Foolish Virgins, The New Evangelical Woman VS. Trump

The New Evangelical Woman Vs. Trump

In recent weeks, several prominent female Christian authors, bloggers, and musicians have denounced Trump — one part of a larger renovation and rejuvenation of old-fashioned ideas of evangelical Christianity. But that doesn’t mean these women, or their followers, are voting for Hillary.

posted on Nov. 7, 2016, at 7:12 a.m.

Anne Helen Petersen

From the Instagrams of Nichole Nordeman, Glennon Doyle Melton, Jen Hatmaker, and Belong Tour Via instagram.com

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — There’s a type of Christian woman you might not know about, particularly if you’re not a part of, or adjacent to, evangelical Christianity — an umbrella designation for those who believe in accepting Jesus into one’s heart (becoming “born again”) and spreading the word of God.
This woman is in her twenties, thirties, or forties. She loves Pinterest, where Christian ideas, verses, inspirational quotes, and memes proliferate, but she also feels pressured by its performance of perfection. She goes wine tasting, but doesn’t get wasted. She might have tattoos. She jokes about anxiety medication, and those 10 extra pounds, and the boredom of playdates. And she knows how to use a flat iron to make natural waves in her hair, let me tell you.
She might host Noonday Parties — like Mary Kay, but for selling fair-trade jewelry made by women in impoverished areas. She’s married, and her husband wears nice jeans, and they have cute family photos in coordinated outfits that were taken outdoors, with great natural lighting. She’s a blogger or, at the very least, reads a lot of Christian blogs.
She listens to secular music, which is the Christian way of saying “music that isn’t Christian.” She wears leggings and a fancy, flowy tunic — maybe with a moto jacket — and statement jewelry to church, which is likely nondenominational, with a name like “The Rock” or “Forest Hills” or “ONE.” Depending on its specific theology, she might have recently attended a prayer vigil or empathy panel about Black Lives Matter and police brutality. She believes in treating LGBT people with love; she might even believe they should be allowed to be married. She might also admit that single Christians sometimes have sex before marriage.
She is black, she is Latina, she is Asian, but mostly she is white — and she is middle-class. In many ways, she resembles an intersectional feminist, even if she does not use the term herself. Her theological posture is one of acceptance, of belonging — not of shame and condemnation. And amongst this current generation of Christian women, she is legion.

“It has to go back to platform. And that platform has to be pro-life.”

Yet she is also conservative, and identifies as such: she cherishes the bond of marriage; she’s pro-life; she is anti-pornography. There are some characteristics of this woman that I recognize from my own upbringing in the church: she raises a hand during praise songs; she uses phrases like “It’s been on my heart,” “I’m feeling tender about it,” “I gave it up to God.” She is relentlessly joyful. She loves to hug. But some combination of factors — social media, the increased number of out LGBT men and women, the changing contours of the cultural landscape — have made it so that, increasingly, this woman is not defining herself apart from the secular world, but very much a part of it, and serves God, and spreads His word, from there.
Call her the Xvangelical, call her the New Evangelical Woman, call her the next generation, but whatever she goes by, this election has made her feel politically homeless. She is repulsed by Donald Trump: As Adrienne, from just outside of Morrisville, North Carolina, put it, “Trump doesn’t represent our beliefs. He’s not religious. I don’t even know if he has morals.” But these women also can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton, in part because being anti-abortion is such a central part of their belief system.
This election has forced them to choose between electing someone whose behavior and attitude rebukes the virtues they hold dear — and helping vote in a candidate who would protect the right to abortion. “It has to go back to platform,” Laura, a fortysomething from Hampton Roads, Virginia, told me. “And that platform has to be pro-life.”
Many congregations are split; even Christian Facebook has become a landmine. And while none of their pastors are telling them who to vote for, they are advising them to pray hard about their decision. “I don’t ever remember an election feeling this intense, or your vote seeming to define who you are,” Leanne, a thirtysomething from Columbia, South Carolina, told me. “You feel so scared you might make the wrong decision.”
That feeling was ubiquitous at the Charlotte, North Carolina, stop of Belong — a traveling tour of Christian speakers and musicians that’s filled arenas in 12 cities over the last three months. Belong is the successor, or reboot, of “Women of Faith,” which launched in 1996 and ended last year. It has younger speakers (most are around 40; one, the much beloved author Patsy Clairmont, is grandma age) and seems reverse engineered to appeal to this new kind of Christian woman.

