Well.
Newsweek is out with a piece that takes-up Donald Trump and evangelicals’ curious loyalty to a man whose entire life is the antithesis of everything they claim to believe.
To historians, the evangelical leaders’ response was no surprise, because they know racism was behind the emergence of evangelicals as a political force in America. “If you are looking for the core animating spark of the Christian-right movement, it’s not abortion but private Christian universities not being able to have laws against interracial dating,” says Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of The End of White Christian America (Simon & Schuster, 2016). He knows that when the federal government forced integration on public schools in the South, white parents yanked their kids out and enrolled them in new church-run schools dubbed “segregation academies.” The white flight was fast and devastating. In Mississippi, for example, the white population in the Holmes County school system dropped from 700 to 28 in year one of desegregation, and by the next year had dropped to zero.
It’s a heavy-handed piece that blatantly laughs at Trump and evangelicals though, in fairness, it is difficult to take any of them seriously or view them with respect.
I do think that racism has much to do with Trump’s popularity, but I think a greater factor is a generalized anger toward the whole of modernity. I know a lot of people who believed that the juvenile behavior of the campaign was just an act, and that most of his promises were insincere and empty — but they voted for him anyway. Why? Because they liked loved his relentless antagonism toward educated professionals, those people who were comfortable with the others, those people who approved of regulations they find constricting and incomprehensible, those people who are unafraid of an evolving world, those people who will say frankly that the Adam and Eve tale has no more dignity than Jack and the Beanstalk, those people who don’t care a hoot about same-sex marriage but care a lot about global warming.
The world has become a place where they are uncomfortable; that’s who voted for Trump.
They could identify with Trump because he, like them, then and still, is the object of mockery, too. They don’t care that Trump is a witless buffoon who, if not checked, is going to run the country into the ground because he is an idiot; they care that he says mean things about the same people they dislike.