Kyl, Kavanaugh And The Slaveholder Religion

Politically, Arizona may be headed in a good direction... but it may be a very long time before it gets there. Democrats in the state-- guided by Chuck Schumer-- picked the single most conservative Trump-supporting Democrat in Congress, as their Senate nominee, Kyrsten Sinema, head of the Blue Dog Caucus. But the Republicans in Arizona are worse; all of them. And that includes Trump-hating Jeff Flake, who was originally elected to the Senate because he was the most conservative Arizona congressman.

Governor Doug Ducey is mandated to pick a Republican for John McCain's seat because McCain was a Republican. He's not mandated to pick someone like McCain though. He's appointing lobbyist-turned-senator-turned-lobbyist Jon Kyl, who will only commit to staying on for a few months because he's eager to enhance his lobbyist clout as a senator again before going back to his lobbyist career. As wretched and horrible as Kyl is-- and, believe me, he is--Ducey could have picked someone even worse: Kelli Ward, Joe Arpaio, Paul Gosar, Matt Salmon, John Shadegg... all of whom were banging on his door and all of whom are even further right than Kyl.

Complicating Ducey's decision had to have been that Kirk Adams, the Arizona House's former speaker and now Ducey's chief of staff, wants to run for the Senate seat in 2020 and if Kyl resigns before 2020, there will be huge pressure on Ducey to appoint Martha McSally-- likely to lose to Sinema in November. That will end Adams' hopes to win that seat. A whole other scenario would be that Ducey simply appoints himself to the Senate after the November election-- whether he wins or loses to Democrat David Garcia.

Kyl's first vote is likely to be on confirming Brett Kavanaugh-- an obvious conflict of interest, since he has been Kavanaugh's "sherpa" for the confirmation process. Obviously Ducey wasn't looking for a maverick, just someone to vote to confirm Kavanaugh and kill Obamacare. And a bonus in case anything comes up for Kyl's lobbying clients, Merck, Northrop Grumman, PHARMA, Raytheon and Walmart.

Miss the NY Times OpEd from Monday, The Evangelical Case Against Judge Kavanaugh? Rev Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a Baptist minister in Durham, N.C. and author of Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom From Slaveholder Religion, wrote that his faith compels him "to challenge the way reactionary conservatives have hijacked our faith to serve their narrow interests.

Conservative evangelicals were at the White House last week for an event the Rev. Robert Jeffress described as “a half state dinner and a half campaign rally.” Evangelicals like Mr. Jeffress are ebullient as the Senate prepares to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh next week, praising President Trump as “the most pro-life, pro-religious liberty, pro-conservative judiciary president of any president in history... [E]vangelicals who toe the line that the religious right has laid out for decades lift their hands in prayer to thank God for a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that now seems just weeks away."

As an evangelical who cut my teeth in politics during the heyday of the Moral Majority movement in the 1980s, I know the enthusiasm many conservatives feel at the prospect of culture war victories at the Supreme Court. But I join many other faith leaders to oppose Judge Kavanaugh not in spite of our faith commitments, but because of them. As we read the Bible alongside Judge Kavanaugh’s record, we find his nomination a threat to the Christian ethic we are called to preach and pursue in public life.

Leading the evangelical challenge to an extreme conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a group of evangelical women has issued a “call to pause,” asking fellow believers to step back from the rhetoric of “life” to examine how decisions before the court would impact the vulnerable people we claim to care about, even the unborn. “The way to reduce abortion is not through escalating culture wars but by reducing poverty,” they argue, noting studies that show abortion rates at an all-time low, though they remain highest among poor women who lack access to health care.

Lisa Sharon Harper, an African-American evangelical who has been a principal organizer of the “call to pause,” notes that a “right to life” is about more than abortion. “Majority conservative rulings have already whittled back civil rights protections, leaving this generation’s children as vulnerable to a new Jim Crow as my great-grandparents, who fled for their lives from the terror of the Jim Crow South.”

For many nonwhite evangelicals, the life issues that matter most are voting rights, living wages, environmental protection, access to health care and public education. The experience of many of those evangelicals illuminates how life issues have been narrowly defined by conservative evangelicals over the last 40 years.

Following the civil rights movement in the South, many white evangelicals felt threatened by political and cultural changes that challenged their assumptions about the natural order of the world. Leaning on the logic of slaveholder religion-- which, as the historian H. Shelton Smith showed, justified human bondage by arguing that white control of society was in keeping with God’s design-- religious conservatives rallied the faithful for moral resistance to the “unnatural” expansion of 14th Amendment protections to women and minorities. Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in 1954, Southern preachers like Jerry Falwell had preached against liberal “activist judges.” But the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision offered Mr. Falwell’s Moral Majority a rallying cry that appeared selfless: defense of the unborn.

Despite an incredible investment in outreach to them, a vast majority of African-American evangelicals never got on board with the conservative rhetoric of the culture wars. Many black evangelicals understood that a reactionary movement against “activist judges” wasn’t rooted in godly concern for unborn children but in a fear of change, even if they, too, valued every child as a person created in God’s image. Across the Sunbelt and the Rust Belt, African-American evangelicals-- who represent as much as three-fourths of the black population-- leaned Democratic.

The enthusiasm of older white men who still control mainly white evangelical organizations like the Family Research Council and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that thrived on the culture wars should give all Americans pause, especially as we pay attention to what Judge Kavanaugh himself has said. In a lecture to the American Enterprise Institute last year, he celebrated the legacy of Chief Justice William Rehnquist by noting how Chief Justice Rehnquist had led the Supreme Court’s turn “away from its 1960s Warren court approach, where the court in some cases had seemed to be simply enshrining its policy views into the Constitution, or so the critics charged.”

...Whether we have any experience in reading the law, evangelicals are familiar with Judge Kavanaugh’s way of reading authoritative texts. This is precisely how fundamentalists read Scripture in the early 20th century, when evolutionary science challenged their reading of Genesis and social science confronted narrow corporate interests during the Gilded Age. Fundamentalism taught reactionary religious voices to dig in their heels and claim final authority about what the text “actually says.” But evangelicals should know better: Our movement in America was founded in an attempt to maintain a commitment to Jesus and the Bible while rejecting reactionary extremism.

As proponents of “Christian nationalism” continue to be the most consistent base of support for President Trump, my evangelical faith compels me to challenge the way reactionary conservatives have hijacked our faith to serve their narrow interests. With Judge Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, their 40-year effort to overturn expansions of 14th Amendment protections by the Warren court may be in reach. This will not necessarily save unborn children, but it will make life more difficult for minorities, workers, poor people and the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

When Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly” in John 10:10, he wasn’t thinking about a victory for those who have used religion to fight back against the gains of the civil rights movement. Jesus was inviting all of us to work together for the vision at the heart of that movement-- a beloved community where all people created in God’s image can thrive.