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   * the Obama years redoubled the evangelicals' dedication to embattlement and prepared them for a true fight in 2016; they just needed the right guy (cliffhanger!)
 ==== A New High Priest ====
+  * as bad as the evangelicals found Obama, they found Hillary Clinton much worse; she was openly supportive of abortion access, and she was a **woman**! gasp!
+  * Du Mez describes Trump as "morally challenged", which is...a severe understatement
+  * evangelicals as a whole took time to warm to Trump, with their figureheads generally favoring more traditional Republican candidates, of which there were several in the race
+  * Mike Huckabee was the typical tone-deaf whitebread conservative
+  * Ben Carson played shield for closeted racists (and compared political correctness to the practices of Nazi Germany? WTF?)
+  * Marco Rubio drew the favor of establishment northern evangelicals
+  * Ted Cruz was essentially Trump Lite (TM) with his talk of "Restoring America" and fearmongering about attacks from without and drive-thru abortions or whatever
+  * eventually most evangelicals came to support Trump by election night
+  * that they would come to favor such a man was not as surprising as it may at first seem; the evangelical tradition had long involved stoking fears of threats to the nation: Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, the erosion of religious freedom
+  * in short, they had been priming their followers for decades to look for a strong daddy who would do anything to protect them from those threats; so when Donald Trump came along in a cloud of foul-mouthed bravado, it was a natural fit
+  * even prominent evangelical leaders, many of whom had endorsed other candidates, were surprised by how quickly and how tightly their followers latched onto him; some pastors feared losing their congregations if they didn't voice support for Trump
+  * last paragraph on p. 256: briefly mentions the alignment between war (spiritual or physical) and capitalism
+  * p. 259 photo: blegh
+  * a group of NeverTrumper evangelical leaders fumbled for any reason to deny Trump's popularity with their followers; surely the evangelical poll respondents weren't true evangelicals, or this was somehow an anomaly
+  * Du Mez puts it bluntly: "Perhaps [they] hadn't been paying attention. Trump was hardly the first man conservative evangelicals had embraced who checked off this list of qualifications."
+  * one by one, they fell in line with those followers; Dobson argued that Trump was "a baby Christian" who should be cut slack for his shortcomings; Grudem went from calling him the lesser of two evils to "a morally good choice" for president who was "deeply patriotic"; Metaxas mocked Trump's tweets in the early days of his campaign but wholeheartedly endorsed him after he secured the election, going so far as to compare Clinton and Trump's critics to Hitler and the Nazis
+  * following the release of the //Access Hollywood// ("grab 'em by the pussy") tape, some evangelicals wavered briefly, but most talked right past it
+    * insert all of Innuendo Studios' "Never Play Defense" here
+  * "Once again, reports of the death of the Religious Right had been greatly exaggerated."
+    * that's a //V for Vendetta// reference, right? Not a bad bit of humor for this point
+  * economic arguments were popular early theories for evangelicals' support of Trump, but those theories were not borne out by research; nor was the claim that the label had been taken over by "fake" evangelicals
+  * those who claimed to have held their noses while voting for Trump were not motivated by fact-based assessments of his fitness for the post (he was demonstrably worse on all counts than Clinton) but rather by the belief that his policies (e.g., Supreme Court nominations) would benefit them
+  * indeed, once he addressed those initial concerns, they remained quiet about his ongoing indiscretions
+  * between 2011 and 2016, the proportion of white evangelicals who believed that "immoral" acts were not disqualifying of public office jumped from 30% to 72% according to the Public Religion Research Institute, a phenomenon they dubbed the "Trump effect"; PRRI's Robert P. Jones: "This dramatic abandonment of the whole idea of 'value voters' is one of the most stunning reversals in recent American political history."
+    * I wager that the actual effect at play was authoritarianism; this was neither a contradiction nor a reversal, but rather completely contiguous with their existing values (as Du Mez notes later)
+  * Trump was exactly the embodiment of the militantly masculine figure they had wanted for so long (or more accurately, had been trained to seek)
+  * "The election was not decided by those 'left behind' economically, political scientists discovered; it was decided by dominant groups anxious about their future status."
