Why have so many evangelicals become determined supporters of Donald Trump, despite his past adulteries and continued narcissism?
Reporter Tim Alberta, in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (HarperCollins, 2023), reports on various psychological theories. One: Bullies often act that way out of insecurity, and evangelicals insecure in a changing American culture have fallen into a “bully syndrome.” Two: Many evangelicals have been discipled by society rather than the Bible, which they look to not for transformation but for affirmation of their own habits and views.
Drilling down on the discipling process, Alberta looks to pastors who emphasize right-wing politics rather than the Bible, which means that congregants “were now coming to church to have their worst impulses confirmed.” Alberta excoriates “Road to Majority” conferences where speakers teach that character, truth, and “honor and integrity didn’t matter. Those were means, and all that mattered was the ends: winning elections.” He criticizes those who unleash “a pack of starved partisan animals to feed on the fright of Christian.”
Alberta is persuasive, but after I finished his book and was reading Psalm 73, I thought about one of the most puzzling words in many English-language Bibles. Verses seven through nine, some might remember, go like this (in the English Standard Version): “Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth.”
Then comes verse ten: “Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them.” The New International Version has that same first word, “therefore,” as does the King James Version and the Geneva Bible of 1587. It’s puzzling: “Therefore”? I would think that evangelicals would turn away from malicious talkers, but the “therefore” makes it seem that evil speech attracts rather than repels.
The verse has puzzled many, including John Calvin, who wrote, “Commentators wrest this sentence into a variety of meanings.” Calvin concluded “that not only the herd of the profane, but even true believers, who have determined to serve God,are tempted with this unlawful and perverse envy and emulation.” Calvin noted that the verse literally concludes with “waters of a full cup are wrung out to them,” which means that those who follow malicious leaders are about to “drink the bitterest distresses, and to be filled with immeasurable sorrows.”
That still does not explain the “why,” but it shows that those on either the left or the right who make power their priority get a comeuppance. There are few new things under God’s sun and Son. ###
I think there’s a simpler, more persuasive answer. For 50 years, evangelicals have conditioned themselves and their followers that there is only one political issue to be concerned with: the criminalization of abortion. Any candidate who promised to outlaw abortion was to be supported; any candidate who didn’t support criminalization was to be opposed. It was that simple. Nothing else mattered: flaws in anti-abortion politicians would be over looked or explained away, while those of pro-choice politicians would be amplified and condemned. Even if a Democrat was more competent or supported other agreeable policies, evangelicals were told that all of that had to be ignored because of abortion. It didn’t even matter that abortion rates went down during Democratic administrations or that a number of Democratic policies are arguably more broadly pro-life: criminalization was the only acceptable position.
In addition, all of this was couched in terms of religious war. Pro-choicers were not fellow citizens that they disagreed with, they were the enemy; they were tools of the devil, controlled by demonic forces. As such, no compromise was possible (“what fellowship has light with darkness…”); total destruction and eradication of the enemy was required. And the chief tool of the devil was Hillary Clinton, a woman who dared to take an active role in government when she should have been the traditional First Lady who stayed in the background.
Unfortunately for the Christian Right, most people didn’t support total abortion bans or the wholesale repeal of Roe v. Wade. For abortion to be criminalized, the will of the people must be overturned. Traditional politicians were hesitant to do this. Beyond gerrymandering and a few other time-tested power plays, there was little that normal politicians could really do. Mitch McConnell and other Republicans did what they could to game the system and get sympathetic judges on the courts, but politics-as-usual was not going to win the day. Evangelicals needed someone special, an outsider who was willing to ignore norms and use an authoritarian playbook, to get them what they wanted.
Exactly at this moment, Donald Trump came along. He was eager to insult, belittle, and destroy anyone who dared oppose him. Even though he was coarse and crude and otherwise distasteful, he was eager to be their champion. Many evangelicals saw this as a divine work. When hope seemed lost, God raised up Trump “for such a time as this” to overturn Roe v. Wade and criminalize abortion once and for all. As a bonus, Trump was running against Hillary Clinton, the devil’s own representative on earth. For the true believer, it is not difficult to see this as a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, and it was obvious which side a good Christian needed to be on. Trump’s cruelty and anti-Christian behavior was troubling to some, but it could be excused or overlooked (“given a mulligan”) because that is what evangelicals have always done when it comes to abortion.