Belong attendees Belong Tour

At the tour’s recent stop in Charlotte, the opening music was a medley of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Mumford & Sons, paired with just a single praise song. The name Belong expresses the ethos of the tour: They didn’t want to create a space of “insiders,” where you felt weird if you didn’t know all the words to the songs, or didn’t know where to put your hands when you prayed.
One speaker joked about how all the women in the audience bought new outfits for the tour — which, for many, serves as a girls’ weekend away from home — unscuffed booties, beautiful scarves, and fresh haircuts abound. The Belong “store” sells big dangly earrings and cute fitted shirts that read “ROCK YOUR PURPOSE”; the fonts, design, and colors design are straight off of Pinterest.
And while God/Jesus/Him are evoked in every talk, the mode is far less sermon-like, and far more “storytelling as verbal hospitality,” as Shauna Niequist put it. There’s hardly any quoting of Bible verses or even group prayer. Instead, talks are focused on how to let go of shame, or be real with one another and truly connect, or how to stop trying to be perfect. Church, at least in the traditional sense, this is not.
Belong has no specific headliner, but the vast majority of women I spoke to were there to see Jen Hatmaker — arguably the avatar of the New Christian Woman. A pastor’s daughter now married to a pastor, Hatmaker has written seven books, runs a popular blog, and has cultivated a substantial social media following. Along with her husband and five children — two of whom were adopted from Ethiopia — she starred in the HGTV series My Big Family Renovation. She loves This Is Us, she jokes about “drinking all the wines,” she posts funny, self-deprecating anecdotes about parenting. Her style, mode of address, and brand is very much like any other lifestyle blogger — she just also happens to be Christian.
Hatmaker is most often described by her fans as “relatable”: “I feel like Jen is my best friend,” one woman in her late twenties told me, “even though obviously I’ve never met her.” She has the contagious exaggerated expressions of a cartoon character, and the unmistakable gravity of charisma. She’s the funniest one on the tour, but recently she’s also become the most controversial, explicitly stating in an interview with Religion News that she supports same-sex marriage and gay believers. As a result, the Southern Baptist chain Lifeway Books, a major distributor of religious literature, has refused to stock her books in its 185 stores and online.

From Jen Hatmaker’s Instagram Jen Hatmaker / Via Instagram: @www.instagram.com/jenhatmaker/?hl=en

In that interview, Hatmaker also crystallized a critique of Trump that had been running through her social media for months. “As a believer, I’m devastated at how successful he has been in pandering to our lowest, basest selves,” she explained. “The selves that are afraid of anybody that does not fit our demographic. The selves that close our arms and our hearts to victims and vulnerable people. He has exposed the darkest corners of our human hearts and then given them free rein to live out in the open. That scares me.”
Several of the most visible and influential of these New Christian Women — including singer and Belong participant Nichole Nordeman, Beth Moore, and author Glennon Doyle Melton, who made a surprise appearance at the Charlotte Belong — have openly criticized Trump. “Do you think we don’t see you, Trump?” Doyle Melton asked on Facebook. “Do you think we don’t know that the way misogynists try to annihilate us is to call us ugly and crazy?” And they’ve watched, in dismay, as male leaders have continued to endorse him. “I find it sickening that these men can face their congregations and their families and their college campuses and feel OK with trusting Donald Trump with their voice and their vote and their country,” Nordeman said, “and still somehow explain it away through the lens of the teachings of Christ.”
Hatmaker has said she’s open to voting for Clinton, but is most drawn to independent candidate Evan McMullin, a 40-year-old ex-CIA agent Mormon. He currently polling at 27.9% in Utah — just 10 points behind Trump — and his campaign, originally conceived of as a protest against Trump and the GOP, increasingly resembles a new conservative party. As one woman commented on Hatmaker’s Facebook page, “Evan McMullin is a hail Mary, but at this point, I’m up for anything that doesn’t involve me voting from Clump,” aka, Clinton or Trump.
In a blog post, Hatmaker pointed to the fact that “Jesus’ subversive teaching taught his followers to shame and expose the evils of political oppression by audacious acts of humility” — not, she points out “through bedding down with the system.” Put differently, Jesus was, and remains, an Independent — and certainly wouldn’t have voted for Trump, whose actions and words belie Jesus’s own teachings.