It's a widely cited statistic: 81 percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. The thrice-married, trash-talking, wheeling-dealing reality TV star from Queens got a higher percentage of the evangelical vote than fellow evangelical George W. Bush or clean-living Mormon Mitt Romney. How'd that happen?
John Fea offers an explanation in his recent Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Three long-term factors fused to produce what Fea sees as an evangelical betrayal: fear, power, and nostalgia.
Evangelical fear, Fea argues, has deep roots in the American experience. Almost as soon as the Puritans stepped off the Arabella to found Massachusetts Bay, they began to worry that declining devotion would provoke God's wrath against the colony. American Christians have been afraid ever since. Residents of Salem were spooked by witches. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestants feared Catholics. Fundamentalists warned that Darwinism would have dire effects on American morals. Southerners resisted extending rights to non-whites. Dispensationalists live in recurring fear of the imminent end of everything.
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