Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the MAGA minority now exerting such control in the Republican party, notably its white evangelical base, are so rabid and aggressive because they know they are in the minority nationally:
"MAGA Republicans know their agenda is unpopular, and they are working to seize power through voter suppression, violence, gerrymandering, and packing the legal system."
Peter Wehner explains to Tim Miller why white evangelicals continue to be red hot for Donald Trump's return to the White House:
"The grievances and resentments and anger are just pulsating on the American right and within evangelical circles. People felt dishonored and disrespected."
“'Two-thirds of the country is embracing a pluralistic, diverse democracy with freedom of religion, but there is a very loud and committed minority in the country that is trying to hold us back from that vision,' [Robert P.] Jones said April 14 during Baptist News Global’s first live-audience webinar."
"White evangelicals make up only 13.4% of the U.S. population and 17% of Texas residents, Jones explained during the discussion hosted at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas.
'But because that one group has so loaded itself into one of our two political parties, it acts like a megaphone. So, they go from 13.4% of Americans to about one-third of Republicans and then leverage that platform to sound like 50% of Americans.'”
White evangelicals will frequently tell you that they support Trump and Republicans in general because of abortion. 81% of them voted for him in 2016 and 4 in 10 votes cast for him were from white evangelicals.
But white evangelicals never had a word to say about abortion until the Catholic bishops forged an alliance with them following the federal government's enactment of civil rights legislation.
As Ryan Burge points out, white evangelicals began voting Republican in large numbers in the late 1960s, and they've continued doing so:
"The Civil Rights movement led to the passage of two historic bills - the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both were signed into law by Lyndon Johnson."
"After signing that legislation, Johnson said in passing to one of his aides Bill Moyers, 'Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.' And, of course, LBJ was right.
What followed was a campaign by the Republican party, specifically Richard Nixon, to appeal to the racial views of white evangelicals living in the South. This is popularly known as the Southern Strategy."
"The fact that Israel's government is far-right is in no small part due to the support (of far-right governments in general but in Israel in particular) of a lobby of far-right nationalist Christian extremists in the U.S. who see the gathering of all Jewish people in Israel as a part of the fulfillment of an apocalyptic prophecy that will end with a handful of true-believer Christian people" (continued in /2)
"More than half of Trump supporters in 2024 are evangelicals. Imagine that. People who profess to be Christian continue to support a vile, law-breaking, Constitution-defying, racist, abusive, lying, insurrectionist."
"The media is not misrepresenting evangelical views. It comes from evangelicals themselves — they embrace the theology of Trump the Savior, a new political Jesus. They believe it. They believe that Trump is being sacrificed for them. …
Many people wear 'Jesus is My Savior/Trump is My President' shirts. A new red hat reading 'Trump Save America; has replaced some of the older 'Make America Great Again' caps."
"For a time, evangelicals tried to maintain a line between Trump and Jesus. But the theological line is getting thinner, razor thin. As Trump recently claimed in a speech, 'I'm being indicted for you.'
This is the substitutionary atonement theory of Donald Trump.
"Now, all American Christians have to deal with this, most especially Protestant ones of European heritage. It isn’t going away. Democracy is in danger; people we love are in danger; our neighbors are in danger. It doesn’t matter if your church doesn’t talk about politics or if you don’t like politics — YOU’VE BEEN POLITICIZED."
"As the presidential campaign heats up, his seemingly bizarre oratory is a critical window into how the Trump campaign plans to maintain and mobilize his core base of white evangelicals, and potentially peel off more Black and Latino evangelicals along the way. …
Between now and November, mobilizing his spiritual warriors by continually divorcing them from reality will be the most potent get-out-the-vote tool he has."
Greg Sargent talks with Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, about Trump's bible grift. He notes that evangelical leaders are conspicuously quiet about what Trump is doing with the bible. Is he making promises to them that he'll let them install a Christian nationalist government if he's elected?
"You can hardly ask for a better example of Christian nationalism [than this bible combining the scriptures with the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Pledge of Allegiance]."
