Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Conservative churches function as the get-out-the-vote infrastructure of a shadow party

Properties2
tagsja-picks, addendum, connection_points, trade, singleton, xref, category/connection-points
aliases@stewart_power_2020, loc. 38

2 min read

Conservative churches function as the get-out-the-vote infrastructure of a shadow party

Evidence

From the perspective of the movement’s leadership, vast numbers of America’s conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party. Here, too, there is a widespread misunderstanding of the way Christian nationalism works. Its greatest asset is its national infrastructure, and that infrastructure consists not only of organizations uniting and coordinating its leadership, and a burgeoning far-right media, but also in large part the nation’s conservative houses of worship. The churches may be fragmented in a variety of denominations and theologies, but Christian nationalist leaders have had considerable success in uniting them around their political vision and mobilizing them to get out the vote for their chosen candidates. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers, 38

Categorization

  • ADDENDUM: The ‘churches as infrastructure’ framing parallels the trees-as-infrastructure essay’s central move of re-reading a natural/social institution as the load-bearing machinery of a political system.
  • XREF: connects to: Churches design culture-focused voter mobilization teams to evade IRS political-campaign rules — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 67; Pastor networks recruit politically connected congregants to lead voter-turnout teams inside churches — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 66; Churches route political campaigning through lay teams to evade IRS limits — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 67 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks