According to reliable statistics, 81% of white American evangelicals, in the year 2016, used their cherished voting right to help elect Donald Trump to the office of POTUS. I don’t have statistics to show how many of those who helped elect the boy president continue to support him, but it’s my personal observation that there’s little buyers’ remorse among the group and that they continue not only to support but to defend him and his execrable actions since assuming office on January 20, 2017. In the words of The Bard, evangelicals supporting and defending a person who in no way embodies their professed beliefs is “like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh” (Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1).
How did this happen? “Christians” who profess to believe in the Bible as a literal, inerrant, God-breathed guidebook for the human race elected a thrice-married, adultery-committing, foul-mouthed, uncharitable , lying, swindling, Putin-loving, crotch-grabbing, over-sized child who shows little evidence of having read their Bible and no evidence of making any attempt to live by its precepts.
It’s a fair assertion that without the votes of white evangelicals, Donald Trump would not be sitting in the Oval Office today, so it’s also fair to ask how on earth hundreds of thousands of people would abdicate every belief which they profess to hold dear to help elect someone who is the antithesis of those beliefs. When the alt-right and the Christian right are on the same page, it’s clear that something is rotten in the state of Christendom.
Documentation for much of my information on this subject is personal experience. I was raised in the evangelical tradition; so I have first-hand knowledge of the thinking, beliefs, and lifestyles of the group. It’s also important to note that although all evangelicals profess to be Christians, not all Christians are evangelicals. The evangelical, also known as fundamentalist, tradition exists within mainstream denominations—with heavy concentration in the various Baptist groups—but they are right of center within their denominational theologies.
Most of us would have little reason to care what this subset of Christianity is up to or why they think the way they do were it not for their increasing influence on politics; and since their political actions affect us all, we have good reason to spend a little time delving into how the evangelical mind works because that thinking has played a large role in creating the situation that currently threatens the stability and future of our nation. Their political clout began with the merger between evangelicalism and the Republican Party, which happened in the 1980s. During my youth, I was consistently told that Christians should stay out of politics; church was church, and government was government.
Two changes have occurred, however, over the last several decades. First, there is little distinction in the evangelical mind between religious beliefs and political or philosophical positions. When evangelicals take a position on any subject, it becomes a part of their theology. Take climate change as a prime example. Evangelicals I know scoff at the scientific evidence proving climate change is real and is being caused by human activity as if those who do believe the findings of science are infidels. Second, their beliefs have become more and more detached from the Bible, which they claim as their infallible guide. The result is a systematic theology which is based on cherry-picked parts of the Bible but which stands in direct contradiction to the book’s broad themes and consistent principles.
To win the vote of an evangelical Republican, one need only state opposition to two things: abortion and homosexuality. Both are, in their view, anti-biblical (though they’re rarely mentioned in the Scriptures and never in the way they are cited) and are core issues which allow no room for negotiation. Crotch grabbing and Russia colluding are not related to those two core issues; therefore, crotch grabbing and Russia colluding become tangential subjects, dismissed as annoying obstacles to pursuing their goals of revoking Roe v. Wade and marriage equality. Never mind that the Bible, in its wholeness, says far more related to sexual assault than to abortion or homosexuality, because I daresay most of these avowed adherents to “the whole Word of God” have never read far beyond the cherry pickings which are used as the underpinnings of their beliefs.
A third subject necessary to an understanding of the Christians who elect, support, and defend a morally degenerate “president” is something called the “Rapture,” which they confuse with the second coming of Christ. Theories on how the world will end have abounded ever since the world began. Evangelicals believe that the end of time will be initiated by an appearance of Jesus Christ in the clouds. Jesus will take all of the people who believe the way they believe out of the world, bodily, and whisk them off to heaven in order to spare them from the devastation and destruction about to be wreaked upon the earth. Once the Christians are safely out of the way, the antichrist will take over and things will get really grim for 7 years. At the end of that time, Jesus will establish a long period of peace on the earth. There’s lots more to it, but that’s the short course.
