“What does it profit a faith to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with its own soul?” Sarah Jones asks at New York magazine. Jones refers to the ever-shrinking Evangelical movement that forms a large chunk of the Republican base. About three-quarters of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump not once but twice.
“To be Evangelical in the 1990s was to learn fear,” Jones writes, herself a product of the church’s culture. The movement inhabits a “shadow universe” within the world. In it but not of it, as the theology goes. But entitled to rule it for Jesus nonetheless. It was easy to believe when membership was relatively stable, when the first thing new neighbors asked was where you went to church. But as youths fled the movement, with membership in decline for 13 straight years, it became harder to believe the promise of dominion.
White Evangelical Protestants and African-American Protestants lie far apart politically. Latino Evangelicals are more of a mixed bag, said Robert Jones, author of The End of White Christian America:
But white Evangelicals are still outliers overall: They’re more conservative than other Protestants, more conservative than Catholics, more conservative, in fact, than any other demographic in the country. The implicit claim of the Moral Majority — that it embodied mainstream opinion — always lacked evidence, but it’s become even less true over time. By the time Trump applied Richard Nixon’s label of a “silent majority” to his own coalition, it barely made sense at all. A bloc that can only take the White House through the Electoral College, and not the popular vote, only to lose it outright four years later, has no claim to majority status. They are a remnant within a remnant, a nation within a nation.
They know it, as do Republicans in leadership. And they don’t like it one bit. Two terms of a black, liberal president and a Supreme Court that sanctioned same-sex marriage rubbed salt in the wounded egos. Their mission to “purify the nation, and pacify the barbarians” was sorely at risk.
Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, attributes Trump’s success with Evangelicals to his ability to exploit “two key Evangelical tendencies,” Posner writes: white racial grievance and the shifts brought on by televangelism that made churches mega and preachers megastars. The culture war was on, Sarah Jones explains, and they needed a general.
Enter Donald J. Trump. Exit Evangelical pretensions that character is what mattered most in a leader.
Former Christianity Today editor Mark Galli caused an uproar with an editorial last year calling Donald Trump “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.” Galli believes Evangelicals “are deeply suspicious of human authority” up to a point:
What they may fear, really, is authority they don’t control. “Paradoxically,” he continued, “they are a group that’s attracted to authoritarian leaders, whether that person be a pastor of a megachurch or a dictator.” Those tendencies existed before Trump. With the help of the far-right press, social media, and alternative institutions, they will survive Trump, too.
“I think that the thing that we have to keep our eye on is the ways in which the infrastructure that they built gives them an advantage beyond what their numbers would tell you,” Posner said. Conservative Evangelicals already know that they’re no longer the Moral Majority, and they’ve found a way to make it work for them. “They’ll recognize, for example, that they may be in the minority on LGBTQ rights, but in their view, that’s all the more reason that they should be protected by either the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or the First Amendment, in having the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.”
Evangelicals raised from the cradle to yearn for the return a heavenly king were predisposed to settle for an earthly one. Republican patricians who give lip service to “created equal” and promoting “the general welfare” in the founding documents follow the tradition of royalists who supported the British Crown during the American Revolution. Some persons are more equal than others. Both factions are sure they represent the better half. Seeing their ability to legislate that slipping away is where more secular Republicans and Evangelicals have found common cause since at least the late 1970s.
After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican post mortem recommended a softening of its radicalism to expand its base. It went nowhere. Democratic norms became disposable. Compromise with barbarians was unacceptable. It matters not if their numbers are shrinking. It’s nothing a little gerrymandering here and a little vote-suppressing there cannot fix to ensure the better half get places in the lifeboats when the authoritarians sink the republic.