[There’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at
least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started with Trump on
a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power,
have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.]
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TRUMPISM IS DEVOURING THE EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT  
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Michelle Goldberg
January 12, 2024
New York Times
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_ There’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at
least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started with Trump on
a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power,
have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole. _

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Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover
of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the
Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right
expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before
Donald Trump. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist
Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called
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apostle” for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in
2021 that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man
may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal
conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you
know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line
had, “perhaps,” been crossed.

Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA
candidates cost
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their prophesied red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of
Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described
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in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally
“in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like
he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research
Council, enthused to Alberta
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the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing
evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American
liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too
far. He had _too much_ of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly
rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a
post-Trump religious right.

But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at
least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their
alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with
their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement
whole.

Absent the sort of miracle that would make me reconsider my own
lifelong atheism, Trump is going to win Iowa’s caucuses on Monday;
the only real question is by how much. Iowa tends to give its
imprimatur to the Republican candidate who most connects with
religious conservatives: George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, Mike
Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, Ted Cruz in 2016. But this
year, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average
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Trump leads his nearest Republican rivals by more than 30 points.

“People think it’s all a good-and-evil election,” and therefore
“we need a strongman — that it’s so serious we can’t play
around anymore with a nice guy,” Tim Lubinus, executive director of
Iowa’s Baptist convention, told
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New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

Like many influential evangelicals in Iowa, Lubinus wants to see an
alternative to Trump. So does Bob Vander Plaats, the head of a
Christian activist group called the Family Leader, who until recently
was seen as a kingmaker in the state. He’s endorsed DeSantis, as has
the evangelical Iowa talk show host Steve Deace. (Iowa’s
culture-warring governor, Kim Reynolds, has also endorsed DeSantis;
she recently used a private social media account
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contrast a photo of him and his wholesome family with a picture of
Trump surrounded by glamorous women at a New Year’s Eve party.)
Vander Plaats has been particularly critical of Trump
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suggesting that Florida’s six-week abortion ban is “too harsh.”

But if the polls are right, Iowa’s evangelicals don’t care what
their ostensible leaders think. Trump’s rise has been accompanied by
a collapse in trust in many American institutions once valued by the
right, including the F.B.I.
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the military
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and that loss of faith extends to many religious authorities. As
Alberta, the son
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a conservative evangelical pastor, documented, preachers who’ve
balked at parts of the MAGA agenda have been abandoned by many of
their congregants.

“The forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry — long
latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism — were
destroying the evangelical church,” wrote Alberta in his book. All
over the country, he reported, “pastors had walked away from the
ministry. Congregations had been shattered by infighting. Collective
faith communities and individual relationships had been wrecked.”

From this wreckage has emerged a version of evangelicalism that
sometimes seems like a brand-new religion, with Trump at the center of
it. As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported
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The New York Times this week, in Iowa, the percentage of people tied
to a congregation fell by almost 13 percent from 2010 to 2020, one of
the sharpest declines in the country. “As ties to church communities
have weakened, the church leaders who once rallied the faithful behind
causes and candidates have lost influence,” they wrote. “A new
class of thought leaders has filled the gap: social media
personalities and podcasters, once-fringe prophetic preachers and
politicians.” Trump captured the spirit of this movement when he
shared a video on his Truth Social site titled
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“God Made Trump.”

There’s no way to know if evangelical leaders could have prevented
this devolution of their faith by joining together to stand up to
Trump before he became such a mythic figure. But now, more than seven
years into their deal with the devil, it’s probably too late.

The power of Christian-right operatives like Vander Plaats came from
their ability to move their followers, but Trump has taken that power
away from them, absorbing it into himself. Vander Plaats has been
reduced to arguing
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as he did in a Des Moines Register essay this week, that Iowans should
choose DeSantis because it would position him to protect Trump from
his persecutors. “A DeSantis presidency ensures justice for
Trump,” Vander Plaats wrote.

Those convinced that Trump is touched by divinity, however, are
unlikely to think he needs another politician to shield him. “I
think they are doing the same thing they did to Jesus on the cross,”
one Christian voter told
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Associated Press, speaking of Trump’s manifold legal troubles. It
doesn’t matter what evangelical elites say. Trump’s acolytes want
to see him rise again.

_The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters
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the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of
our articles. Here are some tips
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And here’s our email: [email protected]
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_Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is
the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s
rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public
service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. _

* evangelicals
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* Christian nationalism
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* Donald Trump
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