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While it can seem as if the whole of evangelicalism has embraced the president, Trump has in fact exacerbated deep fracture lines within the movement. Christians of color have expressed rage over what they see as abandonment by their brothers and sisters in the faith; many have even left their congregations.

Many of these same women have been put off by Moore’s political turn, which was not in evidence onstage that night. Even those who might disdain Trump see her outspokenness as divisive and inappropriate for a Bible teacher. “I don’t think this is the avenue for political discussions,” said Shelly, 56. “I think it should stay focused on God.”

Moore believes she is focused on God. The target of her scorn is an evangelical culture that downplays the voices and experiences of women. Her objective is not to evict Trump from the White House, but to clear the cultural rot in the house of God.

As a well-known preacher from many years ago asked, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly.

White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.

“You are always only one generation away from losing Christianity,” said Micah Schouten, who was born and raised in Sioux Center, recalling something a former pastor used to say. “If you don’t teach it to your children it ends. It stops right there.”

“The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms. Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.’”

“I feel like on the coasts, in some of the cities and stuff, they look down on us in rural America. You know, we are a bunch of hicks, and don’t know anything. They don’t understand us the same way we don’t understand them. So we don’t want them telling us how to live our lives.”

“You joke that we don’t get it, well, you don’t get it either. We are not speaking the same language.”

Those in the town, though, ultimately heard something else entirely. What mattered was not just what Mr. Trump said. It was where he said it. And to whom.

Mr. Driesen spoke of the policies that were important to him, all the usual conservative issues. Small government. Ending abortion. Judges who share his political views. “Traditional families,” he said.“Unfortunately, there’s just more divorce than there used to be,” he said. “There’s more cohabitating. I think it is detrimental to the family. I just think kids do better in a two-parent home, with a mom and a dad.”

“The religious part is huge for us, as we see religious freedoms being taken away,” Ms. Driesen said. “If you don’t believe in homosexuality or something, you lose your business because of it. And that’s a core part of your faith. Whereas I see Trump as defending that. He’s actually made that executive order to put the Bibles back in the public schools. That is something very worrisome and dear to us, our religious freedom.”

They want the Christian education for their children “so we don’t have to have them indoctrinated with all these different things,” he said. “We are free to teach them our values.”

“Silly things. Just let the boys go in the boys’ bathroom and the girls go in the girls’,” he said. “It’s just something you’d think is never going to happen, and nowadays it could. And it probably will.”“Just hope nobody turns it upside down,” he said.“But we feel like we are in a little area where we are protected yet,” she said. “We are afraid of losing that, I guess.”

She paused. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance. If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”

“Trump’s an outsider, like the rest of us,” he said. “We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is.” “Is he a man of integrity? Absolutely not,” he went on. “Does he stand up for some of our moral Christian values? Yes.” The guys agreed. “I’m not going to say he’s a Christian, but he just doesn’t attack us,” his friend Jason Mulder said.

“I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all,” she said. “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

None of them said they had wanted to vote for Mr. Trump, but they did — “When he was the last option,”

But they agreed it would be easier to vote for him this time. Before, it was hard to know what he would be like as president. Now they knew, and they liked the results: Supreme Court justices, conservative judges

“Obama wanted to take my assault rifle, he wanted to take out all the high-capacity magazines,” Mr. Schouten said. “It just —” “— felt like your freedoms kept getting taken from you,”

“We have life very easy, it is laid back, it is like-minded people. And it’s just, I like the bubble,” she said. “I like not worrying about sending them outside to play, or whose house they are going to if they are going to the neighbors a few houses down, they might not go to the same church, they might not hold all the same beliefs, but I trust them. I don’t know, maybe that is naïve.”

The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her. She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.

The Trump era has revealed the complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, even as white evangelical Christianity continues to decline as a share of the national population.

She explained what she meant. “If you are a hard-working Caucasian-American, your rights are being limited because you are seen as against all the races or against women,” she said. “Or there are people who think that because we have conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my husband, I must be against women’s rights.”

“People in my circles, you don’t really hear about racism, so I guess I don’t know too much about it,” Mr. Driesen said of the protests. “When I see the pictures, I thought they all should be at work, being productive citizens.”

