Evangelicals Have Tied their Wagons to Trump

It’s no secret that evangelicals have a Millennial problem.

More than a third of Millennials are unaffiliated with any religion, and younger Americans tend to have more negative views of evangelicals than do other groups. Indeed, there is reason to believe that some Millennials have been turned off evangelicalism specifically by evangelicals’ focus on “culture wars” issues like gay marriage. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, Millennial evangelicals tend to have different views on social issues than do other evangelicals.

All of that brings me to this tweet about Trump and the Oval Office:

I had wondered, at one point, whether Trump’s nomination pointed to the declining influence of evangelicals in the Republican Party. I grew up hearing religious right Republicans rip Bill Clinton up and down for his affair with Monica Lewinsky and call for leaders who were “men of character” and decency. This was ingrained into my bones. And Trump? Let’s just say that his sexual past (and present) makes Bill Clinton’s offenses look like kindergarten stuff.

He’s on his third wife. He openly brags about all the sex he has access to because he’s rich. He says things to the wives of foreign politicians that make him sound more like a sleazy old man than a world leader. He owned the Miss Universe pageant—do you think the evangelicals of my youth looked fondly on such things?

And yet, rather than condemning Trump or distancing themselves from him and planning to run one of their own candidates in 2020 or 2024, evangelical leaders have largely rushed to embrace Trump, not only from a pragmatic standpoint but actually as one of their own. They call him a man of God. They rush to put their hands on him and pray over him in front of cameras and in photos sent to twitter.

I have long felt disconnected from my evangelical upbringing, but I have never felt as repulsed as I do now, watching the evangelical embrace of Trump.

Evangelicals have tied their wagons to a vulgar, vengeful, egotistical leader who basks in the adulation of the crowds even as he whips up hatred against immigrants and openly calls for an escalation in police brutality. Some days I feel like current political alliances are so outlandish that they must be a horrible dream, a nightmare I will wake up from if I just pinch myself hard enough. Then I check my email and yes, my jovial evangelical grandfather did send me all those chain emails about how God had raised Trump up for such a time as this.

It has been a decade since I stopped identifying as evangelical, but watching evangelicals fawn over Trump has broken something in me. I’m past opposing evangelicals over policy or doctrinal differences, as serious as those may be. This is something else entirely—something deeper. I had though that for all of our differences, evangelicals had a soul. I had thought there were core values underlying everything else. For me, this has been an “emperor has no clothes” sort of moment.

Evangelicals’ attachment to Trump is going to define them for the next generation—and it’s certainly not going to help them with their Millennial problem.

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