Since the country’s founding, the American church has served as a moral compass, guiding public legislation, sentiment, and traditions as they evolve. The Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “one Nation under God,” yet the question of which nation and which god has been a point of contention throughout history, as the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees both freedom of expression and separation of church and state. In the 1960s, the Black church epitomized the ‘Nation under God’ by marching the Civil Rights movement to a major victory, displaying the power of religion as a vessel for large-scale political organization.
Not much later, a political supergroup has risen from the reactionary seeds of the 1960s in the form of largely white Protestant church communities. In modern political parlance, this group is called the evangelicals, although in technical terms, evangelicals are merely Protestant Christians who place emphasis on spreading the word of the Bible and becoming “born again,” and interpreting the Bible as it is written. By taking a strong stance on contentious issues over the last fifty years—from Roe to Dobbs to threatened marriage equality to democratic instability—evangelical churches have helped significantly push the Republican Party toward radical conservatism.
Politically conservative evangelicals have long been psychoanalyzed for their usage of a “persecution complex” in sermons. A persecution complex is an irrational fear that one is the object of hostility by other groups. Politicized evangelical churches often insist that their religious freedom and values are under attack by the left. A 2017 poll found that white evangelical Christians tend to believe that Christians are discriminated against more than Muslims in the United States, despite significant survey evidence to the contrary. This fabricated sense of victimization drives evangelical voters to the polls to fix the country’s ‘backwards’ morals (which church leaders define as ideological liberalism), and it works. In 2020, the Pew Research Center reported that 85 percent of self-identifying white evangelical voters who regularly attended religious services voted for Trump. For white, protestant, non-evangelical regular service attendees, that number dropped to 51 percent.
The GOP has rewarded intense evangelical loyalty, as Republicans often rely on their votes to secure key seats in Congress. Evangelical political involvement can date back to the 1960 campaigns of Richard Nixon and the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater. By 1980, they became a more powerful political force and further aligned themselves with the Republican Party during the Reagan presidency, supporting his limited-government approach and socially conservative stances. During Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016, Evangelical churches mobilized voters in his favor and served as a base voting bloc that helped secure his victory. Donald Trump then nominated three conservative judges to the Supreme Court during his presidency, with a primary intention of overturning Roe v. Wade, the case that recognized a constitutional right to abortion in the face of significant evangelical and Catholic opposition. After Roe v. Wade was officially overturned in 2022, Trump celebrated the ruling while appealing to religion, claiming that “God made the decision.” In 2016, The National Election Pool Exit Survey found that white evangelicals comprised 46 percent of Trump’s coalition of voters compared to only 9 percent of Hillary Clinton’s. Trump and Republican legislators who followed in his coattails—both at the federal and state level—had to legislate to appease their loyal constituents for 2020 reelection.
One example is LGBTQ rights. Evangelicals have generally opposed the gay and transgender rights movement over the years. Thus, Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ infamous Parental Rights in Education Act (which prohibited discussion on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida elementary school classrooms) follow logically behind—these were late-term efforts to appease the base for reelection. In many ways, the evangelical and Republican legislative agendas have become synonymous due to this relationship of mutual political gain.
Today’s Republican Party, influenced by conspiracy theories and inclusive of far-right Trump loyalists, does not resemble the GOP of even a decade ago. Many Republicans currently in Congress have questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election and advanced baseless theories about voter fraud. In fact, more than 100 Republican representatives signed the amicus brief for Texas v. Pennsylvania, which attempted to prevent four states that Biden won from certifying their vote counts. Perhaps the most stunning outcome of Trump’s presidency was the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which broke a centuries-long tradition of peaceful transitions of power in the US government. While the support for election denial conspiracies has spanned many demographics, a major player in their saliency has been evangelical Protestantism.
The widespread belief that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump—and the view (at least until last summer) that the former president deserved reinstatement—echoes an archaic monarchic tradition from many centuries ago. That tradition is the “divine right of kings.” Under divine right, the monarch was believed to be chosen by God, so by extension, one who expressed doubt over a monarch’s legitimacy or decision-making was said to be questioning God’s authority. This entanglement of religious morality and government discouraged citizen uprisings and political critique.
A poll of white evangelicals in 2020 revealed that, of those who attend evangelical church services once a week, 49.5 percent believed that Donald Trump was anointed to be president by God. The resulting internal merge of God and Trump is a key reason why Trump received mass support among GOP voters, which included a significant base of evangelicals, following his election denial claims. The lack of evidence of fraud did not matter, because they believed in Trump as God. Just as one would never doubt a spiritual leader’s word, his was not doubted either.
The result is a sort of far-right political religion. A service in Pasadena, California exemplified this fanaticism on a large scale when members of the congregation prayed and sang worship songs for those arrested during the events of January 6. Trump has incorporated prayer into his rallies following the 2020 election, such as in Michigan, when a local evangelical leader prayed, “Father in heaven, we firmly believe that Donald Trump is the current and true president of the United States,”—a move that seems to further Trump’s perceived “divine right” in the evangelical world. Florida Governor and possible GOP presidential nominee Ron DeSantis has also made religious appeals in his campaigns, with a recent ad featuring the slogan “on the eighth day […] God made a fighter” superimposed over a montage of DeSantis’ successes. In 2022, this phenomenon is dangerous and represents a step toward authoritarianism, a regime that in other countries has historically been strengthened by the blending of church and state, such as when Spanish dictator Francisco Franco championed Catholicism to garner followers and support during his rule in the twentieth century. The strategic merging of a Christian God and GOP leadership is one reason why democracy hangs in the balance today—the legitimacy of a politician believed to be anointed by God preserves their power in the eyes of those believers regardless of whether or not the politician wins their election.
It is unclear whether the Republican Party will maintain its reactionary, evangelical-backed right-wing lean or return to its more moderate conservative stances of the past. There is much fear right now on both sides of the political spectrum about protecting civil rights, the future of democracy, and the rapid growth of technology. Following a disappointing showing for Republicans in the midterms, with a smaller margin of victory in the House than anticipated and the Democrats keeping control of the Senate, the GOP needs to rethink its political strategies going into the 2024 election. Indeed, this is already beginning to happen, with more and more Republicans publicly turning on Trump. Furthermore, the evangelical demographic has been steadily declining over the past decades, from a reported 23 percent of the US adult population in 2006 to only 14.5 percent in 2021. This drop in numbers is likely explained by generational replacement in tandem with the drop in self-identifying Christians in the US generally.
But it is clear that these numbers have been enough to sustain the evangelicals’ political presence for now, especially as they are extremely concentrated in rural districts in the South. Still, although the evangelicals have played an instrumental role in the transformation of the Republican Party in recent years, their efforts do not appear to be sustainable as their demographic shrinks. Their presence has been an important wake-up call to the fragility of American democracy and the powerful organization of the American church. As their numbers decline, it is important to ensure that another radicalized religious supergroup does not take its place. It is for the effort of right-wing evangelicals that the Republican Party has become the monolith of echo chambers that it is today. At the very least, the evangelical legacy will continue to influence the direction of the Republican Party moving forward.