Emergent New Ideas

Tia Levings, wrote an amazing article on substack last week titled,  Beating Evangelical MAGA at Their Long Game, where she outlined how we got here and she came up with an amazing list of ways to fight back. Here is an excerpt but the whole article deserves a read. 

Here’s what they did, and how we can do the same thing our way to resist them. 

• Belief-based teaching at home. You don’t have to homeschool, but you should supplement your child’s education with world-broadening content. Teach critical thinking and logic. Teach science. Nurture literacy. Read books, especially those banned by the Christo-fascist state. Value nature and interact with it.

• Support the secular publishing industry. We have libraries and bookstores that are not under the authority of any religious institution. Patronize them. Donate. Attend. 

• Amplify experts. They had James Dobson, pastors, seminaries, and fake parenting experts. We have science, testimony, research, peer-reviewed studies, and the expertise of universities. Listen to them. Share them. Make your kids constantly aware that they have the power of testable questions, curiosity, and learning. 

• Make fact-checking and healthy skepticism a practice. Evangelicals cherry-pick scripture and facts. You can step back and look at the whole tree. They have a knack for picking their scripture and bending the facts around it. You can look at the facts and consider what contributed to and created them. 

• Build community. What they made in Sunday Schools and potluck dinners, you can make in book clubs, hobby classes, gyms, etc. The key is: make it regular, center it around the same goal, and show up. Even if it’s on Zoom. 

• Immerse in your messaging. Careful with this one. It’s not indoctrination but curiosity. Art. Expression. Diversity. Where you identify ruts, break them. Your prize is democratic freedom, open minds, and a diverse society, so don’t sweat minor distractions. Focus on choices that support this end goal. 

• Use music to connect messages to emotions. Evangelicals are great at this, as most recently evidenced by the concert lineup for trance-like worship music at the Kirk funeral event. Flip the script. Listen outside of your genre. Go to a classical symphony for a piece that’s transcended centuries of similar political upheaval. Feel your feelings. Sing in the shower. Dance. Rage. “Everybody Scream” is coming from Florence and The Machine, btw. 

• Focus on electing civic leaders at the lower level. Be some “Karen’s” perpetual bad day because you just won’t shut up about democracy and critical thinking. Make your phone calls. Run for local office. The lower levels work up; MAGA taught this well. PTA officers matter, as do weird offices like the water commissioner. (One of Florida’s state senators today started as a district water commissioner, but I knew him as a little kid who said he was going to be a Christian politician someday.) 

• Teach children to embody the narrative. Reward your kids for curiosity and doubt. Help them log off. Put the computer back in the family room. Incentivize reading. Volunteer as a family. Go to museums as a family for both the art and the example that art matters. Help them become civically minded in their schools. Teach them to call out sick when religious indoctrination is the lesson of the day. Go get them. Please give them the language to defend themselves against child proselytizers.