Evangelical holdouts are notably more tied to specific confessional traditions. At the mass level, they are more frequent churchgoers. This probably means they are more self-consciously aware of and formed by their identity not just as “mere Christians,” but as Methodists, Baptists, Reformed, etc. #NeverTrump evangelical elites tend to be leaders in explicitly confessional institutions.
Generic evangelicals or cultural/nominal Protestants go for Trump. Confessional evangelicals are theologically primed to resist him.
It will be difficult to prove this empirically, since we have enough trouble capturing “evangelical” in surveys without even beginning to measure the magnitude of specific doctrinal confessions.
But I still find this division fascinating.
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