Twilight in the Pews, Part 2
In 2020, conservative White Christians’ support for Trump has come to seem normal. But in 2016 it was actually a surprise.
Originally published on Medium.com 25 January 2021
In Part 1, I argued that the Trump years have been bad for White conservative Christians. This is not a particularly surprising outcome. Trump has failed at a lot of ventures and left a lot of partners in the lurch; there was no particular reason to assume that Christians would be any different. What is more surprising is that conservative White Christians supported Trump in the first place.
The support of White conservative Christians for Trump has become so normalized — and so consistent — that it is easy to forget how unlikely it seemed in the summer of 2016. But as Pew pointed out in the run-up to that year’s GOP convention, weekly churchgoers had understandably expressed greater skepticism towards the casino-owning reality TV star than other subgroups in the Republican primaries. The assumption going into 2016 had been that White conservative Christians would coalesce around either Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz. Cruz made it all the way to the end of the primary as the last anti-Donald holdout, and he pointedly declined to endorse Trump at the 2016 GOP convention.
At the time, many commentators wondered whether White conservative Christians, in the spirit of Cruz’s “vote your conscience” advice, might either sit out the election or decline to vote for the top of the ticket. Some advocated voting for a third party. A few prominent evangelicals, like Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, published some “Never Trump” style op-eds. In a response to the release of the infamous “grab’em by the pussy” recording, Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, wrote that “the best we can hope for in this sad election cycle with these two unsupportable candidates is that we do not allow a national disgrace to become the Great Evangelical Embarrassment.”
I was one of the doubters. I am the son of a Baptist minister, and I aged into an interest in politics during the Clinton years. I remember extremely well the arguments made at the time for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and one of the consistent lines on the Monica Lewinsky scandal was that Clinton’s behavior disqualified him from office because of its moral repugnance. I was proud to vote for Bush in 2000, given his promise to “restore order and dignity” to the White House, because that was the sort of thing Christians stood for.
I left the evangelical church for a progressive Episcopalian congregation years ago, but in 2016 I still believed in my heart that evangelical Christians would not turn out for Trump. Republicans, I predicted, had taken White conservative Christians for granted and built a bridge too far in nominating an ostentatiously secular candidate whose name was synonymous with greed and excess. Given Clinton’s weakness as a candidate, I wrote on Facebook that she should get up every day of her presidency and thank God for Donald Trump, since he was the one Republican who could successfully lose to her, by causing a drop-off in evangelical votes at the top of the ticket.
I should have been paying more attention to Ted Cruz.
White conservative Christians didn’t just make their peace with the Donald; they got onboard the Trump Train, turning out for him in higher numbers than they had for Bush, in 2004, John McCain, in 2008, or Mitt Romney, in 2012. Not all religious conservatives followed this trend. Support for Trump relative to Romney decreased amongst both Jews and members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). But it is also fair to note that White conservative Christians were not alone in their increasing support of the Republican candidate in 2016; it was a general trend across most faith sub-groups measured by Pew after the election. Indeed, the biggest pro-Trump shifts happened amongst Hispanic Catholics (8 points) and the “other faiths” category, including Muslims and Hindus (12 points).
But while other religious groups also increased their support for the GOP in 2016, White evangelicals were unique in the ubiquity of their embrace — at 81%, a full 20 points beyond the next closest group (Mormons). Moreover, the inter-evangelical debate over support for Trump had no analog in previous campaigns. Officers from the upper echelon of Baptist politics did not feel the need to publish op-eds staking out positions on Bush in 2004. All of this is to say that the situation with conservative White Christians in 2016 was noticeably weird. White evangelicals were so excited about Trump that they turned out for him at higher rates than ever despite an unprecedented internal debate and in spite of the obvious dissonance of the optics.
Chart by author; data from Pew Research, sourced above
It was the kind of surprising outcome that made people sit up and take notice. In the aftermath of the election, explorations of Trumpist Christian fervor became an important sub-genre in the larger scramble of reporters heading to small towns in search of the mysterious “Trump voter.” What makes those stories interesting is that those same reporters had regarded evangelicals’ support for the GOP in every prior election of the 2000s as a fact so mundane and predictable as not to require explanation. Do you remember all the hand-wringing and shocked people asking how evangelicals could possibly vote for George W. Bush rather than Al Gore? Yeah. Me neither.
In keeping with the theme of weirdness, the explanations that emerged from both insiders and outsiders to the church were uniformly odd and unflattering. A surprisingly large and vocal number of conservative White Christians insisted that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” chosen by God to advance a divine agenda and defend the Chosen People. (For the maximum MAGA-prophecy experience, see The Trump Prophecy or the MyPillow Guy.)
Others within the movement downplayed the significance of their co-religionists’ political leanings — evangelical data group Barna, for example, published a piece on December 1, 2016, with the lovely shade-throwing title, “Notional Christians, the Big Election Story in 2016.” (Is the proper epithet CINO?) More prosaically, many Christians pointed to cultural issues — abortion, LGBTQ rights, and anti-discrimination ordinances— and the appointment of judges as the explanation for their support of Trump, explicitly embracing the notion that Christians’ insistence on morality in the public square was strategic and transactional, rather than authentic. As they say in Sunday school, the most important Fruit of the Spirit is #winning.
Explanations emerging from outside the church were similarly unflattering. Some commentators, noting the stark racial dynamics of the election, the ugly history of the White Christian church, and the split between White and Black Christians in the election returns, concluded that Trump’s support amongst White conservative Christians reflected the politics of racism. Others, like political scientist Michele Margolis, argued that religious and political identities are reciprocal, meaning that perhaps Trump voters’ religious beliefs were downstream from their identification with conservatism and the Republican Party, rather than vice versa.
As a historian, I tend to assume that the correct answer is some combination of “all of the above,” plus lots of other stuff; people are complicated. But to fully explain the weirdness of 2016, I think we need to add in an oft-overlooked element: a deep sense of despair, or possibly panic, that had taken hold amongst White conservative Christians in the Obama years. That fear shouldn’t be all that surprising — and it may even have been warranted — given the persistent decline that I outlined in Part 1. In Part 3, however, I will argue that conservative White Christians misunderstood the reasons for the decline and exacerbated it by throwing in with Trump.