One hundred days into Donnie Trump’s second reign — er, second term — which religious groups approve of him most?
No surprise — Trump continues to have high approval ratings among White evangelicals. In a recent poll, Pew Research found that 72% of White evangelicals approve of King Donnie — er, President Trump.
Here are the approval ratings for other religious groups in the Pew poll:
72% — White Protestant Christian, evangelical
51% — White Protestant Christian, not evangelical
51% — White Catholic Christian
40% — All US adults
26% — Hispanic Catholic Christian
26% — Religiously unaffiliated
10% — Black Protestant Christian
I was a bit surprised that these approval ratings are very similar to Trump’s first term. In their report, Pew Research says: “Both among the U.S. public as a whole and among major religious groups, Trump’s current approval ratings are on par with what they were around the same time in his first term (April 2017).”
Not surprisingly, White Evangelicals support Trump’s extensive use of executive orders — 53% of them feel that Trump is doing about the right amount by executive order. Only 27% of White evangelicals think Trump is doing too much by executive order, 15% are unsure, and 5% feel he’s doing too little by executive order.
I’d be jumping to conclusions if, based on this one survey, I said that White evangelicals are OK with a president who’s seems to be trying to operate like a king. But I’m keeping that in mind as a possibility.
It was raining today, so the Morris dancers at the New England Folk Festival had to do their thing indoors, in the dreary “Trade Center” next to the hotel. The danced in the middle of the cacophony and distraction of vendors and lunch tables and kid-friendly activities (hula hoops, anyone?). They danced under harsh LED lights instead of real sunlight.
Ring ‘o Bells Morris NYC flourish their hankies at the end of a dance.
It didn’t matter. Ritual dance is ritual dance wherever you do it. It makes you feel that’s there’s something way older than you are. When a Morris side waves their hankies or hits their sticks together, no matter where it is, it can still give me goosebumps.
Renegade Morris about to hit each other’s sticks.
Yes, it would have been better outdoors. But even in a noisy corner of an unattractive trade center, it was worth watching.
In November, British singer-songwriter Angeline Morrison released a new song titled “Jump Billy.” I got interested in the song because it tells the story of someone born in America who left during the American Revolution. If you dive into local history, you’re constantly running up against stories of the Tories who left America during the Revolution. But you rarely hear the rest of the story — where they went, and how they fared.
So why did Morrison write this song? She has long loved the traditional music of the British Isles. As the daughter of a Black Jamaican woman and a White man from the Outer Hebrides, she began to search for traditional songs about Black people like her. By some estimates, circa 1800 there were 20,000 Black people living in London alone — but where were the songs about them?
Morrison did record one traditional English song, “The Brown Girl,” which she imagined might actually be a song about a woman with brown skin (as opposed to a mere poetic description). Then, in the tradition of generations of folk musicians, she decided to write her own songs in the idiom of traditional music, featuring non-White Britishers. In 2022, after having written a number of new songs, she released an album of those songs.
(A side note: if Morrison were working in the U.S. today, she would be accused of violating the recent presidential executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Don’t get me started on how that executive order tells lies about history.)
She is still mining this vein of material, and in her latest song is about the Black sailor William “Billy” Waters. I don’t know if Morrison saw the new book by Mary L. Shannon, Billy Waters is Dancing: Or, How a Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale University Press, 2024) or if she did her own research (or both). In any case, Morrison’s song tells the same basic story that’s told in the book, which goes something like this:
William Waters was born in New York City (probably) around 1775. His family (probably) left New York when the British troops evacuated in 1783; little Billy would have been about eight years old. In 1811, he signed on as an able seaman in the British Royal Navy. Since he signed on as an able seaman, not an ordinary seaman, he (probably) had had previous experience as a sailor. Little else is known about his early life.
