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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31016 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit.

I think it's not his spirit, but rather where else could they go? The Democrats certainly have no signs of welcoming traditional believers aboard, unless they drop all that stuff about abortion/LGBT+ (and male headship for the harder core). What I was mildly surprised by was Kamala Harris failing to reach out on grounds of "I'm Christian too" (yeah, I know: citation needed). She did the usual campaigning in black churches, but no broader appeal to the religious conservatives with stories about "I sang in the church choir as a girl, I attend this church when I'm at home":

Harris, on the other hand, is a rare political figure who may have downplayed her spiritual life in public, given anti-religious sentiments in her native San Francisco Bay Area and a complicated personal religious journey.

Harris is a Baptist who was raised by a Black Anglican father and an Indian Hindu mother, and she is married to a Reform Jewish husband.

She’s a longtime member of San Francisco’s historic Third Baptist Church and has a deep relationship with its pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown. As vice president, she has attended services at Baptist churches in the Washington, D.C., area and in 2022 spoke at the National Baptist Convention.

...In her 2019 memoir, Harris wrote about her mother’s making sure she was exposed to both Hindu and African American Christian religious traditions, adding that she and her sister, Maya, sang in the choir at 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland.

It's probably also complicated by the fact that that is an American Baptist-affiliated church, not a Southern Baptist one, but nevertheless she soft-pedalled on religion, as did Walz (quick, anybody have any idea, without looking it up, what denomination if any he belongs to?)

Whoops, looks like Walz is a souper!

"Tim, who was raised Catholic, became a Lutheran after marrying Gwen. He has called himself a "Minnesota Lutheran" and identified Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as his family's parish."

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