“We are making this huge issue of white versus Black, Black Lives Matter. All lives matter,” she said. “There are more deaths from abortion than there are from corona, but we are not fighting that battle.”

“We are picking and choosing who matters and who doesn’t,” she said. “They say they are being picked on, when we are all being picked on in one shape or form.”

After the election of President Barack Obama, the country seemed to undergo a cultural shift, she said. “It was dangerous to voice your Christianity,” she said. “Because we were viewed as bigots, as racists — we were labeled as the haters and the ones who are causing all the derision and all of the problems in America. Blame it on the white believers.”

There are some signs of fraying at the edges of the coalition, among some women and young people. If even a small fraction turns away from Mr. Trump, it could make the difference to his re-election.

even if he loses in November, mainstream evangelical Christianity has made plain its deepest impulses and exposed where the majority of its believers pledge allegiance.

There is a straight line from that day at Dordt four years ago to a recent scene at a chapel in Washington, where armed officers tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square and shot them with rubber pellets. They were clearing the way for Mr. Trump to march from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church and hold up a Bible, a declaration of Christian power.

“To me it was like, that’s great. Trump is recognizing the Bible, we are one nation under God,” Mr. Schouten said. “He is willing to stand out there and take a picture of it for the country to see.”He added: “Trump was standing up for Christianity.”

encroaching secularism, combined with a perceived liberal hostility toward people of faith, has prompted many conservative Christians to support any politician who will protect their traditions.

many of his fellow evangelicals have simply lost faith in the caliber of America’s political leaders. “In the 1960 presidential election, the voters basically assumed the basic moral probity of both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy,” he told me. “Forty years later, voters came to understand that one was a serial philanderer and the other was a paranoid leader who was a habitual liar … We live in an entirely different information environment, and I do think that changes a lot.”

“The way evangelicals see the world, the culture is not only slipping away—it’s slipping away in all caps, with four exclamation points after that. It’s going to you-know-what in a handbasket,” Brody told me. “Where does that leave evangelicals? It leaves them with a choice. Do they sacrifice a little bit of that ethical guideline they’ve used in the past in exchange for what they believe is saving the culture?”

Conservative evangelicals, she said, had learned from cultural elites on the left that in the struggle for power, idealism sometimes had to be sacrificed.

“What are the public-policy implications? That has to be the question,” she told me. “It’s no longer just about personal morality. It’s not that those things don’t matter to us. They do. But you need to think about it like a war. When you’re at the warfront, you just want the best guy next to you. You don’t care what his morality is, it’s just, ‘Can you shoot that guy over there?’”

“I’m not saying that’s a good thing,” she conceded. “It probably isn’t. We should be a society of reasoned debate, and mutual affection, and coming together in the public square to sing kumbaya. But we’re not. Everyone sees it as a fight.”

Indeed it’s hard to know who we do feel pity toward, except ourselves — for we believe that we are the real victims in today’s world. Those among us who are evangelical Christians are especially paranoid: While Americans overall are twice as likely to say there is more discrimination against Muslims than against Christians, the numbers are almost reversed for white evangelical Protestants.

when it comes to keeping us away from the core truths of our faith, I suspect this one error is key: Christians today seem governed by fear.

Theologians as well as psychologists will tell you that there is a spiritual peril in acting out of fear and a sense of danger. Fear drives us into patterns of “reasoning” that are far from reasonable, but more akin to reactionary patterns of cause-and-effect

And fear moves us away from the core of Christianity — love. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love,” says the first epistle of John.

The tyranny of fear in white Christian life is especially visible among white evangelicals, who stand out in their opposition to pluralism in America.

Christians’ defensiveness is increasing: in 2012, 54 percent of white evangelicals supported giving preference to “traditional Judeo-Christian values”; that number rose to 76 percent in 2015. What’s true of white evangelicals is a leading indicator for white Christians as a whole. The fear of the future makes us, in Jesus’ words, strain at gnats while we swallow camels (Mt 23:24).