+    * an excellent, well-stated point
+  * a year into his presidency, Scott Lamb and David Brody published //The Faith of Donald Trump: A Spiritual Biography//, in which they laundered his apparent flaws into forms more palatable to evangelical followers
+  * he was (or presented as) a believer in a black-and-white morality with clear lines between good guys and bad guys; he validated his followers' most outlandish fears and promised to protect them, with violence if necessary; he promised to provide them with order
+    * that is, he was catnip to authoritarian followers
 ==== Evangelical Mulligans: A History ====
 ==== Conclusion ====
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 > Mr. and Mrs. Baptist may not be able to understand or adjudicate the issue of biblical inerrancy when it comes down to nuances, and language, and terminology...But if you believe abortion should be legal, that's all they need to know.
-With that in mind, what would happen if they were granted the "Christian nation" they claim to crave? Deep discussions of theology have never been particularly popular in American churches (as Hofstadter demonstrates), but those churches still hold a great diversity of beliefs. Could they remain as cohesive as they are today without the culture wars? The closest we've come to such a scenario was the vindication of the anticommunist evangelicals with the end of the Cold War. The defeat of a major military rival did not sate their militarism. How could it have when their identity had so long been built on a false sense of marginalization? Their only option was to find a new enemy, and if that meant preemptive war, then so be it.
+With that in mind, what would happen if they were granted the "Christian nation" they claim to crave? Deep discussions of theology have never been particularly popular in American churches (as Hofstadter demonstrates), but those churches still hold a great diversity of beliefs. Could they remain as cohesive as they are today without the culture wars? The closest we've come to such a scenario was the vindication of the anticommunist evangelicals with the end of the Cold War. The defeat of a major military rival did not sate their militarism. How could it have when their identity had so long been built on a false sense of marginalization? Their only option was to find a new enemy, no matter the logical or moral leaps required to justify it.
+It's easy to see how well Christian nationalism aligns with fascism: "Our nation was once great, prosperous, and (most importantly)  Christian, but then the secularists and the humanists and the communists came along. And once they stripped the God out of America, they took the prosperity, too. Only by purging the nation of their influence can we catalyze a national rebirth and reclaim our rightful place atop the world stage."
+It is immediately clear from the early pages that this book was written largely in response to the Trump presidency. Untold quantities of ink, paper, and bytes have been consumed trying to make sense of it all. It's all too easy to open such a piece with one's jaw firmly on the floor and close without ever picking it up, let alone making a coherent point beyond the self-evident "Trump bad". Perhaps that failure stems from clinging too tightly to the belief that his presidency was somehow an anomaly or that it was without precedent. "Why does two plus two equal four? Because it does, of course---now let's discuss something else."
+Du Mez, however, demonstrates that not only was such a presidency very much precedented, it was in fact the culmination of decades worth of cultural crusades. Evangelical leaders have long stoked fears of existential threats to the nation and their religion---which they view as one and the same---in order to mobilize their followers into political action. Their surprise was realizing how little control they had over the shape of that mobilization in the end. It would almost be amusing if not for the cruelty that ensued.
+Having read Altemeyer's //The Authoritarians//, I felt a gap of sorts in Du Mez's analysis. While she frequently points out that apparent ideological contradictions are often not, she never directly invokes authoritarianism as a key factor. That understanding is a missing piece; trained by their leaders to fear attacks from evil actors in an unambiguous binary spiritual struggle, it is no surprise that evangelicals lined up behind a strong man who confirmed those vaporous fears and offered protection. Indeed, I now wonder how much of the correlation between authoritarianism and religion noted by Altemeyer is coincidental and how much was cultivated by the groups outlined in this book. Are the two meaningfully separable?
+Given that the most powerful players in the text are from the same generation or two, it is tempting to believe that the Religious Right's power will wane as its figureheads and loudest followers die off. But that hope has proven false before.
-It's easy to see how well this line of thinking aligns with fascism: "Our nation was once great, prosperous, and (most importantly)  Christian, but then the secularists and the humanists and the communists came along. And once they stripped the God out of America, they took the prosperity, too. Only by purging the nation of their influence can we catalyze a national rebirth and reclaim our rightful place atop the world stage."
 ===== Related reading =====
   * [[Anti-Intellectualism in American Life]], particularly Part 2
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 readinglist.title    : Jesus and John Wayne
 readinglist.summary  : Discusses the long-running campaign of American evangelicals to masculinize Jesus and the ripple effects that campaign has had on the nation's political discourse.
-readinglist.status   : reading
+readinglist.status   : read
 readinglist.subjects : politics, history, evangelicalism
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