Source: The Guardian

Sam Thielman in New York

Conservative Christians no longer agree on how to vote their collective conscience in America.

To liberals, this group has acted for 40 years with incredible political discipline so often, and with such force, that it seems like a single unit moving in lockstep. But in populous, rural southern Louisiana, a decidedly various body of believers representative of much of American Christendom argues about how to proceed. As the ghost of Ronald Reagan loosens its grip on the party, a vital segment is directionless. Many are solidly opposed to Hillary Clinton; many more are disgusted with Donald Trump.

Today, Henry Beck and Frank Fury, who graduated from the same high school in 1960, are arguing about politics with an agility that comes from regular practice. At the Faith Presbyterian men’s luncheon at Morton’s Boiled Seafood and Bar, a restaurant on the bank of of the Tchefuncte river in Covington, Louisiana, their pastor, Jason Wood, 32, watches quietly.

It’s a warm Thursday in May; a sign outside reads “HOT BOILED SEAFOOD WHEN ARROW IS FLASHING”, which it is.

Fury is short, enthusiastic and turns a memorable phrase: the south, he contends, gets a bum rap. “This is the place of Walker Percy, the great intellect,” Fury reminds me.

Beck, tall, deep-voiced and clad in suspenders, is unmoved: “There’s a lotta rednecks here, Frank.”

“That writer from Mississippi – Faulkner! And the little girl who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird! She’s from Alabama.”

The men are polite, but nervous about talking politics to a reporter. As Van Wilson, the only attendee over 90 years old, says grace over the meal, he asks that God would show me “that we southerners are no different from anyone else, and that we love the Lord”.

This isn’t meant to sting, but it does. Though I live in New York now, I grew up in a town of 600 people in the Blue Ridge mountains and went to college in Birmingham, Alabama, where Wood was my roommate. I go to church every week and I love the Lord, too.

I also recognize the impulse: No one likes to be stereotyped, and blue-state liberals often sneer at rural conservatives who vote against abortion access and gay rights on principle. And those liberals tend to be vindictive when they see those same people’s home cities and states suffer in large part because politicians paying lip service to conservative religious ideology have used their positions to vampirize the standard of living through corporate tax giveaways, union-busting, old-fashioned graft, or – as is too often the case in Louisiana – all three.

Many understand that they’ve been exploited to further the deregulation of trade and labor; they’re just not sure what to do about it.

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