Church attendance is (once again) correlated with authoritarianism — so why do we refuse to acknowledge it?

Since 2016, I have been arguing here at RD that former president Donald Trump’s politics, and his appeal to White evangelical Christians, are best explained through the lens of authoritarianism. Pundits initially scratched their heads for entirely too long over how evangelicals could purport to follow Jesus and support Trump. The answer was always easy; he promised to do, and then did, what they wanted, which any disaffiliated former Christian school kid or survivor of evangelical homeschooling could have told any pundit or journalist who’d bothered to ask.