A Very Fine Article Especially If You Take Some Precautions

TODAY SEEMS to be Michael Sean Winters day here because it's through another of his articles that I got to the fine and provocative article of Michael Luo at the New Yorker The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind, which gives a far deeper insight into the anti-intellectualism and depravity of a large majority of "white evangelicals" in the United States in history.  I would recommend reading it more than a couple of times and following up on his citations, the extent that that is possible for you.  I'll need to get to a good library, eventually.

I would caution on a few points in that I think the anti-intellectualism of the "white evangelicals" is far from a universal trait among them, it being no more a given than the general stereotype of them as being Republican-fascists of the worst kind.  There are many evangelicals who are honest intellectuals, many who are honest readers and adherents of reality and many who would be classified as moderate to liberal and, in a few cases I'm aware of, radical in terms of contemporary American politics.

I would also caution against taking the genuinely identified "evangelical anti-intellectualism" as being an anomaly peculiar to them or to any backward or dangerous religious movement.  The entirely secular realm of American life is at times and to some measure as prone to anti-intellectualism as it is to political retrogression, racism, bigotry, sexism, anti-LGBTQ activity.  THAT A LOT OF THAT ON BEHALF OF SECULAR REPUBLICANS IS AN ATTEMPT FOR THEM TO HARNESS THE POWER OF EVANGELICAL RACISTS, HATERS OF LGBTQ, SEXISTS, ETC IS CERTAINLY NOT SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE REGARDED AS A VIRTUE ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THEY DON'T FEEL THAT HATRED, THEMSELVES.   If anything their cynical manipulation of a force of hateful ignorance makes them the greater sinners.   Lindsay Graham should be the poster child of that as should many gay and lesbian Republicans, libertarians, etc.  who are in no way Christian and certainly don't count themselves as "evangelicals". 

At the end of 2016 got into a number of online brawls over the PEW style broad-brush painting of the members of religious denominations and those "groups" such as "white evangelicals" that such outfits invent, one thinks not infrequently to serve an unstated agenda.   I pointed out that even among the groups most blamed for putting Trump in office that there were often between a fifth and quarter in the PEW numbers who voted for Hillary Clinton and in the ones with the highest percentage who voted for Clinton, there were not insignificant numbers who voted for Trump, including that phony category invented by an ideological anti-religious hack, "nones" which PEW adopted, among the atheists and agnostics among them.   I noted that there was a more or less organized "Evangelicals For Clinton" not that they ever got much news time or online discussion.  

As an LGBTQ guy with a long, long time to see things and the problems with stereotyping,  I reject the kind of blanket categorization and definition that the pseudo-sciences of sociology, polling, surveys and anthropology have made the bigotry acceptable among the educated population.   In that the "white evangelicals" form of thinking isn't all that much different from the typical thinking of secular Americans, it's just they apply it in a different way to other "others".