At the center of the biblical allusion in the “Jericho March” on the National Mall Saturday – a rally of thousands of religious conservatives who met to protest and pray to #stopthesteal – is a revelation of God’s miraculous power in the conquest of a promised land.

And like the prophet Joshua, who fought the battle of Jericho with blasts of trumpets and shouts of soldiers, organizers called on “all patriots and people of faith” to march a symbolic seven times around the Capitol Building in Washington “until the walls of voter fraud and corruption fall down and the American people are allowed to see the truth about this election.”

Expressing a religiously militant zeal, the majority of President Donald Trump’s religious base continues to feel certitude in that view, even after the Electoral College on Monday formalized President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 victory. And after Attorney General William Barr said he had seen no evidence of widespread fraud. And after the head of the Trump administration’s cybersecurity office called 2020 the most secure election in U.S. history.

“When God gives you a vision, you don’t need to know anything else,” said Eric Metaxas, a prominent conservative writer and the Jericho March’s emcee.

Rob Weaver, one of the event’s co-founders, said he received a vision of the march before helping to organize its events. 

“God has shown us three very clear things,” he said. “That there are courts in heaven – which our marchers are taking to in prayer before the Lord – then there are the U.S. courts, the courts on Earth, and then there’s the court of public opinion.”

“We believe that God has called us and the church, in general, to focus on the courts in heaven as well as the court of public opinion,” continued Mr. Weaver.

There is a startling irony in this omission of the courts on Earth, however. White Evangelicals and other religious conservatives have for decades made controlling the federal judiciary a primary electoral focus – a focus that culminated in what will be one of President Trump’s most lasting legacies.

Which is why it came as a shock to so many Republicans that conservative judges in both state and federal courts were among the most emphatic in what became a uniform rejection of the president’s ongoing claims that Democratic elites and technocrats conspired to steal the U.S. presidency.

The president and his allies lost over 60 suits to date save one, a minor case early on. Those losses include two terse dismissals from the Supreme Court, of which three of nine justices were appointed by President Trump and which is itself dominated by Catholic conservatives.

A new ‘lost cause’?

While the judiciary has said the law and evidence come down decidedly on one side, “I’ve seen a lot of historians and others say that we will probably watch a new ‘lost cause’ kind of mythmaking basically happen in real time now, just like with the Civil War what happened in the South,” says Andrew Whitehead, professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. It is a framework with which he agrees.

“A lot of people are trying to understand this current cultural moment in light of religious history, given how widespread support for President Trump remains, and what this might mean,” he continues.

The mythology of the Lost Cause was rooted in a sense of cognitive dissonance and historical revisionism that would recalibrate a Southern sense of identity. That identity is mostly rooted in 19th-century forms of evangelical Protestantism, says Bill Leonard, founding dean and professor of divinity emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 

“It portrayed the South as the prime preserver of the original myth of America as Redeemer Nation,” a form of Christian nationalism long embedded in the larger American psyche, says Professor Leonard. “For these Southern Protestants, the Lost Cause meant that the people who lost the war retained that vision. The defeated people, even in defeat, would be more moral, more orthodox, and more ‘Christian’ than their northern counterparts had been or ever could be.”

Indeed, on their website, the organizers of the Jericho March proclaim this idea using another famous trope of American exceptionalism and Christian nationalism.

“America is a city on a hill and light to other nations, and God’s favor is still upon her,” the site proclaims. “We are proud of the American system of governance established by our Founding Fathers and we will not let globalists, socialists, and communists destroy our beautiful nation by sidestepping our laws and suppressing the will of the American people through their fraudulent and illegal activities in this election.”

But in the complicated histories of American evangelical Protestants there has also long been a particular understanding of how a person is able to perceive truth, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of American history at Calvin University, an evangelical institution in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In many ways, ever since the Scopes trial nearly 100 years ago, American evangelicals have remained skeptical of secular science and any kind of expertise divorced from a religiously-based world view.

“It’s a kind of direct access to God’s word, which is especially common within the charismatic corner of evangelicalism,” Professor Du Mez says. “You know, ‘God spoke to me, God laid it on my heart.’ And so you have this kind of direct access to truth and no outside information is able to challenge the certainty there – and we’re now seeing the influence of charismatic Christianity in there in the Trump base.”

In a much discussed conversation with the conservative radio show host Charlie Kirk last week, Mr. Metaxas summarily dismissed the findings of all levels of the American judiciary. 

