Why do white evangelicals support Trump? Here’s the best explanation yet.

Since 2016, by far the question readers have asked me most is: Why do white evangelical Christians love Donald Trump?

In the last presidential election, more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him, and since then their devotion appears to have hardened.

Given that I was born an evangelical, and in some regards still am one, I’ve tried in several columns to suggest reasons for evangelicals’ admiration for the president. But I’ve never felt I got it right. Frankly, I don’t get it myself.

My own previous answers only served to make a few good friends who are Republicans and pro-Trumpers hopping angry. I feel bad about that, because it wasn’t my intent.

Evangelicals’ Trump allegiance baffles many Americans, in that Trump’s political practices, vocabulary and personal history pretty much represent everything Christianity is supposed to oppose.

But now comes the definitive explanation, in a brilliant Rolling Stone article, “False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump,” by Alex Morris.

If you’re one of those who’ve scratched your head over this, then scratch no longer.

The article’s title — which I assume Morris didn’t write; journalists almost never choose their headlines — is off-putting. It strikes my ear as condescending and combative.

The article itself is anything but.

It’s a lengthy, carefully argued, compellingly written account of a journey that, across more than a century, has transformed white evangelicals from Christianity’s most socially liberal faction into arguably its most conservative and, opponents say, intolerant faction.

Morris is unassailably fair toward all parties involved, and accurate in her historical, theological and political particulars.

She was raised an evangelical. She later became a progressive Christian, but remains close to and respectful of her Trump-idolizing family, even as they likewise love her — and pray for her endangered salvation.

So, to the question: Why do white evangelicals admire Trump?

No simple summary will do justice to Morris’ article. Her answers are complicated.

Read the Rolling Stone piece. Please.

In short, sure, there’s been chicanery and hypocrisy among prominent, and often greedy, evangelical powerbrokers, just as critics of evangelicalism suspect.

But my own main takeaway from the article — to boil it way down to a mere kernel — is that most rank-and-file evangelicals are trying to manifest Christ’s love to the world.

Yes, that’s right. Love.

The problem is, their concept of love is one progressives generally don’t comprehend.

Evangelicals believe in a God who’s equal parts mercy and punishment, who’s unyielding on matters of virtue and sin, who pardons the repentant but destroys the stiff-necked. They believe in a Bible that’s always right about everything. They believe in an eternal, joyous heaven and an eternal, agonizing hell.

From their interpretation of the Bible, they’re convinced human life begins at conception. Therefore, when a woman chooses to have an abortion, she’s choosing — whether or not she understands it that way — to kill her own child.

Compassion and justice demand evangelicals try to stop her from doing that, for both the child’s sake and the mother’s.

Evangelicals don’t loath women who are considering or who’ve had abortions. They love these women, and because they love them, they’re trying to save them from burning forever in a literal, fiery, unquenchable hell.

They don’t despise gay people, either.

Morris recalls how as a child she admired her gay Uncle Robert and his partner. Yet she and her family simultaneously believed Robert’s AIDS was a plague sent on him by God.

If you’re convinced gay activity is sinful and that God will punish it, then love demands you try to persuade people to avoid what will only result in their unhappiness here and their damnation in the hereafter.

Yet for decades now, when evangelicals have expressed their beliefs publicly — beliefs that to them are self-evidently true — they’ve been branded as racists, homophobes, misogynists and theocrats. As haters. They consider this deeply unfair.

Worse, they’ve watched mainstream culture move farther and farther away from them. They fear God may pour out his wrath on the United States. They’re trying desperately to save their neighbors and themselves from retribution.

“The day that Obama put the rainbow colors in the White House was a sad day for America,” Morris’ aunt tells her. “That was a slap in God’s face. Abortion was a slap in his face, and here we’ve killed 60 million babies since 1973. I believe we’re going to be judged. I believe we are being judged.”

The irony is that evangelicals’ most tangible solution has become Donald J. Trump.

For all his personal failings, which many evangelicals find reprehensible, he’s the first president in recent memory who’s actively stuck up for them. Or so they see it.

He’s appointing federal judges who oppose abortion, supporting “religious freedom” laws that ensure Christians can’t be forced to actively participate in gay marriages by baking wedding cakes, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (which some evangelicals view as of momentous biblical importance.)

To them, it’s one of those odd twists you encounter in the kingdom of God. And in the Bible itself.

God, being all-powerful, has appointed a sinful man to protect his holy children and achieve God’s own perfect, mysterious ends.

Read Morris’ article. It’s worth your while.

This story was originally published December 10, 2019 at 10:01 AM with the headline "Why do white evangelicals support Trump? Here’s the best explanation yet.."