Why did evangelical leaders endorse Trump despite his unequivocally divisive rhetoric?

A fairly comprehensive reply to this question on QorA comes from Peter Kruger. Pictures, footnotes, references, etc available at the link, but I've quoted the plain text.

Why did evangelical leaders endorse Trump despite his unequivocally divisive rhetoric?

Quote :

I joined Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) in college, which is a very evangelical organization. I made a lot of very good friends in there, some of which still are my friends, and some of which highly support Trump. These are people I care about, though I have lost some of these relationships in recent years over this divide.

I have to admit, in retrospect, I should have seen it coming.

I was always surprised at how otherwise rational friends could justify fairly misogynistic positions; not just objecting to women pastors, but believing that women working outside the home could be openly detrimental to them. The local Baptist church and “non-denominational” church (loosely affiliated with the Evangelical Free church,) both had wonderful, caring people, who could turn around and buy into Birtherism and the idea that Obama was a secret Muslim.

But even the time of the 2016 campaign, I was stunned to hear the incredible excuses and even outright fabrications that my friends would tell me.

Not just about Hillary, whom they absolutely hated. Hate may not even be a strong enough word. I watched as friend after friend, people who I know had signs in their houses that said, “Love your neighbor as yourself, and pray for even your enemies,” swore that she was the embodiment of evil itself and had to be stopped at all costs. She was a baby-killing, puppy-kicking monster in their eyes. They genuinely believed that she’d had staffers killed who “knew too much.” One particularly zealous person believed that she would use Obamacare to start gay conversion camps where she would brainwash children to be homosexuals. I could never get an answer as to what that was actually supposed to accomplish.

They also would believe things about Trump that went directly against known facts.

One friend told me that he had to have been rich because God liked him, otherwise God would have taken his wealth away. I tried to point out that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had multiple bankruptcies, and would have been wealthier had he just put all his money in an index fund and lived off the interest. This person claimed that these bankruptcies were lies and that Trump never declared bankruptcy. I pulled up the public records of these. That person refused to look at them. I even tried to point to people in the Bible that were wealthy and who were clearly not people God was a big fan of. Nothing would change his mind.

I was told that the Access Hollywood tape was alternatively either a fabrication or that he had repented of it. He had repented of it, of course, because some evangelical leader told them he did. When I asked for evidence, I was pointed to sites I had never heard of before. After researching them, they turned out to often be Russian state media. Nobody believed me when I said this.

I was told that the affairs with various porn stars, one shortly after the birth of one of his children, were just slanders and lies to besmirch Trump, even after the hard evidence of the hush money payments was made public. I was told that the godless Left was so evil that they would fabricate these things.

Several believed he would reverse gay marriage. I showed them tape of him supporting same-sex marriage. I was told it was made-up, because they had tape from some evangelical event where he promised he was against it. They would not listen to the idea that maybe he just tells everyone what they want to hear.

But honestly? This all started decades before Trump. Much of it is the product of zealots and the corruption of power. It’s easy to say that it all comes down to abortion and racism. In part, it does, but it’s also more complex than that.

The History of the Political Evangelical Right-Wing

Some of this goes all the way back to the origins of the religious evangelical Christian right as a political force.

Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there was a fairly major revival of evangelicalism. In particular, radio and then television opened up a whole new way for preachers to reach audiences hundreds or thousands of miles away. By expanding the congregation well outside the church doors, it also expanded the collection plate base.

One of the most prominent and most powerful of these new “televangelists” was Jerry Falwell. He founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in 1956 at the age of 22, and quickly found popularity in radio and then television with his Old Time Gospel Hour. Within a decade, his church had become one of the first modern “megachurches,” boasting thousands of members. As a result, Falwell quickly became a fairly wealthy man.

Falwell himself believed strongly in segregation and racism and spoke out against desegregation and civil rights for blacks. This is a direct quote from Falwell in 1958:

The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race… It will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.

Falwell denounced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., accusing him of being a communist and insincere in his faith for promoting civil rights and desegregation.

Falwell founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy as an explicitly all-white private school in 1967 for people who didn’t want their kids to go to a desegregated public school. Falwell expanded that notion into Liberty University (then Lynchburg Baptist College) in 1971.

