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.
The truth is that the more evangelical you are by church attendance and conviction (the Bible is the Word of God; Jesus is your Saviour; and you need to help your neighbours come to faith) the MORE likely you are to vote for Trump. While those who rarely attend church tended to vote for Biden in the last election, those who attended monthly, or more, substantially voted for Trump (Pew Research). If you were a white evangelical who was serious about your faith, the figure was 85%. Nothing has substantially changed in the four years since Pew conducted that research, and if you live in the USA and are a Bible-believing Christian, the strong probability is that you WILL vote for Trump in the November election this year.
If you want to understand why so many committed Christians will back Trump this fall, the change of heart of his vice-presidential running mate will give you an insight. J.D. Vance, Yale lawyer and writer of Hillbilly Elegy, comes from exactly the kind of community that overwhelmingly supports Trump. Poor, white, working-class folk. In 2016, as a ‘never-Trumper’, he deplored the association of Trump with racism, described Trump as ‘cultural heroin’ in an Atlantic article, and speculated that while he might accidentally do some good, he might also prove to be America’s Hitler. He is a smart guy and has become serious about his faith (he walked away from faith at college, but converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019). His conversion to Trump aligns with his conversion to Christianity. It also helps that he was proved wrong about Trump during his presidency. He had thought that Trump would deliver nothing for working-class Americans despite his accurate description of the problems they faced. By the end of his presidency, paychecks had outstripped inflation by 8.4%, mortgage rates were at their most affordable for decades, 15 million people were lifted out of poverty, and job growth had been continual until the outbreak of the pandemic (see factcheck.org).
More than economic growth, J.D. Vance saw that Trump had turned out to be on the side of conservative Christian values. Despite identifying him as ‘morally reprehensible’ in 2016, Vance came to understand Trump as ‘America’s last best hope’ in his first speech as the vice-presidential candidate.
Here are seven reasons that will help you understand why evangelicals in America WILL vote for Trump in November:
1. Reproductive freedom
Abortion and picks for the US Supreme Court have risen in the priority rankings of what evangelicals are looking for in their president. Kamala Harris has virtually made her campaign about ‘reproductive freedom’. That freedom is a death sentence to any human being who finds themselves living within their mother’s body. For many evangelicals this is a key moral issue. The ending of Roe v. Wade was made possible by Trump’s Supreme Court picks.
The recent dialing back of the anti-abortion rhetoric by Trump (and Vance) – to say that abortion should remain a matter to be decided by the States – is not a pro-abortion affirmation, but rather a defence of the end of Roe v. Wade. It is realpolitik and the most pro-Life stance on offer to an evangelical voter.
2. Gender-affirming care for minors
The LGBTQ+ movement is currently being fought around the (less serious) issue of bathroom access according to your personal understanding of your gender identity, and the (more serious) issue of at what age we are happy as a society to perform irreversible surgery on people who have gender dysphoria. Vance’s ‘Protect Children’s Innocence’ Act (2023) would ban genital mutilation, chemical castration and sterilisation of children. For Democrats who are interested in being as supportive as possible of trans rights, this is anathema.
3. Religious freedom
Religious freedom and freedom of speech in general can feel as if they are in jeopardy. A 2018 Supreme Court case narrowly gave victory to a baker who refused to make a cake for a gay wedding. Jordan Peterson and others have been ‘de-platformed’ at major universities. There’s a fear that if you were to express an opinion such as that marriage should be between a man and a woman, that you may find yourself committing a criminal act. Whether or not this is a real risk, it becomes a much greater risk under a Harris presidency.
4. Identity politics
There is a left-wing tendency to ascribe identity as key to your right to speak to a particular issue. If you're not a woman, how can you have an opinion about issues that affect women (ditto: Muslim, gay, poor, brown-skinned, etc.)? Intersectionality dictates that the more marginalised identities you have that intersect (Kamala Harris has woman, African-American, Indian-American) the more of a voice you should have. For parts of the US that feel especially voiceless and do not identify as part of a marginalised group, this exacerbates the sense of exclusion.
5. Woke vs. traditional values
The west coast and north-east coast cities in the US have ‘woke’ values (whatever that means). The middle of the United States and the south (Texas and Florida, etc.) have more traditional family values. While it’s amorphous, the traditional values of evangelical Christians don’t recognise the woke values of the cities.
6. The elite vs. working class America
One of J.D. Vance’s influences is the thinker Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin coined the phrase ‘the Cathedral’ to describe the cultural elite in America. While the Middle Ages were dominated by ‘the Cathedral’ of the church as key intellectual institution, the modern era is dominated by the Cathedral of ‘journalism plus academia’. The views of a modern Yale, Harvard or Oxford professor align with the views of a Washington Post, New York Times or Guardian editor. This is the modern cultural elite. Without any coordinating influence they nevertheless seem to act as a single cultural force (see Yarvin on SubStack).
This elite resonates powerfully within the Democratic Party and with US universities, but it fails to speak to evangelical America. Trump might be wealthy, but he is an outsider to this ‘elite’ – and so resonates more clearly with those who also feel outside of the cultural norms and mores of the university and the media.
7. A voice for the voiceless
All of which hopefully explains why Trump acts as a voice to the voiceless in evangelical America.
For just a moment – back to the economy. Hillary Clinton’s comments about working-class American coal miners in West Virginia were one of several political missteps that allowed Trump to win the 2016 election. Clinton proudly boasted that in her transition to clean energy she would ‘put a lot of coal miners out of business’. That was tone-deaf for the struggling communities in West Virginia who relied on coal to pay their mortgages and feed their families. Trump spoke for them. While he also could not reverse the inevitable decline of the industry, he demonstrated that he saw them and was for them.
For the evangelical Christian who is concerned about all the issues that I have listed, and no doubt for J.D. Vance who has changed his mind, there is no choice in November. They WILL vote Trump.
en does not endorse any particular political party or candidate. For other articles on Trump published in EN see, for example https://www.e-n.org.uk/comment/2024-04-trump-why-is-he-supported-is-he-playing-christians/ and https://www.e-n.org.uk/comment/2024-03-how-us-evangelicals-could-affect-the-entire-world/ and also https://www.e-n.org.uk/comment/donald-trump-victim-and-martyr/
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