“You firmly believe and I firmly believe that Trump actually won and there has been massive fraud,” said Mr. Metaxas, author of biographies of Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “So let’s just stop. You believe that. So my attitude is like, so, who cares what I can prove in courts? And I’m going to do anything I can to uncover this horror, this evil.”

When Mr. Kirk later asked Mr. Metaxas his thoughts on the status of the president’s cases in court, he simply replied, “I am thrilled to be too ignorant of the details to answer that question in any substantive way.”

While Professor Whitehead and his colleagues have correlated the impulses of Christian nationalism with a deep skepticism of science and the reliability of secular elites, one of its primary characteristics is “this belief and this desire to see a particular type of Christianity privileged in the public sphere again” – one of the reasons the Trump campaign’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has resonated so deeply with religious conservatives. 

At the same time, too, President Trump and many conservatives have focused their most intense allegations of widespread election fraud in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, each in battleground states Mr. Biden won. (Mr. Trump actually performed better in several of those cities than he did in 2016.)

“‘Democrat-led city’ – that’s code for Black,” the Rev. William J. Barber II, president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach, told The New York Times. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”

Us vs. them mentality

And like the Lost Cause mythologies of the post-Civil War South, there is a deep sense of victimhood undergirding the kind of Christian nationalism that has engulfed many Trump supporters. As the president said at a rally in Georgia this month, “We’re all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims. Every one of you.”

“This helped create this entrenched us-versus-them worldview,” says Professor Du Mez. “Why would you want to empower people who don’t have access to truth, people who deny the truth of scripture, people who don’t have Jesus in their hearts? And I think this is where the real anti-democratic impulses we’re seeing lie as well.”

Indeed, the rhetoric of those insisting the election was stolen has become more militant and at times violent. 

Gen. Michael Flynn and others last month urged President Trump to “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” impose martial law and have the military oversee a revote, and “silence the destructive media.” Trump attorney Lin Wood posted pictures of Republican officials in Georgia wearing face masks designed as Chinese flags, saying, “They will soon be going to jail.”

Rise of Christian nationalism  

At the Jericho March on Saturday, before the opera singer Stephanie D’Urso sang “Ave Maria,” she told the crowd, “Are you hearing what I am hearing? I am hearing an army of angels coming from heaven to help our beautiful president win this battle of good versus evil.”

Prominent evangelical thinkers such as Beth Moore and David French have decried “the dangerous idolatry of Donald Trump” in evangelical circles and rallies such as the Jericho March. “They believe that Trump had a special purpose and a special calling, and that this election defeat is nothing less than a manifestation of a satanic effort to disrupt God’s plan for this nation,” Mr. French wrote in The Dispatch. “They were not ‘holding their nose’ to support him. They were deeply, spiritually, and personally invested in his political success.”

And the current commitment to Christian nationalism and a lost cause of a stolen election stands in tension with the wider traditions of the Christian faith, says Professor Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”

“It’s a cause that really works against any perception of the common good, or any idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, or any idea of common grace, that there can be goodness and human flourishing and truth outside of your church, your sect, or, you know, your base,” she says.

Anjum Naveed/AP

Pakistan's military spokesman Maj. Gen. Babar Iftikhar (top right) and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi (top left) speak at a press conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, Nov. 14, 2020. Pakistan said India was sponsoring "terrorism" aimed at destabilizing the country and targeting its economic partnership with China.

Nuclear arch-rivals India and Pakistan have for decades sought to score knockouts against each other on the international stage, trading accusations of terrorism and destabilization.

So, when Pakistan’s foreign minister and the military’s public relations chief recently presented world powers with a thick dossier of alleged Indian-sponsored terrorist activities on Pakistani soil, the initiative was not seen as totally new, though its level of detail – names of accused Indian agents, audio wiretaps, money transfers – was unusual.

What did raise questions was the timing – why now?

In the eyes of some regional experts, it was simply a case of the pot calling the kettle black. India has for years accused Pakistan, and offered proof, of harboring terrorist groups and coordinating their attacks inside India. 

Crucially, the dossier, which was also shared with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, comes as India prepares to take a rotating two-year seat on the U.N. Security Council in January. And it’s also squarely aimed at the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden, a not-so subtle message that India may not be a reliable security partner and democratic exemplar. 

