LifeWay Research

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Sign of tense times: Half of Protestant pastors say QAnon era has reached their pews

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Sign of tense times: Half of Protestant pastors say QAnon era has reached their pews

Having reached the vice president's chair in the U.S. Senate, the self-proclaimed QAnon shaman, UFO expert and metaphysical healer removed his coyote-skin and buffalo horns headdress and announced, with a megaphone, that it was time to pray.

"Thank you, Heavenly Father … for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights," proclaimed Jake "Yellowstone Wolf" Angeli (born Jacob Chansley), his face painted red, white and blue and his torso tattooed with Norse symbols that his critics link to the extreme right.

“Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love," he added, in a prayer captured on video by correspondent working for The New Yorker. "Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. …

"Thank you, divine Creator God for surrounding and filling us with the divine, omnipresent white light of love and protection, of peace and harmony. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government."

Many phrases in this rambling prayer would sound familiar to worshippers in ordinary churches across America, said Joe Carter, an editor with The Gospel Coalition and a pastor with McLean Bible Church near Washington, D.C. But the prayer also included strange twists and turns that betrayed some extreme influences and agendas.

"This is a man who has described himself as pagan, as an ordained minister, in fact," said Carter, reached by telephone. "The alt-right has always included some pagan influences. But now it's obvious that leaders with QAnon and other conspiracy theorists have learned that if they toss in some Christian imagery, then they'll really expand their base and their potential reach 100-fold."

Law-enforcement officials will soon present evidence attempting to prove who planned key elements of the illegal riot that crashed into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, after the legal "March to Save America" backing former President Donald Trump's claim that fraud cost him the White House.

This is just the latest example of how conspiracy theories, on the left and right, have soaked into public discourse about COVID-19 vaccines, Big Tech monopolies, sinister human-trafficking networks and, of course, alleged illegal activities in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

There is no way to deny that this digital tornado has shaken many Protestant churches, according to a new Lifeway Research survey that asked clergy to respond to this statement: "I frequently hear members of my congregation repeating conspiracy theories they have heard about why something is happening in our country."

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Here we go again: Believers face complicated choices in #2020 COVID-tide

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Here we go again: Believers face complicated choices in #2020 COVID-tide

Rather than preparing for a joyous Christmastide, believers are making tough decisions about how to celebrate during a season some call COVID-tide.

What about that beloved Christmas cantata or children's pageant? Government regulations about singing vary nationwide.

All those parties and dinners on the December calendar? Church officials may shut them down or, perhaps, look the other way.

The most emotional question: What about Christmas Eve, with glowing sanctuaries full of families gathered from near and afar dressed in festive holiday attire? In most churches some members will be allowed inside, while others stay home -- as during 2020's Holy Week and Easter -- holding candles while facing computer screens.

No one knows what will happen, especially in Protestant flocks where holiday traditions are more flexible and evolve from year to year.

Nevertheless, about 50% of American adults who typically go to church at Christmas hope to do so, according to a study by LifeWay Research in Nashville. In fact, another 15% of participants in the online survey said they were more likely to attend a service this year. However, 35% of typical churchgoers said they're more likely to stay home.

"About 50% of America are saying, 'We're going to do what we're going to do,' " said Tim McConnell, LifeWay's executive director. Since this survey was done before the recent coronavirus spike, "that makes things even more unpredictable" than they were already.

The survey results seem deceptively ordinary, but tensions emerge in key details. The survey focused on believers, and the unchurched, but included an oversample of self-identified evangelical Protestants.

"It's easy to look at these numbers and see that half the people say they will be having Christmas as usual. Then there's another group of people who say they plan to do even more," he said. "Then you look at the bigger picture and there's that other third that's missing. That's probably the large group of Americans who are older and at higher risk. …

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For Protestant pastors, the 2020 White House race looks a lot like the one in 2016

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For Protestant pastors, the 2020 White House race looks a lot like the one in 2016

For pastors in America's Protestant pulpits, Election Day 2020 is starting to look a lot like 2016.

Most evangelicals whose priorities mesh -- for the most part -- with the Republican Party are ready to vote for Donald Trump, according to a LifeWay Research survey. Protestant clergy who do not self-identify as evangelicals plan to vote for Democrat Joe Biden.

The difference in 2020 is that fewer pastors are struggling to make a decision. A survey at the same point in the 2016 race found that 40% of Protestant pastors remained undecided, while 32% packed Trump and 19% supported Hillary Clinton.

This time, only 22% remain undecided, with 53% saying that they plan to vote for Trump, while 21% support Biden.

"There's still a lot of 'undecided' pastors," said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay. "Quite a few pastors -- for a variety of reasons -- want to put themselves in the 'undecided' bucket. …

"Last time around, Donald Trump was such an unknown factor and many pastors really didn't know what to do with him. This time, it appears that more people know what Trump is about and they have made their peace with that, one way or another. The president is who he is, and people have made up their minds."

Looming in the background is a basic fact about modern American politics. In the end, the overwhelming majority of pastors who say they are Democrats plan to vote for Biden (85%) and the Republicans plan to back Trump (81%).

Some pastors have a logical reason to linger in the "undecided" category -- their doctrinal convictions don't mesh well with the doctrines of the major political parties.

The Rev. Tim Keller, an influential evangelical writer who founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, recently stirred up online debates with a New York Times essay called, "How Do Christians Fit Into the Two-Party System? They Don't."

In recent decades, he noted, Democrats and Republicans have embraced an approach to politics in which party leaders assume that working with them on one crucial issue requires agreement with the rest of their party platforms.

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SBC President J.D. Greear offers blunt sermon on sexual abuse. What happens now?

