Donald Trump’s comfortable victory in Monday’s Iowa caucuses once again shows that in a Republican electorate dominated by white evangelicals, no rival can touch him. Eight years after he lost the evangelical vote by 12 points to Sen. Ted Cruz, and with it the state, this year Trump received 53% of the evangelical vote as he won by roughly 30 percentage points. That’s not just because Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. It’s because, after his authoritarian presidency and its calamitous aftermath, he’s also the leader of the Christian right. Because Trump is now the leader of the Christian right, the customary interventions of Christian right leaders in presidential primary campaigns have faded from must-have endorsements to utter irrelevance.
In November, Bob Vander Plaats, the president of the Family Leader, endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Such an endorsement, from the head of one of the state’s most important Christian right organizations, used to be crucial to winning the state. Leaders like Vander Plaats would vet all the candidates, subject them to litmus tests about the intensity of their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights, inquire about their personal stories of salvation and judge their commitment to governing a Christian nation. They sought and were granted power and influence by being kingmakers. But now, after Trump, this work has lost all significance. He’s both the chooser and the chosen one.
Iowa evangelicals are even more enamored of Trump than they were before they saw how he would govern — and unlawfully try to hold on to power.
Much has changed since Trump lost to Cruz eight years ago. In 2016, 64% of Iowa Republican caucusgoers were evangelicals, and Cruz eked out his victory after endorsements from Christian right power brokers and anti-abortion-rights leaders’ desperate plea to reject Trump. But Cruz, even with his long and deep connections in party and evangelical politics, ultimately fell flat against Trump’s accelerating embrace by white evangelicals across the country. This embrace has endured through countless scandals, two impeachments and an insurrection that itself was fueled by Christian right activism. Eight years later, Iowa evangelicals are even more enamored of Trump than they were before they saw how he would govern — and unlawfully try to hold on to power.
Since its founding in the late 1970s, the contemporary Christian right has projected an image (largely accepted at face value by political reporters) that evangelicals are church-going, patriotic “values voters” who simply want to elect wholesome, biblically literate candidates who would enact “moral,” family-friendly policies. Its leaders created organizations like the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition and their later imitators to persuade evangelical voters they needed to turn out in large numbers to save a Christian America eroded by expanding civil rights and growing secularism. Leading organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council zeroed in on judicial nominees, federal appointees and smaller legal and policy aims that would chip away at civil rights and religious pluralism.
Trump didn’t ask evangelicals to change their goal of a government controlled by white conservative Christians. He just tore away the pretense that they wanted to accomplish that by democratic means. Under Trump, the groups that once focused on wonky minutiae helped him do enormous, intergenerational damage to our democracy. Their influence should in no way be overlooked. But in the base’s view, Trump did these things because he gets them, not because political players performed the mundane tasks of lobbying and persuasion. The Christian right leadership accomplished a lot but made itself less relevant to the evangelical mind in the process.
In the evangelical world, particularly in the charismatic world where Trump has a firm foothold, people believe they are waging a spiritual war against demonic enemies of Christianity and America. Other Republicans, including DeSantis, tried unsuccessfully to campaign on similar themes. But Trump embodies the us-vs.-them mentality of this cosmic battle between the godly and the satanic and uses it, along with his savior status, to his full advantage in falsely portraying his criminal prosecutions as the work of an evil, corrupt political system. For a base that has heard for decades that Christians are persecuted by secularists and that conservatives are under siege by out-of-control liberalism, Trump embodies their resentments.
It’s not an exaggeration to say white evangelical support for Trump has altered the trajectory of the country.
And you don’t have to go to an evangelical church to regularly hear this message of spiritual warfare and, more significantly, the false message of asymmetric warfare against Trump. These, like other evangelical ideologies, are readily available on television, the internet and social media, in books and at conferences and numerous other gatherings.
Trump couldn’t have won the 2016 Republican primaries and the general election without white evangelicals. He remained in power despite his first impeachment because of the backing and pressure of white evangelicals. Now, two impeachments, one insurrection, four criminal indictments and countless incitements to violence later, they are supporting him not despite all that but because of it. It’s not an exaggeration to say white evangelical support for Trump has altered the trajectory of the country. Anyone who wants to right the ship needs to understand how.