Evangelical activism is backfiring
Much white evangelical support for Donald Trump is based on a bargain or transaction: political loyalty (and political cover for the president’s moral flaws) in return for protection from a hostile culture. Many evangelicals are fearful that courts and government regulators will increasingly treat their moral and religious convictions as varieties of bigotry. And that this will undermine the ability of religious institutions to maintain their identities and do their work. Such alarm is embedded within a larger anxiety about lost social standing that makes Trump’s promise of a return to greatness appealing.
Evangelical concerns may be exaggerated, but they are not imaginary. There is a certain type of political progressive who would grant institutional religious liberty only to churches, synagogues and mosques, not to religious schools, religious hospitals and religious charities. Such a cramped view of pluralism amounts to the establishment of secularism, which would undermine the longstanding cooperation of government and religious institutions in tasks from treating addiction, to placing children in adoptive homes, to caring for the sick, to educating the young.
But this is not, by any reasonable measure, the largest problem evangelicals currently face. It is, instead, the massive selloff of evangelicalism among the young. About 26% of Americans 65 and older identify as white, evangelical Protestants. Among those ages 18 to 29, the figure is 8%. Why this demographic abyss does not cause greater panic — panic concerning the existence of evangelicalism as a major force in America — is a mystery and a scandal. With their focus on repeal of the Johnson Amendment and the right to say “Merry Christmas,” some evangelical leaders are tidying up the kitchen while the house burns down around them.
There is a generational cycle of religious identification that favors religion. Adolescents and young adults have always challenged the affiliations of their parents and been less likely to attend a house of worship. This tends to change when people have children and rediscover the importance of faith in the cultivation of values and character. So there is likely to be some recovery upward from 8% as this cohort ages.
But this recovery will come from a very low baseline of belief. Evangelical identification could triple without reaching the level found among senior citizens today. In an interview last November, David
ered, the delivery person is entitled to minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workers compensation and other worker protections. An app worker delivering that same pizza is not entitled to any of those rights and protections simply because the order was placed through an app on my phone. It’s not fair. It’s not right.
We cannot leave behind a class of workers in New York state who are being denied basic rights most other workers have. This is a turning point in our changing economy that reeks of early 20th-century working conditions of low wages and discrimination.
New York has the opportunity, right now, to lead the nation by enacting public policy to protect these workers before the exploitation intensifies.
That is why we are calling on state legislators to support a bill that would end the misclassification of app workers as independent contractors and ensure they are treated as employees, with all the corresponding rights and benefits including the right to organize, minimum wage, workers compensation, disability benefits and other basic worker protections.
It should come as no surprise that app companies have aggressively opposed any and all efforts to end their misclassification of their employees because they know it would immediately provide these workers with a voice on the job.
Farmworkers waited 100 years for that voice and now will finally be able to celebrate Labor Day with the same strength and spirit as all working men and women. We are here to make sure app workers can also join the celebration equally, and sooner rather than later.