White evangelicals rejected a devout Christian because her politics and feminism were wrong

Evidence

Clinton was a devout Christian, but the wrong kind. She spoke about her Methodist faith frequently during the 2016 campaign, reciting favorite passages of Scripture with ease. Tapping into a tradition of American civil religion, she reminded Americans that they were great because they were good, and she urged them to summon the better angels of their nature. On the campaign trail she seemed especially at home among black Protestants, whose prophetic faith tradition bore many similarities to her own progressive Methodism. But for white evangelicals, Clinton was on the wrong side of nearly every issue. A feminist and a career woman, she thought it took a village to raise a child. She promoted global human rights and women’s rights at the expense of US sovereignty, at least in the eyes of her critics. And she was pro-choice. The fact that she read the same Bible didn’t register for most evangelicals, and her faith testimony came across as political pandering, or just plain lying. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 560

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to her earlier chapters on civil religion and the sacred/secular split in evangelicalism; also bridges to how black Protestant prophetic tradition differs from white evangelical political religion.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the wrong kind of Christian’ — how shared scripture reading can be politically coded such that identical religious credentials read as pander or lie across a partisan divide.