Christianity Today’s split with Trump highlights deeper issue in white evangelical America
After evangelical publication Christianity Today published a blistering editorial on what it called Donald Trump’s “grossly immoral character”, some church leaders and the US president himself denounced the criticism as elitist and out-of-touch. The Dec 19 editorial sparked a Christmas holiday debate over religion in US politics, and posed new questions about the close alignment between white evangelical voters and Trump, who has given their beliefs strong political support.
However, the coziness with the Republican president, who was impeached this month by the Democratcontrolled House of Representatives, is exacerbating a long-term crisis facing white evangelicalism, some Christians say - it is being abandoned by younger generations. There has been a big drop-off in white evangelical church participation among adults under 40, and publications such as Christianity Today and religious leaders are struggling to engage “Gen Z”, or those born after 1996.
“One of the major factors is that the church is too tied up in right-wing politics,” said Greg Carey, a professor at Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. Evangelical activism against gay rights is particularly repellant to many members of a generation where “everyone has friends who are LGBTQ,” Carey said.
Trump’s presidency may make the age gap worse, some evangelical Christians believe. “Having to go out and defend this guy day after day, as many of these Trump evangelicals are doing, they’re just destroying their credibility,” said Napp Nazworth, who until Monday was politics editor of another publication, the Christian Post.
Nazworth resigned over the Christian Post’s plans to criticize Christianity Today for its anti-Trump editorial. He told Reuters many younger evangelicals opposed Trump’s immigration and asylum policies and were concerned about alleviating poverty, in contrast to older members of the faith. Evangelical leaders standing with Trump “will have no moral authority to speak to moral issues of the day after defending him,” Nazworth said.
‘Religiously unaffiliated’ Evangelicalism, like all forms of Christianity in the United States, is struggling to attract younger members, amid an unprecedented surge in recent years of the number of people identifying as religiously unaffiliated. White evangelical protestants declined as a proportion of the US population between 2006 and 2018, falling to 15 percent from 23 percent, according to analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute.
Higher-than-average voter turnout among evangelicals means the group still represents more than a quarter of the US electorate, but a failure to draw young worshippers means their electoral heft is set to diminish, said Robert P Jones, chief executive and founder of PRRI. The median age of white evangelicals and white Christians overall is 55, according to PRRI data, compared with 44 for the overall white population.
The evangelical church’s “singular focus” on same sex marriage, relationships and abortion is failing to engage younger generations, said Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth University, and a former editor at Christianity Today. They are motivated by a broader set of issues, he said, adding “in terms of sexual orientation the younger generation just shrugs about that.” ‘Partisan attack’
The perhaps unlikely alliance between conservative Christians and the twice-divorced New York real estate developer has been important for Trump in a country that is more religious than most other western democracies and where a president’s spiritual life is closely examined. White evangelical Christians overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2016, when exit polls showed he won 81 percent of their votes. They have mostly stuck with him despite the controversies over his harsh attacks on political rivals and demeaning comments about women, thanks largely to Trump appointing scores of conservative judges who support restrictions on access to abortion.
Many US evangelicals also strongly support conservatives in Israel, and hailed Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there. Trump, who describes himself as Presbyterian and whose advisors include evangelical figures such as Florida televangelist Paula White, dismissed Christianity Today as “far left”. A group of nearly 200 leaders from the conservative wing of evangelicalism defended him in a letter to the magazine, praising the president for seeking the advice of “Bible-believing Christians and patriotic Americans”.