Evangelicals for Trump: In Power or Persecuted?

When it comes to religion, the cultural contrast between rural Ohio and suburban Massachusetts is as great as you might expect. I grew up in rural Ohio but have spent most of my adult life in suburban Massachusetts, one of the states in the Northeast with cities laying claim to the first nine spots of the Barna Group’s “most post-Christian cities in America”. This is one of those statistics that is easy to believe on an anecdotal level. In my community, admitting that one regularly attends church is fraught enough to seem confessional. I had one friend tell her husband in hushed tones that I had accidentally “come out” to her — her words — as a conservative. I don’t know which of us was more shocked: her husband or me. But for a person of faith, the benefits of living in a relatively secular place are many, chief of which is knowing people different from yourself. This has become especially meaningful during this contentious election cycle, which has demonstrated (in spades) the enormous disconnect between the secularism of my Northeast neighbors and the religiosity of my Midwestern home community.