White evangelicals in the US overwhelmingly support Donald Trump, but their reasons are often misunderstood by their British counterparts. Dr Alastair Roberts looks at the cultural and political forces at play
Separated by an ocean, American and British Christians often struggle to understand each other’s politics.
Americans are considerably more likely to be oblivious to British politics than the other way around. However, notwithstanding the extensive coverage of and even preoccupation with American politics in British media, British observers often have highly misleading impressions of the animating forces, the faultlines, and the affiliations of American politics.
Perhaps our supposed overfamiliarity with it prevents us from recognising the foreignness and strangeness required to appreciate it on its own terms.
Evangelicals on this side of the Atlantic can find it difficult to understand the extremely high levels of support for President Trump among white American evangelicals (over 80%). Even more confusing - and perhaps dismaying - for some may be the enthusiasm for Trump among many prominent evangelical leaders, such as Franklin Graham, who prayed at the inauguration.
Many British Christian observers resonated more with Bishop Mariann Budde’s much-discussed sermon, within which she expressed her concern for “gay, lesbian and transgender children…who fear for their lives”, for undocumented immigrants, and for refugees, asking President Trump to show mercy.
Much American evangelical support for Trump makes sense on account of the binary dynamics of a two-party system. Many evangelical voters may have been ambivalent or unenthusiastic about Trump, their vote merely indicating that they considered him preferable to the only real alternative of Kamala Harris.
Variation within US evangelicalism
In contrast to the UK, white evangelicals are a large constituency in the US, with the potential to exercise an influential role in American politics, even if their lack of alternatives can make them a cheap date. However, there are wide variations in their regional distribution: while 52% of Tennessee’s population identifies as evangelical Protestant, for instance, only 10% of the state of New York does. In America’s established centres of cultural and political power, evangelicalism is typically very weak. While 43% of Americans identify as Protestant, only 6% of Harvard’s class of 2027 does
As British evangelicals would likelier have a greater cultural proximity to New Yorkers than to Mississippians, figures like Tim Keller may feel much more relatable to us. That many of American evangelicalism’s most influential cultural institutions and figures have also been formed and operated in contexts where evangelicalism is a much smaller minority is an underconsidered source of tension within evangelicalism itself: ‘winsomeness’ as an evangelical posture is tailored more for minoritarian settings, whereas evangelicals in settings where they are the largest religious grouping or even a majority may desire a more assertive approach, presenting Christian faith as the rightful vehicle for their broader culture.
America is a vast country and 65% of Americans have visited fewer than 20 states. The degree to which Americans are foreigners to each other should not be underestimated. The worlds of evangelicals and those many of them would term ‘coastal elites’ barely intersect. Influential yet alien agencies and constituencies easily become the objects of paranoia, hostility, and contempt. And, in a two-party political system, where so much seems up for grabs every four years, such feelings can easily be excited and mobilised by politics on both sides.
On the backfoot
Evangelicals can be acutely sensitised to the contempt and hatred they feel directed towards them. Centres of American power and culture have often treated evangelicals as poster boys for stereotypically backward and prejudiced white Americans, a convenient foil for their progressive identities, a target for draconian measures, and a ridiculed and demonised group in media and entertainment.
The appeal of Trump’s belligerent and anti-establishment posture in particular, beyond any loyalty to the Republican Party, for evangelicals is in no small measure a reaction against such felt cultural marginalisation and disdain. Trump seems like a champion for evangelicals against their cultured despisers.
Friend-enemy
While Trump may compromise on abortion issues and sideline the pro-life movement’s policy interests, he will defend peaceful pro-lifers from the sorts of punitive measures employed against them by the Biden administration. Trump represents a form of friend-enemy politics and, even when he does not share their policies, he will treat them as friends. He will also, importantly for many evangelicals, treat their opponents as enemies, giving them no quarter and engaging in a sort of authoritarian politics that has been rare on the American right over the past decades.
Trump seems like a champion for evangelicals against their cultured despisers
The official handling of COVID, the response of cultural institutions to George Floyd, the pushing of punitive, censorious, and unpopular measures and propaganda designed to establish transgender ideology (especially those which threatened or subverted parental prerogatives), the institutionalization of DEI values throughout American institutions, and the evacuation or pathologisation of American identity coupled with support for mass immigration all served to provoke a reaction against progressivism. However, while evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump, key elements of his coalition include, like Trump himself, groups who may formerly have leaned towards the left. We probably should not expect any radical reversal of socially liberalising developments under Trump: his movement is not a new Moral Majority. Rather, ‘barstool conservatives’, represented by figures such as Joe Rogan, and the ‘tech right’, represented by figures like Elon Musk, are the more dynamic and influential members of Trump’s movement.
