Hahrie Han
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Hahrie Han’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I don't know that I've seen data that like people who are doing it as white evangelicals on the conservative side are necessarily white. have a stronger identity than people on the white Christian side who are also on the left. But I think it's more that they're nested within structures and those structures kind of channel that political power in a different way.
You know, this makes me, Albert Hirschman is a political scientist who wrote this like terrific book in the mid 20th century called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. where he talks about the idea that, you know, the fundamental logic of market organizations is different from the fundamental logic of what should be political organizations.
The idea being that market organizations operate on the logic of exit, which is that if I don't like your product, right, I go and I find another one. So if I don't like Cheerios, I go buy Chex, right? If I don't like Heinz, I go buy Hunt's ketchup or whatever the thing is, right? Whereas political organizations shouldn't operate on the logic of exit, right?
So if I don't like what your candidate is doing or I don't like what your organization is doing, instead of just going and finding another product or an organization that has a similar but better product, instead what I should do is exercise voice. Right. I should stay and I should try to advocate and change what I think is the right thing to do. But that's a much harder ask of people. Right.
And in order to have that, people need loyalty. That's hence the title of the book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty. And I think.
I would sort of say that the difference between the left and the right is less about identity and more about the fact that a lot of the left-leaning organizations that drive participation on the left tend to operate more on the logic of exit, whereas the ones on the right have become more effective at operating on that logic of voice.
And so they're able to channel activity and sort of sustain disagreement and sustain that kind of deliberation in a different way.
Absolutely. I mean, you know, there's a, there's a terrific group of scholars right now who've done a lot of work kind of looking at what are the roots of this kind of, you know, quest for what people call kind of Christian nationalism, you know, within evangelicalism and how is that tied to some of these theological fights have been going on for a century or more. So, so,
That is both true that those roots have been there for sure, but that it became, in the United States at least, it became much more pronounced starting around the 1970s. And then it got tied to a partisan agenda, you know, by the end of the 20th, early 21st century. And once it got tied to a partisan agenda, then, you know, you began to see this kind of...
breaking apart that Trump in some ways is the culmination of. But one thing I will say is, you know, in doing research on this book, one of the things that I realized is that You know, evangelicalism is, like, Protestant evangelicalism is a very rich and varied tradition, and, you know, many of these traditions are.
And the part of it that has become the most prominent is one that asserts that the way to realize you know, their faith in the modern age is to try to, you know, exert Christian political power, right? And so this is the rise of the moral majority. This is the Christian right that we're seeing and that we're talking about.
And that has very fundamentally changed American politics in the past several decades, for sure. But there's a whole different trend within evangelicalism that in some ways the largest churches in America kind of come out of that trend. And that trend is really rooted in much more of a missionary tradition.
Where the idea is, is that the way in which you realize your faith or realize the vision of, you know, God's kingdom on earth is not focused necessarily on exerting political power, but instead is on converting as many people as possible to Christianity, right? And so the goal there is humans, it's souls, you know, that they're trying to convert.
And that's why, you know, some of the biggest mega churches in our country country really come out of that missionary tradition because they're so focused on growth as opposed to the ones that get the most political attention, which are often focused more on political power.
Yeah, this is an area where I think the data that we have is actually very challenging for a variety of reasons, which is the idea that we definitely have a lot of data that says people who self-identify as evangelical are increasingly more likely to be conservative.
And I will just say, I just want to be really clear that I think no matter how you cut the data, evangelicals tend to be more conservative than not. I think that is unequivocally true. Is it as extreme as numbers where it's like eight and 10 white evangelicals voted for Trump? You know, I think those numbers are overstated.
And the reason for that is precisely what you said, which is one of the things that we know is that there are a lot of people who identify with the political agenda of evangelicalism that will self-identify as evangelical, even if they don't adhere to the faith tenets of evangelicalism.
Whereas there are people who may not agree with a political agenda of evangelicalism, even if they adhere to the doctrinal beliefs that define evangelicalism as theology. And then when a pollster calls them and says, are you evangelical? They say, no. You know, they might say that I'm a Christ follower. They might say I'm a Jesus follower. They might say I'm Christian follower.
But they won't say that they're evangelical because they associate that with a political identity that doesn't represent them. And so the data is really murky, you know, and there's this question of who gets to define what evangelical is. Is it adherence to the political identity? Is it adherence to the faith identity? Is it the people who show up in the pews on Sundays?
You know, it's like there's a lot of murkiness around it.
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