How did major evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump happen?

Now that he has failed to be reelected, what does that mean for their faith? The article by Richard T. Hughes, “The ferocious last gasps of the religion of Christian America” attempts to give us a comprehensive answer. Evangelical believers can be helpfully challenged by what he says, and then must work at the right answers.

He claims that American Christians have replaced genuine Christianity with a Protestant White Male Heterosexual counterfeit. It culminated in the world of Trump and, with his defeat, with him it is doomed to extinction. Since the statistics for that Evangelical support ran around 80% in Trump’s favor, we need to think that over all very thoroughly.

Do we really think America is Christian? Our history is complex. Many people came here to own their own land, fed up with being in a tenant-farmer class forever. But others came for their religious freedom as European state churches were becoming more domineering. While New England sought to be exclusively Puritan and Virginia Anglican, Quaker Pennsylvania and its Daniel Boone gateway to the Midwest opened the door to many smaller groups, including my own heritage of Calvinistic Methodism.  Our “separation of church and state” could be friendly to tiny groups, but also to those Deistic Masons who ran the country. We kept out Southern European Roman Catholics for a while, mostly because of their domineering history, but later welcomed them too.

Were we then “a Christian country?” When Harvard, Yale and Princeton all were, it could seem that way. When before public schools existed, most private schools were Christian and the Bible became our children’s guide to life. With those Mormons, were we really that much for religious liberty? Only if they stayed in Utah, OK there.

But did being Christian mean White, as Hughes says? When we restricted Black education and at the same time valued our “educated ministry,” it could seem that way—but our evangelists would still have separate services for Blacks. In my Iowa town, our local AME church had no pastor and so they all attended my church—until someone raised money so they could have their own pastor “and be more comfortable.”

Even as a teen I knew whose comfort was on the line. In old slavery days masters would break up Black prayer meetings with their whips, sure that they were being prayed against. Whites thought it was a good idea to have segregated schools, since otherwise our wonderful daughters might meet Black boys there and decide to marry them.

Yes, our history is of segregated churches too, within our segregated society. We sent missionaries all over the world, Africa too. But at home we didn’t worship together and we barely knew each other. Hughes is right, our Christianity was definitively White. We must do better.

But we have been changing. The Presbyterian Church of America with its strong Southern base has gone on record as repenting of racism. The Philadelphia Gospel Movement, following the New York model, is increasingly crossing denominational and racial lines in its commitment to making the city a better place. But—there are many White pastors who still get into serious trouble when they teach that Jesus’ call to “love your neighbor as yourself” includes crossing racial lines.  BLM and CRT may offer useful insights, but referring to them can result in justifiable rejections because of humanist or Marxist backgrounds, even when their programs can be helpful.

We needed to take that look at our racism, but the primary question remains: why did Evangelicals see in Donald Trump someone who could help them? The answer is virtually the same as for all Trump supporters, who are sure that he is the only one who can protect persecuted minorities from cultural oppression by the Elites. When Evangelicals state what has been forever ordinary Christian truths, that abortion and homosexuality are wrong and that belief in any other religion will be of no value, then our post-modern culture is bound to attack and see Christian values as hate crimes. Not only did Trump oppose abortion but he chose three conservative justices for the Supreme Court who are very likely to protect Christian speech. So when 80% of Evangelicals supported Trump, wasn’t that reasonable? President Biden may be Roman Catholic but since he supports homosexuality and abortion, won’t he of course oppose Evangelical, or Catholic, biblical teaching?

How can we possibly put these two together, opposing BOTH racism AND abortion? If you are an Evangelical and are both #1, committed to battling racism and #2 abortion, can you be in favor of a Biden presidency and the culture supporting it? When your very existence is in question, can you still regard battling racism as more important?

Well, Christ is Risen indeed! His victory has been won; isn’t that always what we live from, regardless?

Now think about Hughes. Biden won and Trump lost! Does that signal the decline and fall of Christian Evangelicalism? Since it was a decreasing, aging movement anyway, won’t this be the last straw?

Here is our startling answer: Evangelical Christianity does best when persecuted! When “we suffer with Christ and we are raised with him,” when we learn to drop all our idols of self-worth and self-identity and trust vigorously in our God himself (the way we always said we did but didn’t), when we found God only the frosting on the cake of our proud identity. If a hostile world is what we now have, at least we can be more awake than before!

The way ahead will be very hard. “Pro-life” movements will suffer and be probably illegal. Ditto even more, telling the Biblical truth about homosexuality.  Hate-speech crimes will send many of us to jail with major fines. Even worse, our Evangelical world can make things hard for those of us who show our concern for more than good theology, but also for the gospel relevance that must go with it.

What then? We will see if Hughes is right. Will God’s people quit, or will they turn to him, so vigorously and passionately that Revival will come again? With Revival’s always powerful commitment to evangelism, to love for our enemies, with a result much more significant than either Post-modernism or Trumpism could ever bring?

Jesus has told us that he is hated and so will we. There is Jesus’ own take on our lives that we especially need to reckon with right now.

Thank you, scholar Hughes, for pushing us to that godly reality.

So are we triumphant Democrats or blamable Republicans? Yes, of course, both/and...  and much more, too.