{"id":69415,"date":"2025-01-07T07:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=69415"},"modified":"2025-01-06T21:11:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T02:11:04","slug":"wheres-wallace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/","title":{"rendered":"Where’s Wallace?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I came across a bunch of posts last summer on the trajectory and history of white evangelicals\/Republicans over the past 60 years and bookmarked them or left the tabs open on my computer for months. Then Matthew Avery Sutton\u2019s JAAR<\/em> article on white evangelical historiography<\/a> was published and that kind of sucked up all the attention on that subject matter for a while.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve still got all of those bookmarks and a few open tabs, so let me finally get around to those.<\/p>\n

First up is Ryan Burge\u2019s \u201cA Sixty Year History of White Evangelicals and Politics<\/a>.\u201d His subtitle is \u201cA comprehensive look at partisanship and voting patterns among the most important religious bloc on election day.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the post that prompted the question in the title of this post.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lawrence Gilliard Jr. as D\u2019Angelo Barksdale from that amazing scene in The Wire where he realizes that his family has had his young friend Wallace killed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhere\u2019s Wallace, String? Where the f\u2013k is Wallace.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Except \u201cWallace\u201d here doesn\u2019t refer to the innocent young boy played by a very young Michael B. Jordan in The Wire,<\/em> but rather to white segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who ran for president in 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976. As a third-party candidate in 1968, he won five states and won about 10 million popular votes \u2014 13.53% of the total.<\/p>\n

Burge writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I bristle at the underlying motivation of that question \u2014 why do White evangelicals vote for Trump? Because the answer is even simpler: They vote for Trump because White evangelicals are Republicans, and Donald Trump is the standard bearer of the GOP. That\u2019s the same reason they voted for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.<\/p>\n

However, I wanted to take a long view of this question \u2014 have White evangelicals always been Republicans, or is this a very recent phenomenon?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Burge\u2019s Substack no longer lets us read his whole post for free, but before it fell behind the paywall I was able to read the full thing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>His answer to this long-view question was that white evangelicals \u2014 the Billy Graham orbit of post-war Protestantism that spun off from white fundamentalism \u2014 have always been politically conservative<\/em>, but they haven\u2019t always been so overwhelmingly Republican<\/em>. He sees the increasingly partisan identification of white evangelicals as simply a corollary of the larger partisan polarization that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s, in which former conservative Democrats and former liberal Republicans switched parties.<\/p>\n

So, in Burge\u2019s view, the fact that many white evangelicals used to be conservative Democrats but switched parties over roughly the same time period that other conservative Democrats did just confirms his previous near-tautological thesis: White evangelicals do what they do because they\u2019re Republicans and that\u2019s what Republicans do. Why do they support Trump? For the same reason they supported Reagan. And Nixon. QED. NBD.<\/p>\n

But again, String, where\u2019s Wallace?<\/em><\/p>\n

Where\u2019s the Southern strategy? Where\u2019s Atwater\u2019s confession? Where in this \u201c60-year History of White Evangelicals and Politics\u201d is any of the history documented by historians like Dan T. Carter or Kevin Kruse or Carolyn Ren\u00e9e Dupont or Jesse Curtis or Anthea Butler or Jemar Tisby or Rusty Hawkins?<\/p>\n

The mirror opposite of Burge\u2019s colorbland 60-year history is Nick Rafter\u2019s granular look at white working-class support for George Wallace from union workers in Michigan: \u201cHow Labor Undermined Itself in America<\/a>.\u201d Rafter pays almost as little attention to religion as Burge does to the race politics of white identity.<\/p>\n

Alas, Rafter is also<\/em> on Substack so his post is also now tucked behind that site\u2019s paywall. Here\u2019s a snippet I copied back when it was free to read:<\/p>\n

In short, I don\u2019t know the answer to this question. I don\u2019t believe there is any economic message that the Democratic Party or progressives can sell to white working-class voters that will lead to them putting aside their cultural concerns. Progressives forget that no matter how hard they push economic issues, there will always be a conservative movement that keeps these voters fed with a healthy diet of cultural war anxieties. You can try to change the subject, but you can\u2019t change a voter\u2019s priorities. If you aren\u2019t speaking to a voter\u2019s top concerns, they will just ignore you.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe class-based politics works in a multicultural society like the United States. It only ever has in homogenous societies and even then minorities often become targets (Jews in France and the Soviet Union for example, or Muslims in China). In the United States, the Populist movement of the 1890s unraveled over whether to include Blacks in their ideas, and New Deal policies were often designed to exclude them to get the support to pass Congress. It is no surprise that Civil Rights and the embrace of multiculturalism destroyed class solidarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My first reaction to his piece was that \u201ccultural concerns\u201d was too soft a euphemism. He was talking about white union support for the anti-union segregationist Wallace. There wasn\u2019t a vast cluster of \u201ccultural concerns\u201d animating that support.<\/p>\n

But I think the obvious inadequacy of that euphemism is exactly why Rafter accepts and repeats the use of it, exposing it for the sham that it is.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why his piece is such a useful corrective and antidote to Burge\u2019s contention that white evangelicals are Republicans because that\u2019s the party of \u201csocial conservatives\u201d who support all the various proxies that have come and gone over the years to serve as cover for the gigantic, looming \u201ccultural concern\u201d that undergirds them all.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If we’re gonna talk about the “History of White Evangelicals and Politics” over the last 60 years, we’re gonna have to talk about George Wallace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":69476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicals"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere's Wallace?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If we're gonna talk about the "History of White Evangelicals and Politics" over the last 60 years, we're gonna have to talk about George Wallace.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Where's Wallace?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If we're gonna talk about the "History of White Evangelicals and Politics" over the last 60 years, we're gonna have to talk about George Wallace.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-01-07T12:00:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-01-07T02:11:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2025\/01\/Wallace.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"550\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"309\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/\",\"name\":\"Where's Wallace?\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2025-01-07T12:00:35+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-01-07T02:11:04+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"If we're gonna talk about the \\\"History of White Evangelicals and Politics\\\" over the last 60 years, we're gonna have to talk about George Wallace.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2025\/01\/07\/wheres-wallace\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Where’s Wallace?\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\",\"name\":\"slacktivist\",\"description\":\""Test everything; 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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