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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The real world turns out to be really messy.
So... So about 70% of Americans identify as Christian. Within that, the largest kind of grouping is probably non-denominational evangelicals, right? But there's also large groupings of Catholics, obviously, and other denominations within that. And so the estimates vary. I will say that...
You know, there's a sociologist at Carleton College named Wes Markowski who has developed this term that he calls the other evangelicals, which are basically people who are evangelical by faith in the sense that they believe in the core tenets that define evangelicalism, but they reject the political identity of evangelicalism.
He estimates that that represents about 30 to 35% of evangelicals by faith, which is about comparable to the estimates of what percentage of evangelicals are Christian nationalists. So you can imagine that if we have a distribution, about a third on one side are sort of kind of a more authoritarian Christian nationalist side, and then about a third is what Markovsky might call other evangelicals.
But again, the data here is really murky. And so these are all estimates based on putting a variety of data points together.
I think the estimates that I've seen are usually around 30% to 35% of Americans overall.
Yeah, yeah. It's a non-trivial. And that number includes, I think, not just white evangelicals. I think the data that I've been talking about is primarily within the white evangelical community.
I mean, I think it's a very – actually, I will say I don't know that I've seen a ton of theorizing in the sense that I think the assumption is that it's a very instrumental deal on both sides. Transactional. Yeah, it's super transactional that Trump wants – He needs votes. He needs support. You know, he had whatever it is that drives Donald Trump. Right.
You know, he's pretty transparent about a set of things. The evangelical community was willing to deliver it to him or a certain portion of the evangelical community, I should say, is willing to deliver it to him. And on their side, they felt that in return. You know, they saw the realization of a set of political priorities that had been on the agenda for, you know, for several decades now.
And so, you know, there was that transactional relationship that I think is part of, at least certainly in the book and the research that I did around it, kind of stressed that. The, you know, relationship between people who were evangelical by faith, were maybe a little bit uncomfortable with some things in the political identity, but weren't really sure what to think about it.
But then, you know, Trump comes into office, he has all this support. And it felt like it called the question for a lot of people in ways that maybe they could ignore in the past.
Yeah, I mean I think there's several things that are going on there. So there is – I think there is a portion of people who kind of held their nose and voted because it would help enact like other views around reproductive rights or sort of other things that they might want. But I think there's also –
A significant portion of people who are evangelical that feel very maligned by the political system in general. Right. It is true that we live in a secular society and, you know, feel that a lot of the kind of like cults. socio-cultural institutions in American life are dominated by secular approaches to life.
And so that creates a feeling of defensiveness, I think, that kind of manifests and was stoked by Trump. And so I think that's where you sort of get that sense of people not necessarily feeling they have to hold their nose, but this is something that they actively support.
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think there's been, you know, more and more data that kind of shows that there are sort of perceptions of status and status threat that sort of shape people's willingness to support a candidate like Trump.
I mean, this, you know, not to kind of harp on Valerie Bunce's definition, which I do love, but it's sort of, to me, it's this idea that, well, when are people willing to accept the uncertainty of outcome that we're asking them to accept in order to buy into a political system if they feel like their people, their tribe, are going to be squashed?
You know, should the other side win or that it poses some kind of existential threat, you know, to things that they hold sacred, then, you know, I think you see more and more people kind of begin to, you know, look for ways to blow the system up or, you know, try some completely different alternative or whatever the case may be.
Yeah. So, you know, most of my day job, most of my work is, you know, partnering with organizations that are trying to get people involved in collective action and public life in different ways, and then essentially putting data and learning around their work to try to understand how they can do that more effectively. Like, how do we do that better? And my attention was drawn to...
2016 ballot initiative in Cincinnati that was trying to pass universal preschool with targeted resources for the poorest children in the city, which given the demographics of Cincinnati is primarily a poor black population. It's very high rates of racialized poverty in Cincinnati. And if you remember in 2016, you know, Trump won Ohio by a pretty significant margin.
And this ballot initiative passed in Cincinnati by the largest margin of any new education levy in Cincinnati history. And so I thought, OK, what is going on here? Right. Because not only did this new tax pass, it passed by this huge margin.
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