In 1974, the IRS moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because it prohibited interracial dating. This infuriated and worried Falwell, who was concerned that his college might be next. The final straw for him came in 1978, when the IRS stripped tax-exempt status from private all-white schools following several Supreme Court decisions. It galvanized white Southern evangelical segregationists, who found a charismatic and popular voice in Falwell, among others. These white, racist evangelicals founded the Moral Majority in 1979 in direct response to the Ford administration’s push to desegregate the resistant South.

The Moral Majority aligned itself with the Republican Party, who had recently incorporated disgruntled “Dixiecrats” with Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The Republican Party set itself up as the party of segregation, so that’s where the Moral Majority went.

Initially, the Moral Majority and evangelical Christians didn’t go nuts over Roe v. Wade and the abortion debate. It was largely a Catholic issue, and because of that, the evangelical Christian right was largely ambivalent about it. The Southern Baptist Convention was already resolving to support legal abortion for cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormality, or “the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother” in 1971, and reaffirmed that resolution in 1974 and 1976, after Roe.

W.A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention remarked of the Roe decision that “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

However, the 1978 mid-term elections showed conservative evangelicals that pro-life might be a winning wedge issue for them. Pro-life voters, largely Catholics, were incensed by Roe and alarmed by a spike in legal abortions after the decision. They showed up in droves in the 1978 midterms to support anti-abortion candidates. They took multiple Senate and House races and a handful of governorships that took pollsters completely by surprise.

Falwell and others saw it as an opportunity. By aligning themselves with the anti-abortion crowd, they could pick up enough voters to potentially get into office. The segregationists were only a highly vocal minority by 1978; the country was clearly moving on. If the Moral Majority focused only on the restoration of segregation, it was clear that they could never get enough political power to effect any change. But, if they could find a way to get the anti-abortion voters into their coalition and repackage segregation some other way that included the anti-abortionists, they might be able to get enough voters to get their people into office, and from there onto the courts, to undo this wave of progressivism.

In 1980, the Moral Majority started to push the anti-abortion issue as a matter of “freedom of conscience” to get the anti-abortion crowd on board. But the goal was still the restoration of segregation, which had been repackaged very quietly with that “freedom of conscience.” They managed to find a candidate for the presidency that embraced this idea in Ronald Reagan.

The election of 1980 gave the movement considerable oxygen. Reagan had fashioned himself as a born-again evangelical Christian, and while the campaign was not exactly a stunning upset, it was at least in part successful because President Carter ran a fairly ineffective campaign and administration.

But Falwell took as much credit as he could for swinging the country to Reagan, whether justified or not. He proclaimed himself something of a kingmaker, and his followers generally believed him.

Throughout the 80’s, the Moral Majority would continue to expand their wedge issues to get conservatives on board. They ramped up their narrative about the “homosexual agenda” that intended to destroy the nuclear family, among other things. The hellfire and brimstone tradition of evangelical Christianity was well-suited to pushing forward a message that God would condemn the entire nation for allowing such immorality in its midst. Cable television and the end of the equal time rules provided yet another outlet for Falwell and the Moral Majority to broadcast this message.

But by the 1984 election, the Moral Majority was losing steam. By the 1988 election, the Moral Majority as a political organization essentially fell apart when it refused to endorse Pat Robertson for a presidential run.

However, the politicization of the evangelical religious right remained. While the segregationists in the party have (or perhaps had until recently) gone somewhat dormant or at least quiet, the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ “traditionalists” have continued to be a dominant and vocal force, and some of the most reliable Republican voters in the conservative coalition.

As a result, Republican candidates for office have had to court this vote for over 30 years. John McCain spouted nonsense about the United States being a Christian nation and added Sarah Palin to the ticket for this very reason. The same was true when Trump added Mike Pence; it was a virtue-signalling choice to woo otherwise wary evangelicals.

To court this evangelical vote, for nearly forty years Republican candidates have promised anti-abortion judges that would overrule Roe, halt the “gay agenda,” restore “traditional” (read white, mostly Southern evangelical) values into law, bring back school prayer, and restore “religious freedom.”

And that brings us to today.

Evangelicals in the 21st Century

I’m not sure who originally said it, but someone once told me that humiliation is the root of all terrorism. I’ve found it to be quite true.

