In 2016, 81 percent of self-identified evangelicals cast their votes for Donald Trump. People then and now find it hard to comprehend how the family values crowd could vote for an “irreligious lecher” and unashamedly devotee of mammon. Garry Wills, writing in the NYRB argues that the fit is not awkward but in fact neatly dovetails. One just has to understand evangelicals.
In his review The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald (2017), Wills notes that evangelical religion is revival religion. It sprung from spontaneous gatherings and spread by “emotional contagion”. Its defining traits, says Wills, are crowds and drama.
Revivals are “events”. They were nothing like going to a parish church on Sunday. The Methodist revivals in England and the American great awakenings took place outside regular churches. They drew huge crowds and were held outdoors—on the frontier, the were, literally, camp meetings. When they went inside, it was to tents, chapels and halls. Today’s mega-churches bear more resemblance to a camp meeting than a parish service. Within these crowds, emotion was communicable. Religion for them is an experience, not an argument.
Revivals are dramatic. The ‘decision for Christ’ takes pale against a backdrop of end-times expectation. “The urgency to be saved at once, with a flood of relief at such a rescue, comes from an awareness that the end is near”, say Wills . Evangelicals want sudden rescue, linked with sudden judgment. “You do not improve your way into heaven. There is no moral evolution along the sawdust trail; you “hit it,” as Billy Sunday said”.
Lurking between the lines here are two other important evangelicals traits. The emphasis on emotion and conversion bred a distrust of scholarship and learning. Unlike the Puritan Calvinists, theological sophistication was of no value in the revival. The Fundamentalist movement of the post Civil War eras formalized the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and scriptural literalism. This extended over time to a general distrust of of expertise based on scholarly or social credentials. Besides not being beholden to scholarship, evangelcials are also skeptical of organizations. They operates outside of traditional denominational structures. Evangelicals regard regular clergy as ‘Chinos’ (Christians in name only). This is exacerbated by the emphasis on end times in evangelicals preaching. Looking for signs of the worlds end, they grew disinterested t in the ongoing world—unless it impinges on theirs. Workers rights did not engage them; “godless” communism did. As so all the culture war issues.
Readers who have gotten to this point should be experiencing a shock of recognition between the nature of the evangelical experience and the Trump campaign. Trump’s campaign events were gatherings of the faithful. When he took the podium, he made it up as he went along, sizing up the crowed and working them in a crude sermon. Despising elites, he was “telling it like it is”.
Trump’s message of “American carnage” naturally resonated with evangelicals, who know what an End Time sermon should sound like. That carnage is partly about sinking rural economies, but it has at least as much to do with changing social values. They have been alarmed by homosexuality and feminism (Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafley), abortion (Jerry Falwell) and even secular humanism (Francis Schaeffer’s “death rattle of The West” ). The GOP has pandered to this element for years. Trump and Bannon sang an old familiar tune, but do so in a way his audience understands.
Meanwhile, the things that would seem to make Trump a pariah to evangelicals—money and sex—are non-issues. Money is, if anything, a plus; a sign of the Lords favor. And, once the initial trust has been gained and they believe he is speaking the word, things like sexual dalliances can be overlooked or forgiven.
Trump’s period in office has not done much to dampen their enthusiasm. Congenitally distrustful of elites, they do not mind that he is gutting government agencies or breaking constitutional norms. Russia does not bother them. Godless communism is no longer a thing; Putin’s anti-gay bullying is a plus. Who needs universal health conflicts when you have individual blessing? Who worries about climate when the world is ending?
Is there anything that can draw a wedge between Evangelicals and the GOP? At the end of the book, Fitzgerald suggested that the cycle of periodic revivals may have finally exhausted itself. She notes that their numbers numbers are declining, they have fewer national leaders and millennial are as involved. Will’s is skeptical, but notes that there is another thread of the evangelical experience, that of the black churches where the central themes are deliverance from Pharoh and crossing into Jordan. The preaching of William Barber offers a moral counterpoint, crouched in language an evangelical and understand but which dovetails with the broader opposition to the GOP.