In 1812, the captain’s log reports that Waters fell from the from the main spar, broke both legs, and had to have one leg amputated. Waters was invalided out of the Navy with an inadequate pension, as was all too typical at the time. To earn enough money to live on, he turned to busking. He gained fame as a frequent performer outside London’s fashionable Adelphi Theatre. As many buskers did at the time, he adopted a distinctive dress: for Waters, this included his naval coat and a tricorn hat decorated with showy feathers. In his act, he not only sang and played fiddle, but he also danced with great dexterity; this last was considered remarkable due to his wooden leg.
Waters married and had two children. In spite of his fame, he and his family lived in St. Giles rookery, notorious as one of the worst slums in London. He died in 1823, aged approx. 60. At the time of his death, he was living in the St. Giles workhouse, an institution for indigent people. Presumably, by that time he was no longer able to earn his living busking. So much for his fame —sic transit gloria mundi.
As an able seaman, Waters would have had as good a life as could be expected for a working class man — and he could live in freedom, whereas slavery persisted in New York until well after his death. After he had his leg amputated, the Royal Navy didn’t treat him especially well. Yet in spite of his disability, he was able to earn enough money to allow him to provide for a family.
— And this is just one story telling how the American Revolution played out in the lives of ordinary people. We hear over and over again stories of how the Revolution affected prominent people like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. I like to hear those old stories about those wealthy and prominent people who remained in America. But I also want to hear how the Revolution affected ordinary people, including the ones who left America. It’s hearing all those stories that makes history come alive for me.
(N.B.: Morrison’s song is so new, I couldn’t find lyrics to it anywhere online. I’ll post my own transcription of the lyrics after the jump.)
The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), World Relief, and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity have released a report about the impact of the Trump administration’s proposed deportations on American Christian communities. I found the report, titled “One Part of the Body: The Potential Impact of Deportations on American Christian Families” available online on the USCCB website (link to the PDF).
According to their report, the majority of people subject to deportation are Christian. You can go to the actual report to read their methodology, but to give you a quickie summary, here’s a screen shot of a relevant pie chart taken from the report:
Screenshot of part of page 15 from the online report by NAE, USCCB, et al.
An article about this report by Religion News Service (RNS) points out that U.S. vice-president J.D. Vance is Catholic. According to RNS, Vance does not agree with previous statements by Catholic bishops that deportations pose any problems. But the real question is how many American Christians will see this as a problem. RNS interviewed Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies and an astute commentator on American religion. Butler thinks this report could serve to alert Catholic leaders to a major problem facing them, saying, “For Catholic parishes, for Catholic ministries, this is a disaster.” According to the report, 18% of U.S. Catholics are at risk of deportation, implying that perhaps one in five U.S. Catholics are either at risk of being deported, or at risk of of having a family member being deported.
Looking at the religious affiliations of people seeking asylum in the United States, the report concludes that more than three quarters of asylum seekers are are Christians. Of those Christians, 58% are Catholics.
Screenshot of part of page 17 from the online report by NAE, USCCB, et al.
Will reports like this sway the current administration? I doubt it. More importantly, will reports like this sway the majority of the electorate who elected the Trump administration? Well, reports like this are designed by members of the professional-managerial class to affect others in the professional-managerial class — so perhaps this report will influence some Trump voters who are both Christians and who belong to the managerial-professional class.
But honestly — I don’t see reports like this having an effect on voters who don’t belong to the professional-managerial class. Instead, if you really want to influence a broad range of people, you tell stories. So maybe this report will have some impact if it convinces story-tellers to tell about Catholics and Evangelicals, people leading good and moral lives, who got deported.
The current presidential administration has been making history.
I don’t mean making history the way that phrase is typically used. I mean the Trump administration has been making history up, by erasing facts that don’t meet the administration’s standards for political correctness. The erasures have taken place in several formats, including on federal websites, in federal training materials, etc. The American Historical Assoc. and the Organization of American Historians have issued a “Statement Condemning Federal Censorship of American History”; I’ll include the full statement below.
A few of the changes have been stopped by public protests, such as removing the Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force training videos. The Air Force removed the Tuskegee Airmen from the videos because they intepreted Trump’s executive orders against DEI as applying to any mention of the history of a Black combat unit. Given the wording of the executive order, I feel the Air Force made a reasonable interpretation of the order, i.e., the fault lies not with the Air Force but with the executive order.
