Trump Evangelicals are not ... Evangelical

If you want to know the larger reason for the cultural rot in our country, look no further than the truth beliefs and dynamics of the Trump Evangelical voters.

Check out this article from the New York Times: Trump is Connecting with a Different Type of Evangelical Voter

Karen Johnson went to her Lutheran church so regularly as a child that she won a perfect attendance award. As an adult, she taught Sunday school. But these days, Ms. Johnson, a 67-year-old counter attendant at a slot-machine parlor, no longer goes to church.

She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. “I have my own little thing with the Lord,” she says.

Christian faith is about more than our subjective identification. We are called to believe in a real, objective Savior.

What kind of Christianity is this? It's not the real deal, but rather shows the declining religious fervor in this country, and why this country is in big trouble.

Ms. Johnson’s thing includes frequent prayer, she said, as well as podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics and “what’s going on in the world” from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview. No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.

“Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Ms. Johnson said recently as she waited outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear the former president speak.

"Trump is our David and our Goliath." Huh? Those two persons in the Biblical accounts were polar opposites, one determined to destroy the other, and one destroyed the other. This kind of self-destruction is why the culture is in trouble in the United States.

White evangelical Christian voters have lined up behind Republican candidates for decades, driving conservative cultural issues into the heart of the party’s politics and making nominees and presidents of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

But no Republican has had a closer — or more counterintuitive — relationship with evangelicals than Mr. Trump.

The reason for the counter-intuitive realities is that too many Christians are not reading their Bibles and they are not connecting with their living Savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus is not a means to a political end, either. He is the leader. He is not just our king, but the King of Kings. Yet the growing idolatry among many so-called Christians towards Trump is really disturbing.

But religion scholars, drawing on a growing body of data, suggest another explanation: Evangelicals are not exactly who they used to be.

Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.

And this is precisely the problem. Church has become a cultural thing, an identifier for political and social purposes, rather than an identity fully ensconced in Christ Jesus. This is beyond unacceptable.

People are basically worshipping a different Christ when they start establishing their own norms and customs for what defines faith.

“Politics has become the master identity,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”

This assessment is astute in its correctness. Ben Shapiro has been sounding the alarm on people using politics as their main source of identity, will, and purpose. That kind of low-leveling thinking has led to the growing divide in our country, and the growing weakness of the Church in the United States.

The head of the Church is Christ Jesus, not Trump, and a political agenda must not push aside, or "trump," the necessity of the Gospel being preached. I don't come to church just to learn how to vote. I come to church to see Jesus, to be transformed by His Holy Spirit to be more like Him.

In his last (written) words to the Church, Peter told us to "Grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord." (2 Peter 3:18). 

It's all about Jesus, not political outcomes. It's about Jesus, not our limited goals and our feel-good interests.

These "Evangelical" voters are not really all the evangelical, since they aren't all that interested in spreading the Good News, unless it's good news about Donald Trump.

Emptying Pews

Ms. Johnson’s Sunday morning routine changed well before Mr. Trump arrived on the political scene. In her early 20s, she was married to a man who didn’t believe, so she “dropped off going to the building.” She didn’t lose her faith, but life, including children and a few moves, pulled her in other directions.

In this she was typical. Church membership in the United States has been slipping for decades, along with the share of Americans who identify as Christian — and particularly as Protestants, the branch that has historically been the gravitational center of American religion. In the middle of the 20th century, 68 percent of Americans described themselves as Protestant. By 2022, 34 percent did, according to Gallup. (A further 11 percent described themselves as simply “Christian,” a category Gallup did not include until the late 1990s.)

Here's the core cause of our nation's ills. We have lost our identity in Christ, in Church, in faith, and we have gravitated toward our little goals and limited interests. Social cohesion is falling apart, in large part because people are not going to church anymore, either.

And recall at the beginning of the New York Times article, how Ms. Johnson considers herself a faithul believing Christian, even though she forsakes the assembly of herself with other Believers in Christ.

At first, declines mostly affected the more liberal mainline Protestant denominations. But in recent years, self-identified evangelical church attendance has dropped as well, and a larger share of conservatives than liberals report leaving church. In 2021, for the first time on record, less than 50 percent of Americans were members of a church.

COVID-19 and the horrid government backlash to this disease revealed the spiritual weaknesses in America. So many churches went along with the closures, required masks, or settled for online gatherings, despite the guarantees for freedom of religion in the United States Constitution. The fact that churches would cave so quickly to the state exposed their doctrinal and spiritual weakness.

“It’s the largest and fastest religious shift in our nation’s history,” said Michael Graham, the former executive pastor of a nondenominational church in Orlando, Fla., and the co-author of the recent book “The Great Dechurching.”

The transformation has been particularly visible in Iowa, where self-identified evangelicals, who make up about a quarter of the state’s population, are influential bellwethers in Republican politics — but where religious practice has changed more starkly than almost anywhere else in the country.

From 2010 to 2020, the state’s population of church adherents — people with some level of involvement in a congregation — fell almost 13 percent, a sharper decline than in any state except New Hampshire, according to the U.S. Religion Census, a comprehensive decennial survey of congregations.

No wonder Iowa went for Trump again, even though DeSantis demonstrated more religious adherents and political bona fides than Trump.

And the schedules of blue-collar jobs and youth sports no longer consider Sunday mornings sacrosanct, making regular attendance more difficult for working people and families.

Tricia Shuffty, 42, a Republican-leaning independent in Lucas County, said she voted mostly on “biblical issues.” But “unfortunately, I work Sundays,” Ms. Shuffty, a security guard, said, “so I don’t get to go to church regularly.”

The economy has taken a bad turn, for sure, and more people are working two or three jobs just to stay ahead. I do not view this challenge as the bigger reason why the Church in the United States is in trouble.

Clergy and religion experts are quick to note that people who have left church, or did not attend in the first place, have not necessarily abandoned religion. Evangelicalism has long had an individualistic strain that resists the idea that personal faith requires church attendance. Many people whose connection to organized religion has eroded continue to strongly identify as Christians.

That individualistic strain is straining this country. Civilization is not possible without societal cohesion, and that cohesion gives way when people focused on their little lives to the exclusion of everyone else. The Republican Party's drift toward license in the name of liberty, coupled with a complete abandonment of virtue, reflects this larger societal problem.

‘The Only Savior I Can See’

There was little sign at the outset of the 2016 Republican primary season that evangelicals would take to Mr. Trump as enthusiastically as they eventually did. When World magazine, an influential Christian publication, surveyed about 100 evangelical leaders in December 2015, none of them named Mr. Trump as their preferred candidate.

But as Mr. Trump gained ground in the early primaries, his growing strength among white evangelical voters became clear. Polls showed that the future nominee was most popular among one group in particular: white evangelicals who seldom or never went to church.

These are the same "evangelicals" who likely do not read their books and have used Trump as the replacement Savior for Christ, whom they are not encountering, in part because they don't read their Bibles, and in part because they don't go to church.

Final Comment

Let's face it: the "Trump Evangelicals" are more in love with Trump than they are with Jesus.

They are not going to church.

They are not reading their Bibles.

They are not walking by faith.

They are reframing Jesus and adherence to His grace and truth based on their limited political and cultural interests.

And this trend is a larger reason why our country is in trouble right now.

No presidential candidate is a savior or a Messiah for the country. No one person in the White House is going to fix the spiritual and societal ills ruining this country.

We need a Great Awakening, and that means a restoration of the Gospel, which necessarily rests on the Centrality of Christ.