The other day I saw a thread about Missouri, and why Republicans are so successful there. A poster claimed that part of the reason was Southern Baptists, and how they are basically stupid. I don't think it was necessarily mean-spirited. People just assume that Evangelicals are stupid, and our culture reinforces that belief. And they've been doing this at least the 1920s, when they performed character assassination on William Jennings Bryan.
I am basically an Atlas unicorn. I am an Evangelical from the Bible Belt who did not vote for Trump despite the fact that I did vote for Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and other Republicans at the local level. My family also refused to vote for Trump. I had many reasons why I didn't vote for Trump, but if he hadn't been an inspiration to racists across the country, I probably would have held my nose and voted for him.
Here is an interesting article:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/no-the-majority-of-american-evangelicals-did-not-vote-for-trump/I actually was not born into an Evangelical family. My parents were moderate Lutherans when I was born (I think it was Missouri Synod, but I don't remember, it might have been ELCA). When I was very young, my family temporarily moved to the UK, and my parents became Evangelical Christians. They appreciated how British Evangelicals rarely talked about politics. Despite the fact that they didn't preach about abortion, my mother was convicted that it was immoral from reading the Bible. This was in the late '90s.
At that time, I was a very young child. I have been attending Evangelical churches most of my life, often Southern Baptist churches. During that time, the pastors didn't talk about politics very often, and I was never told how to vote. The only times I remember hearing about politics were on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and a few messages around the time of Obergefell v. Hodges. IIRC these were Sunday school messages, not regular sermons. My most recent church in Kentucky doesn't preach politics at all, and the preacher condemns racism just as often as he condemns abortion (maybe even more often). The main theme of his sermons are always the gospel, though.
Many people act as if Evangelical Christianity was invented by Jerry Falwell to get Christians to vote Republican. It wasn't. We've been around long before the Republican Party and we'll be here after the GOP dissolves. We exist on all Continents and speak many different languages. Don't let your hatred for the GOP tarnish your view of a diverse international religious movement.
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