This attraction to exhilaration is a dominant characteristic of evangelical Christianity in America that dates back to the First Great Awakening in the 18th century. It goes a long way in explaining why a group that shares so little with Trump became his most reliable voting bloc.

To Americans who stand outside the evangelical tradition, Franklin Graham’s recent proclamation that there’s “no question” that God supports Donald Trump’s presidency was another head-scratcher in a growing list of puzzling statements by Christian leaders over the past year.

Even without getting into the question of whether God chooses sides in elections, or how Graham can be so sure of his preference, there is the obvious fact, much discussed in the campaign, that the generally non-churchgoing, avidly materialistic Trump seemed an unlikely vessel for God’s will.

But Graham’s remark and white evangelicals’ continuing support of Trump make more sense when viewed in light of American evangelicalism’s history and DNA. It is a subject explored in depth in “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” a new history of the movement by Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances FitzGerald.

“He did everything wrong, politically,” Graham told the Atlantic’s Emma Green. “He offended gays. He offended women. He offended the military. He offended black people. He offended the Hispanic people. He offended everybody! And he became president of the United States. Only God could do that.”

Graham’s mentality reflects the evangelical obsession with dramatic solutions and easy answers that Michael Horton, a professor of theology at Westminster Seminary in California, described in his 2014 book, “Ordinary.”

“American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for The Next Big Thing,” Horton wrote.

James K.A. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Michigan, wrote in 2016 that many Christians have been trained by their religious culture to look for divine presence only in the spectacular and exciting.

“Too often we look for the [Holy] Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary,” Smith wrote in his 2016 book, “You Are What You Love.”

This attraction to exhilaration is a dominant characteristic of evangelical Christianity in America that dates back to the First Great Awakening in the 18th century. It goes a long way in explaining why a group that shares so little with Trump became his most reliable voting bloc.

The dominant narrative among most white evangelical Christians in America has been, for some time, one of decline. America has drifted far from God, according to this view, and the only way to revive the nation’s fortunes is to restore the Christian ideals that used to govern the nation’s people and its laws.

“This land was our land but it was stolen from us in the 1970s,” is how Horton put it in a recent phone interview, describing the common evangelical view.

Some Christians look to religious revival to usher in this restoration, but the last such spiritual awakening was the Jesus movement in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, with the founding of the Moral Majority, politically engaged evangelicals have tried to impose their moral outlook on the country through political means.

But many evangelicals tried to keep to themselves, walling themselves off from secular culture. All the while, the tectonic plates of culture shifted beneath their feet. When the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, that set off alarm bells inside a community that had tried its hardest to sing praise hymns and hope for the best. It was a break-the-glass moment that alarmed many who had tried to ignore the changes in culture to that point, and it put them in a more darkly pessimistic mood.

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