President Trump and the evangelical lust for power

Why do the religiously devout so readily kneel before this profane charlatan?

President Trump.
(Image credit: Screenshot/O'Gene Films)

"I was raised in an evangelical congregation, and today still consider myself a Christian," says filmmaker Christopher Alan Maloney in the opening sequence of In God We Trump. "But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't imagine my Sunday School teacher or youth pastor casting their vote" for someone like President Trump.

I could say the same, except I have actively avoided wondering how some of those beloved figures from my childhood voted in 2016. It is one thing to hear that infamous statistic, that 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted backed Trump, and to consider it from the broad, socio-theological view of analysis. It is another thing entirely to confront the possibility that the people who shaped your own ethics, not by their words alone but by their very lives, could have discarded that example at the ballot box.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.