This is disastrous because, from the perspective of hope, in many ways our age represents an unprecedented opportunity for Christians. The collapse of Christendom over the past few centuries has created a potentially more egalitarian, authentic and pluralistic religious world. Serious relationships with members of other religious traditions, as well as atheists, teaches believers more about their faith than we would ever have otherwise known.

Luther’s dream of a “Priesthood of all believers” is potentially closer than ever.

Ironically, it may well be that it is Christians’ fears about losing control of the culture that have accelerated the rise of secularism itself

Consider the rise of the “Nones” in American public life — those adults, especially younger adults, who when asked about their religious affiliation, say “none.” For decades that number was very low, but then it began to increase rapidly in the 1980s. Why was that? It seems to be caused by the tight alliance of Christianity, especially conservative white Christianity, with conservative politics over the past several decades — an association itself driven by prophesies of a rising tide of godlessness in America after the 1960s.

Pope John Paul II, who most American Christians (even Protestants like me) would allow was a pretty good Christian, said in his first homily as pope, “Do not be afraid!” This remains useful theological advice. If we are Christians, we must believe that we are safer in God’s hands than in our own. We should take no care for the morrow, but preach compassion and mercy to all, without distinction. If we do that, they’ll know we are Christians by our love — rather than our fear.

This week two influential conservative Catholic scholars, Robert George and George Weigel, put out an open letter to their co-believers, urging them to reject Trump as “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”

some clarity is also needed about what it means, exactly, that Trump is winning religious voters.

Trump is not the first choice of most active churchgoers. Indeed, active religiosity is (relatively speaking) one of the bulwarks against Trumpism, and his coalition is strongest among the most secular Republicans

38 percent still described themselves as weekly churchgoers.

As with the wider conservative coalition, Trump is heightening conservative religion’s internal contradictions and fracturing it along pre-existing fault lines

Trump is losing the most active believers, but he’s winning in what I’ve previously termed the “Christian penumbra” — the areas of American society (parts of the South very much included) where active religiosity has weakened, but a Christian-ish residue remains.

The inhabitants of this penumbra still identify with Christianity, but they lack the communities, habits and support structures that make the religious path (somewhat) easier to walk. As a result, this Christian-ish landscape seems to produce more social dysfunction, more professional disappointment and more personal disarray than either a thoroughgoing secularism or a fully practiced faith

his occasional nods to religious faith — like, say, his promise to make store clerks say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” — are well tailored for voters for whom Christian identity is still a talisman even when an active faith is all but gone.

among Americans who do still have an active faith, Trump has exploited the widening gap between what many conservative Christians assumed about the relationship between their country and their faith, and what the last 10 years or more of social and political change have revealed about the nation’s drift

Evangelicals have for decades believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they’ve woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction.

If this is really a post-Christian society, they seem to be thinking, then Christians need to make sure the meanest, toughest heathen on the block is on their side. So it makes sense to join an alliance of convenience with a strongman, placing themselves under his benevolent protection, because their own leaders have delivered them only to defeat.

the lure of the strongman is particularly powerful for those believers whose theology was somewhat Trumpian already — nationalistic, prosperity-worshiping, by turns apocalyptic and success-obsessed.

With the steady post-1960s weakening of traditional Christian confessions, the preachers of this kind of gospel — this distinctively American heresy, really — have assumed a new prominence in the religious landscape. Trump, with his canny instinct for where to drive the wedge, has courted exactly these figures

he’s wooed televangelists and prosperity preachers, and pitched himself to believers already primed to believe that a meretricious huckster with unusual hair might be a vessel of the divine will.

Which he is not, save perhaps in this sense: In the light of Trumpism, many hard truths about American Christianity — its divisions, its failures, its follies, its heresies — stand ruthlessly exposed.

for many white evangelicals, religious and economic spheres are conceptualized as two sides of the same coin. They describe their worldview as one in which the spiritual and the material are mutually dependent and interactive. And the popularity of this worldview cuts across social class.

approximately 31 percent of Americans, many of whom are white evangelical men, believe that God is steering the United States economy, thus fusing their religious and economic interests. These individuals believe in what I call an “Authoritative God.” An Authoritative God is thought to be actively engaged in daily activities and historical outcomes. For those with an Authoritative God, value concerns are synonymous with economic concerns because God has a guiding hand in both. Around two-thirds of believers in an Authoritative God conjoin their theology with free-market economics, creating a new religious-economic idealism. Nearly one-fifth of American voters hold this viewpoint, signaling that it can be a major political force.

