As with Trump’s rise in 2015-16, evangelical elites and their aspirants—a group Stephen Wolfe has aptly called the “evangelical arm of the ruling class”—have evidently still learned nothing. And this year will be no different. Evangelicals will vote in overwhelming numbers for Trump in the general election after his inevitable victory in the Republican primaries. And evangelical elites will continue to reserve their harshest judgment for their own tribe, a relationship that looks more and more tenuous by the day.

Don’t make Donald Trump your idol.” “It’s not about Left vs. Right but about the Messiah who already came.” “Saving souls is more important than saving your country.” “Jesus isn’t running in 2024.”

Ever since the former president soundly defeated his opponents in the Iowa caucus last week (as polls had been predicting for quite some time, to the consternation of the political class), and then immediately repeating the victory in New Hampshire, the crush of evangelical elite rhetoric targeting Trump’s evangelical voters has been deafening.

Passive aggressive tweets from pastors and online theologians and op-eds from individuals in the midst of some form of deconstruction have flooded the zone. Accusations abound, and sweeping, ideological generalizations are rampant. Even the very salvation of Christian Trump supporters has been called into question yet again.

Ben Ziesloft has pointed out that the veritable cottage industry of anti-Trump books written by the self-proclaimed guardians of “our democracy” is only equaled by the pile penned by evangelical thought leaders who castigate the evangelical hoi polloi who don red MAGA hats. (Whether or not the term “evangelical” is simply a sociological label or captures orthodox, low-church Protestants who attend church weekly is a different question entirely.) As Miles Smith has trenchantly observed on X, “Is their [sic] any more boring type of self-loathing American than an ‘Evangelical intellectual’ who is still writing about Trump?”

Aaron Renn has already begun reviewing one of the latest entries in this genre, Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Among other things, Alberta profiles the “well-organized, well-funded” network called “The After Party” that anti-Trump evangelicals Russell Moore, David French, and Curtis Chang, a liberal Silicon Valley consultant, created in the wake of the 2016 election. This group has been working hard ever since “to reduce Republican voting by evangelicals by providing doing so with a theological rationale.” Unsurprisingly, in original reporting at First Things, Megan Basham has shown that they’re bankrolled by a number of left-wing foundations.

In other words, Moore and French are doing the very same thing that Vote Common Good, a progressive Christian nonprofit, is doing: making sure that a Democrat stays in the White House for the foreseeable future. As Vote Common Good’s website notes, they too are looking to persuade “an additional 5-10% [of evangelicals] who are looking for an ‘exit ramp’ from supporting the Republicans who sacrifice the common good.”

In an election year, the spigot will undoubtedly be opened even more. Scott M. Coley’s forthcoming Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, Ideology and the Religious Right (published by the increasingly heterodox Eerdmans Publishing Company in June), is a prime example. A talk he gave in August 2022, where he described the “ideology of the religious right” as including “creation science, illegitimate appeals to biblical authority or sufficiency, [and] Christian colorblindness,” is likely a preview of some of the arguments Coley will draw on in Ministers of Propaganda. Upholding orthodoxy, it seems, is not part of his project.

Books like Alberta’s and Coley’s, however, aren’t meant to be read. Rather, they are for signaling one’s own inclusivity, rejection of power, and care for the migrant—all elements that are consistent with regime-approved morality.

As with Trump’s rise in 2015-16, evangelical elites and their aspirants—a group Stephen Wolfe has aptly called the “evangelical arm of the ruling class”—have evidently still learned nothing. And this year will be no different. Evangelicals will vote in overwhelming numbers for Trump in the general election after his inevitable victory in the Republican primaries. And evangelical elites will continue to reserve their harshest judgment for their own tribe, a relationship that looks more and more tenuous by the day.

On the surface, this is akin to political consultants who consistently run losing campaigns featuring outdated and ineffective messaging but nevertheless remain extremely confident that next time, Americans will finally pick someone who can defeat the Soviets and balance the budget. But if it didn’t work last time, why would deploying the same strategies work this time? Instead, why not reach out to dissident figures on the Right? Or men who lift weights or work with their hands for a living?

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