The reward for believing as they do and for accepting the ridicule of those who don’t believe as they do is that they will in the end be vindicated. Jesus will come down and stick it to all of those critics, and the whole of humanity will have to admit that the evangelicals were right all along. They will also be the chosen few who will get to spend eternity in heaven, while doubters will burn (literally) in hell: a great pit filled with “fire and brimstone.”
This belief is supported by the usual string of cherries picked from various parts of the Bible, but the exclusivity of it gives the “true believers” privileged status. They are “in this world but not of this world.” Their other-worldly view allows them to detach themselves from such concerns as whether mentally ill people buy guns or the “president” likes to sexually assault women or a foreign adversary interfered in our presidential election on behalf of the guy who won. All that is important in their view is how these things fit into the “prophecies” of the Book of Revelation, which is probably the most misinterpreted book in all of the 66 of the Bible.
Any world event, however negative to those who live in the real world, is seen through the evangelical glasses only in terms of what it contributes to the fulfillment of those so-called prophecies. So it is possible to see Donald Trump as having been appointed by God, because God is going to use Trump to advance God’s plan of bringing God’s kingdom to Earth. I have personally been told that I needn’t worry too much about concerns for the future, because Jesus is going to come back before those things happen anyway.
Jessica Rettig, in an article titled “The Religious Ties of the Republican Party,” interviews Daniel Williams who explains the history of the merger between religious conservatives and the Republican Party. According to Williams, who also wrote the book God’s Own Party: the Making of the Christian Right, conservative Christians first latched onto the GOP during the 1970s. Although some movement was seen during the Eisenhower years, the major momentum occurred during the Nixon and Reagan eras. Since “the evangelicals were looking for a party that would champion what they viewed as moral values and their interests in the Cold War and the Republican Party was also looking for potential voters,” it was so to speak a marriage made in heaven: win-win. Williams goes on to explain how both the Cold War and opposition to Islam strengthened the political power of Christian evangelicals. They saw the federal government as “acting in the interests of God by fighting against communism internationally and by rooting out communist subversives within the country.” He adds, “In many ways, the war on terror became the new Cold War for evangelicals.”
Jessica Rettig wrote her article in 2010. More recently, Sarah Posner published an article titled “Amazing Disgrace” on March 20, 2017. Posner begins by posing the question “How did Donald Trump—a thrice-married, biblically illiterate sexual predator—hijack the religious right?” Well, that’s just what we’ve been wondering! Rettig says that Russell Moore, “a prominent leader in the Southern Baptist Convention,” began noticing the evangelical trend toward Trump even while many still dismissed Trump’s candidacy as a bad joke. Although Moore “had positioned himself as the face of the ‘new’ religious right,” he of course understood the old religious right’s mindset. In his book Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel, Moore writes, “The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues. But too often we do.”
Posner goes on to say,
“As Trump continued gaining ground in the polls, Moore began to realize that the campaign represented nothing short of a battle for the soul of the Christian right. By backing Trump, white evangelicals were playing into the hands of a new, alt-right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of white nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and social-media propagandists who viewed the religious right, first and foremost, as a vehicle for white supremacy.”
In Posner’s own words, “The religious right—which for decades has grounded its political appeal in moral ‘values’ such as ‘life’ and ‘family’ and ‘religious freedom’—has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda.” Once again, we’re looking at the disconnect between the avowed adherence to the Bible as the “infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God” and the failure to understand and practice even the most basic precepts of that book. The alt-right represents human nature at its most degraded, yet these “Christians” have philosophically joined hands with that movement. In the world of oxymorons, nothing is more extremely ironic than “alt-right Christians.” Yet they’re real and they walk among us.