Religious-economic idealism is the belief that the free-market works because God is guiding it.

this ideology explains two supposed paradoxes. First, it indicates why some religious working-class Americans have embraced the GOP. It is not that these individuals ignore their class interests, but rather that they believe issues of abortion and gay marriage are linked to whether God is willing to help solve both social ills and their economic woes.

the fact that income does not predict whether an American believes in an Authoritative God indicates that this is not a class-based ideology. Instead, it is a cosmic worldview, which appeals across economic divides. Most clearly, it benefits the wealthy because conservative economic policies tend to favor them. But wealthy Americans with an Authoritative God can also have a religious-like devotion to their economic conservatism. In this way, their economic pragmatism transforms into a type of religious dogmatism. And dogmatism does not bend to changing circumstances and outcomes, so that we can expect believers in religious-economic idealism to cling to laissez-faire policies even when they appear not to work.

religious-economic idealism makes economic and cultural issues fully compatible, which may be a blessing and a curse for the Republican Party. It blesses the GOP with strong support from individuals who may be personally disadvantaged by their economic strategies, but also curses them with an unforgiving and inflexible constituency if political compromise becomes a necessity of governing. In a universe where God decrees no government intervention, any deviation or compromise from the free market is heresy.

Americans who feel that “God has a plan” for them and their country are much more likely to think that “success is achieved by ability rather than luck” and that “able-bodied people who are out of work should not receive unemployment checks.” And over half (54 percent) of Americans who think God controls the economy feel that “anything is possible for those who work hard”; in contrast, only one-quarter of Americans who rely on human resourcefulness, rather than God’s plan, feel this way.

Because evangelicals assert that you alone are responsible for your eternal salvation, it makes sense that the individual is also responsible for his or her economic salvation without government assistance, especially if God is the only assistance you really need.

they're a sign of a broad acceptance and appreciation of Jewish culture. Outside of New York City, Jews are generally rare in terms of numbers. Yet in spite of this, they've become seen as normal—and popular—by the population at large.

Why, despite the anti-Semitism that still exists in the United States, are Americans mostly down with the Jews?

There's generalized cultural cachet, which is a little hard to pin down, but from doting articles about deli food in The New York Times to Adam Sandler's famous ode to Hanukkah, staples of Jewish culture have become ubiquitous and adored. 

white evangelicals rated the faith more highly than respondents from other religions; they were more enthusiastic about Jews than anyone besides Jews themselves. This is not a coincidence; evangelicals have typically been strong supporters of Jews and Zionism, citing the group's status as God's "chosen people" in the Bible and the prophesied future of Israel as the site of Jesus's second coming. 

Buddhists and Hindus were given decidedly chillier ratings than their Jewish brethren, and Muslims ranked the lowest out of all religious groups, including the ever-despised atheists. People of these faiths are more likely to be first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants; they haven't been around as long as Jews. 

63" out of 100 was the mean rating for the most popular group in the survey (and I'll say it again, just because it brings me pleasure: that would be the Jews). Americans from all groups, it seems, feel pretty lukewarm about anyone who isn't like them.

The last time the religious left made this much noise was in protesting the Vietnam War, when the members of the clergy were mostly white men.

Now, those in the forefront include blacks and Latinos, women and gays, along with a new wave of activist Catholics inspired by Pope Francis. And they include large contingents of Jews, Muslims and also Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists in some cities — a reflection of the country’s religious diversity.

Relations between Democrats and religious progressives have been more difficult since 1980, when evangelicals deserted Jimmy Carter — one of their own, whom they had supported in 1976 — for Ronald Reagan.

Last year, he branched out. Along with the Rev. Traci Blackmon, a well-known supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, and other clergy members, Dr. Barber trained thousands of activists in 32 states, an effort that continues.

