Our thinking about white evangelicals has come a long way in four years. While they have been tight with the Republican Party since the realignment of the South, there has long been some independence – if the GOP nominated a pro-choice candidate, like Rudy Giuliani for instance, evangelical elites threatened to bolt the party. By 2020 it seems clear that independence is no longer an operative concept. Evangelicals appear to be all-in for Trump.
This is the jumping off point for this post. We’d like to push this notion to its limits and ask, are evangelicals obedient to Trump? Or do they just follow Christian nationalist policy positions that Trump promotes? CONT.
Paul A. Djupe (Denison) & Ryan P. Burge (Eastern Illinois U.), Religion in Public