Opposition to Roe v. Wade has for a generation been recognized as what Albert Mohler calls “the catalyst for the moral revolution within evangelicalism.” Sarah Posner argues, however, that abortion was not the issue responsible for the creation of the religious right; instead, according to Posner, it was the IRS’s revoking of the tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University and other institutions that refused to admit non-whites, which happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Posner says, “It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that ‘enraged the Christian community,’ Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.”
Frank Schaeffer Jr., in his 2007 book Crazy for God, agrees that abortion was not immediately a concern for evangelicals; it was only after certain influential leaders “stirred them up over the issue” that evangelicals became politicized. Schaeffer argues that evangelicals have been “played for suckers” by high-profile leaders who have little genuine spirituality and much desire for power.
Sarah Posner writes this stunning statement: “That’s why white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s victory—they provided the numbers that the alt-right lacks. The alt-right supplied Trump with his agenda; the Christian right supplied him with his votes.”
If Sarah Posner and others are correct, the driving force behind the Christian right’s theology and politics is not really abortion or homosexuality—as they say—but deep-rooted racism and white supremacy. Here are a few facts:
“According to an exit poll of Republican voters in the South Carolina primary, evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.”
Matthew MacWilliams is the author of articles in which he reports the results of his own research into traits which predict support of Donald Trump. He found the usual factors of race, income, and education levels; but those were insignificant compared to the “single statistically significant variable . . . authoritarianism.”
Although authoritarians can be found in all political parties, geographic areas, occupations, and religions, authoritarianism is at the very core of the evangelical religious philosophy; and it helps to explain the disconnect between their avowed adherence to the Bible and the reality of their anti-biblical attitudes and practices. For example, their concern for life is belied by resistance to reasonable gun control and unconcern for the poor—the people Jesus called “the least of these” and said that those who serve them are serving him.
In truth, many evangelicals follow strong leaders more than they directly follow the teachings of Scripture. To name a few of those leaders, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Sr. and Jr., Rick Warren, Franklin Graham, Bill Hybels, Joyce Meyer, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, and Beth Moore are far more likely to influence the beliefs and practices of evangelicals than is their own personal reading and interpretation of the Bible. In fact, their interpretation of the Bible has most likely been informed by one or more of those people and others who could be listed. And no evangelical with a normal human need to be accepted within one’s tribe would dare contradict the teachings and interpretations of their esteemed leaders.
If authoritarianism is indeed the main common denominator among Trump supporters, it is no longer a surprise to see evangelicals on that list. And there is no way to reason with this group, because in their minds all of their information comes directly from God, they are privy to things the rest of us who don’t enjoy VIP status are not, their leaders hold god-like authority, and then there’s the whole thing about Jesus coming back to wipe out everyone except them and show the rest of us that we’re the ones who’ve been wrong the whole time.
To repeat, all evangelicals profess to be Christians, but not all Christians are evangelicals, and it is unfair to judge the whole lot of us by the actions of that one group. Micah 6:8 sums up Christianity for me:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
I still have some work to do; but I’m going to keep striving for justice, kindness, and a humble walk with God and let the fundies (fundamentalists) have their rules and condemnation.
As for what all of this means to the political future of our country, the mergers between evangelicalism and the Republican Party and between evangelicalism and the alt-right mean that this group of “Christians” will continue to wield political influence for the foreseeable future. I wish I could offer a solution, but that’s above my level of influence. All I can say is that understanding a problem is key to addressing it, so I hope this article sheds a little light that may help us as we go forward.
PLEASE NOTE: My purpose in writing this article was not to decide the genuineness of anyone’s Christianity; faith is a private matter, so other people’s faith or lack thereof doesn’t affect me and is therefore none of my business. It’s not my job to pass judgment on others, even though some others have passed the judgment that I am not a “real” Christian. My only purpose was to examine the political influence of a large group of my fellow citizens, because their influence on governmental affairs does affect me and IS my business. The truth is that without this group, we would not have the “president” we now have. That means they’ve affected all of our lives, whether we’re mainstream Christians, fundamentalists, or atheists. And that’s a scary reality.