The Making of A Great America Made in the Image of TRUMP

This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled: "The Church Shares the Blame"

One of the things that suddenly hit me after dreaming about the president’s all-white presumptive victory gathering was that Republicans had lost the White House because they refused to challenge the exclusionist notion that Making America Great Again most certainly looked like making her white again. I’m a lifelong Republican who voted for Reagan, Bush I, Dole, Bush II, and McCain. How did my party so easily come to the conclusion that it could regress to a less inclusive vision of America that didn’t include very many people that looked like me? Further and more importantly, how did my Christian leaders, national and local, go to the wall, in ride-or-die fashion, for the most exclusionary, openly racist, and divisive president in my lifetime?

One article called part of the pro-Trump demographic “a white evangelical tsunami”:

“As partisans and analysts puzzle over the higher-than-expected turnout for President Trump (nearly 6 million fewer votes than for President-elect Joe Biden, but still high), they are poring over groups and subgroups: White, non-college-educated men. Suburban women. Young Black men.

But much of the Trump 2020 phenomenon can be explained by a far simpler way of looking at the electorate: There are White evangelical Christians — and there is everybody else.

White evangelicals are only 15 percent of the population, but their share of the electorate was 28 percent, according to Edison Research exit polling, and 23 percent, according to the Associated Press version…This means White evangelicals turned out in mind-boggling numbers. Because they maintained their roughly 80 percent support for Republicans (76 percent and 81 percent in the two exit polls) of recent years, it also means some 40 percent of Trump voters came from a group that is only 15 percent of America.” (Milbank, 2020)

It would be different if the motivation to support the president was based on some Christian ideal, but it’s not. Sadly, the research shows that the president appeals along racial lines were the reasons for record white evangelical turnout:

“White evangelicals have, in effect, skewed the electorate by masking the rise of a young, multiracial and largely secular voting population. The White evangelicals’ overperformance also shows, unfortunately, why the racist appeal Trump made in this campaign was effective. White evangelicals were fired up like no other group by Trump’s encouragement of white supremacy.

A Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate who now runs the Public Religion Research Institute, Robert P. Jones, argues that Trump inspired White Christians, “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy,” attracting them not because of economics or morality, “but rather that he evoked powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”... 

A group that was once seen as censorious became the least strict chaperone at Trump’s bacchanal. Under the president’s influence, White evangelicals went from the group most likely to believe personal morality matters in a politician to the group that is least likely. ‘We’re not electing a pastor in chief,’ explained Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty University. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, argued that ‘outward policies’ should matter more than ‘personal piety.’ Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition made his case for Trump’s re-election based on conservative deliverables. ‘There has never been anyone,’ Reed said, ‘who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump.’” (Gerson, 2020)

Timothy Dalrymple, president of Christianity Today Magazine, wrote an editorial that I included in MGA Vol I that describes the transactional relationship between the Republican party and evangelicals as the “`hyper-politicization of the American church,’ the great sickness that causes evangelical Christians to continue to be loyal to a president who is ‘extravagantly immoral.’” I previously quoted Mr. Dalrymple as saying that “American evangelicalism is not a Republican PAC.” In that quote, he also said that the Church should “collaborate with political parties” but stand apart so that it can continue to “to be what Martin Luther King, Jr. called ‘the conscience of the state.’” (Thompson, Vol I)

As evangelicals sided with the president, despite his character flaws and his efforts to divide America along MAGA lines, they lost their ability to be “the conscience of the state.”...