White Evangelicals: When Donald Trump is Gone, Your Dishonor Will Remain

Among white evangelical Protestants, 83% continue to support Trump.

They support Trump despite his coarseness and misogyny, despite his racism and demonization of immigrants, despite more than two dozen sexual abuse allegations and a jury’s assessment of sexual assault liability against him, and despite his 34 felony convictions.

They support him even though Trump tells us all up-front that he will “prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against citizens, abandon allies, and play politics with disasters.”

While pondering all this, I watched clips from Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, which the New York Times described as a “carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.”

Even by Trump’s low standards, the rally seemed a garish Halloween spectacle.

Among other grotesqueries, the rally served up a crude, racist line about Latinos and described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

The basest of instincts were on display. There was no bottom.

We saw this with our own eyes.

Yet, almost immediately afterward, prominent evangelicals prayed over Trump, declaring that God was raising him up “once again to be our president.”

In this frame of mind, I recalled what Liz Cheney had said about Republicans defending the indefensible in support of Trump, and using her same words, I tweeted this:

“Dear White Evangelicals: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

It was a tweet that garnered over 110,000 views and 292 comments. There were strong reactions.

Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global described it as having generated “some of the most vile commentary on X related to the election.” There was some mean, ugly stuff, including personal attacks and comments on my physical appearance.

I know… I know… when people are reduced to that kind of personal incivility, it says a lot more about them than it does about me.

And when evangelicals call me a “demon,” well… it’s happened so often by now that I just think they aren’t very creative.

And yet… it’s not as if I don’t notice these things. I feel the punches. But with some two decades of abuse survivor advocacy in the Southern Baptist Convention—and the seemingly endless meanness that Baptists have constantly dished out—I’ve developed a thick skin.

I had to. It was the only way to survive in the face of so much hate.

Ever since Trump came on the scene back in 2015, many people have wondered how evangelicals could support such a grossly immoral man. “Isn’t it incongruous with their values?” they repeatedly asked.

I’m convinced that, by and large, white evangelicals champion Trump, not despite his terrible flaws but because of them.

I wrote about this in a column called “Southern Baptists and Trumpism,” but it’s really applicable beyond Baptists to white evangelicals more broadly.

They like Trump’s authoritarianism, racism, and misogyny. They like his meanness.

If Trump can unapologetically spew such ugly stuff, then so too can they. He effectively gives permission for them to unleash their worst selves—and to even self-righteously rationalize it.

He is a reflection of who they are.

And sadly, he is a reflection, not of evangelicals’ best selves, but of their worst selves.

I think that’s part of what I saw in the comments to my tweet.

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