"This ideology is a tool for a leadership-driven political machine that turns this mythology that the US was founded by and for white Christians into political power."
Paul Waldman on why Trump's bible grift may be comical, but it's not funny:
"We had been led to believe that what evangelicals wanted was a candidate who was like them, who knew the hymns, could quote scripture, and held Jesus in his heart. But that turned out not to be true. What they wanted — and they may not have known it themselves until Trump came along —was someone who would validate their hatreds and promise them power."
"As Sarah Posner, author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump told me not long ago, Trump has effectively sidelined religious right leaders because he’s the leader of the religious right now, and the fact that he knows nothing about the Bible or evangelical culture is irrelevant.
They see him as their ally in a battle against demonic forces; Trump is essentially their weapon in a holy war."
"That Trump has turned Holy Week into an ugly carnivalesque grift is not surprising, given his character and the financial crisis he is facing due to legal troubles, but it should be appalling to every Christian. Christian theology has a word to describe those who claim the attributes a deity or who treat sacred things with contempt and disrespect. That word is blasphemy."
"And the failure of Christians—especially white evangelical Christians to whom Trump is pandering—to speak out against such disgrace during the holiest week of the Christian liturgical year is a measure of our captivity and complicity in Trump’s denigration of both Christianity and our nation."
Jeff Brumley highlights a new book by Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood called Baptizing America, which shows that the problem of fusing Christianity and Americanism into white Christian nationalism goes way beyond white evangelical churches. It has been part and parcel of white Christianity in the US across the board for a long time now, and pointing to white evangelicals as the sole problem lets other white US Christians off the hook.
“For anyone who grew up in a white church in the U.S., Christian nationalism is just in the air that we breathe. We all need to do the work to detox, to separate the wheat and chaff from what’s gospel and what’s American. But it’s easier and more comforting to look at the extreme and dangerous examples of Christian nationalism today and to say, 'Oh, we are not like those people over there.'"
Robert P. Jones thinks that, much as many of us would like to stop listening to Trump's violence-laden rants, it's dangerous to stop doing so. Jones points to what Trump told white evangelical broadcasters a few weeks back, which did not get sufficient media coverage:
"In his rambling 75-minute speech, Trump delivered his most thorough articulation of his vision of white Christian nationalism to date."
"For Sarah McCammon, 'it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said "Jesus saves" and crosses and Christian symbols' that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.
'I wanted to tell my story,' she says."
~ Martin Pengelly
McCammon, an NPR political reporter, tells her story in a new book called Exvangelicals.
A fascinating part of her story: she was raised in a very restrictive white evangelical family, but had a grandfather who was a military vet and an accomplished neurosurgeon, who came out of the closet as gay after fathering three children.
She saw what a wonderful person he was, and began to realize that what she was being told in church did not square with the reality of a more complex world:
"And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”
"As soon as Senator Katie Britt started speaking, I knew exactly who she is. She is so many of the pastor's wives and Sunday School teachers I knew growing up in an Evangelical church. Be sweet. Obey."
~ Jess Piper
And the reason this matters — should matter to all of us — is that these white evangelical women not only want this for themselves: they want to impose it on all the rest of women.
"You all know Michelle Duggar. Remember her voice? Too high pitched? Too much like a little girl? Too breathy. That’s purposeful. Michelle has to show submission to her husband in all interactions public. She stared at Jim Bob anytime he spoke. She was quiet until given a question or prompt. She was also harboring secrets and that’s something I can’t forget. Terrible secrets behind that voice.
"Christian nationalist Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is married to a woman who also uses the voice. I first heard her speak in a Fox News interview. I had the same reaction I had to Senator Britt. I turned the video up and listened…and got a cold shiver."
"The breathless speech, the incongruent facial movements and smiles. The cadence of condescension. I am better than you, and here are the ways. I have children. They are perfect. I have a marriage. It is perfect. I am pretty and well-educated. I am a Christian—I am god fearing and I prove it by holding hands with my family and praying for the rest of you. I am better than you."