Pakistan’s campaign comes as India has bulked up its international profile, emerging over the past decade as an ever-closer security partner of the U.S. and becoming something of an Asian democratic counterweight to Communist-ruled China. At the same time, Pakistan has seen its importance to the U.S. and other powers diminish as the U.S. winds down its presence in Afghanistan.    

“It’s no surprise Pakistan would be coming out with such a dossier, especially as India is about to take a seat again on the Security Council,” says Karl Inderfurth, an assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs during the Clinton administration. “Pakistan has watched from the sidelines as India has only grown in regional importance, so I see them acting to remind the powers on the council that one of their partners has a history of stirring up trouble in the region.” 

India has successfully painted itself as the innocent target of terrorism, says Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Asad Khan. But it is time the world understood not just India’s destabilizing activities in the region but also its attacks on democratic governance and human rights at home under the current Hindu nationalist government, he adds. 

“A certain narrative has been built around Indian victimhood – how India has suffered at the hand of terrorists – and much of that blame has been thrown at us,” Ambassador Khan says.

“Indian fingerprints”

In an interview with the Monitor over Pakistani tea, Ambassador Khan noted that his country has successfully brought down the number of terrorist attacks inside Pakistan over the last decade and wrested control of large parts of the country from non-state actors.

But over the last two years Pakistan has faced a resurgence of attacks and “unfortunately we see the Indian footprint and Indian fingerprints all over the place,” he says.  

India has dismissed Pakistan’s claims as lies and repurposed accusations from the past aimed at diverting attention from Pakistan’s own failings.

Pakistan and its dossier “enjoy no credibility,” India’s permanent representative to the U.N., T.S. Tirumurti, said in a tweet. The Indian mission to the U.N. in New York said in a statement that Pakistan “cannot change the fact that they are the epicentre of terrorism.”

As the two rivals toss accusations back and forth, the reality is that India has broadly seen its star rise in global affairs as Pakistan’s has languished. U.S.-India relations have been on an upward trajectory for two decades, with the Trump administration’s renaming of the Pacific Command to the Indo-Pacific Command in 2018 just one tip of the cap to India’s growing strategic importance.

Another key player is China, which has a growing economic footprint in Pakistan but tense relations with New Delhi that include a longstanding border dispute that flared again this summer. 

Indeed Pakistani officials accuse India in their dossier of trying to destabilize Pakistan’s economic cooperation with China by fomenting terrorist attacks against Chinese-financed development projects, including a deadly assault at a luxury hotel in Gwadar, a port city in southwestern Pakistan. 

Seeking traction in Washington

But where Islamabad appears to be hoping its accusations against India gain some traction is in Washington.

“We see the U.S. as perhaps the only country in the world that is in a position to play an important and critical role on this issue,” says Ambassador Khan. “We are hopeful the engagement of the U.S. could work to support peace and security for our region.”

In particular, Pakistan would like to see the U.S. pressure India over its revocation last year of the disputed Kashmir region’s autonomous status and the repressive measures Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to enforce there.

But most regional experts are skeptical that the Biden administration will rush to take Pakistan’s side and prioritize human rights over security ties with Mr. Modi’s government.  

“We may see the U.S. taking a little tougher stance toward India over its human rights record, but basically we’ll continue to court India as a counterweight to China,” says James Dobbins, who served as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama White House. “And overall I don’t think we’ll see the Biden administration taking a very different approach to Pakistan than the Trump administration did.”

Allegations of Indian support for separatists in the Balochistan region might indeed have merit, says Mr. Dobbins, a senior fellow at the Rand Corp., since India has been suspected of such activity in the past. But Washington is more concerned about Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan and with the Afghan Taliban, as it tries to wind down its longest war and implement a fragile peace plan struck by the Trump administration. Mr. Dobbins says he’s pessimistic that Pakistan will use its influence over the Taliban to support this plan.

Fear of encirclement

The reason goes back to India.    

Pakistan’s overriding concern is that an increasingly powerful India would become an influential power in postwar Afghanistan. That in turn could lead to a dreaded “encirclement” of Pakistan by its chief adversary, says Mr. Inderfurth, a professor of international relations at George Washington University.

“I imagine Pakistan is as anxious as everyone else to see how a Biden administration will re-engage with the international community, and in particular with South Asia, and I’m not surprised if [the Pakistanis] are trying to influence those relations out of the blocks,” he says, referring to Pakistan’s dossier of accusations.  

