Donald Trump, who has been leading the national polls for the Republican nomination since this past summer, has strong support among evangelicals. Given Trump’s beliefs, lifestyle, crude language, and some of his positions on issues, this is baffling. As Jonathan Merritt argues in “The Atlantic,” “Trump is immodest, arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-obsessed, thrice-married, and until recently, pro-choice. By conventional standards, evangelical Christians should despise him.”
Nevertheless, in various polls, significant percentages of evangelicals (as high as 45 percent of white evangelicals in a December 2015 CNN poll) say that they would vote for the real estate mogul. Granted, his support among evangelical leaders is limited primarily to proponents of the prosperity gospel such as Paula White and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland. In a July 2015 World Magazine survey, only four percent of 94 prominent evangelicals said that they supported Trump for president while 75 percent declared that “they absolutely would not vote for him in primaries.” In a December 2015 World poll, none of these leaders reported that he or she would vote for Trump if the presidential election were held that day.
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