For those of us on the sideline who observe the misanthropic behavior of Donald Trump, we find that the only reason he courts any religious group is for the voting bloc returned to him in an election. Evangelical whites are his target. They buy his bibles and baubles, and any gestures offered to support the rock solid conservative social issues. Just as he has smeared our governmental structure with his immoral and corrupt values, he has infected them because they buy his junk and believe in his junk. Over a period of time, this corruption has affected a large part of younger church goers who have seen the disease destroy the minds of their elders. David French addresses this issue in today's newsletter:
Donald Trump’s presidencies are the evangelical church’s unwanted gift to America.
You don’t have to rehash all the events of the last decade to make that case. A single statistic tells the tale: In 2024, Trump received 82 percent of the white evangelical/born again vote. He lost the rest of the vote by a whopping 18-point margin, 58 percent to 40 percent.
And while their support for Trump is declining, white evangelicals are still Trump’s most loyal religious supporters. In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.
And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.
Actions have consequences. And one of those consequences is that a church that wraps its arms around arguably the most vulgar, most corrupt president in American history will repel good people, especially those people who’ve encountered MAGA’s claws. Or, as Jesus said during his Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruit you will recognize them.”
That reality is reflected in the stark partisan divide in the Graham Center’s numbers. Two-thirds of Democrats said Christian support for Trump made them less likely to want to go to church. And 42 percent of independents were inclined to agree. I was a bit surprised to see that one in four Republicans were also put off from church by Christian support for Trump.
This is a finding that should trigger soul-searching among American evangelicals. If Jesus instructed his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations,” then it’s worth pondering whether the decision to so loyally support a man like Trump is worth actively repelling millions upon millions of Americans from church.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Last week the popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey hosted two Christian apologists, Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle, to discuss the survey and its findings. Cliffe Knechtle and Stuckey’s different responses were almost perfect encapsulations of the different ways that evangelicals approach the political challenges of the moment.
First, Cliffe Knechtle, the senior pastor of Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Conn., described the view that I had understood to be the most sound approach to faith and politics. As Knechtle observed, people are suspicious of Christians’ political motives, so in his evangelism he rejects explicitly political arguments. “Instead,” he said, “we are going to address moral issues. So we’re going to address every ethical moral issue, but I learned from Billy Graham that we’ve got to be very careful how closely wedded to a politician we get.”
Graham, Knechtle noted, got much too close to Richard Nixon. Reflecting on his choices later in life, Graham told Christianity Today, the magazine he founded, that he regretted his political engagement and he “would have steered clear of politics.” The implication was clear: If Christians tie themselves too closely to any politician or party, that’s our fault.
In that formulation, Christians — just like every American from every other faith background — should express their values in the public square, and we should not be deterred by the fact that many people vehemently disagree. Thank God, for example, for the enduring Christian witness of so many 19th-century abolitionists and members of the civil rights movement.
At the same time, no political party embodies Christianity, and while you can certainly argue as to whether any given party or given politician is more Christian in its platform or his personal conduct, God doesn’t have a party. And the effort to marry God to a political party will harm the church.
Stuckey had a different take, one that I’ve heard more often in the age of Trump. She questioned whether revulsion at Trump was the real reason people are retreating from church. In reality, Stuckey argued, “We don’t want to see our sin because it’s hard.”
As she amplified in a post on X, “There may be many reasons a person won’t go to church, but most of the reasons people give are excuses. The main reason, I think, is this: we are uncomfortable seeing our own sin and our need for a Savior.”
Before I disagree with Stuckey, I’m going to agree with her. I absolutely believe that people can be uncomfortable in church because of their own sin. A man who is cheating on his wife won’t enjoy a sermon condemning adultery. A racist is going to squirm in his seat if a pastor describes his Black or brown neighbor as a human being of equal worth and dignity.
If you aren’t trying to change for the better, church should be an uncomfortable place.
But that’s not what’s happening here. When many young people look at the church’s embrace of Trump, they’re not rejecting the church because it’s too moral. They’re rejecting it because they see the church’s immorality. They see its fear and moral compromise.
