In my previous post, I mentioned the luxury of having a newspaper left outside my hotel room door every morning in Kyoto. The Japan News is designed for an international readership, with wide-ranging global coverage and inserts from the U.S. and U.K usual sources (mainly WaPo and the Times.) I found no daylight between their editorial positions and official pronouncements from DC and London. No matter, I still found plenty to interest me. I cut out several articles, intending to blog about them in coming days, which in this case has turned out to be 38.1 So, in no particular order, four stories following.
Study Shows that 15% of White Evangelicals are Christian
Got your attention, didn’t I? You will have to keep reading to get to the punch line. Shadi Hamid of The Washington Post examines perhaps the most substantial, and certainly the most loyal component of Trump’s base. The piece is not a criticism of Trump, for why should he not get votes wherever he can find them? Rather, it is an examination of how evangelical political involvement has changed the very definition of what it means to be one. Of the 80% of White evangelicals who voted Trump in 2020, Hamid asks,
How can people who prize moral rectitude and personal witness to Jesus so faithfully support the most secular president in American history, someone who seems by his behavior at best indifferent to Christianity?
The author finds that Trump has been able to change the very meaning of “evangelical.” Many were cautious about him at first, in 2016, and their relationship was transactional: most were Republicans, and Trump was the Republican candidate. But then he promised and delivered on his Supreme Court appointments, resulting in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. As American culture secularized, White Evangelicals felt themselves under attack, and Trump said he would protect them. And so, they embraced him. While other Christian denominations are hemorrhaging members, Evangelicalism grew from 25% to 29% between 2016 and 2020.
But those fearing the rise of some Christian theocracy, your fears may be misplaced; and here is where the statistics get very interesting. These new evangelicals do not actually go to church; their identification of same is just a way to signal their support of Trump, where “politics rather than religion was the driving force.” Non-attendance by evangelicals was once unusual; now 27% never or seldom attend church.
Evangelicalism is now about shared political convictions. Pay attention to the following statistic:
43% of evangelicals do not believe in the divinity of Christ.
It gets even better. In a 2022 study, 15% of Muslims, 12% of Hindus, and 5% of Jews describe themselves as “born-again” or evangelical Christians. How does that even work? I guess it works in a world where words have no real meaning any more. So, it seems to me, you don’t have to be a Christian to be an evangelical, you don’t have to believe in the divinity of Christ to be one, but you do have to support Donald Trump. As Hamid notes, “partisan commitments are replacing religious affiliation as people’s overarching source of identity.”
The author notes that Democrats abandoned the ground to the GOP, beginning with Hillary Clinton in 2016, who refused to make the overtures that Obama had made. It is at this point that the writer makes one of the most delicious Freudian slips that I have ever read. I am amazed no one caught it—but the fact that they did not speaks to the very process Hamid has outlined. Here it is:
In 1990, 40% of White evangelicals were Christian. Today, this share is closer to 15%.
Clearly, he meant to write “Democrats,” rather than Christian. But this is what he wrote and this is what got printed. This clipping is a keeper.
He closes with this line: “Religion matters, even when it’s not really about religion.”
The “Bungle in the Jungle”
This article addresses the construction of Indonesia’s new capital on the island of Bornea, Nusantara. I had no idea. Start-from-scratch capitals have an uneven record. We started it off with Washington DC, I suppose, but then we were a new country, and most of our current cities had not yet seen the light of day either, so I do not know if we really qualify.
Most of these cities are not the first or second places you would want to visit in a country: Brasilia, Canberra, Pretoria, Islamabad come to mind. Astana, Kazahkstan seems to have made the cut by sheer for of will. Nigeria has one—Abuja—of which I had never heard.
Even that great fool Mikheil Saakashvili tried to impose one on the Republic of Georgia. To promote development of the central and western part of the country, he constructed an enormous glass dome on the outskirts of Kutaisi. Georgians nicknamed it “the Turtle.” Ten years ago it was leaking and the air conditioning did not work. When the pro-NGO folks stormed the Georgian Parliament recently, it was in Tbilisi, not Kutaisi. So I am assuming that the experiment did not work. Two other countries have ground-up capitals under construction, or at least contemplation: Djibloho-Ciudad de la Paz in Equitorial Guniea, and Ramciel in South Sudan.
