Skip to main content Skip to navigation
CAS in the Media Arts and Sciences Media Headlines

Opinion: The Truth About Trump’s Evangelical Support

By Matthew Avery Sutton, professor of history at Washington State University

Matthew Avery Sutton.
Sutton

Donald Trump has never pretended to practice traditional Christian virtues. Yet in 2016 he earned 81 percent of the white evangelical vote—a higher percentage than George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain. Trump’s success surprised a lot of us: How could a group of staunchly moral religious voters give their support to a man with a long track record of lying, cheating, using profanity, and grabbing women “by the pussy”?

If this seemed jarring, it may be because evangelical leaders have projected a whitewashed vision of their movement to the rest of the country so successfully for so long. To be an evangelical, leaders of the movement and the scholars who follow them insisted for several decades, is to commit to the authority of the Bible, the centrality of Jesus, the necessity of individual conversion, and evangelism. With this move, they separated evangelicalism from its existence in the world. Evangelicals might try to influence politics and culture, but politics and culture, they implied, had no impact on the untainted core of evangelicalism. Billy Graham might be sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom, and Jerry Falwell might be advising GOP platform committees, but the evangelical gospel was timeless, unaffected by the forces of history and the world around it. The sexists, racists, and xenophobes who regularly appeared in their ranks, they argued, did not reflect the true movement, only its distortions.

Find out more

The New Republic

 

Evolutionary Biologists Find Several Fish Adapt in the Same Way to Toxic Water

Several species of fish have adapted to harsh environments using the same mechanism, which brings to question evolutionary chance, according to a study by Kansas State University and Washington State University.

Joanna Kelley.
Joanna Kelley

Joanna Kelley, associate professor in biological sciences and co-lead author at Washington State University; and many additional collaborators recently published an article about repeated adaptations to extreme environments in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Find out more

Environmental News Network
National Science Foundation
WSU Insider
Science Daily
WIBW

Ask Dr. Universe: Why do some birds cheep loudly while other birds cheep quietly?

Jessica Tir.
Jessica Tir

When I got your question, I called up my friend Jessica Tir, a graduate student at Washington State University who studies songbirds.

She said one of the main reasons a bird will make a loud sound is to attract a mate. When the birds find each other, they can make a nest for their eggs and wait for babies to hatch.

“That’s the song they are going to sing for the rest of their life,” Tir said.

In the lab at WSU, Tir records songbirds’ songs on microphones to learn more about how they communicate with each other, especially when they are hungry. The research will help us learn more about communication and how much food there is some birds’ habitat.

While humans can make sounds with help from their vocal cords, birds use a part called the syrinx (SEE-RINKS). Ostriches have a much bigger syrinx than, say, a tiny swallow, but they work in similar ways.

Find out more

Ask Dr. Universe 

The Hidden World of Holy Spies: A Q&A with NEH Public Scholar Matthew Avery Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton.
Sutton

In civics classes across the country, students are taught that a metaphoric wall separates church and state. However, the church-state connection is far more complicated, according to NEH Public Scholar Matthew Avery Sutton professor of history at Washington State University. “During the 1940s,” he writes, “American leaders came to understand in deeper and more explicit ways how central religion was to crafting successful foreign policy.” They hatched numerous plans to use spirituality as a political tool, but one in particular stuck: hiring missionaries to “serve God and country” as spies.

Sutton’s book, Double Crossed: the Missionaries who Spied for the United States during the Second World War, examines this “holy” espionage throughout WWII, presenting a fledgling U.S. intelligence agency, its religious assets, and their unusually close alliance.

Sutton is currently writing a book on the history of American Christianity, from colonial times to the present. In it, he hopes to explain how Christianity has developed in and shaped the United States.

Find out more

National Endowment for the Humanities

Ask Dr. Universe: What gives leaves their shapes?

We can find all kinds of leaves on our planet. Just think of tiny pine needles, fern fronds, ivy vines, or a big banana leaf.

Eric Roalson.
Roalson

My friend Eric Roalson is a professor in the school of Biological Sciences at Washington State University who is very curious about plants. He said there are a few things that give leaves their shapes.

A lot of plant families have been around for hundreds of millions of years—so they have had a lot of time to adapt to their environments, too. Plants may keep the qualities that have helped them survive through the years. They might develop new qualities that help them survive in their habitats. Or they might lose the qualities that are no longer useful.

Roalson also told me that plants in the same family often have similar shaped leaves. But not always. We see a lot of biodiversity in plants—that is, a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes in a community of living things.

Find out more

Ask Dr. Universe