During his inaugural address Jan. 20, Donald Trump sought to assuage a long-held fear among religious conservatives. “My recent election,” he said, “is a mandate to completely and totally reverse … all of these many betrayals that have taken place and to give people their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom.”
The statement reads like Trump’s typical bluster. It is overwrought and so devoid of fact as to be impossible to prove or disprove.
Greg Jarrell
His audience knows who they are, though — white, conservative, loyal, suburban — and they rejoice in being captive to his view of the world. White evangelicals, in particular, have been conjoined with him in a relationship that reinforces each side’s goals. Trump fulfills their belief that evangelical Christianity is under attack and therefore needs a strongman; they provide him with a sheen of theological legitimacy he never could produce on his own.
Trump plays astutely on the white evangelical fear of losing cultural power. It’s a fear pastors hold and pass on to their congregants.
When I was interviewing one such pastor in 2022, he raised this fear completely out of the blue.
“Trump plays astutely on the white evangelical fear of losing cultural power.”
“There’s a day and time coming where a church like ours, with what we believe, we’re probably going to lose our tax exemption,” he said. “If we were to have to pay taxes because of what we preach and teach, it would really hurt us, maybe even destroy us.”
At no point in recent history has there been a legislative move toward taxing congregations, and especially not one that might levy such taxes based on theological tests. Conservative churches may have endured the disdain of some fellow citizens, but they have faced no persecution.
Quite the opposite: Religious institutions stand outside most IRS reporting guidelines for other nonprofits. Congregations of varying ideologies regularly flout the restrictions on supporting specific candidates during election cycles and do so without consequence. In numerous states, publicly funded vouchers now fund religious education for students, often in schools run by evangelicals.
Churches need their nonprofit status. Some also want fear. A people who are afraid, whether the source is real or imagined, seeks a protector. They’re liable to wind up in a protection racket.
Trump is more than happy to cast himself in a messianic role, come to save a people whose faith has been ripped from them. He’s glad to remind an audience of one harrowing experience that demonstrates his anointing to return America to the white evangelicals.
“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear,” he claimed. “But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” He further spoke of pursuing a “manifest destiny into the stars.” He said he would “begin the complete restoration of America.”
All of this is vaguely theological, borrowing from a language he does not understand but gives evangelicals the patina that he is part of the in-group. And all of his speech echoed his famous messianic promise in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech: “I alone can fix it.”
Not content to let Trump be the only one engaged in theological malpractice, Franklin Graham offered a prayer during the inauguration. He prefaced his prayer by commenting that Trump must have felt like the past four years had been a dark time, “but look what God has done!”
“Now begins a policy program that does to others what the evangelicals wrongly feared would be done to them.”
His prayer compared Trump to Moses and JD Vance to Aaron holding up Moses’ arms in the midst of battle. He also flirted with crossing a blasphemous line: “When Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand,” he prayed.
God raises up prophets, in biblical language. But God also raises up Jesus. With a full decade of white evangelicals slowly handing over their beliefs, their lives and their integrity to Donald J. Trump, we’re right to question just how high they’re willing to raise him up.
Now begins a policy program that does to others what the evangelicals wrongly feared would be done to them. Trans people are under attack. Immigrant communities are targets of state and extrajudicial violence. Political enemies will be targeted. Poor people face the loss of basic social safety net programs. A great white backlash is fully under way in response to the simple assertion that Black Lives Matter. This is only the beginning. We’re not yet able to imagine the depravities to come.
White evangelicals did not do all this on their own, but they have blessed it at every step. They have turned Trump into what they think they want, but what the world almost certainly won’t be able to live with — a god of their own making.
Greg Jarrell is the author of Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods. He lives in Charlotte, N.C, where he works as senior campaign organizer with The Redress Movement.
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