White evangelicals embraced Carson without surrendering racial or political commitments

Evidence

Ben Carson, too, was popular among evangelicals. An African American conservative, Carson knew how to play to the white evangelical crowd. He suggested that a Muslim should be disqualified from serving as president, defended the right to fly the Confederate flag, compared political correctness to the practices of Nazi Germany, and suggested that the Holocaust would not have happened if Jews had been armed. Carson appealed to evangelicals who claimed, and often sincerely believed, that they held no racist convictions, without requiring them to sacrifice any of their social and political commitments. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 565

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s project on the continuity-not-hypocrisy thesis: Carson shows how sincere non-racist self-image could coexist with Confederate-flag defense — relevant to Du Mez’s argument about how the gospel of militarized masculinity absorbed racial politics without explicit racism.