But like Mr. Dobbins, Mr. Inderfurth says the U.S. interest in resolving the war in Afghanistan is likely to mean just as troubled relations with Pakistan as in the past.

“Biden and the new national security team he’s bringing in have a long history of dealings with Pakistan, particularly over the eight years of the Obama administration,” he says. “And suffice it to say, those years did not go very well.”

Chris J Ratcliffe/AP

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (left) and renowned naturalist David Attenborough speak with schoolchildren at the launch of the next United Nations Climate Summit, to be held next November in Glasgow, Scotland.

Consider this intriguing equation: Brexit (Britain’s imminent departure from the European Union) equals a boost for the international fight to slow climate change.

Also, very possibly, a spur for two other items on incoming American President Joe Biden’s wish list: a reinvigoration of NATO and a new Western consensus on how to constrain China’s growing reach.

The equation isn’t a direct one. And it’s receiving scant attention given the more immediate, economic implications of Britain leaving the EU, the trading bloc it joined in the 1970s and which accounts for the lion’s share of its trade.

But these longer-term effects are a likely result of the core political challenge Britain will face after leaving the EU on Dec. 31: to find a new, post-Brexit identity that maintains the country’s relevance, and influence, on the world stage.

Way back in 1962, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson said of the British that they had “lost an empire and failed to find a role.” Britain’s EU membership helped square that circle; not only did its economy thrive, but the United Kingdom also became a pivotal member of the union, along with France and Germany, and offered a valuable bridge to Washington.

Now London has lost that role. And with the empire long gone, the government of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson again faces the need to find a new international role.

That’s where climate change comes in. It so happens that Mr. Johnson will be hosting the next international follow-up summit on the 2015 Paris climate accord in the Scottish city of Glasgow. It was delayed due to the pandemic, but is scheduled for next November.

Earlier this year he was being criticized for not taking preparations for the conference seriously enough, and for a lack of ambitious plans to promote cleaner energy at home. But he is now rectifying that. In recent months, he has pledged that Britain will cut carbon emissions to more than two-thirds below 1990 levels by the end of this decade, and has championed an expansion of wind-powered electricity generation and other carbon-free energy sources.

In a move timed to coincide with a virtual, interim summit held last weekend, aimed at encouraging greater progress ahead of the Glasgow meeting, he also announced that Britain was ending all government subsidies for fossil fuel projects overseas.

It is becoming clear that as governments worldwide pay more and more attention to the climate issue, Mr. Johnson sees next year’s summit as a major opportunity to demonstrate Britain’s post-Brexit international leadership and assert the new identity that Cabinet ministers have been describing as “global Britain.”

Still, to lend genuine heft to that role Britain will need to reinforce its historically close ties with the United States, a task it hopes won’t be made more difficult by Mr. Johnson’s close personal relationship with President Donald Trump.

Leading the referendum campaign to leave the EU in 2016, Mr. Johnson held out the promise of a comprehensive post-Brexit free-trade agreement with the U.S. that would offset any economic damage from Brexit. But it has since become clear that such a deal will mean protracted negotiations, U.S. commercial conditions that could prove unpopular with British voters, and then ratification by the U.S. Congress.

So in the meantime, the focus in London has shifted to other ways of strengthening the alliance with Washington – as a diplomatic and political substitute for Britain’s old seat at the EU’s top table.

Thus the relevance of NATO: Britain, as America’s most important military partner in Europe, remains a key member of the transatlantic security alliance.

Mr. Johnson sent an important signal last month when he scotched a government plan to cut military spending and insisted instead on an additional $21 billion in funding. That means Britain’s military expenditure will rise to about 2.2% of its gross domestic product, well above the European average, and a dollars-and-cents recognition of Washington’s long-standing view that its NATO allies do not pull their financial weight.

The move was a reminder to the U.S. of Britain’s continuing viability as a military ally. It has also positioned the U.K. as a key European player in advance of Mr. Biden’s expected reengagement with NATO, an alliance that Mr. Trump once dismissed as “obsolete.”

Mr. Johnson knows that, in American eyes, European security is a less pressing priority than the potential threat posed by China. So he appears hopeful that he can align “global Britain” with Washington on this front, too.

Despite the importance of Britain’s own trade relationship with Beijing – now magnified by Brexit – he signaled where his priorities lay a few months ago by doing a policy U-turn, at the Trump administration’s behest, so as to limit the involvement of the Chinese firm Huawei in Britain’s future 5G telecommunications network.

