Commentary
Hailing Deliverance
A Last Trump Before an Apocalypse?
In a column published on March 3, Charles Krauthammer noted what is to many a surprise: strong Evangelical support for Donald Trump over a field of far more likely candidates. Why, he wondered, are they supporting him in such large numbers instead of conservatives whose Christianity is far more believable? Krauthammer noted that Evangelicals have no illusions that Trump is one of them (his ancestral Presbyterianism does not make him a Christian by Evangelical standards), or about his dingy ethics, or his ambiguous political record. Looking, after the Super Tuesday primaries, at Trump's victories over Ted Cruz in states where Evangelicals dominate, Krauthammer asked,
How could this have happened? A more scripturally, spiritually flawed man than Trump would be hard to find. As several anti-Trump evangelical voices have argued, Christian witness cannot possibly support a thrice-married man with such an impressive list of sins, featuring especially spectacular displays of the seven deadlies. . . . The message is clear: I may not be one of you. I can't recite or even correctly cite Scripture. But I will patrol the borders of Christendom on your behalf. After all, who do you want out there—a choir boy or a tough guy with a loaded gun and a kick-ass demeanor? Evangelicals answered resoundingly. They went for Trump in a rout. The essence of Trump's appeal everywhere, far beyond evangelicals, is precisely the same: "I'm tough, I will protect you."
First let us define. "Evangelical" is what Donald Dayton has called an "essentially disputed" term. It applies to all Christians insofar as its fundamental meaning is "concerned with the gospel," but in the context of American religious life since the mid-twentieth century, the unmodified word has come to identify doctrinally conservative Protestants who regard the Bible as the supreme rule of faith and practice, and who reject the social and theological liberalism of the Protestant mainline, but who also reject the bad temper and self-isolation of fundamentalism. Its churches are usually independent or loosely associated, and Baptist in theology.
Evangelicalism has always contained outlying elements that tend left or right of its center, and the last few generations have seen the rise of the anomalous "liberal Evangelical." Still, as a whole, Evangelicals may be safely identified as socially and politically conservative. The Pew Research Center identifies more than 25 percent of Americans as Evangelicals. As loose as this figure must certainly be, it is clear that politically they are a force to be reckoned with.
Krauthammer believes these Evangelicals support Trump because they are afraid, want a government that will protect them, and favor a man whose promise to provide it answers to what they believe is the magnitude of the threat. I think he is right. My own observation within Evangelicalism is that the fear is of near-apocalyptic proportions. Only this could support the desperation evident in Evangelical voting for a man like Trump.
I would say the latest and most acute phase of this amplifying fear began with the re-election of Bill Clinton in 1996 as an unmistakable signal of the moral fall of America. Evangelicals could recognize the first-term Clinton, who gained his electoral margin by charm and flimflamming of epic proportions, as an unfortunate blip on the screen, but not so with a re-election before which he had become publicly known as a scoundrel.
George W. Bush was by Evangelical standards both a believer and a good man, and in that sense a rest from the Clintons to some degree explainable by natural electoral cycles. His presidency, however, saw the continuing rise and consolidation of the power of those who opposed traditional Christianity, preeminently the feminists and organized homosexualists, both of which wished to alter the state in accordance with a principle of equality that, whatever its relation to the Tocquevilleian American character might be, outraged conservative Evangelicals, particularly by their concerted attack on the natural family.
It would be a mistake, however, as Krauthammer implies, to separate too far the exasperation of Evangelicals with the exactions of Obamaesque progressivism—which includes the anger of the betrayed at the Republican establishment—from that of the larger group of Americans who support Trump because they're weary of being ground underfoot by utopian liberals who despise them. All of these are fed up with the increasing tyranny of political correctness, the shameless vote-courting of illegal aliens and the irresponsible with public monies, the lack of any decrease in cronyism or government boondoggling, and the increasing number of expensive, invasive bureaucrats whose principal job is to add to the complexity and burden of life in all its aspects, all anxious to punish when the opportunity arises, as in the IRS scandals, anyone whose beliefs and practices do not fit those of the Party. All this is hateful to a much larger group than Evangelical Christians.
The fear and anger of the Evangelicals who support Donald Trump is that of the common man imposed upon by the utopian messianism of elitists whose intellectually fashionable godlessness is only one aspect of their unshakeable belief in their superiority. Support for a man who is, to Evangelicals, essentially a pagan, is a desperate measure to save a country that has historically been kind to their faith. C. S. Lewis illustrated the phenomenon in Merlin's cautious suggestion to Ransom of the nearly unthinkable: that a solution to the domination of England by the forces of evil, which he had been assured would not come from within Christendom, might be sought from those who dwell beyond Byzantium. •
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
on the Brevity & Theology of Her Recorded Words by Judith Anderson
30.2—March/April 2017
The Education of Children Takes Generations of Fidelity by W. Ross Blackburn
33.1—January/February 2020
on the Consequences of One Birth Before Roe v. Wade by Craig Kellogg Galer
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
