Evangelicals' Unholy Alliance With Trump

For decades now I have said that "evangelicals" and right wing "Christians" pose a clear and present danger to constitutional government in America.  In fact, white Christian nationalist and dominionists are quite open in their desire to overthrow the U.S. Constitution which they would replace with a "Christian" theocracy where a minority of Americans, namely themselves, would rule over the majority.  This, combined with the reality that a number of surveys have shown a large overlap between evangelical "Christians" and white supremacists.  Thus, in some ways it is little surprise that this segment of American society is full onboard with Donald Trump's racist and fascist agenda which seeks to see Trump installed as nothing less than a monarch who is above the law.  The irony, of course, that these self-styled "Christians" pay little attention to Christ's gospel message of love of neighbor and instead embrace a hate driven, cherry picked version of Old Testament passages which they weaponize to disparage those they deem "other" - namely all non-whites, non-Christians, LGBT individuals and anyone else who does not subscribe to their toxic beliefs.   The irony, of course is that evangelicals have played a major role in driving people from organized religion and Christianity in particular.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the unholy alliance between evangelicals and Trump. Here are article highlights: 

Karen Johnson went to her Lutheran church so regularly as a child that she won a perfect attendance award. As an adult, she taught Sunday school. But these days, Ms. Johnson, a 67-year-old counter attendant at a slot-machine parlor, no longer goes to church.

She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. . . . . No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.

White evangelical Christian voters have lined up behind Republican candidates for decades, driving conservative cultural issues into the heart of the party’s politics and making nominees and presidents of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

But no Republican has had a closer — or more counterintuitive — relationship with evangelicals than Mr. Trump. The twice-divorced casino magnate made little pretense of being particularly religious before his presidency. The ardent support he received from evangelical voters in 2016 and 2020 is often described as largely transactional: an investment in his appointment of Supreme Court justices who would abolish the federal right to abortion and advance the group’s other top priorities.

But religion scholars, drawing on a growing body of data, suggest another explanation: Evangelicals are not exactly who they used to be.

Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.

“Politics has become the master identity,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”

This is most true among white Americans, who over the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency became more likely to identify as “evangelical,” even as overall rates of church attendance declined.

The Republican caucuses in Iowa next week will be a test of how fully Mr. Trump continues to own that identity. Among his rivals, Gov. Ron DeSantis has invested most heavily in courting Iowa evangelicals, using a traditional playbook. He has secured the support of prominent evangelical figures and attested to his hard-line bona fides on abortion, an issue on which he has criticized Mr. Trump for being inconsistent, and in culture-war fights in Florida, his home state.

But Mr. Trump’s track record and recent polling suggest that is not certain. In early December, Mr. Trump had a 25-point lead over Mr. DeSantis among evangelical voters, according to a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

What may matter more than endorsements and policy plans are Mr. Trump’s embrace of Christianity as a cultural identity — and his promises to defend it.

At a recent rally in Waterloo, Iowa, Mr. Trump cast Christians as a broadly persecuted group facing down a government weaponized against them. Catholics are the current target of “the communists, Marxists and fascists,” he said, citing a recent controversy about a retracted F.B.I. memo, and adding that “evangelicals will not be far behind.”

Church membership in the United States has been slipping for decades, along with the share of Americans who identify as Christian — and particularly as Protestants, the branch that has historically been the gravitational center of American religion. In the middle of the 20th century, 68 percent of Americans described themselves as Protestant. By 2022, 34 percent did, according to Gallup.

At first, declines mostly affected the more liberal mainline Protestant denominations. But in recent years, self-identified evangelical church attendance has dropped as well, and a larger share of conservatives than liberals report leaving church. In 2021, for the first time on record, less than 50 percent of Americans were members of a church.

The transformation has been particularly visible in Iowa, where self-identified evangelicals, who make up about a quarter of the state’s population, are influential bellwethers in Republican politics — but where religious practice has changed more starkly than almost anywhere else in the country.

From 2010 to 2020, the state’s population of church adherents — people with some level of involvement in a congregation — fell almost 13 percent . . . Some once-faithful attendees now join services online, in some cases sampling the streamed offerings of churches far from home. Others simply never got back in the habit of attending at all.

And the schedules of blue-collar jobs and youth sports no longer consider Sunday mornings sacrosanct, making regular attendance more difficult for working people and families.

But the drop-off has had impacts far beyond individual spirituality. As ties to church communities have weakened, the church leaders who once rallied the faithful behind causes and candidates have lost influence. A new class of thought leaders has filled the gap: social media personalities and podcasters, once-fringe prophetic preachers and politicians.

There was little sign at the outset of the 2016 Republican primary season that evangelicals would take to Mr. Trump as enthusiastically as they eventually did. . . . But as Mr. Trump gained ground in the early primaries, his growing strength among white evangelical voters became clear. Polls showed that the future nominee was most popular among one group in particular: white evangelicals who seldom or never went to church.

Mr. Trump elevated a cohort of obscure evangelical pastors and media figures, who were often outside the theological mainstream but unwavering in their devotion to him. He increasingly championed Christians as a constituency, rather than nodding to their values, as previous presidents had. His rallies took on a tent-revival atmosphere.

Mr. Trump himself has become a model for embracing evangelicalism as an identity, not a religious practice. . . . . He is rarely seen in church, but a poll this fall by HarrisX for The Deseret News found that more than half of Republicans see Mr. Trump as a “person of faith.” That’s more than any other 2024 Republican presidential candidate and substantially more than President Biden, a lifelong Catholic who attends Mass frequently.

An increasing number of people in many of the most zealously Trump-supporting parts of Iowa fit a religious profile similar to the former president’s. “Iowa is culturally conservative, non-practicing Christians at this point,” Mr. Burge said. “That’s exactly Trump’s base.”

For evangelicals who do not embrace Mr. Trump’s politics, the politicized identity now regularly attached to the label has occasioned some soul-searching. . . . “It was becoming very difficult,” said Dale O’Connell, a Presbyterian pastor in Lucas County, who retired from the ministry in 2016, after 50 years, in part because of an increasingly right-wing atmosphere in some of the congregations he served.

The evolving evangelical identity is already scrambling how politicians appeal to these voters. Mr. Burge’s research has found that “cultural Christians” care relatively little about bedrock religious-right causes like abortion and pornography.

Shifts in evangelical identity have also threatened the influence of the evangelical leaders whose posts at large churches, Christian media companies and faith-based organizations for decades made them power brokers in Republican politics.

In recent months, Republican candidates competed for the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, a power broker in Iowa’s evangelical politics. But polls show his endorsement of Mr. DeSantis in November having little effect on the loyalties of evangelical voters, who continue to favor Mr. Trump broadly.

“This election is part of a spiritual battle,” Mr. Tenney said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

Hatred towards and retribution against others is what now defines evangelicals who both make a mockery of the "Christian" label and Christ's social gospel.