Ultimately, Britain now would like to join the U.S. in forging a coherent China strategy that all the Western allies could share. This would try to strike a balance between recognizing the benefits of economic engagement, as well as the need to work with the Chinese on issues such as climate change, and an unapologetically tough stand against unfair trade practices and violations of human rights.

And ironically, however personally chummy Mr. Johnson was with the outgoing American president, this is a policy approach that “global Britain” suspects will find greater favor with his successor.

When Yana Gavrilkevich, a painter and art teacher, got the notice that she was being evicted from her art studio, it was “a catastrophe.” And she was not the only one being turned out.

Most of the units in the large, 1960s-era apartment building in eastern Moscow in which her studio sits are simple ones. But the entire top floor consists of 14 large, high-ceilinged studios, specially built for artists in Soviet times and quite different in design from the apartments below. Generations of artists have worked here, painting, sculpting, illustrating, and such, enjoying the perks of a now-defunct system that once gave them work, premises, and a high social status.

But now the artists – not just in this building, but hundreds all across the city – are being kicked out of their subsidized studios, as Moscow officials appear to have decided that the care and feeding of culture is no longer their problem.

“This is not merely where we work. It’s also where most of us keep our working materials and collected art,” says Ms. Gavrilkevich, who inherited a studio here from her father, a noted Soviet portrait artist. “It’s not just a workplace, it’s a place of artistic continuity, memory. And now we’re just to be thrown out into the street.”

The workshops are now mostly empty, as their former occupants bow to the inevitable demolition of the building under a grand Moscow plan to replace old city housing with new buildings, as part of a much larger urban renovation project that is rearranging the entire Moscow landscape in favor of big real estate developers. But while the regular inhabitants of the building are being provided alternative housing by the city, the artists are being shown the door, with the implicit message that it’s time to start adjusting to life under capitalism.

“A new generation of city officials has decided to weigh and measure everything in terms of its monetary value,” says Sergei Alexandrov, a well-known Russian painter, who has received his final eviction notice from the small studio he has occupied for decades. “It doesn’t matter anymore how famous you are, or what work you have done. Now you’re not needed. Or at least the state doesn’t believe that culture is its concern anymore.”

Fred Weir

Denis Rudikh (left) and Yana Gavrilkevich stand in a studio in a soon-to-be demolished apartment building in eastern Moscow, Dec. 1, 2020. Both artists, along with at least a dozen others, were evicted from their own studios in the building by the city, without compensatory space.

Cultivated by the Soviets

The workshops came into being as part of a generous Soviet system that trained large numbers of artists in specialized schools and put them to work decorating public spaces with ideologically themed murals, monuments, posters, and other adornments; illustrating film sets and book covers; and much more. But it also provided them with private studio space where they could pursue their own projects. Most of the Moscow workshops now under threat were established in the 1960s, a time of relative economic prosperity and a great deal of political and cultural ferment in the USSR.

The Soviet state regarded everything in terms of production. The world was a big factory populated with workers fulfilling their assigned roles in socialist society. It recognized that artists and other creative people needed special conditions to ply their craft. Accomplished artists were handed workshops by the Union of Artists, and also given lucrative state orders to fill.

Even today, a walk around any Russian urban space will reveal many of those old gems. Not just the grand monuments to Soviet heroes and the palatial metro stations, but also murals calling for world peace that cover entire apartment blocs, sculptured fountains in parks, and mosaics dedicated to children’s play in kindergartens or to book-learning in schools. While much of the output of Soviet artists is regarded as dross today, some of it is highly prized and can be found in top museums and art galleries.

“The later Soviet period gave us these workshops, but it also stimulated very fruitful nonconformist trends in art,” says Ms. Gavrilkevich. “State investments into culture may have served an ideological goal, but they also drove an explosion of creativity.”

Today, the workshops are assigned by the Moscow Union of Artists, which holds leases on all the threatened studios that are valid until 2025. But three months ago, the Moscow government told them to leave. The final notices arrived in early December.

Around 500 studios are currently on the chopping block, involving about 700 artists. That’s the lion’s share of some 900 such workshops that remain in the entire city. The Moscow government is carrying out the evictions with little public discussion, and it has so far attracted scant notice in the Moscow media.

In response to questions from the Monitor, the city property department offered a brief, unsigned response: “Under the terms of contracts concluded with the city, in the event of reconstruction or demolition of the building where the public organization is located, it must vacate the occupied non-residential premises.”

