace Abbott, testifying in 1938:

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.”

Backward into the future we go.

Reprinted with permission from Suntimes.