Other changes to American history remain in place. For example, as of right now the home page of the Stonewall National Monument doesn’t contain the word “transgender,” and the the acronym “LGBTQ” has been replaced by the acronym “LGB.” (The Internet Archive Wayback Machine shows that the acronym “LGBT” was used prior to the Trump administration executive orders; see e.g. this archived webpage from 2022.) Since trans people were integral to the Stonewall riots, the simple removal of the “T” from “LGBTQ” does in fact represent a major rewriting of history by the federal government. The Trump administration may not like transgender people, but like them or not, they were most definitely a part of the history of the Stonewall riots.
I see several things going on here. First, while the Trump administration and their allies denounce “cancel culture,” this looks like cancel culture to me. Second, while the Trump administration and allies denounce censorship, this looks like censorship to me. And finally, as I said at the beginning of this post, this is political correctness — which the Trump administration and their allies have also denounced.
No surprises here. The Trumpites are not the first politicians to spin stories that have little relationship to facts, but which help to bolster their agendas. But it seems like a good idea to document the amazingly vast extent to which the Trump administration is just — making stuff up.
In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell provides historical context that helps us understand why philosophers tackled certain problems at different times in history. In much of the Middle Ages, there was no philosophy. So Russell describes the battles between various polities, and the struggles between the Roman Catholic Church and secular authorities, which helped set the stage for the blossoming of scholastic philosophy in the thirteenth century.
In 1154, Hadrian IV became Pope. Hadrian soon became embroiled in a struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, who had become king of Germany in 1152, and wanted the Pope to crown him Holy Roman Emperor. According to Russell, however, Hadrian IV and Barbarossa were able to find common cause when the city of Rome sought to become an independent city. A poulist faction in Rome wanted an elected body of lawmakers, and they wanted the right to choose their own emperor. The Romans brought in one Arnold of Brescia, a man known for his saintliness. Russell doesn’t make it entirely clear what Rome hoped to get from Arnold, but I suppose they wanted moral credibility.
Unfortunately for Rome, Arnold was a heretic. Russell describes his “very grave” heresy thus: “he maintained that ‘clerks who have estates, bishops who hold fiefs, monks who possess property, cannot be saved’” [i.e., cannot be saved from damnation in the Christian scheme of the afterlife]. Arnold maintained that clerics should abjure material things and devote themselves solely to spiritual matters. However, Arnold’s biggest heresy was that he was supported Roman independence. This enraged Barbarossa. Hadrian IV became equally enraged when there was a riot in Rome in which a Roman Catholic cardinal was killed.
This happened during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter which was the most holy week of the year for the residents of Rome. Hadrian banned the Romans from joining in the Easter rites, unless they got rid of Arnold. The Romans submitted to Hadrian, and expelled Arnold from Rome. Arnold went into hiding, was discovered by Barbarossa’s soldiers, executed, his body burned, and the ashes disposed of in a river. Literally nothing of Arnold remained around which resistance could be organized.
Once Arnold of Brescia was disposed of, Hadrian and Barbarossa could resume their political battle without further distraction. Russell comments:
“The honest man being disposed of, the practical politicians were free to resume their quarrel.”
This is a useful lesson for our own time. Since at least the time of Newt Gingrich, it feels like the honest people have slowly been forced out of politics by the “practical politicians” who seem mostly interested in their personal grabs for power.
