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This is my hometown, and the college where Trump spoke the words of the headline are my alma mater. This piece describes an odd religious/political/ethnic subculture that made me, and from which I escaped, to some extent. (thread) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html
Whether political power has any place in Christianity, I'll leave to others to unpack. What I'd like to talk about is the actual power of the subculture this piece describes: the power it wields, and the power it fears losing.
The article presents the place, my hometown, as a backwater, a place ignored and looked down on by coastal elites. A place, in short, with no power.
The residents present it that way too, quoted in the piece. Over and over again, they say that coastal elites look down on them, that they're outsiders, that they're despised, that they have no voice—and that Trump fights for them.
Are they right that they have very little cultural power? You'd think maybe, right? It's a tiny town in a corner of Iowa, population around 8,000, dominated by a goofy little religious subculture of Dutch immigrants, host to a small Christian college with a funny name.
What you wouldn't know from the article, or the quotes, is that this little town and the surrounding county get a fair amount of national press attention. I can practically set my watch to it. Whenever an election looms, I know my hometown is about to show up in the news again.
The NYT has profiled it before, in fact, in articles analyzing the county as a bellwether for how white evangelicals will vote. It's pretty good at picking (Republican) presidents. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/upshot/how-a-quiet-corner-of-iowa-packs-such-a-fierce-conservative-punch.html
The Atlantic, too, has gone to Sioux County to see what the residents thought about the impeachment of Donald Trump. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/11/trump-impeachment-conservatives-iowa/601705/
The New Yorker, too, has dug into the culture and history of the area. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/13/where-the-small-town-american-dream-lives-on
Because of the importance of the Iowa caucuses, the town is also an important stop for any Republican candidate who'd like to be the party's nominee, resulting in a lot of articles like this one, every 4-8 years. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/us/politics/12brownback.html
And because the caucuses bring national reporters to the area semi-frequently, they'll often stick around or come back for features like this one, on changing attitudes toward divorce in rural America. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/us/24divorce.html?searchResultPosition=11
Or human interest pieces, like this one on an Italian restaurant that was there, for a while. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/us/03iowa.html?searchResultPosition=16
When you really look at it, the reality is that this town, this county, this conservative Christian subculture, isn't so ignored, so looked down on and despised, or so powerless, after all.
In fact, you might say that this tiny community punches way above its weight, in terms of political and cultural power. Picking presidents. Commanding the attention of the media.
And the "elite media" that supposedly despises this place—the place where I grew up—actually treats it with a lot of deference, constantly giving it column inches that could just as easily be given to other people, other places, other American cultures deserving of a voice.
The community I grew up in, in short, wields a tremendous amount of power. They have a voice—a loud one. Narratives of their powerlessness and persecution are largely myths.
Meanwhile, a few hours' drive but a seeming universe away culturally in Minneapolis/St. Paul, what I see is that my hometown used their power to elect a man who uses his power to *actually* persecute my neighbors: BIPOC, LGBTQ+, immigrant, refugee neighbors.
And maybe what I'm building to is that my hometown maybe, just maybe, should think about giving up some power. Should start listening to the voices of others instead of complaining—in the pages of the nation's paper of record—that they have no voice.
