Is there any mystery why evangelicals would make common cause with the Trumpians? I’m sorry that some will choose to join the media chorus denouncing the Trump supporters as racist, sexist homophobes. There is virtue-signaling satisfaction that comes with doing so. I am hopeful that others will honestly consider the moral, political, social, and economic program of Trumpian politics, compare it with the progressive program, and reconsider who exactly are the voiceless, the oppressed, the poor, the despised in our country.

Once again there is post-election discussion of evangelical voting habits. Apparently around 80% voted for President Trump again in 2020, as they did in 2016. This was the case despite a number of high-profile evangelicals urging the alternatives: voting for Biden, a third-party candidate, or skipping the Presidential election altogether. The overwhelming evangelical support for Trump causes consternation in some circles, incomprehension in others. How can Bible-believing Christians vote for a man of his character? Are evangelicals all hypocrites? Or are there defensible reasons? We can understand the evangelical vote and more broadly the evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic vote, and more broadly still, the whole Trumpian phenomena under two headings: power and the powerless. Evangelicals make common cause with Trump supporters because, simply, they share a common cause.

Power

First it is important to recognize where the concentration of power rests in our nation today. Serious Christians care about power because so often God presents Himself as the defender of the powerless, the champion of the widow, the fatherless, the orphan, and the poor; the voice of the voiceless.

Start with the media. The major media in America has always leaned leftward. Its politics going back to Walter Cronkite and forward to the most recent past have been moderate, generally left of center. Yet there always were aspirations of objectivity. When a Nixon or Reagan or Bush won an election, congratulations were offered along with some attempts at acknowledging the positive accomplishments of conservative governance.

No more. The mask is off. The last four years have seen the claims of objectivity abandoned and political advocacy joined unapologetically. The media today speak with one voice, the voice of progressivism. Their zeal for progressive causes, programs, and candidates is exceeded only by their contempt, even their hatred for any opposing voices. Whether the subject was climate change, the Green New Deal, immigration, fracking, the Iran nuclear deal, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, gay marriage, transgenderism, religious liberty, foreign trade, Russian collusion, impeachment, tax cuts, deregulation, “Black Lives Matter,” Antifa, Bret Kavanaugh, abortion rights, etc., etc., etc., there was only one possible point of view. Those who dared to deviate from the party line were immediately demonized. Attempts to cancel or silence followed. This abandonment of balanced reporting, of the ideal of objectivity, of the goal of diversity of viewpoints is infuriating for Trump supporters and ominous for Christians. The convictions of evangelical Christians at multiple points are precisely those which major media despise.

However, it gets worse. Social media now is colluding with the more traditional major media. Unwanted opinions are actively being silenced or suppressed. Until relatively recently, social media platforms saw themselves and generally were treated not as publishing houses responsible for content, but something more like as utilities. We don’t blame the gas company if someone uses natural gas to blow up his neighbor’s house. For the most part we didn’t hold social media responsible for content disseminated through their platforms. This changed with this election cycle. Because social media was held by some on the left to be responsible for the result of the 2016 Presidential election, it caved to the pressure to change. Consequently, unwanted viewpoints, even unwanted facts were censored by social media in 2020. The executives of social media giants have appointed themselves the arbiters of permissible opinions, opinions which just happen to coincide exactly with the progressive agenda. Those who hold contrary views are branded as racist, sexist, homophobes and banished from the internet.

Regrettably, it still gets worse. This uniformly secular progressive outlook is shared by all the major cultural centers of power. They have all lined up behind the progressive agenda: the major corporations, the universities, the non-profit organizations with their vast trusts, Silicon Valley, and the administrative state. All right-thinking people are said to agree with this consensus. The rest are dismissed as ignorant or despised as “fascists.” Those who are pushing back, who are resisting this cultural monolith have turned to Donald Trump because they believe that he alone of all the major political figures will fight for them.

Powerless

The most shocking moment of the 2020 election was for many the rally on Saturday night before the election when 57,000 people showed up for a Trump rally in Butler (!), Pennsylvania. The crowd-shots showed a majority blue-collar, unsophisticated, middle-American crowd. Whether one loves or hates, approves, or disapproves of President Trump is not at issue. However, the devotion of the Trump supporter is the phenomena worth exploring.

I was prepared to see this level of commitment by a drive in October from Boone, NC to Lexington, VA and the campus of Washington and Lee University. Most of this drive was on state roads. The poverty all along the way was palpable.  Double-wide mobile homes are the luxury houses of rural America. Trump signs were everywhere. My daughter Sally and her husband Peter saw the same in their drive from Charlotte, NC to Chicago. The country, outside of the major cities, is Trump country. Whatever one’s politics, love of neighbor should motivate us to sit up and take notice that something far out of the ordinary has been happening. No candidate in my lifetime has been able to generate the kind of enthusiasm that Trump does. This scene in Butler was more or less repeated at rally after rally, day after day up to and including Election Day. Major media dismissed the phenomena of the Trump enthusiast as more evidence of racism and sexism. Of course they did. More likely, his crowds represented a coalition of the excluded. It was an alliance of the overlooked.