It’s difficult to view evangelical Christians as a monolithic bloc today for reasons I’ll get into in a bit.

But, generally speaking, the majority tend to feel under assault. They are increasingly mocked and derided by the mainstream culture, often for stereotypical reasons.

Take me, for example. I’m a man of faith. I’m a reasonably devout United Methodist - not exactly a Bible-thumping evangelical. I have been accused at least once, on the basis of that alone and without anyone bothering to inquire further, of:

Being part of the “patriarchy” that is oppressing women (seriously, look up the United Methodist Church and women, folks - we’ve been probably one of the most progressive churches on this front)
Believing in young-earth creationism (get this one a lot)
Being anti-intellectual
Believing in “sky fairies” (ah, militant atheists, how I don’t miss being one of you…)
Being anti-LGBTQ (to be fair, the Methodists don’t have a great track record on this in the last few years depending on where you are,)
Being stupid or uneducated
Being a Jehovah's Witness (I’m still not sure how you get from Methodist to that, but ok…)
Watching Kirk Cameron movies (this one honestly just puzzles me, but it’s come up at least a half dozen times)
Supporting slavery (seriously, folks, read the history of the Methodists)

and
Supporting abortion clinic bombings (that one also puzzled me.)
I’ll be honest. It’s why I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my faith on Quora anymore.

As Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, has been shrinking, it has received the most attention from the press reporting. This isn’t necessarily unfair, since it’s been the predominant religion in the U.S. for a long time. But that level of reporting makes it feel to many Christians like Christianity itself is under special threat.

The non-press media has taken that and run with it, painting the devout often as a backwards, ignorant, hateful group of bigots, furthering the stereotype and further humiliating Christians.

Now, zealous, outspoken Christians haven’t exactly helped themselves out. Whenever I hear about the “war on Christmas,” the most goddamned ubiquitous holiday in the world, because some parade in Tulsa changed its name to “Holiday Parade,” I want to put my head through a wall.

And honestly, I think God probably feels the same.


Every major Federal holiday of a religious origin in the United States is a Christian one. We don’t take off school or close the banks for Eid or Rosh Hashanah or the Martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev Sahib.

Many of my more evangelical friends seized on a recent NGO report that said Christians are the most persecuted group in the world as proof that they, themselves, are totally suffering for Christ because they got a Starbucks cup that didn’t have a picture of Jesus on it.

I call shenanigans at least when it comes to the United States.

But, those loud few do lead to the rest of us getting painted with a fairly wide brush, and it’s usually one of derision and scorn. It’s leading to a crisis of identity. Do we openly identify as Christians? What does that mean now?

Are we prepared to endure that level of mockery? Jesus was pretty clear that this was how it was going to be, but there are a lot of people who just don’t want to have to deal with it. And I get that. It’s certainly not easy being unpopular, and worse so when it feels like you’re not allowed to hit back.

And that humiliation leads to a group of people who end up thinking with a siege mentality.

So, who do they turn to?

As Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and early Trump supporter said, “I couldn’t care less about a leader’s temperament or his tone of his vocabulary. Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals. They don’t want Casper Milquetoast as the leader of the free world.”

When you feel like the world is just full of assholes who hate you, who do you want?

Your own asshole who at least is on your side. You want a strongman. You want a bombastic bully. At least so long as he’s working for you.

This siege mentality, this fear of losing a long-held place in society, the perceived breakdown of your group social identity… all of that paves the way for a demagogue to come in and promise to reverse it all. To bring it all back.

They don’t want the meek little Lamb of Israel. They want the fucking Lion of Judah. They want God to show up with bears to maul the people mocking them.

Basically, they want the pain they are feeling to stop.

Fractures

It’s important to note here that evangelical Christianity has started to diverge more and more in recent years. The religious right once dominated evangelical Christianity. That is starting to change as the movement is beginning to fracture.

This fracture has increased under Trump, who has exposed some of the dark undercurrents within the movement. His behaviors are so polarizing and so outrageous that there are very, very few who are on the fence about him.

For better or worse, Trump forces all of us to confront issues and beliefs that might have slipped through un-talked about for years. His divisive rhetoric does galvanize people and requires us to engage with deeply uncomfortable topics ranging from gender and sexuality to more and less subtle institutional racism. We just can’t ignore these issues any longer.

