In his new book, Ben Howe attempts to explain something that should never have occurred: why most white evangelicals voting in 2016 chose Donald Trump.
Many observers thought Trump could not win because evangelical Christians could not support someone whose life (and tweeting) was so at odds with their beliefs and practices. Indeed, Trump failed to win a majority of evangelicals in any Super Tuesday primary.
Howe’s subtitle tells the tale: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power over Christian Values.
The explanations are varied. One is economic. Areas of the US that simply felt forgotten overlap significantly with white evangelical support for Trump. So there was receptivity to Trump’s message, and economic concerns trumped moral ones.
Or perhaps they didn’t: many evangelical leaders claimed that issues of life and religious liberty were at stake, perhaps irreversibly, if Hillary Clinton won, so voters should choose Trump despite (or, in some cases, forgiving) his personal failures. Pressure on voters on abortion and the supreme court was at times intense. In the end, “only 4% of evangelicals cited abortion as their determining factor” – but it was a decisive 4%.
As Howe notes, “Trump evangelicals are very fond of binary choices”, many of which are in essence “false dilemmas” in which a supposed “greater moral consideration takes precedence”. This “whataboutism” was key. Could one have opposed Trump and Clinton? Of course – and Trump would have lost. Yet, as Howe reminds us, “putting God in one compartment” and politics in another “is clearly out of step with Christian tradition”.
This provides a further clue. Howe writes extensively about the impact of social media and cable news in deepening the political divide in America and intensifying it to fresh levels of vitriol and “hyperbolic outrage”, largely based on the idea of victimization. This had dramatic effects: a spirit of bitterness and a “persecution complex” on the right meant that “ [a]s the clicks came, and the ideas were reinforced through group dynamics, they became even more pronounced. Anger had become a currency.”
Anger is, of course, one of the seven deadly sins, yet the “toxic mixture of resentment and desire for revenge” made power more attractive: “It was time to start winning again.”
Trump promised power. “In the end,” Howe writes, “It’s what many absolutely believe Trump as president has given them.”
Power was one of the temptations the devil offered Jesus. He refused.
This is a deeply introspective, at times anguished book. Howe shows how each proffered rationale for support for Trump departs sharply from evangelical tradition. Howe was brought up in a strong evangelical household. Both parents worked at Jerry Falwell Sr’s Liberty University and took troubled youths into their home.
He cannot compare this with, notably, Jerry Falwell Jr’s unremitting support of Trump, even posing for a picture in front of a Playboy magazine with Trump on the cover, which would have horrified his father, who bitterly opposed the easy spread of pornography. Howe was “stunned” at this but it was merely a prelude to a pastors’ gathering with Trump in June 2016 in which Howe sees the beginning of the shift in support.
“In a generation,” he writes, “the movement had changed … from trying to be a force for change in politics, to being forcefully changed by politics.” This is a far cry from the changed lives that were the traditional hallmark of the evangelical movement, as another recent book about a former Klansman devoting his life to racial reconciliation illustrates so well.
Ultimately, Howe is most concerned for the witness of the evangelical church, not least “the injury it does to the soul of Donald Trump”. He asks: “You’ve gained the world. How is your soul faring?”
The movement “need[s] to own our own mistakes”, he writes, and develop the ability to “find the strength to be a light for others, even when we find the light of our nation dimming”. To balance reason with compassion.
Perhaps younger evangelicals will bolt in 2020; as evangelical leader Russell Moore recently noted, “[They] never expected a nominally Christian culture” anyway, so the binary choice is less compelling.
The percentage of white evangelicals who pull the lever for Trump in 2020 matters, probably decisively, to the result. It thus matters for the world and it matters for them. Or, as Jesus put it: “Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you.”
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John S Gardner is a writer, formerly special assistant to George HW Bush and deputy assistant to George W Bush. His recent review of Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers may be found here
