Who Are Trump's Christians?

Ivan Plis

Society, Americas

Meet the evangelicals who support the GOP front-runner.

For decades, Republican electoral politics has relied on “the evangelicals”—a vague swath of socially conservative low-church Protestants who would reliably support GOP candidates saying the right things about abortion and family values. Ever since Ronald Reagan told the Moral Majority in 1980 that although “I know that you can’t endorse me. . . I endorse you,” the Republican establishment has had a tenuous but stable relationship with the Christians who made up its most loyal voter base.

Then along came Donald Trump. Far from fracturing the Republican base, his real talent has been to exploit internal rifts that had long lain dormant. It’s no secret that instead of principled conservatives, he appeals viscerally to the losers of the global economy. His staunchest supporters feel vulnerable not just because of declining working-class employment, but also because of a loss of social belonging and binding community norms of all kinds—including church membership—that has hit working-class whites harder than any other group.

In fact, modern American evangelicalism has always been ill defined; part of the problem stems from its lack of an organizational center. Instead of an evangelical Vatican, hundreds of tiny denominations jostle alongside more established churches. There are ecclesial bodies in which some members would call themselves evangelicals, while others do not. And when it comes to politics, “evangelical” is often extreme shorthand for “socially conservative white Protestants.”

How, then, can pollsters and policymakers properly assess the role of evangelical Americans in politics?

Rather than attempting to define the boundaries of evangelicalism, one recent approach has identified four conditions—beliefs about Jesus, the Bible, salvation and spreading the gospel—that correlate strongly with American Christians calling themselves evangelicals. These beliefs also correlate with regular church attendance. This approach, which prioritizes belief and practice over the self-identification of “evangelical,” yields a much more useful and coherent category for pollsters and social scientists to work from—even if it is a category more focused in its definition than what the pundits are used to.