“If we’re going to change the country,” he says, “we’ve got to nationalize state movements. It’s not from D.C. down. It’s from the states up.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

50th anniversary of the landmark sermon at Riverside Church in Manhattan in which King denounced the Vietnam War, saying, “I cannot be silent,”

Dr. Barber preached against Mr. Trump from the same pulpit and denounced what he saw as pervasive racism across the political right.

Such a loose alliance of people of many faiths, many causes — and no small number of intractable disagreements — may never rival the religious right in its cohesion, passion or political influence

Issues on which the religious left is at odds with Democratic doctrine include military spending and the death penalty, though the most polarizing is abortion — the main barrier, for many liberal evangelicals and Catholics, to voting as Democrats — as could be seen when the party split recently over whether to endorse an anti-abortion Democrat running for mayor of Omaha.

Setting abortion aside, political appeals based on religious beliefs continue to carry risk for Democrats, given the growing numbers of Americans who claim no religion:

Secular voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and younger voters are far more secular than older voters.

“Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left,” he said. “The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.”

If Dr. Barber works from the outside in, Mr. Wallis is the consummate inside player. His Capitol Hill operation is on an upswing, its big new offices bustling with interns plotting social media campaigns like a “Matthew 25 Pledge,” to “protect and defend vulnerable people in the name of Jesus.”

“People are trying to figure out: How do we get traction? But it has not yet jelled,” she said. “So I yell at the Holy Spirit, ‘Hurry up!’”

In Cincinnati alone, 21 churches have joined a sanctuary coalition, forming teams to respond when immigrants are detained, as one group of ministers did recently when a Guatemalan man seeking asylum was held at a nearby jail. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

More and more, younger evangelicals are questioning their association with the religious right, Mr. Nathan said: “I don’t know almost any evangelical Christians who feel comfortable with the old evangelical guard. They’re certainly not in my orbit. Millennial Christians are really concerned about social justice.”

“I wish we were not in this place,” he said, “but it’s one of the gifts of this moment. The energy is there, and there’s new, deep relationships that are being forged between clergy and congregations that never existed before.”

“We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.

Like many Republicans in Congress, some evangelical leaders who have been most supportive of Mr. Trump distanced themselves and their faith from the rioters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, called the violence “anarchy.” The siege on the Capitol “has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity,” he said. “Our support of President Trump was based on his policies.”

The riot on Wednesday, carried out by a largely white crowd, also illustrated the racial divide in American Christianity.

Hours before the attack on the Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta had been elected to the U.S. Senate after many conservative white Christians tried to paint him as a dangerous radical, even as his campaign was rooted in the traditional moral vision of the Black church. And for years many Black Christians have warned white believers that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on race was going to end badly.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., Laura Kloosterman, 34, attended mass on Wednesday and prayed that Congress would decline to certify Mr. Biden’s victory. She had read claims online about flawed voting machines undercounting votes for Mr. Trump — there is no evidence for these claims, which Mr. Trump and right-wing voices online have promoted.

These false beliefs have forged even stronger connections between white evangelicals and other conservative figures.

The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”

A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”

I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.

Why? Because he realized the health of the church wasn’t up to the state, nor was it dependent on the church’s nonbelieving neighbors.

Paul demonstrates ferocious anger at the church’s internal sin, but says this about those outside the congregation: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”

Yet as we witness systemic misconduct unfold at institution after institution after institution, often without any real accountability, we can understand that many members of the church have gotten Paul’s equation exactly backward. They are remarkably tolerant of even the most wayward, dishonest and cruel individuals and institutions in American Christianity. At the same time, they approach those outside with a degree of anger and ferocity that’s profoundly contributing to American polarization.

Under this moral construct, internal critique is perceived as a threat, a way of weakening American evangelicalism. It’s seen as contributing to external hostility and possibly even the rapid secularization of American life that’s now underway. But Paul would scoff at such a notion. One of the church’s greatest apostles didn’t hold back from critiquing a church that faced far greater cultural or political headwinds — including brutal and deadly persecution at the hands of the Roman state — than the average evangelical can possibly imagine.

Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions

Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.

Trump’s coffers have paled in comparison with Clinton’s.

In total, he’s given himself a little over $56 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which doesn’t come close to his “more than $100 million” pledge.

