"In the end, white Christian America stood by its man.
The exit polls present an imperfect but definitive
picture. At least three-quarters of white Evangelicals
voted for Donald Trump in November, a figure largely
unchanged from 2016. Evangelicals didn’t win Trump
another four years in power, but not for lack of
effort. While most of America tired of the president’s
impieties, the born-again found in themselves a higher
tolerance for sin.
And the sins are legion, lest we forget. He tear-
gassed protesters so he could walk to a D.C. church
and hold a Bible in front of it without interference.
He lied and cheated, and smeared women who accused him
of sexual assault. He separated migrant children from
their parents and staffed his administration with
white nationalists. Over a quarter of a million
Americans died of the coronavirus, while he railed
against doctors and scientists trying to save lives.
Not even a plague turned Evangelicals from their
earthly lord. For Trump, the consequences are
political and legal. For Evangelicals, the fallout has
a more spiritual quality. What does it profit a faith
to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with
its own soul?
Evangelicals had more to lose than Republicans, for
reasons I learned in church as a child. You can’t
evangelize anyone if your testimony is poor. If you
disobey your parents, or wear a skirt that falls above
your knees, how can anyone believe you’re saved?
Another Sunday school lesson, conveniently forgotten?
Be sure that your sin will find you out. Evangelicals
bought power, and the bill is coming due. The price is
their Christian witness, the credibility of their
redemption by God. Evangelicalism won’t disappear
after Trump, but its alliance with an unpopular and
brutal president could alienate all but the most
zealous.
To be Evangelical in the 1990s was to learn fear. The
world was so dangerous, and our status in it so
fragile. The fossil record was a lie, and scientists
knew it. You could not watch the Teletubbies because
Jerry Falwell thought the purple one was gay. No
Disney, either, and not because Walt had been a
fascist; Disneyworld allowed a gay-pride day, and in
one scene of The Lion King, you could see the stars
spell out “sex.” You were lucky to even be alive, to
have escaped the abortion mill. The predominantly
white Evangelical world in which I was raised had
created its own shadow universe, a buffer between it
and the hostile world. Our parents could put us in
Christian schools or homeschool us; if they did risk
public school, we could take shelter with groups like
YoungLife and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes,
which would tell us to make the most of this chance to
save souls. We had alternatives for everything; our
own pop music, our own kids’ shows, our own versions
of biology and U.S. history, and an ecosystem of
colleges and universities to train us up in the way we
should go: toward the Republican Party, and away from
the left, with no equivocation.
Whatever the cause, whatever the rumor, the fear was
always the same. It was about power, and what would
happen if we lost it. Certain facts, like the
whiteness of our congregations and the maleness of our
pulpits and the shortcomings of our leaders, were not
worth mentioning. You were fighting for God, and God
was not racist or sexist; He was only true. The
unsaved hated this, it made them angry, and that was
proof you were doing the right thing. If “owning the
libs” has a discernible origin point, it’s here, in
the white Evangelical church.
While I was in college and Trump was still a reality-
show star, Evangelicals faced a crisis in the pews.
Young people were leaving the church, and they weren’t
coming back. The first signs arrived in 2007, in the
last hopeful months before the Great Recession. A pair
of Christian researchers released a study with
troubling implications for the future of the church.
Young people aged 16 to 29 were skeptical of
Christianity and of Evangelicalism in particular,
concluded Dave Kinnaman of the Barna Group and Gabe
Lyons of the Fermi Project. 'Half of young churchgoers
said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental,
hypocritical, and too political,' they wrote. Among
the unchurched, attitudes were even more negative. A
mere 3 percent said they had positive views of
Evangelicalism, a precipitous decline from previous
generations.
I interviewed Lyons about his research while I was a
student journalist at Cedarville University, a
conservative Baptist school in Ohio. By the time I
graduated, I’d become one of his statistics, an
atheist with a minor in Bible. Trump was not even a
glimmer in Steve Bannon’s eye, but the Evangelical
tradition had already asked me to tolerate many sins.