In other words, they don’t reject church because they’re afraid to shed their sin and become better people. They’re rejecting the church because they refuse to embrace sin and become, well, worse people.
From the comments:
J Jess Pittsburgh Watching my Southern Baptist parents fall deeper down the rabbit hole year after year has been nothing short of heartbreaking. There's a lack of curiosity, a rejection of the "sin" of empathy, and an impenetrable defensiveness that flies in the face of the humility the Bible teaches. And they're so unashamed and outspoken about it! They can't help but rail against some "woke nonsense" in every conversation. It's exhausting.Show full comment
You don’t have to rehash all the events of the last decade to make that case. A single statistic tells the tale: In 2024, Trump received 82 percent of the white evangelical/born again vote. He lost the rest of the vote by a whopping 18-point margin, 58 percent to 40 percent.
And while their support for Trump is declining, white evangelicals are still Trump’s most loyal religious supporters. In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.
And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.
Actions have consequences. And one of those consequences is that a church that wraps its arms around arguably the most vulgar, most corrupt president in American history will repel good people, especially those people who’ve encountered MAGA’s claws. Or, as Jesus said during his Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruit you will recognize them.”
That reality is reflected in the stark partisan divide in the Graham Center’s numbers. Two-thirds of Democrats said Christian support for Trump made them less likely to want to go to church. And 42 percent of independents were inclined to agree. I was a bit surprised to see that one in four Republicans were also put off from church by Christian support for Trump.
This is a finding that should trigger soul-searching among American evangelicals. If Jesus instructed his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations,” then it’s worth pondering whether the decision to so loyally support a man like Trump is worth actively repelling millions upon millions of Americans from church.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Last week the popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey hosted two Christian apologists, Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle, to discuss the survey and its findings. Cliffe Knechtle and Stuckey’s different responses were almost perfect encapsulations of the different ways that evangelicals approach the political challenges of the moment.
First, Cliffe Knechtle, the senior pastor of Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Conn., described the view that I had understood to be the most sound approach to faith and politics. As Knechtle observed, people are suspicious of Christians’ political motives, so in his evangelism he rejects explicitly political arguments. “Instead,” he said, “we are going to address moral issues. So we’re going to address every ethical moral issue, but I learned from Billy Graham that we’ve got to be very careful how closely wedded to a politician we get.”
Graham, Knechtle noted, got much too close to Richard Nixon. Reflecting on his choices later in life, Graham told Christianity Today, the magazine he founded, that he regretted his political engagement and he “would have steered clear of politics.” The implication was clear: If Christians tie themselves too closely to any politician or party, that’s our fault.
In that formulation, Christians — just like every American from every other faith background — should express their values in the public square, and we should not be deterred by the fact that many people vehemently disagree. Thank God, for example, for the enduring Christian witness of so many 19th-century abolitionists and members of the civil rights movement.
At the same time, no political party embodies Christianity, and while you can certainly argue as to whether any given party or given politician is more Christian in its platform or his personal conduct, God doesn’t have a party. And the effort to marry God to a political party will harm the church.
Stuckey had a different take, one that I’ve heard more often in the age of Trump. She questioned whether revulsion at Trump was the real reason people are retreating from church. In reality, Stuckey argued, “We don’t want to see our sin because it’s hard.”
As she amplified in a post on X, “There may be many reasons a person won’t go to church, but most of the reasons people give are excuses. The main reason, I think, is this: we are uncomfortable seeing our own sin and our need for a Savior.”
Before I disagree with Stuckey, I’m going to agree with her. I absolutely believe that people can be uncomfortable in church because of their own sin. A man who is cheating on his wife won’t enjoy a sermon condemning adultery. A racist is going to squirm in his seat if a pastor describes his Black or brown neighbor as a human being of equal worth and dignity.
If you aren’t trying to change for the better, church should be an uncomfortable place.
But that’s not what’s happening here. When many young people look at the church’s embrace of Trump, they’re not rejecting the church because it’s too moral. They’re rejecting it because they see the church’s immorality. They see its fear and moral compromise.
