David French on the crisis within the evangelical movement.
“I’d be happy to die in this fight…. This is a fight for everything.” That’s what Eric Metaxas, a prominent Christian radio host, told President Donald Trump during a radio interview a few weeks after the 2020 election. If the hysteria in those words surprises you, you probably haven’t paid close attention to how evangelicals have responded to Trump over the last four years. Indeed, evangelicals have been one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies. Even after it was obvious that Trump lost, many Christian leaders redoubled their support for Trump and joined a legal effort to overturn the election and disenfranchise millions of Americans. And just two weeks ago, Franklin Graham, a public face of evangelical Christianity, compared GOP officials who voted for Trump’s impeachment to Judas Iscariot, the biblical character who sold Christ out for 30 pieces of silver. So that’s where American evangelical Christianity is right now. David French is a senior editor at the Dispatch, a columnist at Time, and most recently the author of Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore our Nation. French is also a constitutional lawyer and a conservative Christian who has tracked the evolution of evangelical politics as closely as anyone over the past several years. I reached out to French to talk about how Trump became a pseudo-champion for millions of American Christians, why conspiracy theories are so attractive to religious fundamentalists, and why he believes Trump’s evangelical base represents a serious threat to the rule of law in the US. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. You call this moment a particularly “dangerous time for Christianity.” What makes it so dangerous? There are a few things. I think when you see such a large segment of American Christianity, of white evangelicalism in particular, tie itself so closely to one political party and to one man, Donald Trump, you’re not exactly tying the faith to virtue. That’s obvious enough. There’s really some fascinating research done by Ryan Burge, who is a statistician and a scholar of religion at Eastern Illinois University. He has shown how different American religious strands, whether it’s Black Christians, Mormons, atheists, Catholics, they all maintain some distance in their ideology from the party they most affiliate with. But this isn’t true for white evangelicals. It is an exact overlap. The identification between white evangelicals and the GOP is almost perfect. That’s a problem because it means your faith is now tied to an entire array of both personalities and political positions that do not naturally flow from biblical ethics. Any time you’re going to tie faith to ideas and people who do not either personify biblical ethics or positioned to flow from biblical ethics, you’re creating a real problem. They’ve essentially politicized their faith. But why Trump? Is he just a random but convenient vehicle for Christians? Or is there something particular about him — his celebrity, for example — that makes him a perfect fit for the modern Christian ethos? Man, that’s a big question. Part of it is simple. White evangelicals are Republicans, and Republicans are white evangelicals, which has been the case for a long time now, and Trump was just the Republican nominee, and so he had to work incredibly hard to lose their support. I’d say he worked pretty damn hard to do just that, David — Right, you could say he worked hard to do that by engaging in all kinds of behaviors that are obviously un-Christian, that are contrary to Christian ethics, that are deeply harmful to other people. But that’s where it gets complicated. I tell people all the time that live in other parts of the country, in non-MAGA parts of the country, that they have to remember where white evangelicals tend to get their information about the world. When it comes to politics, most evangelicals are not getting their information from the pulpit. I think it’s a misconception that a lot of people who are outside of the evangelical world have, that at church they’re getting a ton of politics. No, but what’s happening is a lot of Republican Christians are getting catechized in politics through conservative media, through Fox News, through talk radio. As I’ve told a lot of people, if you had the information inflow that a lot of my neighbors have [French lives in Tennessee], you’d be MAGA also.
