I had once assumed that while ‘evangelicals’ overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, the word ‘evangelical’ was loose. I assumed a cultural sense to the word ‘evangelical’.
Surely, if you were serious about your faith, your Trump-mania would be dialed down? Surely, it would be the racist, xenophobic ‘evangelicals in name only’ – who rarely attend church, and have a cultural and not a personal faith – that were behind the rise and presidency of Donald J. Trump.
I think that my prejudices on this question betray my British heritage. While I have pastored in the USA for more than 12 years (throughout Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies), I only moved from the UK at the beginning of 2012. Like most of my compatriots, I had been trained by the UK media to ridicule Trump. Why a higher percentage of people voted for him in 2016 and in 2020 than voted for Keir Starmer in the recent UK election remained a mystery to me for quite a while.