Trump is badly misunderstood by those who would represent him as a far-right wing ideologue (even though such are to be found among his supporters). He is a businessman and a media personality. He is trying to reboot America, the greatest show in the world. He is permissive and a libertine but is not going to push fringe sexual ideologies upon the population. In place of an institutional culture of DEI that became increasingly identified with incompetence, inefficiency, resistance to excellence, corruption, sanctimony, censoriousness, passive aggression, vengefulness, and guilt-manipulation, Trump wants America to be feelgood, bold, assertive, dynamic, excellent, and fun - to be ‘Great Again’ - and, as America’s new CEO, will deal firmly with those who get in the way of this. As a CEO, he is also seen as someone who is committed to effectiveness over political procedures and conventions; he will get things done and deliver key results and victories for his supporters, the overturning of Roe v Wade being an important example.
Caution needed
The new right wing that Trump represents is in many respects a post-Christian right. It is coarse in its speech and permissive in its values. In its reaction against the excesses of the progressive left, it can jettison a Christian sensitivity to victims, regard for the weak, or love for enemies. The values of the rising tech right can be cruel and dehumanising, in extreme cases regarding weak, marginal, and unemployable persons as little more than excess biomass. An unconcern with the interests of the weak and despised may make aggressive deportation policies easier, but evangelicals who are currently intoxicated with this attitude may well find themselves at the receiving end of it in the future.
Budde’s remarks about mercy in her sermon will naturally and not inappropriately be heard in light of her progressive liberal commitments, as illustrating the double standards and partial justice so often advanced by people in that quarter. However, in Trump’s America it may be very easy for some Christians to forget mercy and love for their enemies.
6 challenges for the American Church
What challenges might Trump’s victory pose for the Church in America?
First, the drive to fight and win cultural and political conflicts, which have their place, can easily displace love for enemies and attempts to secure reconciliation with them through peace-making and sharing of Christ’s grace. The ethos of the politics surrounding Trump is not conducive to such Christian virtues.
Second, the manners and behaviour of the Trump coalition are coarser and their influence on the conduct of Christians within it is already apparent; too many on the Trumpian Christian right can exhibit a discourtesy and lack of compassion that can be alarming.
Third, where Christians as an identity group have a lot at stake in secular politics, it can be easy to forget that we are citizens of a greater kingdom and that, important as the politics of this age remain, the Church will always relativise them and hold them accountable to a higher ruler.
Fourth, in such settings the Church can easily be reimagined as a cultural affinity group and we can lose our sense of our connection with Christians in very different nations and cultures.
Fifth, Christian missions, charity, and relief work, which embody and encourage Christian concern for foreigners, outsiders, strangers, refugees, etc. may face increasing resistance from some quarters with rising nativism.
Finally, in the tech right and barstool conservatives we see a vision of a post-Christian right and, while Trump’s coalition offers Christians victory alongside them, both groups represent emerging threats, with which Christians will increasingly have to reckon.
Politics is dangerous
British Christians need to be praying for their brothers and sisters in America.
While important, politics is an inherently dangerous field of endeavour, one where ends and means are easily confused. While we should not be blind to common unhealthy dimensions of American evangelicals’ relationship with politics, we should beware of making a virtue of our own unchosen political impotence. There is much that we should admire in and could learn from the confidence, assertiveness, entrepreneurial attitude, and constructive posture of many of our American brothers and sisters.
It is easy for the excesses and extremes of American evangelicalism to catch our attention, but there are countless Christians who are seeking to be faithful to Christ, keep political loyalties in their appropriate place, and maintain the integrity of the Church in a political and cultural situation that poses novel challenges and temptations.
The relationship between British and American evangelicalism has been an exceedingly important one historically. Despite the smallness of British evangelicalism, many prominent American evangelicals have come to the UK to study theology in our universities. American evangelicalism has also been profoundly shaped by British Christian writers such as C.S. Lewis, J.I. Packer, N.T. Wright, and others.
As social media and the Internet increasingly connect British and American Christian discourse and as some Americans more aggressively seek to influence the UK (Elon Musk’s recent forays into British political controversy being an example), we also should expect the dynamics of American evangelical Trumpism to find expressions in our UK contexts. In such a situation understanding American evangelical politics may be increasingly essential for navigating our own.
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