Once upon a time, social scientists who study religion and politics in the United States thought they understood voters who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — read: evangelical Protestants. Beginning in the late 1970s, when Jerry Falwell, a Baptist minister in Virginia and founder of Liberty University, launched the Moral Majority, which became the lobbying arm of white Protestants alarmed by what they saw as the nation’s moral decline, evangelicalism seemed to capture the affinity between conservative Protestantism and the GOP. That analysis looked plausible from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.
Then came Donald Trump. As pollsters quizzed voters and early primary returns came in, support for Trump among believers, who (one would think) should be offended by his failed marriages and vulgar remarks, was not only a surprise but a phenomenon that defied more than three decades of faith-based electoral expectations. As much as born-again leaders distanced themselves from Trump, polling data suggested that rank-and-file evangelicals were supporting him at levels that contradicted the assumption that conservative faith and conservative politics go hand in hand. In state after state, from Massachusetts to Virginia to Mississippi, Trump won the evangelical vote that pollsters and social scientists widely assumed would go to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
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