The construction of Nusantara is certain a bold move. Djakarta, at 32 million and traffic-clogged, is sinking, and plagued with water shortages. The Indonesian government hopes to move into the new capital on August 17th, their independence day. What is unsaid is, of course, that they want to present the incoming government with a fait accompli, which would permit no later wiggling-out of the plan. The picture above is what they envision. The photo below is what it looks like currently.
In addition to delays in construction, there are other problems; the water is not yet on site, and squatters are presenting a problem to development plans, foreign investment has stalled, and land speculators have descended upon the area. Construction dust covers everything. A concrete shell promises to be a state of the art hospital by August 17th.
Again, this is a bold mold—Borneo, of all places—by a country that is often overlooked, but is a powerful economic force and the largest Muslim country in the world. I wish them well, but the odds may not be in their favor.
‘Overtourism’ pushes Europe to its limit
After having just completed a 32-day around the world trip, with a heavy carbon footprint, I cannot very well complain about ‘overtourism,’ can I? Oh, of course I can! In my defense, I tend to go places where tourists are not. There were no queues in Langwathby or Hanoi. While the tourist hordes crammed the cobblestone streets of Prague, I had the art museum galleries all to myself. Even with the heavily touristed Royal Mile in Edinburgh, I approached from a council house bedroom a few blocks away.
But hotspots—Spain, Portugal, Venice, Mallorca, etc.—may be reaching a tipping point. The author approaches the subject by way of Mallorca. The author Robert Graves (1895-1985), most noted, as least to me, as author of I, Claudius and Claudius the God, lived in the remote Mallorcan village of Deia. He could see it coming, but thought his village too far removed. His son William, now 83, runs the Graves museum in Deia, and has lived to see his father proven wrong. Most of the locals have been priced out or sold up, and Graves’ neighbors are now all rental units, with the streets clogged with rental cars. Protests against ‘overtourism’ are on the rise in Spain and France. Twenty million visitors are expected in Mallorca alone this year. Rents have doubled throughout the islands. 400 families are now living in caravans. In the capital, Palma, several cruise ships may unload each day, each with 7,000 passengers. But Mallorca’s government is taking action, reducing the island’s beds by 18,000, which is 4% of the total.
On my day trip to Ha Lon Bay in Vietnam, I struck up an acquaitance with a young German, 25 years of age. He was spending two months traveling in Southeast Asia, before returning to Germany to look for another job, either there or elsewhere. (That is a difference between Europeans and Americans; an American would never take off for two months if he did not have a job waiting for him upon return.) He was quite frank about the kind of tour he was taking, the one popular with young European men in Southeast Asia, particularly in Bangkok. In fact, he had just come from Bangkok and was cutting Vietnam short to return there. He had an interesting family story, which included opposition to Hitler back in the bad old days. Even his great-grandmother, who had to attend the rallies, told them that she never once mouthed the words “Heil, Hitler.”
Anyway, this young man’s family has a three-generation association with Spain. He and his sisters all have Spanish names, even though they were fully German. His mother and one sister live on Mallorca. I quizzed him about the article. He was sanquine about it all. Their village was apparently still very far removed from all that. He said there were American beaches and there were European beaches, and that they went to neither.
But back to Robert Graves, the author concludes with this: “But coves with translucent water, of the kind where the poet took his daily swim, can still be found empty or almost so—at this time of year at least.”
“Netanyahu’s speech could cause long-term damage”
Ya think? This article came before the debate, before the assassination attempt, before the palace coup, and before the Netanyahu’s infamous appearance before the U.S. Congress yesterday. Josh Rogin for WaPo warned that “Congress is giving Netanyahu a platform to interfere in U.S. politics, as he has done before” and he “could further polarize the U.S.-Israel relationship.” Yea, verily.
Rogin notes that this is Netanyahu’s fourth such visit, surpassing the record set by Winston Churchill. He relates the long-lasting damage from his 2015 appearance, and fears 2024 will be much the same.
I do not have much to say about this, for alone among our foreign policy problems, I view this one to be absolutely unsolvable; at least, that is, with the current generation of American leaders. The author quotes Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.): “Everything points to the fact that Netanyahu is focused on his own political survival at the expense of the interests of Israel and at the expense of the U.S.-Israel relationship…We shouldn’t be a part of advancing his agenda.” Sadly, we are; up to our necks.
In checking out the excellent online presence of Japan News, I see that the headline today is the demographic collapse of the country. Their population has been in decline for 15 years in a row, dropping 861,237 in 2023 alone.