END-OF-LIFE BARGAIN WITH TRUMP
Grieving white evangelicals are on the losing side of demographics and LGBT rights
One of the biggest mysteries of Donald Trump’s presidency has been white evangelicals’ steadfast and enthusiastic support for him. Unlike Mormons, whose support for Trump was nearly 20 points lower than their typical level for Republican presidential candidates, white evangelicals’ support for Trump was in line with, and even slightly higher than, their 2004 votes for fellow evangelical George W. Bush (81% vs. 78%, respectively).
And unlike Trump’s arts council and economic advisory councils, which saw so many resignations that the committees themselves dissolved, Trump’s evangelical advisory committee experienced just one resignation and is standing by its man.
While many may dismiss this turn of events as pure hypocrisy, anyone seeking understanding will want to look deeper. White evangelicals branded themselves as “values voters.” That they could support Trump as strongly as Bush and more resolutely than arts and business leaders ought to serve as a signal that something dramatic has happened in the interim.
FADING VITAL SIGNS
The key to understanding the puzzling white evangelical/ Trump alliance is grasping the large-scale changes — most prominently the declining numbers of white Christians in the country — that have transformed the American religious landscape over the past decade. These tectonic shifts are detailed in a report released Wednesday by the Public Research and Religion Institute, which I direct. Based on interviews with more than 100,000 Americans last year, the American Values Atlas is the largest survey of religious and denominational identity ever conducted in the USA.
One of its most important findings is that as the country has crossed the threshold from being majority white Christian to minority white Christian, white evangelical Protestants have contributed to a second wave of white Christian decline. Over the past decade, they have dropped from 23% to 17% of Americans. During this same period, religiously unaffiliated Americans have gone from 16% to 24%.
The engines of the white evangelical decline are a combination of external factors, such as demographic change, and internal factors, such as religious disaffiliation — particularly among younger adults at odds with conservative Christian churches on issues like climate change and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. As a result, the median age of white evangelical Protestants is now 55, and the median age of religiously unaffiliated Americans is 37. While 26% of seniors are white evangelicals, only 8% younger than 30 claim this identity.
The evangelical alliance with Trump can be understood only in the context of these fading vital signs. White evangelicals are, in many ways, a community grieving its losses. After decades of equating growth with divine approval, they are on the losing side of demographics and LGBT rights, one of their founding and flagship issues.
DESPERATE DEAL
Thinking about white evangelicals as a grieving community opens up new ways of understanding their behavior. Drawing on her interactions with dying patients and their families in the 1960s, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified at least five common “stages” of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As Kübler-Ross found, when the stubborn facts of one’s own demise don’t yield to denial or anger, people commonly attempt to make a grand deal to postpone the inevitable.
While there are some lingering pockets of denial, and anger was an all-too-visible feature of Trump’s presidential campaign, thinking about the white evangelical/Trump alliance as an endof-life bargain is illuminating. It helps explain, for example, how white evangelical leaders could ignore so many problematic aspects of Trump’s character. When the stakes are high enough and the sun is setting, grand bargains are struck. And it is in the nature of these deals that they are marked not by principle but by desperation.
White evangelicals have clearly seen Trump’s presidency as a possible way to stave off changes that would constitute the real end of an era where their cultural worldview held sway. These insights certainly don’t necessitate abandoning negative judgments about this grand bargain. But in our deeply divided country, understanding the motivations of our fellow citizens, even those with whom we strongly disagree, is no small thing.