Evangelism

Reading this expose of a Baptist cogregation in a small Alabama town, it's hard to know exactly where to draw a line between the ignorance and bigotry stated by the congregants and their devotion to a literal intepretation of the Bible.  It's a fundamental way of seeing the world in a starkly literal way.  Their descriptions of heaven and hell and essentially childish and simplistic, lacking any theological dimension beyond, "I'm saved and whatever problems I have, everything will be as I want them to be once I die in the blood of the Lamb."

Once you've committed to one type of blind faith, why not another?  Why not believe that Donald Trump is an agent sent from God, like Saul/Paul?  Why not believe that he honestly does care about you, when all available evidence points in the opposite direction?

The GOP is essentially these theocratic fundamentalists.  Their reach extends to some small government libertarian types, but most of them are the people in this story, who have embraced a completely immoral narcissist, because he validates their own prejudices, especially about Islam, Mexicans and Blacks.

America was founded by Christians who were mostly unconcerned with questioning religious dogma.  Franklin, Washington and Jefferson all had somewhat complicated relations to faith.  But they were also - and more importantly - men of the Enlightenment, what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world.  We have millions of Americans who remain stuck in the enchanted world of biblical literalism, married to situational morality.

I don't know how you reach them, and maybe you don't.  Most likely, you can't.

ADDED: I just picked up Francis Fukuyama's book, Political Order and Political Decay.  In it, he describes the challenges that Greece and Southern Italy pose to the Eurozone and the general idea of "good governance."  Good governance usually results when the state seems itself as an impartial judge of all citizens, what we call the rule of law.  It has to overcome natural human tendencies to rely on kinship and communcal loyalties.  We naturally gravitate towards those we know and trust, but the state must not preference one group over another.  If you actively distrust the broader institutions of a state, you are simply not going to embrace modern governance and modernity as a whole. 

That seems to sum up the Evangelicals who fall back into their very local, very kin-based relationships in these small towns.