Infamously and endlessly reported, 81% of white evangelical voters supported Donald Trump when he first ran for president in 2016. And for many of evangelicalism's "cultured despisers," this vote was and remains the nail in the coffin. During the Clinton era, evangelical leaders, from James Dobson to Jerry Falwell, continuously raised the alarm about the crisis of character in the White House. During Clinton's 1998 impeachment fight, Pat Robertson railed that impeachment was necessary because Clinton had “debauched, debased and defamed” the presidency.
A mere eighteen years later, Robertson would defend Donald Trump's Access Hollywood remarks — "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything...Grab them by the pussy." — as mere "macho talk."
Bonnie Kristian, in In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers, turns to evangelicalism's Clinton-to-Trump about-face on character in her chapter entitled "Hypocrisy." Here's what she writes toward the start:
As I’ve said, I’ve made this charge myself, and out of all the critiques of evangelicalism I’m interrogating, hypocrisy is the one to which I’m most sympathetic. There is something here, and it hits hardest on race and on Trump, particularly regarding his personal character.
I admire the candor, because this is a very difficult thing to explain to outsiders. According to evangelicals, character matters for Democrats but not so much for Republicans. To the eyeball test, it does look like rank hypocrisy. And yet, Bonnie makes some very strong arguments in defending evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump.
Here's, I think, the strongest defense she makes: Evangelical support for Donald Trump was exactly the same as it has been for every GOP candidate in recent memory. There was nothing strange or unusual about 81% of evangelicals voting for the Republican candidate. That's what evangelicals have always done, and that's what they did in 2016.
To be sure, given Trump's glaring character defects, one might have wished and expected that evangelical support would have gone down, at least a little bit, in relation to a business-as-usual GOP nominee. And that didn't happen. Still, evangelicals vote, and in our two-party system they're going to pull the lever for the Republican.
I want to argue that this electoral inevitability in regard to evangelicals is precisely why I called the movement a dumpster fire. Of course, Bonnie is right that this is just what evangelicals do. But I think there is a huge problem with what it is that evangelicals do, politically speaking. Their electoral rigidity is precisely the problem.
But before I get to that, I do want to back up and blame evangelicals for the election of Donald Trump. Let me stipulate, for this bit of the argument, that "the 81%" in the 2016 election is just evangelicals being evangelicals. While I'm going to take issue with that in a moment, for now let's take Bonnie's defense of the 81% as sound.
Given that stipulation, I want to back up to examine how evangelicals participated in Trump's nomination in 2016. Because it was there, in the GOP nomination process, where Trump could have been averted if evangelicals had lived up to their beliefs and roundly rejected Trump. True, as Bonnie says, once Trump won the nomination, the 81% in the general election was inevitable. But after the first primaries in 2016, Trump consistently came to win the evangelical vote. So while we might not be able to blame evangelicals for supporting the GOP candidate in the 2016 general election, we certainly can blame evangelicals for allowing that candidate to make it to the general election. There is fault to assign here. Evangelicals deserve blame for Donald Trump's rise to the presidency. Evangelicals were a dumpster fire during the GOP nomination process.
But might evangelical voting on behalf of Republicans be defensible?
As we know, evangelical voters have become, especially so in 2016, single-issue voters. The only thing that matters is abortion. Trump promised a conservative Supreme Court nominee, and he delivered. Roe was overturned. The transactional relationship between Trump and American evangelical voters was vindicated.
But it's precisely this issue, with how evangelicals have become single-issue voters, where I take issue with evangelicalism. By placing all their political eggs in this single basket, evangelicals have allowed their Christian witness to become horribly distorted and twisted. Every social value and moral commitment of the Christian ethical and virtue traditions has been sacrificed to achieve this one political victory. To be very, very clear, I am not claiming that the fight against Roe wasn't important. What I am saying is that the singular pursuit of overturning Roe has so distorted the moral witness of evangelicalism that it is no longer, outside of abortion politics, recognizably Christian.
More, this single issue voting becomes a partisan cul-de-sac. Single-issue voting creates partisan dependency. Specifically, if Republicans are the only viable vehicle for achieving the desired abortion outcome, then preserving Republican power becomes a political necessity. And once that partisan capture takes hold, evangelicals become increasingly entangled with the rest of the party’s political program: militarism, American exceptionalism, racial politics, free-market capitalism and its accompanying hostility to unions and welfare programs, and gun rights. And much of this bundling malforms, twists, and distorts the Christian ethic. The single issue becomes a gateway drug to a whole partisan political identity. What began as a strategy for protecting a single moral commitment ends up destroying the rest of the Christian moral witness.
So, when Bonnie asked me on Substack what evangelicalism could do, concretely, to improve without becoming progressive, here's something I would suggest: Evangelicals need to commit to being comprehensively pro-life.
A good example of what I mean by comprehensively pro-life is the social teaching of the Catholic Church. Like evangelicals, when it comes to abortion, Catholics are pro-life. And yet, because the moral and social witness of Catholicism is comprehensively pro-life, Catholicism has not allowed its politics to become twisted and malformed as has happened to American evangelicalism. Because of this, Catholics are swing voters in America whereas evangelicals are political partisans. When we heard Pope Francis and now Pope Leo quarrel with Trump over immigration and war, we're hearing something from Catholicism that sounds recognizably Christian. When Catholicism speaks, Jesus comes into view. By contrast, while evangelicals have successfully battled against abortion, their politics, holistically considered, is no longer recognizably Christian. When evangelicalism speaks in American politics, Jesus does not come into view.