The Democratic National Committee asked a federal judge Wednesday to hold the Republican National Committee in contempt of court, claiming that Donald Trump and his campaign had violated a longstanding consent decree that bans the RNC from intimidating minority voters.

That connection places the RNC in direct violation of a 1982 consent decree that limits how Republican officials can challenge minority voter qualifications at the polls, the DNC argued.

“The RNC is working in active concert with Trump, the Trump campaign, and Stone to intimidate and harass minority voters in violation of this Court’s Consent Decree,” the DNC’s filing said. “The Court should use its inherent contempt powers to remedy those violations, and enforce future compliance with the Consent Decree, with sanctions.”

The RNC settled the lawsuit in 1982 and agreed to a consent decree that, among other conditions, required the party and its associates to “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities…where the racial or ethnic composition of such districts is a factor” and “where a purpose or significant effect of such activities is to deter qualified voters from voting.”

“Frankly, if any Catholic votes for Hillary Clinton, if I were a Catholic, I wouldn’t be talking to them anymore,” Trump said. “She’s been terrible in what she said and her thoughts toward Catholics, and to evangelicals—she was mocking evangelicals, also. Why would an evangelical or a Catholic—and almost, you could say, anybody of faith—but in particular, because they were mentioned, evangelicals and Catholics, why would they vote for Hillary Clinton, and how could they vote for Hillary Clinton?”

As Hunter’s book points out, neither political nor cultural change usually happens like this. Instead, it comes from networks, institutions, interest groups, and it requires strategy, alliance-building and steady pressure.

This is part of why evangelical Christians, notwithstanding their numbers, tend to have less influence over actual Republican governance than fiscal conservatives or foreign-policy hawks. They’re always looking for a hero (or heroine), while the party’s other factions focus on staffing decisions and policy commitments, where the real work of politics takes place.

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump.

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.

Another important thing to understand about Cyrus is that he is not a queen. In the Christian nationalist world, legitimate political power is largely male power. Mr. Drollinger insists that the Bible describes only “male leadership.”

while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

The Democratic electorate just didn’t share the level of anger and antipathy—or have the same death wish—no matter how many Republican pundits wishcast it upon them.

The decades of resentment against elites primed evangelical voters to rally behind someone who was willing to fight and anger those elites.

What this left in the Republican coalition was a small group of purely ideological and devoutly religious (especially Mormon) voters uniting with the waning number of what used to be known as country-club Republicans to stave off Trump. The numbers were so overwhelmingly against them that even the country-club Republicans quickly decided to join a new club and put on a red Mar-a-Lago visor.

In the end, it was the rare wisdom of Rep. Thomas Massie that best encapsulated the situation. The majority of Republicans weren’t either ideologically motivated or motivated by competent governance. They just wanted to support “the craziest son-of-a-bitch in the race.”

On top of the influx of working-class, free-market skeptics, the evangelical base of the party proved deeply susceptible to populist insurgency. Prior to 2016, the “true conservative” theory of the case was that the ideological homogeneity of evangelicals would allow them to play the role of gatekeeper against a hedonistic, populist insurgency.

And so they have.

There have been several deeply reported articles about how black voters came to play this critical role in Democratic politics, and they all come to a similar general conclusion: Black voters made a pragmatic choice driven by who they think can beat Trump.

Call it the inverse of the Massie Corollary—they didn’t want to risk four more years of Donald Trump on the craziest son-of-a-bitch in the race. Instead, they picked the most palatable and trustworthy son-of-a-bitch they could find.

The suburban swing voter and black voting blocs were joined by the urban NPR/The Daily-listening liberal who hates Donald Trump so much that she would prefer getting COVID-19 to having him in office next January 21. These voters, who in another situation might’ve been Bernie-curious, were not about to let Donald Trump spend six months calling them commie-sympathizer

Put together, these groups created a wall that was impenetrable for Bernie’s populist campaign.

Because the Democrats had an electorate that was uber-engaged, pragmatic, and focused on beating Trump, it only took those 72 hours for the preponderance of the electorate to get the message: Bernie wasn’t inevitable. The party could do better.

It turns out that black voters were for Democrats what Republicans had assumed evangelicals would be for the GOP

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