Why are The College Educated Republicans Swinging For Trump

 

 Journalist Tim Alberta was raised in the evangelical church and is a practicing Christian. But he’s grown increasingly concerned about how entrenched politics has become in the evangelical movement. In his latest book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, Alberta lays out the state of the evangelical church today and its shift toward the cultural and political fringes. Below are excerpts from Alberta’s interview with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.

“UNDER SIEGE”

TIM ALBERTA: There’s a two-word phrase that you will hear when you hang around evangelicals long enough, particularly political evangelicals, and that two-word phrase is “under siege.” [It’s] a belief that the barbarians are at the gates, a belief that the hostile, godless, wicked, secular culture and the hostile, wicked, secular government [are] coming for Christians, that we are being persecuted, and that persecution will intensify … That is the mindset of a lot of these folks. And once you’re there, then you can pretty quickly get to a place where you’re willing to compromise some of your core values, your core beliefs, in the interest of keeping those enemies at bay, warding off those threats, and allowing the ends to justify the means.

You have this huge scramble of people winding up in these churches that are now preaching this blood-and-soil Christian nationalism. You have pastors like Greg Locke in Tennessee, who a few years ago nobody knew who he was, and now he’s got millions and millions of followers and enormous influence in the evangelical world. Those sorts of figures would have been considered fringe 10 years ago. And now, in some sense, they’re actually quite mainstream. It’s difficult, I think, for people outside of the church to take any of that seriously, to say, Well, hold on a second. You’re telling me that white Christians think they’re persecuted … that they feel like they’re being marginalized and almost martyred, and that is what justifies their affiliation with Donald Trump and some of their political behaviors? And the answer is yes.

 DONALD TRUMP VS. MIKE PENCE

Alberta points to the evangelical community’s broad support of former president Donald Trump and rejection of former vice president Mike Pence — an evangelical Christian himself — as a key example of how this movement has changed over the past decade.

ALBERTA: Donald Trump had been speaking at this Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering — this was in the summer of 2022 — and it was really the first time that Trump had ever publicly gone after Mike Pence for his actions on January 6 and the violence at the Capitol. Donald Trump comes to [this] conference full of thousands of evangelical political activists. These are people who had been Mike Pence’s comrades in arms for decades. He was really the torch carrier for that movement. And Trump gets up in front of these folks, and he starts ripping Mike Pence and calling him a coward, calling him weak, mocking him, really a pretty cruel demonstration. And the crowd went wild. They loved it. They were eating it up. And it was so jarring to see that.

 There’s something almost Shakespearean to this reality that one of Trump’s enduring legacies will have been that he conditioned evangelical Christians to demand something decidedly un-Christlike from their political leaders. In other words, here is Mike Pence, who believes all of what they believe. He sits in the pews with them. He teaches their Sunday-school classes. He is a serious, devout believer. And yet he can no longer pass muster because he’s not willing to be antagonistic and provocative and angry and loathsome in the way that Trump is. And I know, just from my own reporting, that Trump takes great satisfaction in that. Trump believes that he has effectively transformed the evangelical base of the Republican Party and made it into almost his own image, which is, I think, not an overstatement in many ways.

PANDEMIC EFFECT

ALBERTA: When historians look back at this period to try and understand this great realignment happening within American Christianity, I think they’re going to zero in on COVID-19. The reason I say that is because for tens of millions of evangelical Christians who had spent decades marinating in this end-times prophecy, this apocalyptic rhetoric around The government is coming for Christians, the arrival of COVID-19 — and, more specifically, the orders from a lot of blue-state governors to close down houses of worship — that was almost like a prophecy being fulfilled. It was a sense of, OK, we’ve been warned about this day. We knew this day was coming … The threat has arrived. It’s here. And now what do we do about it?

 I met people who’d been in congregations for 40 years, and they got up and walked away because their pastor decided to comply with the government, decided to close down the church for a few Sundays, and they felt that was a betrayal — a betrayal of scripture, a betrayal of their duty as Christians, and almost like a white flag of surrender to the secular left that was coming for them. And where did those people go? They went to churches that were almost belligerent, militant in saying, No, we’re going to stay open. We’re going to defy the government. And we’re going to do so not simply because we believe that we have a responsibility as Christians to meet on Sunday morning, but because we believe that this is the proxy war for good versus evil, that those satanic secular leftists are coming for us. If we let them have our churches, then it’s game over. So we’re defending our churches because we’re defending our way of life, and we’re defending America, and we’re defending everything we believe in.

THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH

SHUMITA BASU: What does this mean for the political future of the evangelical church? Are we just going to keep marching toward a more politics-based identity for religious groups like evangelicals?

ALBERTA: My fear is that in the short term, yes, we will. The political environment we are in now is so hot and so toxic, and … with social media and with cable news and with the algorithms set up the way they are, even those Christians I’ve met who have been making a really concerted effort to extract themselves from the political hothouse have told me that inevitably they just keep getting sucked back in. It’s really, really hard to stay out of it. So it’s hard to imagine that this moment we’re in is going to fade anytime soon.

“Younger Christians, including those who are personally very conservative … they are really pushing back hard against all of this.”

—Tim Alberta

On the other hand, I would be remiss if I didn’t say this: The great source of optimism I have … is that there is a real generational clash here, a real generational break. As I’ve traveled and as I’ve met people in my generation and in the generation behind us on college campuses, what I’ve been really encouraged by is that the younger Christians, including those who are personally very conservative … they have no appetite for Trumpism. They have no appetite for nationalism … They are really pushing back hard against all of this. They are organizing and they are mobilizing, and they are trying to reclaim their faith tradition from their parents’ generation. That’s a painful thing. It’s a hard thing. It’s going to take time. But that really has given me an incredible amount of optimism about the long term prognosis here.