The statement added, without explanation, “It is possible to place these creative workshops within the previously provided areas.”

That note of official ambiguity is giving hope to some, but Yelena Yanchuk, a Communist deputy of the Moscow City Council, says nothing is likely to change unless public opinion gets engaged with the plight of the artists.

“At some point Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that no artists will be thrown into the street,” she says. “But he made that remark in passing, and no clear instructions followed. So, maybe the city officials are waiting for orders. Meanwhile, the situation looks like a mass ban on the artists’ profession.”

Mr. Alexandrov, who has exhibited his Russian tradition-themed paintings in the U.S. and other countries, says the tragedy is that the state is depriving artists of their few remaining Soviet-era perks at a time when Russia still lacks the developed art markets, rich benefactors, foundation grants, and other buffers that are available to help struggling artists in Western countries.

“We want to integrate into the modern world, but our state has no idea how to aid us in that transition,” he says. “We have the impression that we are just not needed; we are disposable. For many artists, these evictions will be a professional death blow.”

Left fallow by capitalists?

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the system of subsidized workshop space for recognized artists continued under the patronage of longtime Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

“Under Luzhkov, many artists were evicted from places that had become prime real estate, but the city always found them alternative workshops,” says Denis Rudikh, an artist and Moscow Union of Artists activist. “The state stopped purchasing artistic production, but made it possible for us to survive by seeking private orders, teaching, doing things that kept body and soul together, but also enabled one to still have the identity of an artist.”

Of course, many graduates of Russia’s still-prestigious art schools find lucrative employment in the private sector today, in advertising, film, media, and corporate PR. It’s possible they regard the older Moscow artists clinging to their Soviet-era workshops as dinosaurs. But some of those artists retort that consumerism has sucked the essential creativity out of art.

“I teach young children, and the more I teach, the more I sense a growing lack of empathy, a disconnect in emotional development,” says Ms. Gavrilkevich. “Western consumerism developed over a long period of time, but here it just exploded into being overnight. It seems like everything in this world is in the here and now. Take what you can get today, and there is no room for emotional growth, tradition, or continuity.

“In retrospect, it feels like the Soviet system, for all its faults, gave us space to create, time to reflect, and art that was intended for everyone.”

When two filmmakers made a recent documentary about poverty and rural identity in Appalachia, the first thing they did was track down a man named Billy Redden. 

In 1971, a Hollywood casting director for the horror movie “Deliverance” discovered Mr. Redden, then a teenager, at his school in Georgia. The director was looking for someone to play a so-called inbred. Mr. Redden’s now-famous scene, in which he plucks a banjo while sitting on a back-porch swing, remains a reference point for how some people describe poor, rural America.

“You can’t make a movie about media representations of Appalachia without telling the story of ‘Deliverance,’” says Ashley York, co-director of the 2018 documentary “Hillbilly.” 

Though the role brought Mr. Redden brief fame, he’s disturbed by the thriller’s lingering impression of mountain people as destitute rapists.  

“He wouldn’t have done it had he known that,” says Ms. York.

Almost 50 years since “Deliverance,” Hollywood still exerts a powerful influence on perceptions of America’s countryside. Three recent movies – “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Nomadland,” and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” – are provoking fresh conversation about their portrayals of the rural underclass. 

Courtesy of Ashely York and Sally Rubin

Ashley York (left) and Sally Rubin co-directed the 2018 documentary “Hillbilly.” The filmmakers, here in a selfie, set out to contrast the real Appalachia with media portrayals.

It’s a touchy topic. White, rural voters have been excoriated in some quarters of the media for voting for Donald Trump. Consequently, popular culture depictions of those in the countryside are often viewed through a political lens. Those living in small-town America worry about how they’re portrayed by filmmakers who’ve parachuted into a locale. Others argue that the outsider storytellers can bring fresh perspectives to socioeconomic issues. But there’s also widespread agreement that Hollywood should venture into the outer reaches of red states more often and try to tell nuanced stories about what unites and divides us.

“One of the things that drives the fury of Trump voters is that they feel looked down on and stereotyped, belittled by who they perceive as the elite,” says Ty Burr, movie critic at The Boston Globe. “The things we don’t address in the movies and in popular culture are issues of class, issues of ethnicity. You’ve got to be intersectional with this stuff. It’s not just, poor people living in the country love Trump and the middle class and upper-middle class people in the cities and suburbs love Biden. Maybe it’s a lot more complicated than that.”  