In other words, they don’t reject church because they’re afraid to shed their sin and become better people. They’re rejecting the church because they refuse to embrace sin and become, well, worse people.
From the comments:
J Jess Pittsburgh Watching my Southern Baptist parents fall deeper down the rabbit hole year after year has been nothing short of heartbreaking. There's a lack of curiosity, a rejection of the "sin" of empathy, and an impenetrable defensiveness that flies in the face of the humility the Bible teaches. And they're so unashamed and outspoken about it! They can't help but rail against some "woke nonsense" in every conversation. It's exhausting.Show full comment
We’ve seen the intensity of Christians’ support for Donald Trump. We’ve heard the prophecies. We’ve seen the rallies and the politicking in the pulpit. We saw the Christian crosses and flags on Jan. 6.
We’ve seen the conduct of so very many Christians in the MAGA movement — we’ve seen their cruelty, their dishonesty and their racism.
Let’s go back to the Sermon on the Mount. If Christ says that we will know people by their fruits — by their character and actions — then what kind of fruits do you see in Trumpism?
As my friend Russell Moore, an editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today, wrote in Plough magazine in 2021, “The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings.”
For example, here’s one of those teachings, taken from the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 resolution on the importance of character in public officials: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
The convention was quite obviously taking aim at Bill Clinton, but if that sentence doesn’t describe a man like Donald Trump, who could it describe? And yet 76 percent of Southern Baptists supported Trump in 2024, an increase over both 2016 and 2020.
I’ve spent enough time around Trump-supporting Christians to know that there is a deep well of hurt and anger over any suggestion that they (or the church more broadly) should face any social disapprobation over voting for Trump.
A majority of believers in the pews have never been unkind to anyone online. Many of them don’t even know about the cruelty meted out against evangelical dissenters. The only anger or cruelty they’re familiar with is meted out against conservative evangelicals, by the left, and those incidents (real and imagined, told straight and wildly exaggerated) blanket right-wing airwaves.
The result is a sealed moral environment. First, there isn’t a single Christian I know who would admit to making politics his or her religion. Instead, all of them would argue that they voted for Trump because of their religion. Their politics flows from their theology, they’d say, and not the other way around.
But this means that many Christians then interpret an attack on their politics as an attack on their religion. If you’re angry at the choices you make because I’m a Christian, then you must also be angry at my Christianity.
Making matters even worse, the Bible predicts in many places that Christians will face persecution from unbelievers because, as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” As a result, the very fact that Christians face criticism for supporting Trump becomes a perverse form of confirmation that they were correct. After all, they’re getting “persecuted.”
This self-conception, however, collides with reality. It turns out there is a lot of evidence that for many evangelicals, their faith flows from their politics, not vice versa.
As Ryan Burge, one of America’s foremost religion researchers, wrote in the pages of The Times, “Those who had warmer views of Mr. Trump were more likely to become evangelical between 2016 and 2020 than those who didn’t feel warmly toward him.” The politics preceded the faith.
“The evidence points in one direction,” he continued: “For many Americans, to be a conservative Republican is to be an evangelical Christian, regardless of whether they ever attend a Sunday service.”
In fact, the share of people who described themselves as “evangelical” in spite of rarely attending church has surged. Between 2008 and 2020, the percentage of self-identified evangelicals who reported that they seldom or never attended church increased to 26.7 percent from 16.1 percent. At the same time, white evangelicals became more politically unified under the Republican banner.
Evangelicals are less churchgoing and more partisan. When you read the words and watch the conduct of MAGA Christians online, it can seem as if the church is more influenced by Trump than the church influences Trump. When it comes to politics, he’s the evangelical pope.
When Stuckey said, “We don’t want to see our sin because it’s hard,” she was correct. But in this instance, the community most unwilling to see its sin is in the Christian church. The sin lives in the people who allowed fear and anger to swallow their commitment to truth and character.
Now the entire world lives with the consequences of the choices they made.
****
Juan Matute
R.B.R.
C.C.R.C.
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