There was George W. Bush and his catastrophic invasion
of Iraq; welfare policies that starved the poor; the
dehumanization of immigrants, of LGBT people, of women
who do not wish to stay pregnant, and my own, non-
negotiable submission to men. At some point I realized
that I had traveled some distance in my mind, and I
could not go back the way I came. I was over it, I was
through.
The years after my personal exodus brought with them
more proof that the church was in trouble.
Partisanship did not entirely explain why. Membership
declined fastest in mainline congregations, even
though they tend to be more liberal than the
independent churches of my youth. Social media has
expanded the philosophical marketplace; all Christian
traditions face competition from new ideologies for
the hearts and minds of the young. But conservative
denominations are suffering, too. The Southern Baptist
Convention said this June it had experienced its 13th
consecutive year of membership decline. By age 22,
two-thirds of adults who attend Protestant services as
teenagers have dropped out of church for at least a
year, LifeWay Research found last year, and a quarter
cited political disagreements as the reason. An
alliance with a president the young largely hated
might not lure new generations to the fold.
Years of attrition have taken a toll on white
Evangelicals, said Robert Jones, the author of The End
of White Christian America and the founder of the
Public Religion Research Institute. “If you go back a
couple of election cycles ago, into Barack Obama’s
first election, they were 21 percent of the
population, and today they are 15 percent of the
population,” he told me. The share of Black
Evangelicals has remained relatively stable, he added,
while the numbers of Latino Evangelicals has grown.
And while these groups ostensibly share a religious
label, politically they are far apart.
'If I take the religious landscape, and I sort
religious groups by their support for one candidate or
the other, what inevitably happens is that there are
no two groups further away from each other in that
sorting than white Evangelical Protestants and
African-American Protestants,' Jones said, adding that
Latino Evangelicals are 'a little more divided.'
(Indeed, Trump won significant support from this group
in 2020.)
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.
There are still dissenters. Last year, the outgoing
editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, called for
Trump’s removal from office. Galli wrote the typical
approach for his magazine was to 'stay above the
fray,' and 'allow Christians with different political
convictions to make their arguments in the public
square, to encourage all to pursue justice according
to their convictions and treat their political
opposition as charitably as possible,' he wrote. But
Trump had abused the power of his office and revealed
a 'grossly deficient moral character.' Galli has since
converted to Catholicism, a decision he explained to
Religion News Services as being more personal than
political.
Others stay. But they can experience a painful
friction between their spiritual convictions and
political independence. My parents, both pro-life
Evangelicals, have now voted against Trump twice. I
spoke to another by Skype, not long before the
election.
I know Marlena Proper Graves from my days at that
Baptist university, when I was an upstart college
feminist, and she was a resident director and the
spouse of a professor. Now the author of two books on
faith and a doctoral candidate at Bowling Green State
University, Graves worries about the influence of
Trump, and Trump’s party, on her beloved church. The
word 'Evangelical,' she noted, had always referred to
a constellation of beliefs. 'You have a relationship
with God, God cares about you, God cares about all
people, and Christ is central,' she said, ticking them
off. 'But now it seems to be something of a culture.'
That culture is an exclusionary one. 'I’ve been
disinvited from events because of my views and
activism for immigrants, because it’s controversial,'
she said.
When Proper was young, she told me, she listened to
Christian radio all the time, just like I did.
Preachers and commentators like James Dobson, a famed
radio personality and the founder of Focus on the
Family, would opine on the issues of the day, on
morality, and virtue. 'All these people would talk
about character,' she said. “How you can’t vote for
Bill Clinton in particular because of Monica Lewinsky,
because he had affairs.” Then came Trump. 'People
said, first, that they didn’t think he would win. Then
it was all about abortion and judges. I felt like I
was being punked,' she remembered. But many
Evangelicals are in on the joke. Faced with popular
rejection and the humiliation of Trump, they declare
themselves persecuted, and identify numerous enemies.
The mission remains the same: Purify the nation, and
pacify the barbarians."
--(looong article; the rest at link...)
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