Why Are White Evangelicals Eager To Endorse GOP Bigotry?

 

Have you wondered why white evangelicals, who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus, are so accepting of the Republican Party's growing bigotry? Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has an answer. He says:

White evangelicalism, with its strong emphasis on personal salvation, has always had a weakly developed and myopic political ethic. It developed a theology obsessed with personal (especially sexual) morality, which largely screened out concerns about social or structural injustice outside the church. This was by design, given that for most of its existence, it required a theology that was externally compatible with slavery and segregation — in short, with white supremacy. More recently, White evangelicals faced a crossroads when [Donald] Trump entered the political scene in the Republican Party, the party to which they fled in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the Democratic Party’s support for the civil rights movement.

Given that history, with the vast majority of White evangelicals supporting and blessing segregationist leaders just a generation ago, I wouldn’t characterize the current state of White evangelical responses, or lack of responses, as wildly inconsistent with this past. But the way White evangelicals have overtly given themselves over, not just to one political party but to one authoritarian personality, is deeply troubling.

On these questions, there is one public opinion survey question I keep coming back to, which gets to the heart of this continued White evangelical acquiescence of moral judgment and political responsibility. In 2011, PRRI asked whether people thought an elected official who committed an immoral act “can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” While just 30 percent of White evangelicals said such a candidate could fulfill their duties in 2011, that number jumped to 72 percent in 2016 when Trump was at the top of the ticket, and it remains at 68 percent today.

In short, White evangelicals have never had a robust political ethic based on rigorously developed principles but rather an ends-justify-the-means approach to politics that starts with support for outcomes that are perceived to serve their interests and then marshals theology as backfill.