In a recent speech in Louisiana, President Donald Trump commended evangelicals for supporting him in the fraught contest over impeachment. He said church leaders were telling him that impeachment was fostering spiritual revival: “I got a call from the evangelical leaders the other day, a whole lot of them. They said the church has never been more energized as it is right now because of what they’re trying to do to our president,” Trump said. His reference to his friendship with “the evangelical leaders” might seem straightforward, but it actually obscures more complicated evangelical alignments in America.
The “evangelical” movement dates back at least to the Great Awakening of the mid-1700s, when myriad American colonists, including significant numbers of African Americans and Native Americans, professed new faith in Christ. The term evangelical has historically denoted Protestant Christians who emphasize the new birth of salvation (being born again), who believe they have an active relationship with God, and who see the Bible as the infallible word of God. Although white evangelicals in America have disproportionate power and resources, people of color have also been part of the evangelical movement since the beginning. As historian Philip Jenkins and many others have shown, evangelicals are now represented in virtually every ethnic group around the world.
Many observers have discussed the high percentage of American evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016. Most acknowledged that exit polls focused only on white evangelicals, but many stories still concluded with generalized assertions that more than 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelical Protestants supported Trump. More carefully worded reports remembered that exit polling was surveying only people who voted. Thus, these stories were typically about self-identified white evangelical voters. To be fair, the problem of vague rhetoric about polls’ expansive coverage does not apply only to evangelicals. Most pollsters are uninterested in nonvoters, but evidence would suggest that perhaps 42 percent or more of evangelicals have not voted in recent presidential elections.
Some polls estimate that about 41 percent of all Americans self-identify either as “born again” or evangelical. This percentage surely exaggerates the number of committed evangelicals in the nation. Surprising numbers of people will tell pollsters that they are born again or evangelical, even if they do not attend church or hold distinctive evangelical beliefs. The estimates still indicate, however, that there are likely tens of millions of politically inactive evangelicals in America. These people may be as regular churchgoers as many evangelical Trump supporters, but in most stories about evangelicals, nonvoters might as well not exist.
White Christians undoubtedly resonate more with the term “evangelical” than African American Christians do, as many of the latter understandably hear undesirable racial and political overtones within the term. Still, there are substantial numbers of black, Latino, Asian American and other evangelical people of color in America, many of whom take a different view of politics than do pro-Trump white evangelicals. But for a variety of reasons, pollsters commonly account only for white evangelical voters.
Isn’t it still true that overwhelming numbers of white evangelical voters supported Trump? Yes, this is undoubtedly the case, even if we account for the murkiness inherent within self-identification, which is the most common method of labeling someone an evangelical in polls. But even among white evangelical leaders, there is a rift between “Republican insider evangelicals” and the white evangelical leaders — some of them quite conservative — who have criticized Trump. Among the former are religious right stalwarts such as First Baptist Dallas’ Robert Jeffress, James Dobson, Franklin Graham and Ralph Reed, and pastors and television personalities whom critics associate with the prosperity gospel. Arguably the most prominent of Trump’s “evangelical” advisers is Paula White-Cain, although many mainstream evangelical leaders consider her theologically suspect at best. The recent endorsement of White-Cain’s new book by several Republican insider evangelicals, such as Jeffress, led Christian critics to question whether Trump’s “evangelical leaders” had become so compromised that theological principle no longer mattered, as long as the leader in question backed Trump.
The evangelical leaders whom the president cites are actually a small group who make regular appearances for prayer sessions at the White House and for admiring interviews about Trump on Fox News and on the prosperity-gospel themed Trinity Broadcasting Network. But in 2016, prominent white evangelicals including Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention, John Piper of Desiring God Ministries, and Beth Moore of Living Proof Ministries criticized Trump’s personal characteristics and implied that evangelicals should not vote either for Trump or Hillary Clinton. Russell Moore’s criticisms even led Trump to denounce him as a “nasty guy with no heart” on Twitter. Such dust-ups between Trump and traditional evangelical leaders such as Russell Moore are just one way that “the evangelicals” in America and around the world are far more diverse than polls — or Trump himself — would indicate.
Thomas S. Kidd is a history professor at Baylor University and the author of Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.