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SBC President J.D. Greear offers blunt sermon on sexual abuse. What happens now?

For decades, Southern Baptist leaders rolled their eyes whenever there were headlines about clergy sexual abuse cases.

That was -- wink, wink -- a Catholic thing linked to celibate priests. Then there were those mainline Protestants, and even some evangelicals, who modernized their teachings on marriage and sex. No wonder they were having problems.

This was a powerful, unbiblical myth that helped Southern Baptists ignore their own predators, said SBC President J.D. Greear, during a recent national conference hosted by the denomination's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission and the new SBC Sexual Abuse Advisory Group.

"The danger of this myth is that it is naive: It relegates abuse to an ideological problem, when it should be most properly seen as a depravity problem. … It fails to recognize that wherever people exist in power without accountability abuse will foster," said Greear, pastor of The Summit Church near Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

"What part of society has not been affected? It happens on Wall Street, in Hollywood, on Capitol Hill, in academic institutions, sports programs, Catholic and Protestant churches, liberal and conservative," he added. "I want to say something as an evangelical to evangelicals: We evangelicals should have known this. Didn't Jesus say there would be wolves in sheep's clothing that would come into the flock in order -- not to serve the flock -- but to abuse the flock?"

The shameful truth, said Greear, is that victims inside America's largest Protestant flock tried -- in recent decades -- to awaken SBC leaders. Then alarms sounded last February when the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News revealed that several hundred Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers had been accused of sexual abuse, with 700-plus victims.

This created another myth -- that these news reports marked the beginning of the crisis. Some Southern Baptists, said Greear, also suggested that victims should learn to practice forgiveness, implying that their cries for justice were "attacks from adversaries, instead of warnings from friends."

The SBC president became emotional at this point: "It's wrong to categorize someone as 'just bitter' because they raised their voice when their important warnings were not heeded. Anger is an appropriate response -- a BIBLICAL response -- in that circumstance. …

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Survey of clergy spouses shows that privacy, isolation are issues in their glass houses

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Survey of clergy spouses shows that privacy, isolation are issues in their glass houses

Study the weekly calendars of most American churches and somewhere there will be a reference to a "prayer group," or words to that effect.

These gatherings may take place at church, in homes or at a coffee shop. The format will usually be informal, but -- after snacks and a devotion of some kind -- people are offered time to share what is happening in their lives so others can pray for them.

What is a pastor's spouse supposed to do?

Consider these numbers from a recent LifeWay Research survey of 720 spouses randomly selected from a multi-denominational list of Protestant pastors. Nearly 50 percent of clergy spouses said their candid prayer requests "would just become gossip," with 11 percent "strongly" agreeing. Half said they no longer confide with church members because they have been "betrayed too many times."

"For these spouses, the walls around them are pretty high," said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay Research. "If you ask them to open up with people in a new church community, they're already going to be pretty cautious about doing that."

While this survey found high levels of satisfaction among clergy spouses, concerns about privacy and isolation are the "kind of thing that seminaries may need to warn people about when their spouses go into the ministry," he said.

There's more. Nearly 70 percent of these clergy spouses said they had few friends with whom they could be candid. Just over half said they had experienced "personal attacks" in their current church.

Are they are living in a "fishbowl"? Half agreed.

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Americans willing to talk about politics, but few anxious to discuss religion

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Americans willing to talk about politics, but few anxious to discuss religion

While it's hard to pinpoint the precise moment it happened, it's clear that most American discussions of religious liberty have turned into shouting matches about "religious liberty," a term now commonly framed in "scare quotes."

The recent U.S. Commission on Civil Rights "Peaceful Coexistence" report made this clear, claiming the First Amendment's defense of the free exercise of religion is not as important as some people think. Thus, "civil rights" now trump "religious liberty."

The commission stressed: "Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights."

In a quote that went viral online, commission chair Martin Castro added: "The phrases 'religious liberty' and 'religious freedom' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance."

This creates a major problem for Americans who are worried about civil public discourse or even the odds of having friendly conversations with friends, family and neighbors, noted Scott McConnell, head of LifeWay Research.

"What did our parents tell us when we were growing up? They warned us not to talk about politics, not to talk about religion and not to talk about sex," he said, reached by telephone.

"Well, it's hard to talk about anything that matters these days -- like religious liberty -- without talking about all three of those things and usually at the same time. ... No wonder people are tense."

Just how tense are Americans, when it comes to talking about religion?

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Dark Halloween nights vs. bright All Hallows' Eve rites

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It's Halloween in suburbia and most of the houses are decorated and glowing, waiting to serve treats to Disney princesses, superheroes, movie pirates, zombies. Minions and tiny people disguised as puppies, pumpkins or other innocent options.

But a few houses are dark because, for reasons of safety or theology, their inhabitants have made the countercultural decision to avoid contact with a season they believe has grown too dark and dangerous. Others believe "pagan," evil influences have shaped Halloween, deep into its roots.

"It's hard to know precisely what people mean when they use a word like 'pagan.' For many people it means anything that's ungodly or disturbing. … That's what some Americans think Halloween has become -- a clash between good and evil," said Scott McConnell, vice president of LifeWay Research.

A recent LifeWay telephone survey, he said, found that 21 percent of Americans have decided to avoid Halloween altogether, while another 14 percent specifically try to avoid "pagan" elements of the festivities. Nearly 60 percent said Halloween is "all in good fun," while 6 percent of survey participants were "not sure" what they thought.

While some people are worried about ghosts, goblins, devils and other images of death and decay, Americans are much more likely to see Hollywood symbols of "good and evil" arrive at their doors shouting "trick or treat."