Evil, Identity, and White Evangelical Support for Trump

• In Event: 2329 - Section on the Sociology of Religion Referred Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Religion, Politics, and Civic Engagement

Abstract

The initial motivation for this paper was the puzzle of evangelical support for Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Why would “values voters” – who for the last four decades have promoted biblical morality and traditional marriage – support a thrice-married casino-owner who cannot quote a Bible verse and has previously supported Planned Parenthood and LGBT-friendly policies? To investigate this question, I lived and worked in Pleasant Fields – a small, historically conservative Christian town in the Midwest – between April 2016 and January 2017. I conducted fifty in-depth interviews; worked part-time as a diner waitress; and participated in churches, volunteer organizations, McDonald’s coffee groups, and a range of social spaces and community events. I returned for another stint of fieldwork and follow-up interviews in December 2017. In this paper, I use these data to explore how white evangelicals draw upon their cultural toolkit (particularly conceptions of evil, narratives of America’s Christian founding, and End Times imagery) to make sense of the challenges facing America and justify their political choices. The two most frequently and extensively discussed concerns articulated to me by Pleasant Fields evangelicals are Islamic terrorism and the advancement of the “LGBT agenda.” Both are conceptualized as threats to the freedom of Christians, the status of truth, and the moral direction of America. The language used to talk about Islam and the LGBT agenda is imbued with notions of “evil,” assigning theological weight to their support of Trump. These twin enemies are placed within an underlying narrative of spiritual warfare and the approach of the End Times, in which violence, sexual immorality, and persecution place Christians in a highly precarious position. Within the theologically-framed narrative of spiritual peril and global uncertainty, the New Testament injunction to be “shrewd as serpents” functions to legitimate pragmatic political choices.

Author

• Jessamin Birdsall, Princeton University