Scraggly
MAGA attendees listen to the opening prayer during a campaign event for
Donald Trump on Dec. 19, 2023, in Waterloo, Iowa.
For many Americans who consider themselves Christian, it seems impossible to square the behavior of Donald Trump with any form of the religion they hold dear. It’s not just that Trump has little understanding of the core tenets of Christianity or its roots in Judaism: It’s that Trump’s actions seem to be the polar opposite of everything Christians are supposed to believe.
This is a man who has made vengeance the core of his latest election campaign. Whose philosophy is to return any blow 10 times over. Who regularly calls for violence, on levels large and small. A man who is eager to kill people by the thousands. Who declares that those who refuse to follow his every order deserve death. And that’s before even dipping into a personal life filled with accusations of fraud, adultery, theft, and rape.
Where Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” Trump declares, “I am your retribution.” How can anyone who claims to follow one of these men support the other?
The answer, according to The New York Times, is simple: Trump supporters have redefined Christianity. For them, it has little to do with religion, and even less to do with Christ. Christianity is now just another synonym for MAGA.
That Republicans have long claimed a special position as the more religious party is no surprise. A quick look at the 1956 Republican Party platform shows a party that was already opening with a “declaration of faith” and an insistence that the “rights of men came from the Creator and not from the State.” By contrast, the Democratic Party platform in the same year opens with a “preamble” and is a lot more focused on the actions of the government than it is on celebrating their “creator.”
Still, no one party could claim any ownership of religious voters. Even after Ronald Reagan and his supporters essentially created the religious right in 1980, both parties continued to battle for religious voters based on issues, not on some presumption that one party was inherently more “godly.” Republicans worried about losing liberal mainstream Protestants when they tried to cut funding for social programs, while Democrats were aware that issues like abortion rights were costing them conservative churchgoers.
As the 20th century drew to a close, Democrats continued to maintain a toehold in even the most conservative churches. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter were all Southern Baptists. Carter was a Sunday school teacher who authored several books on his Christian faith. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham might be incapable of separating his religion from Trump, but his father Billy Graham was a lifelong Democrat who warned against fully supporting any political leader (even if he did make his name by thumping his chest over those godless commies).
In the 2000 election, George W. Bush took the Protestant vote while Gore won Catholics (and Jews, and other faiths). In 2008, the same thing happened with John McCain and Barack Obama. Between those two elections, Democrats made gains with both Catholics and Protestants while also widening the gap with Americans who considered themselves unaffiliated with any religion.
But what’s happened in the past three decades, and especially in the Age of Trump, is very different. The number of Americans who no longer consider themselves affiliated with any religion has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 1992, America didn’t look much different than it did in 1972 (or 1952) when it came to religion. But by 2022, the number of Americans who called themselves Christian was just over two-thirds of what it had been when Clinton and George H. W. Bush faced off, according to polling from the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey.
In the past few years, that change has accelerated sharply. And where earlier declines seem to have been largely felt by more progressive Protestant churches, recent “de-churching” has been felt most heavily on the right, among the same evangelical groups that have spent the last decades building megachurches and increasingly aligning themselves with Republican positions, according to The New York Times.
The percentage of Americans who call themselves Protestant—including evangelicals—has dropped from 70% in 1953 to 34% in 2022, according to Gallup. That’s a decline of more than 0.5% a year. Since 2016, the rate has averaged 0.67% a year.
In the past decade, the number of those who self-identify as evangelical has declined more rapidly than the still ongoing fall in numbers at more liberal churches. A larger share of conservatives than liberals report that they no longer attend any church. This is a big factor in pushing America’s total church membership below 50% for the first time since Pew or Gallup began their surveys.
If the rate continues to decline as dramatically as it has over the past six years, Protestantism will disappear in the United States in the next 50 years. Based on the Pew results, Christianity itself would vanish not long after.
Both of those scenarios are extremely unlikely. However, there is one group in Gallup’s poll on religion that has increased over the past two decades, and the nature of that category may explain a lot about what’s going on.
The one growing category (in addition to those unaffiliated with any religion, which is way up) is people who report themselves as “Christian (nonspecific).” This was just 2% of the population in 1999. It’s 11% today. And “nonspecific” seems to match well with The New York Times’ description of Trump’s followers.
As the article makes clear, while church membership in the United States has been declining, many of those who no longer associate with any church still consider themselves Christian—though they seem to be a very different sort of Christian.
According to the U.S. Religion Census, church attendance in Iowa fell 13% in a decade—over twice as fast as the nation overall. Of those who still attend, many complain of an aging church population and the difficulty of bringing in young families when their children are involved in multiple activities. (On a personal note: This is exactly the issue afflicting my own church, where Sunday school is down to a handful of children, young families are very rare, and I’m practically a spring chicken. Church membership is aging, and you don’t have to peek in many pews to see that this is true.)
However, religious leaders continue to insist that even among those who have left an organized church, many still strongly identify as Christian. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to suggest these people may be among the “nonspecific” Christians in Gallup’s polling: people who have become unmoored from any particular church, but still hang on to the label of the religion they knew as a child.
But even as churches have been shrinking, Trump has been surging, and in story after story, America is being told that Christians support Trump. Except … do they? Because what’s going on doesn’t really seem like Christianity at all.
Take the example of a retired corrections officer quoted in the Times article.
“I voted for Trump twice, and I’ll vote for him again. He’s the only savior I can see,”
Or this rather confusing statement from a former Sunday school teacher who now works in a slot machine parlor and says, “Trump is our David and our Goliath.”
Conservative theologians may be trying to draw connections between Trump and the Persian leader Cyrus the Great, who in the Bible is credited with freeing Jews from captivity and returning them to Jerusalem, but most Trump supporters aren’t nearly so esoteric. Trump is front and center in their beliefs.
Why has Jesus been ousted as the central character in many a “Christian’s” life in favor of Trump? As Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, explained to The New York Times, “Politics has become the master identity. Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”
These are people for whom “Christian” is a label. It doesn’t mean they have any interest in understanding the tenets of Christianity as a religion: It means they follow Trump. And it helps to explain why so many pastors are willing to trade Jesus for Trump when standing at the pulpit.
“People who love their country and believe in God, but haven’t been typical churchgoers—he’s brought those people into the fold,” said Jackson Lahmeyer, the founder of Pastors for Trump, a national group of church leaders backing the former president.
These are pastors who have done just what the retired corrections officer and the slot machine attendant have done: replaced Jesus with Donald Trump. Only while Trump’s supporters may find that a vitriol-spitting bigot seems to fit the God-shaped holes in their hearts, Pastors for Trump have an even more crass and destructive reason. In the face of emptying churches, they’re willing to swap out crosses for MAGA hats in the hope it will put asses in the pews and dollars in the offering plates.
The “Christian” label serves another purpose for Trump supporters: It allows them to play the victim. It gives them the right to be racist, misogynist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ+ … then retreat behind religion if anyone points it out. It’s martyrdom in a box, always ready for instant deployment.
And if that means they have to trade a message of love, acceptance, and forgiveness for one of spite, anger, and violence … hey, does it matter? They’re Christians. You wouldn’t understand.
Just take this prayer from Joel Tenney, a “local evangelist” who doesn’t lead a church but opened for Trump at an Iowa rally.
“This election is part of a spiritual battle,” Mr. Tenney said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
Tenney might seem to be explicitly preaching against what followers of Christ are told to do. But that’s the old Christianity. The kind that doesn’t even own a gold-trimmed penthouse.
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