Does Support for Trump Increase as Biblical Authority Declines?

Some pundits are scratching their heads over evangelical support for Trump:

Evangelicals have for decades believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they’ve woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction. They worry that coaches getting fired over praying at schools, fire chiefs getting fired for citing scripture, bakers getting bankrupted over their refusal to bake a cake—their entire perspective on Christian faith as a key element of what made America great has been swept away.

In this post-apocalyptic environment, it becomes increasingly clear why Southern evangelicals would drop their requirements that a political leader who seeks their backing be one of them, ideologically or faithfully. They have different priorities now: They want an ally who will protect them, regardless of his personal ethics.

That’s why Trump has been able to peel away so many evangelicals as his supporters, despite being an unchurched secularist with three wives who couldn’t tell a communion plate from an offering basket. It is because of the increasingly large portion of evangelicals who believe the culture wars are over, and they lost.

What if the key to understanding evangelicals’ apparent political inconsistency owes to an abandonment of biblical authority?

At a recent Sunday morning service at Redeemer, I spoke with Aaron Link, a 28-year-old software engineer for Google who teaches first graders in the church’s Sunday school. He told me he was, like most Redeemer members, theologically conservative, believing the Bible to be “the Word of God, therefore it’s inerrant, it’s trustworthy, it’s authoritative.” Yet Link was flexible when it came to particulars. The creation narrative in Genesis? “I’ve heard different things from people here […] I’m still trying to figure it out.” Should women be allowed to lead in churches? “It’s not something I’ve looked into. If a person argued that it’s scripturally based, I’d go with that.” Should all parts of the Bible be taken literally? “Just because you believe a part of the Bible is metaphorical, you’re not compromising the inerrancy of Scripture.”

What remains unclear is whether evangelicals’ gradual loosening of biblical strictness will enable them to overcome the significant demographic challenges coinciding with their change of course. Last year’s most important religion-related publication might well turn out to have been the Pew Forum’s 2015 Religious Landscape Study, a comprehensive survey of the nation’s religiosity that found a startling 5-million drop in the number of American Christians since 2007. The number of evangelicals rose by 2.4 million, but the increase was not enough to keep pace with overall population growth. If current trends continue, evangelicals will be outnumbered by non-religious Americans in just a few years. A closer look at the Pew numbers suggests even the growth evangelicals experienced was powered largely by mainline Protestants and Catholics fleeing their own declining congregations. More than a quarter of all evangelicals were raised either as mainline Protestants or as Catholics, according to Pew, compared to just nine percent converted from outside Christianity. Among millennials, the youngest age cohort surveyed by Pew, just one-fifth are evangelical, compared to 35 percent professing no religion at all.

In which case, evangelical support for Trump may be part of a broader electoral alignment that shows the growth of nones and the decline of the Republican Party’s popularity:

The likely reason why Republicans have declined in popularity among the non-religious is GOP’s long habit of identifying itself as a Christian party standing up for “Judeo-Christian values.”

As increasing numbers of whites and Asians have chosen non-Christian religions or no faith tradition at all, they are also leaving the Republican Party. Some are joining up with Democrats but many are choosing “none of the above” just like what they are doing with religion. Much of this movement parallels already established patterns observed by Jewish voters who were much more inclined toward Republicans before Christian nationalism became a force within the party.

Sure, Trump is in the lead in the GOP’s presidential primaries. But if he is merely in the Republican Party, but not of it, then evangelical support for Trump could well be indicative of evangelical voters who pay lip service to but don’t follow the Bible.

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