White Evangelicals, Authoritarianism, and Trump

No man exercised greater influence on me than my grandfather. He died when I was twelve, several years before I came to a Christian confession of my own. Papa was a country Missionary Baptist, member of a church that had an outdoor pool in order to facilitate baptism in “living water.” I remember the quiet intensity of his praying and his faithful preparation every weekend to lead adult Sunday School.

Papa read a great deal despite his eighth grade education. Only recently did I come to understand why his education ended so early: just fourteen, he set out on his own after his mother suffered a mental health collapse that would leave her institutionalized for the rest of her life. I had all the information but never put it all together until my Mom shared the whole story. Compassion for my grandfather, dead over 50 years, moved me to weep for him.

Somehow Papa’s Bible fell to me after his death. Inside I found some study notes, along with a typewritten page of fundamentalist apologetics. You can find the story, marked “false” at Snopes.com, the internet fact-checker. As the story goes, NASA scientists once found themselves stumped by a missing day in their astronomical calculations. A Christian scientist resolved the problem by pointing them to Joshua 10:12-13. There God stops the movement of the sun and the moon – “about a whole day,” as the King James Version renders it – to allow the Israelites extra time to exterminate their enemies.

I suppose my grandfather treasured that story.

Our media teems with analyses of why white evangelicals support Donald Trump. Evangelicals have long touted “family values.” But in the 2016 election they favored a serial adulterer who has no firm connection to an actual congregation over a lifelong United Methodist, and they did so by an 80-16 margin. Some attribute white evangelical support for Trump to the racist disposition of many white voters, which indeed had a measurable impact on the election. Others point to policy issues, abortion and church-state relations, which surely influenced evangelical voters.

By no means am I competent to rank the reasons for white evangelical loyalty to Trump. Messiah College historian John Fea is indeed qualified, and his book on the question will show up this summer. I’m eager to read the book, but I’m also impatient. For now, we might ask what distinctive factors in evangelicals’ DNA might lead them to support an authoritarian candidate like Trump. And Trump was an authoritarian candidate. Saying “I alone can fix it,” and “I know more than the generals,” candidate Trump accused the news media of “fake news” encouraged his supporters to beat up protestors at his rallies, compared US intelligence agencies to Nazis, and attacked the credibility of a judge who happened to be Mexican-American. I would like to highlight a few dimensions of evangelical identity that surely predispose Christian conservatives to tolerate this kind of authoritarianism.

              
First, suspicion of expert opinion thrives among Christian conservatives. The fundamentalist movement emerged as a response to the twin threats of Darwin’s theory of evolution and critical biblical scholarship. Not only did fundamentalists lose the battle to control mainline Protestant denominations, they also lost public respectability. The Scopes Monkey Trial symbolizes their loss of esteem, leading to a broad cultural prejudice against religious conservatives as backwater rubes who oppose science and reason. For these reasons Christian conservatives crave public legitimacy. Alienated from higher education and other conventional sources of knowledge, fundamentalists have been quick to believe what their leaders tell them. Back in 1995 evangelical historian Mark Noll addressed this problem in his classic The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

                
Second, fundamentalists compensated for their cultural losses by creating alternative institutions, a world of their own. Christian schools, colleges, universities, seminaries, and publishing houses allowed fundamentalists to credential their own experts. Meanwhile, “evangelicals” emerged from the fringes of fundamentalism, establishing their own institutions. We might explain the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists in terms’ of evangelicals’ desire for greater integration into the broader society. But that boundary is remarkably porous.* If the Creation Museum may provoke general ridicule, the far more hip Museum of the Bible garners major media attention – but hardly of the flattering variety. Evangelicals and fundamentalists both tie themselves to the notion of biblical inerrancy – a commitment that inevitably leads to cultural conflict. Their institutions may look and feel different, but both groups find it necessary to guard their own sources of truth.

                
My grandfather’s NASA story shows how easily the combination of cultural marginalization and institutional protectionism render Christian conservatives especially susceptible to false narratives, whether actual “fake news” or authoritarian lies. Nine women may accuse senatorial candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, but true believers will believe neither them nor the media sources that report their stories. On a grander scale, most evangelicals reject contemporary climate science, perhaps in numbers large enough to tip the scale on US policy.

                
My grandfather died in 1978, just as the Moral Majority was gaining national prominence. Keen observers noted a shift in the fundamentalist ethos at that point. Christian conservatives began an effort to return from the cultural margins and exercise influence over the larger culture. Imitating pop culture, Christian music and film industries sprang up. Indeed, Christian filmmaking may be at its high point right now. Christian political influence ushered Ronald Reagan to the White House.

                
Few have paid it serious attention until recently, but within the Religious Right a new theological sensitivity emerged – dominionist theology. Dominionists teach that Christians should “take dominion” over culture, electing leaders and enacting laws according to their understanding of God’s will. In short, dominionism is thoroughly authoritarian. Most dominionists are not so extreme, but some preachers will call for the execution of gays and lesbians on biblical grounds. Dominionism represents an extreme form of evangelical authoritarianism, but its influence is growing.

                
Christian fundamentalism emerged as a response to cultural movements that undermined cherished Christian assumptions, especially those tied to the Bible’s literal and scientific accuracy. By rejecting widely accepted sources of knowledge, such as academia and the media, then by building their own sources of authority, Christian conservatives have grown more and more insular – more and more authoritarian. The ultimate expression of evangelical authoritarianism may lie in the home schooling movement. By removing children from the public schools, evangelicals can indoctrinate them in creationist science and theological dominionism. Indeed, Frank Schaeffer, one of the early and most influential home schooling advocates, has said as much. Now an atheist, Schaeffer writes that the home school movement was explicitly designed to “undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.”

                
If we take the long view, we should not be surprised that white evangelicals came to support Donald Trump in such large numbers. Trump favored their cherished policies, winning their sympathy despite his, um, complicated personal life. His authoritarian rhetoric troubled few religious conservatives, who are long accustomed to such discourse. And because they do not trust conventional experts and popular news media, evangelicals were ready to believe Trump suffered unfair attacks from the media. “Fake news,” indeed.

*Some readers will take exception to the ways in which I am blurring the categories of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. We may indeed distinguish between the two groups. Fundamentalists tend to hold narrower views concerning what might count for legitimate differences of opinion among Christians, and they generally voice a more negative view of the larger culture. Evangelicalism emerged as a moderating response to both tendencies. But if we pay close attention to how evangelicals and fundamentalists actually use these categories, the distinction all but vanishes. Conservative Christians call themselves evangelical when it favors them. This applies even when they believe women should submit to the leadership of men, oppose equal rights for LGBTQ persons, and believe that persons who do not confess Christ in the way they do are bound for hell. For these reasons I choose not to distinguish between the two groups. After all, 80 percent of “evangelicals” voted for Trump.