I’ve been rereading Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2006). Van Ronk was a musician best remembered for his fingerstyle guitar and his interpretations of blues music, although he thought of himself as more of as a jazz musician manque. He was one of the core musicians of the 1960s Folk Revival, though he never hit it big like his friend Bobby Dylan. Van Ronk was also a serious leftist. He started out as an anarchist, joined the IWW, and wound up as a Troskyite. In his memoir, he reflected on the politics of the 1960s:
“I was encouraged by a lot of the changes that were happening in the 1960s, but as an orthodox leftist I was also a very strong critic of the student movement and the New Left. Of course, I agreed with a lot of their stances — I was strongly pro-civil rights and strongly antiwar — but most of those people were not really radicals, just a bunch of very pissed-off liberals. They had no grounding, and indeed no interest, in theory, and their disdain for studying history and learning economics infuriated me. The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood — and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another. They wanted the world to change, but essentially it was a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on. The working class at least has some power — if the working class folds it arms, the machinery stops — and as for the ruling class, its power is obvious. But what power does the middle class have? They have the power to talk: yak, yak, yak. To interpret, reinterpret, and re-re-reinterpret. And that is the history of the New Left in a nutshell.”
Interestingly, I feel the current Republican party actually does have a serious theoretical grounding. I disagree violently with the Republican party’s economic policies, but you have to admit that they are firmly grounded in Milton Friedman’s economic theories. Even if today’s Republicans have drifted away from Friedman in some respects, still a great deal of their agenda — doing away with Social Security, privatizing the National Park System, getting rid of the Post Office, etc. — comes straight out of his work.
Who on the American left offers any theoretical grounding to compete with Friedmanism? If Dave Van Ronk were still alive he’d no doubt advocate for Trotskyism, although to my mind that’s a non-starter in 2025 America. Personally, I’d vote for William J. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. However, I suspect Barber’s Christian affiliation is a dealbreaker for many of today’s pissed-off liberals; plus it has proved difficult to get pissed-off liberals to focus on poverty as a central issue.
Brief notices of other histories of East Asian and Southeast Asian countries that I’ve been reading
Tuttle Publishing’s “Brief History of…” series
Tuttle Publishing says that its core mission is “to publish best-in-class books informing the English-speaking world about the countries and peoples of Asia.” Founded in Rutland, Vermont, back in 1832, they now have offices in Vermont, Tokyo, and Singapore. Their “Brief History” series provides popular one-volume histories of various countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia. Current titles in this series cover the following countries: China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea (including North and South Korea), Singapore and Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. An although Bali is part of Indonesia, there’s also a separate book on Bali in this series.
I’ve read all these titles except the ones on Bali and Japan. I can affirm that each book I’ve read gives exactly what they promise: a brief introduction to the history of each country. Each one is competently written and entertaining, and each one generally relies on secondary (and tertiary) sources rather than primary sources. If you want something more than a Wikipedia article, but something less than a dry scholarly history, these are the perfect books to read. While the quality of the books is consistently high, I’ll offer brief comments on the relative strengths of each volume. Then I’ll discuss two other books published by Tuttle that offer more in-depth accounts of two polities.
For some reason, I got interested in the history of Southeast Asia a year or so ago. Mostly I was interested in learning more about a part of the world that was completely neglected in my schooling. Below are brief summaries of three of the books I’ve been reading.
This romance novel from 1848 begins with Gilbert Markham, the male protagonist, telling how he saves a small boy from falling off a high wall. The boy’s mother, the widowed Mrs. Helen Graham, sees him do this; but instead of thanking Gilbert, she treats him coldly and with suspicion. Nevertheless — or perhaps precisely because she treats him so badly — Gilbert falls in love with Mrs. Graham, abandons his previous sweetheart, and pursues this mysterious widow despite her attempts to keep him at arms’ length. So ends the first part of the book. Gilbert manages to portray himself as weak-willed and foolish, and thus not the typical hero of a romance novel.
The second part of the book consists of entries from Helen Graham’s diary, whose real name turns out to be Helen Lawrence Huntington. Helen has given this diary to Gilbert so he can understand her better. In the diary, Helen tells how she fell in love with Arthur Huntingdon, a weak-willed and unscrupulous man. She foolishly marries him. To her astonishment — but not to ours — after their marriage, Arthur reveals himself to be abusive, irrational, domineering, and nasty. Helen puts up with him until she sees that their son is beginning to imitate his father. This she cannot stand, so she flees the marriage with her son, and hides in the country under an assumed name, where she meets Gilbert Markham. So ends the second part. Will her life improve in the third part?