The old guard of fundamentalist zealots have increasingly turned off younger crowds to religion. While religious belief across the board has been shrinking, evangelical Christians have been among the hardest hit.


Younger voters are getting consistently more liberal and more accepting of non-traditional culture, and as fundamentalist conservatives continue to dominate evangelical Christianity, they are fleeing in droves.

Even younger people who still identify as evangelical Christians are tending to be less restrictive and reactionary than their parents and grandparents. See Pete Buttigieg as an example of this more liberal side of evangelical Christianity starting to assert itself.

Much of this is due to a perception (not undeserved) that the older, more conservative generation in the church is extremely hypocritical and clinging to beliefs about Scripture that are unsupported or very selectively supported.

Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly frustrated with a conservative, reactionary church with what they see as a phony persecution complex. These generations roll their eyes when Fox News riles up their grandparents about how you can’t say “Merry Christmas” anymore.


Younger conservatives are also breaking with the traditionalists. Younger popular evangelicals such as the late Rachel Held Evans and Jen Hatmaker challenged the traditionalist interpretations of the more fundamentalist faction quite successfully and found significant popularity doing so.

There is also a group of conservative traditionalist evangelical Christians who, while supporting many of the same policies as those who have supported Trump, believe that it is a Faustian bargain and ultimately self-defeating. Prominent evangelical writer Max Lucado is an example of this kind of group. This group notes that Christ said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?” and that Jesus was offered control of the whole world should he simply bow down to the devil.

Other leaders have been mixed, supporting the president in general, but criticizing his more horrific policies. Franklin Graham, for example, has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s family separation policy, but has also called for a national day of prayer to shield Trump from “demonic attacks,” and has been critical of the press for predominantly critical coverage of the presidency. Graham faced recent backlash for telling the openly homosexual Pete Buttigieg to repent and turn away from his life.

Still others, such as Jerry Falwell, Jr. and James Dobson, continue to simply excuse or even deny Trump’s boorish behavior, including his sexual sin as the wrongdoing of a now repentant man who prayed the Sinner’s Prayer and has totally-turned-over-a-new-leaf-in-his-life-we-pinkie-swear. They point to the parts of the Bible where God used some quite unsavory characters to build the nation of Israel as justification that Trump’s actions and rhetoric, while not always tasteful, is part of a greater plan to make a Christian nation. And of course, baby-eating Killary was always worse, so better to have an imperfect man than the anti-Christ herself, they claim.

It’s easy to accuse those men of simply seeing Trump as an expedient way to preserve their power, prestige, and status. After all, Falwell, Dobson, Robertson, these men have become exceedingly wealthy and well-known through the religious right. Falwell makes more than a million dollars a year from Liberty University and Thomas Road. Robertson has a net worth in excess of $100 million from his televangelism and programs like The 700 Club. James Dobson is worth over $4.5 million from his writings and participation on Focus on the Family. These men wield significant influence over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. In practical terms, Trump simply made good business sense.

All of this continues to come amidst greater revelations of enormous sexual misconduct scandals in the evangelical churches where powerful men abused their positions to take advantage of women. The #metoo movement has been creating a reckoning in the evangelical Christian community around what had long gone publicly unacknowledged, but quietly well-known.

Those who can’t tolerate the insane cognitive dissonance required to accept the status quo in the evangelical Christian movement have been fleeing or started to openly rebel in the pews.

Those who remain and accept the status quo will largely accept virtually anything so long as they can undo the 20th century.

That fracturing and splitting away makes it unsurprising to me that evangelicals by and large support Trump: they’re largely the ones who are left. Add back all the people who have fled, and that statistic may look quite a bit different.

The Leadership Is Not Uniformly on the Trump Train

As I just discussed, it’s not entirely accurate to say that all evangelical leaders endorsed Trump. Many did not. Many quite prominent ones did not, and there is no shortage of ones who openly denounced him. Many reacted with outspoken disbelief, anger, grief, and fear after the election. Others were cautiously optimistic but have soured on him after actions such as his family separation policy.

But those who did endorse him had varying reasons for doing so, many of which long pre-date Trump himself.