The recent sequel to the hit comedy “Borat” doesn’t exactly reflect that complexity. In the guise of the titular journalist from Kazakhstan, actor Sacha Baron Cohen visits two Trump voters in an unspecified small town. The subjects of Mr. Cohen’s candid-camera prank come across like a modern-day version of “Li’l Abner.” As they pore over QAnon conspiracy theories in their cabin home, the movie invites audiences to laugh at the sweet-natured duo’s simpleminded gullibility.  

Those tropes of rural Americans as ignorant, wild, drunken, and lazy are one reason why Dee Davis founded the Center for Rural Strategies. The nonprofit based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, strives to present accurate portraits of rural cultures as a way to deepen public debate and improve economic conditions for countryside communities. In 2003, Mr. Davis marshaled a successful campaign to dissuade CBS from producing a “catfish-out-of-water” reality television show called “The Real Beverly Hillbillies.” But other shows such as MTV’s reality series “Buckwild” and TLC’s “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” have perpetuated stereotypes. 

“Rural people want to be known for pulling their weight, not people who have to be taken care of, or who are jokes, or who are bigots,” says Mr. Davis. “They may not vote the way you want them to vote. But if you run into a ditch in front of a Trump voter’s house, they’re still going to find a way to pull you out of there and they’re going to offer you supper.”  

Yet the recent horror franchises “Wrong Turn” and “The Hills Have Eyes” suggest that urban visitors to the countryside will be set upon and eaten by rural people. According to some scholars, such portrayals are rooted in the idea that urbanized capitalism represents the progress of civilization. Thus hillbillies are savages who can be left behind.

Then again, when Hollywood rails against capitalism or materialism, the reverse happens. Movies serve up beatific visions of small towns as hearths of the nation in which salt-of-the-earth communities eschew the rat-race lifestyle, uphold simple virtues, and bake apple pies for each other. Think “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Spitfire Grill,” “Doc Hollywood,” or anything on the Hallmark channel. 

“In both cases, whether overromanticized or overvilified, it hides the complexity of what’s really going on in terms of the intertwining of the fates of urban and rural [areas], and the mobility of people between the two, and the shared values that occur across both,” says Emily Satterwhite, a professor of Appalachian studies and pop culture at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. 

Searchlight Pictures/AP

In “Nomadland,” Frances McDormand stars as a woman living rootlessly across the American West after the Great Recession. Film critics have lauded the movie for its realistic depiction of rural America.

One new movie that film critics have lauded for its realistic depiction of rural America is Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland.” (Following an Oscar-qualifying limited release this month, it will be released nationwide on Feb. 19.) Filmed in Nebraska, the drama follows a former school teacher (played by Frances McDormand) who becomes a gig-economy itinerant worker after her factory town literally shuts down during a recession. The Chinese director offers a humanized portrayal of the rural underclass, which includes real-life RV park dwellers playing themselves. Mr. Burr, the film critic, says the characters in the movie may not be fully aware of how the system that they’re in is making their lives poorer. In that respect, the cinéma vérité of “Nomadland” presents an alternative to some of the prevalent narratives about poverty in Hollywood movies.

“They [often] become these dramatic stories of the ways in which individuals, through their own determination and heroic efforts, overcome the obstacles in their way,” says Stephen Pimpare, senior lecturer in American politics and public policy at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester and author of “Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen.” “So it winds up retelling what I would argue is this fiction, that poverty is the fault of the individual and something that can be remedied by altering individual behavior.”

Unlike some of its predecessors, “Hillbilly Elegy,” from Netflix, tells an aspirational story. The prestige drama is based on J.D. Vance’s memoir about how he worked his way up from a poor Appalachian family to earn a law degree at Yale University. But many critics lambasted the conservative author’s views on overcoming poverty, which include personal responsibility and hard work.  

While promoting the movie, director Ron Howard has repeatedly emphasized that his adaptation – starring Amy Adams as Mr. Vance’s drug-addicted single mother and Glenn Close as his no-nonsense grandmother – is apolitical. The movie’s only overt nod to Mr. Vance’s views is a scene in which he complains to his Indian, Ivy League girlfriend about the difficulty Appalachian Hill People encounter when trying to overcome their socioeconomic status. She pointedly reminds him that her immigrant father arrived in America with nothing.  

