Despite many worthy efforts at explication, evangelical remains an uncertain label. Always an admixture of theology, history, and sociology, a turning mobile of persons, networks and institutions with only the most tenuous ties to one another — often yielding inexplicable kinship, on the one hand, but also ties that will not bind, on the other. That I have an uncertain relationship with evangelicalism will not surprise readers who have previously encountered my essays on Covenant.
Within the last decade, evangelicalism has come to connote, more than anything else, a political and cultural stance defined by support or even enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. The most-cited evidence of this support is surprisingly steady polling data telling us that 80 percent of white, self-identifying evangelicals supported Donald Trump’s candidacy for the presidency in 2016, again in 2020, and yet again in the 2024 election. Spanning almost a decade, this support is startlingly consistent, and neither Trump’s words and behavior nor the roulette of his various political opponents seem to have moved this needle.
A consequent phenomenon remains steady, if less empirical: the posture of that remaining 20 percent the remainder of self-identifying evangelicals is in a state of perpetual incredulity, if not contempt, with respect to the majority. To the extent that Trump support is increasingly assumed to be constitutive of evangelical, the minority of dissenters are tempted to eschew the label evangelical if not the Christian faith altogether,[1] inasmuch as we were trained to think that evangelical and Christian are coextensive categories. How the results of this most recent election will play out in the evangelical community in the long term remains to be seen.
In what follows, I wish to offer some field notes on this 80% percent of evangelicals who remained Trump’s loyal supporters. I do so as an amateur observer, not as a demographer or political scientist, but as such also an insider, whence one can perceive things polls cannot quite get at. Nothing in what follows should be counted as an apologia, but I also hope none of it descends into smug disdain. More capable persons have offered detailed and nuanced accounts (John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump [Eerdmans, 2018]; Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism [Harper, 2023]. What I offer is an answer to my own curiosity: “How could they do that?” as one who, evangelical bona fides notwithstanding, could not do that.
I start with two observations that could be made by any pollster or demographer: this 80% of evangelical Trump support was of white evangelicals, and it comes especially from the Southern United States, which is both disproportionately evangelical and politically conservative. The case can be made that, while evangelical was hardly incidental to Trump support, white and Southern, race and region as much as religion, perhaps did much, if not more, of the work. If we want to understand the Trump phenomenon in terms of sheer demography, these are almost certainly the two most important observations. But for a deeper, insider, analysis that gets at the interior theological and cultural ethos, we must look elsewhere.
Pentecostals Are Evangelicals Too
Because Pentecostals and charismatics are worthy of a label unto themselves, it could be easily overlooked that, for sake of political analysis, they are normally a set fully included under the evangelical umbrella. Therefore, when the political inclinations of evangelicals are described, perhaps a full third of these may be equally well or even better described as Pentecostals. When we see the Oval Office photos of “evangelicals” praying for Trump, we must not fail to note the preponderance of Pentecostals, many of whom are deeply embedded in a prosperity gospel.
For several reasons, Pentecostalism was especially well-inclined to find in Trump an agent for a hoped-for restoration of political and cultural fortune. Inherently triumphalist, Pentecostalism expects a move of God beyond current limits and circumstances. This note is even more emphatic given the prosperity accent found in many Pentecostal churches, where the prophetic fortunes of Israel are mapped not only onto personal lives but also uncritically and unselfconsciously onto the United States. It is no surprise, then, that strands of Pentecostalism are hotbeds of dominionist restorationism, such as the Seven Mountain Mandate as promulgated by the New Apostolic Reformation.[2]
Thus, Trump’s brash triumphalist claims — which needn’t so much be true as fortifying — his sense that there are enemies to be subdued, and the authoritarian bravado that accompanies it all rang familiar to strands of Pentecostalism. Restorationist evangelical supporters are divided over Trump’s religious sincerity — some are confident of his (recent) evangelical conversion, while for others he is simply a modern Cyrus whose resolute advocacy on behalf of the (Christian) nation does not require his personal piety. His past, his character, his impiety — they matter not if he is the Lord’s anointed.
Dispensationalist Detritus
Contrarily, yet somehow of a piece in the tangled mobile of evangelicalism, the influence of generations of North American dispensationalism has left enormous glacial remains (on which see especially Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation [Eerdmans, 2023]). By origins and by rights, dispensationalists ought least of all to evince hope for Christian political and cultural sway, much less any version of dominionism. In its foundations, dispensationalism is an evasion of the sullied world of politics and power in favor of the urgency of evangelism given the futility of this present age and the imminent return of Christ. Holding that political justice, international peace, and cultural righteousness are unambiguously not to be had while Satan runs loose in the present age as “the prince of the power of the air,” classic dispensationalist eschatology defers this earthly millennial reign of Christ to a future age following a rapture and tribulation. In the meantime, growing ecclesial apostasy and cultural degeneracy are all that can be expected, from which men must be saved.
