Opinion | The Factors That Made Evangelicals Ready for Trump

Tim Alberta: Well, it’s easy to forget now, but much of the high-profile evangelical leadership in 2016 was really resistant to Donald Trump and helped to organize behind Ted Cruz. It wasn’t until Trump had sealed up the nomination, really, that support from white evangelical figureheads started to coalesce. And it was understood, I think to be transparently, unapologetically transactional: Trump was promising these people that he would not only deliver them policy wins on abortion and religious freedom and culture war issues but that he would also give them a seat at the table, that he would empower them in ways they had not been politically empowered before.

There was this really uneasy alliance, which of course now, eight years later, seems crazy to say.

Coaston: Something that struck me in your book was a theme of impending doom and, moreover, desire for that doom. One interviewee told you, ‘I always thought we’d have a major event in my lifetime — an uprising, a revolution.’ He doesn’t sound afraid of such an occasion. It sounds like many of the other people you spoke with want one. Where do you think that sentiment came from?

Alberta: I think when you spend so much time swimming in these waters of ‘The end is near, they’re coming for us, brace yourself for this collision between the forces of good and evil,’ you actually start to not only anticipate it, but you start to look forward to it. That’s why, Jane, I think Covid was such an extraordinary moment, not just in American life but specifically in evangelical life. People had been stewing in that prophetic talk for decades, for generations — that one day they’re going to come for you, one day the church is going to find itself in the cross hairs of the government, and you’d better be ready to stand on your beliefs and stand for your convictions. And when Gavin Newsom says, Hey, we’re shutting down houses of worship as a public health measure for a few weeks here, suddenly it was, I think for so many of these people, it was like the prophecy was being fulfilled. Like, OK, here we go.

What was most surprising to me in that period, to the point of your question, is that a lot of these people weren’t reluctantly entering the fray. They were charging into the fray. They felt like they’d spent a lifetime preparing for just this very clash with the culture, and here it was, and it was very binary. You’re either going to stand up for God and for your faith and fight or you’re going to be a coward and you’re going to be a collaborator and you’re going to give in.

Coaston: How widespread do you think the evangelicals you spoke with believe their views are among Americans? Throughout the book, it seemed to me like the people you spoke to believed they were simultaneously besieged on all sides, and yet there were millions of them and they were going to win every election.