Evangelicals heed the gospel of Donald Trump
The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
In 2011 Oran Smith, head of South Carolina’s conservative Palmetto Family Council, got an unexpected phone call. It was Donald Trump — and he wanted to talk about his faith.
Upset by comments from Mr Smith that he would not be able to win over South Carolina voters and only cared about money, Mr Trump set out to prove him wrong. Over the following months, he wooed Mr Smith with phone calls and a visit to Trump Tower in New York, introducing him to his family and expounding on his pro-life, pro-marriage values.
The charm offensive worked. “I found him to be a very good listener, he never interrupted anything I wanted to say and was much more conservative than I thought he was,” Mr Smith recalled.
Mr Trump has solidified his lead in the Republican race in large part thanks to evangelical Christian voters who have carried him to victory in most southern states, handing him crucial delegates in his pursuit of the Republican nomination.
Ben Carson, Mr Trump’s deeply religious former rival in the Republican race, endorsed the party frontrunner on Friday, saying: “I have found in talking with him that there’s a lot more alignment, philosophically and spiritually, than I ever thought that there was.”
How a thrice-married, twice-divorced, foul-mouthed New York real estate tycoon won over several evangelical leaders and their flocks speaks to the resonance his message of resurrecting the US as a global power and focusing on economic success has had across traditional voting silos.
Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of The End of White Christian America, said Mr Trump had won over some southern evangelicals by appealing to their nostalgia for an old white Christian era way of life that many feel has been threatened by everything from political correctness to illegal immigrants from Mexico. He likened the tactic to the “southern strategy” Republicans employed in the 1950s and 1960s to woo white Democrats.
“Trump has been able to pull together the southern strategy, the conservative right and the Tea Party,” he said. “They all look back to a mythical golden age of mid-century America.”
In South Carolina, where 60 per cent of voters identify as evangelical, Mr Trump took a third of the evangelical vote, beating Ted Cruz, who has long been seen as the true religious conservative in the race. He also beat Mr Cruz in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, taking between 39 per cent and 48 per cent of the evangelical vote in each state.
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said the exit poll data may have overstated Mr Trump’s evangelical support, as southerners tend to tell pollsters that they are evangelical even when they do not regularly attend church.
Yet he noted the figures reflected a growing schism between more and less practising evangelicals.
“What seems clear from detailed polling of evangelicals is that the Christians who are least likely to support Trump are those who are active church attenders and for whom their Christian faith exists as a central part of their identity,” Mr Moore said. “On the other hand, throughout areas of the country — particularly in the Bible Belt — there exists a sort of cultural Christianity, where people instinctively answer yes to the question, ‘Are you a Christian?’ or ‘Are you an evangelical?’ even if they haven’t been to church in decades.”
Many people were stunned when Jerry Falwell, the president of Liberty University, the largest Christian college in the world, endorsed Mr Trump.
Appearing with the candidate in Iowa in January, Mr Falwell suggested that he was supporting Mr Trump more for his business experience than his faith. “He has turned companies around. I think he can turn our country around,” he said.
While Mr Moore said many evangelicals were disgusted by the “race baiting, authoritarian language and . . . Kardashian levels of vulgarity, profanity and misogyny”, they appear to be outnumbered by believers willing to hold their nose and vote for Mr Trump in the hope that he can beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.
The Palmetto Family Council’s Mr Smith said he had been disappointed by Mr Trump’s supportive comments on Planned Parenthood and criticism of former president George W Bush. Yet he said he understood why many religious conservatives were flocking to him, likening him to the Persian rulers in the scriptures who, although they were secular, protected the prophets Nehemiah and Ezra.
“You’re saying ‘I’m not necessarily looking for someone who looks like me and talks like me but someone who can defend my social and cultural values’,” Mr Smith said. He, along with other evangelical voters, had been asking whether it was worth putting up with Mr Trump’s “baggage in order to actually win the ultimate goal” and “stop the Hillary train”.
Other evangelical leaders pointed to the Bible as a reason why so many Christians had been able to forgive Mr Trump for a well-publicised affair during his first marriage, or slip-ups such as saying “two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians”, a jarring phrasing for evangelicals who place enormous emphasis on the gospel.
“His indiscretions are much more visible than another candidate’s indiscretions but I guarantee they all have them because they’re all human,” said Brad Atkins, pastor of South Carolina’s Powdersville First Baptist Church. “Only God knows the man’s heart,” he added.
Mr Carson appeared to concur by offering his endorsement on Friday despite the fact that Mr Trump had once compared Mr Carson’s accounts of his violent childhood to that of a “child molester”.
Asked if he had moved past the incident, the former neurosurgeon said he had and urged voters to do the same. “I’ve completely forgiven him,” he said. “That’s the duty one has as a Christian.”
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