Yet as dispensationalism would become less and less a disciplined theological system and more and more a populist eschatology without guardrails, it bred all manner of sensationalism and conspiratorial speculation within populist evangelicalism, especially on matters geopolitical and with respect to anything that might smack of globalism. Trump’s pessimistic, conspiracy-friendly rhetoric here finds a credulous audience. Things don’t have to make sense entirely if they sound familiar enough.
Meanwhile, a subtle but profound fruit of dispensationalism is the consigning of Jesus’ moral teaching to a secondary status in canonical Scripture. If, as authentic dispensationalism taught, Jesus’ teachings, say, in the Sermon the Mount, were to be the law of the kingdom, and if that kingdom offered to his Jewish compatriots was refused and thus deferred, then it is not intended to govern Christian lives here and now. It seems strange to say it, but biblicist evangelicalism under dispensationalist influence has an uncertain relationship to the Jesus of the Gospels.
Finally, since the mid-20th century, classic dispensationalism spawned an unwavering, arguably uncritical, firmly Zionist support of Israel (see Hummel’s Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations [U Penn, 2019])..) This is so deeply embedded in the evangelical consciousness that even non-dispensationalists are inclined to accept it uncritically as an article of Christian faith. Every U.S. president since the mid-20th century has understood this and has used it to his political advantage. Not himself theologically inclined, Trump is well-advised on the matter, as indicated by his symbolic recognition in 2017 of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the American diplomatic enterprise from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The Trump Cards
Onlookers with disdain toward the 80-percenters could never hope to understand evangelical loyalty to Trump without taking stock of the breathtaking cultural changes on sexuality and gender, on the one hand, and the perduring moral mandate to protect the life of the unborn, on the other.
Recall that it was not until 2012 that Barack Obama affirmed his support of same-sex marriage, having previously confessed his ambivalence on the matter. That was little more than a decade ago. Now, gauging the political liabilities, Trump’s 2024 Republican party backed down from its previous 2016 platform language defining marriage as exclusively between “one man and one woman” (mentioned five times) in favor of simply affirming (once) the “sanctity of marriage,” leaving definitions to the reader. That the 2024 RNC regards Obama’s pre-2012 stance a bridge too far is a stunning change in political calculation indicative of a national change of heart, celebrated by many, rued by some, regarded as settled law and history by most.
Clearly, then, Trump and the MAGA campaign did not lead with opposition to the legality of same-sex marriage, but in the tidal waves of change, their partisans found solace in the party that is leaving the matter alone while tremendous dissonance with the party that led with LGBTQIA+ affirmation. In its place, to be sure, was a rhetorically barbed backlash against transgenderism and gender nonconformity, generally focusing on easier targets. Same-sex marriage may be the law of the land, and it may even be permanent, but some protestation against the transgression of the natural order brought reassurance.
Meanwhile, and in sharp contrast, the SCOTUS overturning of Roe v. Wade fuels a hopefulness that matters once settled and thought unchangeable can change, provided no available tactic is considered off-limits to achieve a righteous end. That Trump did in short order what other Republican presidents technically campaigned to do but couldn’t fuels his mythos — or should we say shows him to be a providential agent.
Arguably since the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan until today, evangelicals have been galvanized by this one issue as by none other. Herein lies the power of the evangelical voting bloc and the reliable utility of evangelicals to the Republican Party. The singular political sway of this moral issue might be illustrated by an evangelical dinner table conversation, of which I have often been a participant. Someone protests that there are other important issues for Christians besides abortion; we needn’t be one-issue voters. We talk about each one of them: foreign policy, healthcare, the economy, race relations, the growing wealth gap. And then something like this is concluded: “I don’t know how to solve the healthcare crisis, but I know that baby with a beating heart is a human being, and I can’t vote for anyone who thinks that we have the right to take another human life.” It may well have been a complex, textured, productive conversation, but that argument will usually at last win the day.
So, when one of your candidates had made it his stated ambition to overturn Roe v. Wade and succeeded and the other candidate is running on the right to choose (i.e., as you see it, to take a human life), whether you’re holding your nose or wearing a MAGA cap, most evangelicals felt they had no real choice but to do the most liberal thing imaginable and call upon big government to protect the rights of the most vulnerable.
How could they vote for him? That’s how.
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[1] For evidence to the contrary of this admittedly anecdotal speculation, see “During Trump presidency, more White Americans adopted than shed evangelical label,” Pew Research Center.
[2] See, e.g., “What Is Christian Nationalism, Exactly?,” The New York Times; “The Rising Influence of the New Apostolic Reformation,” The New Republic. For the sake of brevity, I can only mention in passing an alternative version of dominionism, namely its arch-Reformed counterpart, postmillennial theonomy (sometimes called reconstructionism).
Garwood Anderson is the Donald J. Parsons Distinguished Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Nashotah House Theological Seminary and, beginning September 1, 2024, the Distinguished Fellow, Biblical Studies and Theology, at the Lumen Center of the Steve and Laurel Brown Foundation, Madison, Wisconsin.