Arguments about “Hillbilly Elegy” tend to fixate on whether poverty should be alleviated through overhauling systems versus focusing on individual choices, says David French, author of “Divided We Fall” and a senior editor at The Dispatch. In fact, a careful reading of Mr. Vance’s book reveals that it sits somewhere between the two poles. He’s long argued for systemic fixes and rejected the rugged individualist brand of conservatism. 

“The interesting thing about ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ the movie especially, is that it does not give you the impression that what J.D. had to do was lift himself up by his own bootstraps,” says Mr. French, who recently interviewed Mr. Vance and Mr. Howard about the film. “He gives you the impression that people had to yank him up – like his grandmother, and specifically with [her] dramatic intervention into his life.” 

In the case of Appalachia, some observers say that movies such as “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Winter’s Bone” depict such a narrow slice of life that viewers miss out on the culture and demographic diversity of a region of 25 million people that stretches from New York to Alabama. By perpetuating a narrative about extreme poverty in the region, some viewers wouldn’t suspect that millionaires live there, too. Black and Indigenous people, and LGBTQ individuals, are seldom represented, either. When Ms. York teamed up with Sally Rubin to co-direct the documentary “Hillbilly,” the progressive-leaning filmmakers set out to contrast the real Appalachia to media portrayals. Their aim was to humanize the region’s white voters – including Ms. York’s pro-Trump family members – during a fraught political moment.  

“In Hollywood in the last five years, there has been a movement to diversify the industry, to be more inclusive. ... The poor white people from the Appalachian Mountains are sort of that last remaining group of people that it’s OK to make fun of,” says Ms. York, who was born in Eastern Kentucky but now lives in Los Angeles. “I really hope that this ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ moment can really help us take a step forward in the media culture and in doing something that’s thoughtful.”

AP

A new Floating Solar Array at the Orlando (Florida) International Airport opened Dec. 10, 2020. The 19,350-square-foot island includes 360 solar panels.

Five years after the groundbreaking Paris climate accord, governments still find themselves scrambling to confront the crisis. At the recently concluded Climate Ambition Summit 2020,  United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged countries to declare themselves to be in a state of climate emergency. Nearly 40 already have.

But amid that alarm one part of the solution has been quietly underway. Companies that produce clean electricity (wind and solar power, which doesn’t result in the release of climate-warming carbon dioxide) have been growing at a spectacular rate, attracting enthusiastic investors that even include cautious pension funds. 

Far from being small feel-good boutique businesses with little energy to add to the grid, these companies are emerging as clean power giants. Their origins come from both the world of electric utilities, with little-recognized names like Enel, NextEra Energy, Iberdrola, and Orsted, as well as from oil and gas behemoths such as Britain’s BP, which see that the future of energy is in renewable sources. The clean energy companies aren’t tiny upstarts: The value of NextEra stock, for example, briefly surpassed that of ExxonMobil in value last fall.

In the United States, renewable electricity from wind, solar, and hydropower already makes up nearly 18% of the total output. That’s up from almost none 10 years ago. Globally, wind and solar produce about 9% of the electricity generated, a figure that should grow to 56% by 2050, according to BloombergNEF, which researches clean energy.

A dramatic drop in the cost of solar panels and wind turbines is making clean energy more and more cost competitive, even against abundant natural gas, and is restructuring the energy marketplace. Spending on renewable electrical power may for the first time exceed spending on oil and gas drilling, predicts Goldman Sachs. 

In his campaign, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden promised to look much more kindly on clean energy efforts. A newly formed renewable energy trade group, the American Clean Power Association, with some 800 member companies, officially debuts Jan. 1, and will try to hold him to his promises.

Around the world new records for the generation of clean energy are being set. In October, the Australian state of South Australia, with its 1.76 million people, briefly was powered by solar energy alone. Solar now consistently provides about half the state’s electrical needs. 

Because solar and wind provide variable levels of output (periods of lack of sunlight or wind), how to store electricity has presented a challenge. That’s why a recent report from Wood Mackenzie and the Energy Storage Association is so encouraging. It shows that some 476 megawatts of storage was deployed in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2020, an increase of 240% from the previous high, set in the second quarter.

Numbers and stats can overwhelm. But their message is clear: The conversion to a world powered by electricity from renewable, nonpolluting sources is underway. Clean energy  still faces challenges. But incubated by government incentives, private efforts have grown up, changing the way we light our lives and helping to slow the warming of our planet.