Pew sees increase in Trump-era ‘evangelical’ label – and yes, they are ‘real’ evangelicals

New data released by the Pew Research Center once again has pundits running with the pointless narrative that conservative, mostly white American evangelicals are essentially a “Politics(As opposed to “religious”) identity and movement – the not-so-subtle subtext being that “true” evangelicals pose no threat to democracy and human rights. In short, what a Pew find, using data from the same group of respondents after the 2016 and 2020 elections, is a net increase of 4% in white Americans who identified themselves as born again or evangelical during this period, with that increase apparently being due to favorable attitudes towards Donald Trump.

This is an interesting finding, but it just does not support the conclusion that “evangelicals have traded religion for power,” like a writer abstract Charles M. Blow remark on the data. For the vast majority of white evangelicals, attempting to acquire or maintain the power to impose what they believe to be the will of God in the public arena is a religious imperative, which is not contradicted by their support for former President Donald Trump.

After all, he did more to promote their agenda than any previous president, including George W. Bush, including stacking federal courts and the Supreme Court with right-wing Christian extremists. This transactionalism and harsh maneuvers are, of course, political, but that does not make them any less religious. What Blow sees as evangelicals abandoning morality for power is certainly hypocritical – evangelicals decried “sexual immorality” in the case of former President Bill Clinton, when it suited them, but gave Trump a leave. – pass for far worse offenses. On a deeper level, however, this ugliness is evangelical morality – a morality based on social hierarchy and obedience.

Granted, I was initially puzzled, and even a little upset, by Pew’s new findings. As an evangelist and creator of the hashtag #EmptyThePews, I had wanted to see a large-scale exodus of white (and equally authoritarian) evangelical churches during the Trump years. But when I took a step back to consider the context of these findings, I realized that they weren’t really overwhelming.

Certainly, I have to admit that the Trump years themselves were not characterized by a large proportion of evangelicals leaving their pro-Trump churches in protest. Nevertheless, it was precisely in those years that evangelicals came together and created a movement it only increases in visibility. Evangelicals found it impossible to ignore our movement, although they are generally refuse engage directly with exvies, preferring to talk In regards to us rather than To us in their unsuccessful attempts to maintain control of the narrative.

In addition, a large number of young people (and not just a few old people) have clearly “emptied the pews” of white evangelical churches over the past few decades, although we do not know exactly how many, as data on evangelicals is scarce. . What we do know is that white evangelicals have decreased precipitously as a percentage of the US population in recent years, from about 23% in 2006 to about 14% today (although they continue to vote in greater numbers than the general population, giving them representation disproportionate in elections). And in the 2020 election, non-religious voters, a strongly progressive population, made up a full quarter of the electorate, for the first time overtaking white evangelical voters who made up 19% of the electorate.

It’s unclear exactly how to square Pew’s data suggesting that some Americans have recently started identifying as evangelical or born again with these results showing overall population decline, let alone the constant results all along the Trump era that, among white evangelicals, frequent church attendance was strongly correlated with higher support for Trump. This correlation, which should form the basis of any discussion of white evangelical religion and politics, definitely refutes any suggestion that pro-Trump evangelicals are mere “nominal” Christians – unless of course you want to assert that evangelical churches themselves are not “really” evangelical.

Even #NeverTrump Republican and consummate expert “respectable” evangelical David French is forced to admit that there is not “a clear political difference between white evangelicals who attend church and those who never grumble. [church] doors “in his blog post on Pew data. And yet he goes on to make the contradictory claim that “theologically evangelical” (i.e. “truly” evangelical) Americans make up such a small proportion of white evangelicals overall – “a minority of” ‘a minority’, does not exercise decisive political power. Evangelicals who do not fit into this elite minority are those, he asserts, who do not know their Bibles, which is why “evangelical political action can be so cruel and often so disconnected from ethics. biblical ”. It doesn’t matter that French supports some of these cruel actions, especially when it comes to LGBTQ rights.

In any case, there is little need to stress that the same elite warriors of evangelical culture who lead evangelical political action have evangelical institutional pedigrees. They were often homeschooled or attended evangelical schools and / or colleges where they memorized passages from the Bible and read evangelical theology. They attend evangelical doctrinal churches. And now they are lobbying Congress, like Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, former pastor and former dean of Liberty University Law School; or they hold a position in Congress, such as North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who was homeschooled and briefly attended Patrick Henry College; and Illinois representative Marie miller, a Sunday school teacher at Oakland Christian Church who became infamous for saying out loud that “Hitler was right” about the importance of indoctrinating young people.

But while Pew’s findings don’t tell us that the theological “purity” of white evangelism has been diluted with an influx of “nominal” Christians, a process the French supports spanned decades and culminated with Trump, so what exactly are they saying to us? The truth is not much. Without more granular data, we can only engage in (hopefully informed and plausible) speculation about the forces behind the numbers.

Who are these white Trump voters who avoided the “born again” label in 2016 but adopted it in 2020? I suppose they are older and therefore hardly represent the wave of the future; but whether I’m right or not, these are people who saw the evangelical white churches, rightly so, as pro-Trump, and therefore decided to identify themselves as that kind of Christian, which is hardly a victory for the “real” evangelicals.

Beyond that, who knows exactly what is going on with the current cycles of label reshuffling among American Christians? To really answer this question, we’ll have to wait and see how things turn out, but the phenomenon itself is nothing unusual. Rebranding is a constant in American religious life and is not limited to evangelicals, but evangelicals show a tendency to be very brand conscious. This is why some of them tried to drop the evangelical label in recent years, and many Baptist churches have abandoned their affiliation of their names in recent decades due to widespread negative associations with the term “Baptist.”

Let’s be clear. Trump’s evangelical embrace represents the culmination of a decades-long process in which the white evangelical subculture merged with the Republican Party, but it does not mean, as France claims, that “transformation is political and not religious ”. For me, having grown up in evangelical churches and Christian schools, I have always taken for granted that being a Christian means reading the Bible daily; attend church often; pray before meals, before any important event and before going to bed; fight cultural wars; and (when old enough) vote Republican.

Our right-wing political extremism was part of our religious identity, completely intertwined with our devotion to the four tenets of the beloved French Bebbington Quadrilateral: Biblicism, Crucicentrism, Activism, and Conversionism. We have cultivated knowledge of the Bible, interpreted in an authoritarian manner, of course.

This clearly remains the case for a large part of Trump’s evangelical supporters, even though a part of evangelicals may not be very familiar with the Bible. The idea that there is a clear line between the end of religion and the start of politics is a fiction, exploited far too easily by people who want to save Christianity “pure” from human ugliness. With American democracy (as it is) in crisis precisely because right-wing Christians have seized disproportionate power, we cannot afford to continue letting the experts get away with it Christian supremacist sleight of hand.