Progressivism is made up of two groups: wealthy coastal elites who look with condescension on non-wealthy, non-coastal non-elites, and those who are their governmental dependents. Who is left out of the picture? Ordinary working people, the hoi polloi, the unwashed masses. Boutique liberals have their voice: they own the megaphones. Protected and privileged minorities (racial and sexual) have their voice: they are the pet projects of progressivism. What about all those people who live in what the coastal aristocracy contemptuously refers to as “flyover country?” Who is looking out for them? They have given their answer: Donald Trump. One may not agree with their answer, yet it surely is meaningful that they think so. The phenomena of the 74 million Trump voters who, in the face of four years of relentless and vehement media attacks on Trump still voted for him, begs to be accurately understood.

This huge, largely excluded and overlooked group cares about their jobs. The last several decades have not been kind to them. Their manufacturing jobs were sent overseas, their factories closed, their remaining employment options bringing them into competition with low-wage immigrant labor. Their communities have been ruined, their marriages destabilized, and their children rendered hopeless. Who cares? Donald Trump, in their view. He is willing to stop illegal immigration, to place tariffs on goods made in China, to pressure American corporations to bring resources and jobs home even at the expense of profits, and demand accountability on the part of pharmaceutical companies. Under his leadership the economy exploded with growth and unemployment shrank to historic levels even while wages rose, especially on the lower end of the pay scale. He cut taxes, cut regulations and the economy responded. Trump’s policies were good for ordinary workers of all races. As a recent Newsweek article put it, “The coalition that Trump built is here to stay –– multiracial, working-class, and growing in number.”[1] Trump’s 63 million votes in 2016 grew to 74 million in 2020, more votes than any other candidate in American history other than Joseph Biden.

Moreover, Trumpians don’t hear their values being expressed by their cultural betters. They value their religion. The culture elite are either silent on the matter or derogatory when they speak of faith. Trump supporters are galvanized by the willingness of progressiveness to restrict religious liberty in favor of “social justice” as they define it. Trump supporters value their families. Yet those whose hands are on the levers of power denigrate the traditional family. The social elite introduce strange new terminology as they speak of overthrowing “heteronormativity,” describe conventional people as “cis gendered,” and rail against the nuclear family. They demand that transgenderism be recognized and their new “woke” vocabulary and pronouns be used. Progressives don’t bother to hide their intention to indoctrinate American youth in the mores of the sexual revolution. The Trumpians recognize and fear the threat that liberal radicalism poses to their children. Trump supporters love their country. They are grateful that they live in a land in which they enjoy peace and prosperity, essential rights and freedoms, franchise and the rule of law. Yet the powers that be represent their nation as inherently racist, sexist, and unjust, as the focus of evil in the world. Joseph Epstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal, put the issue this way:

 Imagine yourself a member of the lower middle class recently put out of work by the Covid pandemic and worried about how you will supply your family’s basic needs in the months ahead. You turn on your television set to watch the news, and you see major American cities taken over by rioters and looters claiming they are protesting “systemic racism.” In disgust you change channels to discover kids at Yale and elsewhere denying speakers who disagree with them the right to speak, and then claiming they feel unsafe even behind ivy-covered walls. You change the channel once more to discover your local anchors are delighted to run a piece about the first trans judge in your county, a former man, now claiming to be a woman but who even in a dress looks a good deal more masculine than most. Enough, enough! Bring on Donald Trump.[2]

Where does this leave us today? Half of the country is persuaded that the institutions that control our national discourse are right. They are persuaded that the singular progressive voice of the media, social media, the corporations, the universities, the non-profit organizations, Silicon Valley, and the administrative state are correct. They vote for those who favor the progressive agenda: empowering the federal government as an agent of change, activist courts, normalizing the sexual revolution, expanding the welfare state, restricting  “hate” speech, limiting religious liberty, undermining parental rights, controlling the schools, advocating government-run health care, opening the borders, and providing unlimited access to abortion.

Half of the country is alienated from the progressive agenda and its media megaphone. They feel alienated from the system, abandoned by the political parties, and overlooked by policy makers. They deeply feel the contempt of the “chattering classes,” those who presume to tell them what they should think. They know they are characterized by progressives as a “basket of deplorables,” as “bitter clingers,” who “cling to guns or religion,” who are “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” Consequently, they vote for a man who is brash, uncouth, vulgar, self-absorbed, narcissistic, and at times cruel. Why? Because he acknowledges their existence.  Because he fights for them. Because he is willing to take on the media and cultural elite despite the brutal and relentless attacks on him. Because he promises to protect their jobs, their families, their schools, their unborn children, and their religion. Is there any mystery in their political loyalties?

Is there any mystery why evangelicals would make common cause with the Trumpians? I’m sorry that some will choose to join the media chorus denouncing the Trump supporters as racist, sexist homophobes. There is virtue-signaling satisfaction that comes with doing so. I am hopeful that others will honestly consider the moral, political, social, and economic program of Trumpian politics, compare it with the progressive program, and reconsider who exactly are the voiceless, the oppressed, the poor, the despised in our country. Christian preference for the powerless over the powerful is not a novel phenomena. The unborn, the uneducated, the unemployed, the unheard, and the unprogressive are not unnatural allies for the disciples of Christ.

Dr. Terry L. Johnson is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is the Senior Minister of Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Ga.

[1] Jon Schweppe, “The Coalition that Trump Built,” Newsweek, Nov. 23, 2020.

[2] Joseph Epstein, “Donald Trump, the President His Detractors Loved to Hate,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 13, 2020.