Great article. I’m an Evangelical Republican that’s voted against Trump 5 times, and your analysis matches my experience. It’s been difficult to find evangelical churches that don’t preach politics, and even those, 10% of the members are still conspiracy theorists. I’ll keep voting for the most Christian candidate in the primaries, but I’ve lost faith that they will ever win a primary. I’m hoping for the next Great Awakening, but I feel like that’s 20 years out.
I preemptively apologize for asking rude and basic question.
I am not a Christian but my in law family is (they are former evangelicals converted to eastern orthodox). They are lovely people - like conservative but not bigoted and have been nothing but nice to me (I am Asian and they are white).
After I saw them, I wonder why many evangelical people are so addicted to bigotry - and some of those bigotory doesn't seem to correlate with the teaching of Christianity tbh. Like if anything, didn't it teach you to love your neighbor instead of saying "3/5 compromise is great idea!"...?
Honestly, my experience is that Christians are the least racist people on the Right. I’m Mixed Raced, hispanic and white, and have never once felt unwelcome in a church because of my race. Every church I’ve been to has been ethnically diverse. Now there are some racists, but that’s because racists are disproportionately on the Right and Evangelicals are disproportionately on the Right. If you look on Substack for atheists on the Right, they tend to be the most racist. The American Left effectively bans any of their members from being racist, so it’s not surprising that there are more racists on the right.
Now evangelicals are bigoted against LGBT people, but that’s fairly easy to explain. Paul preached against homosexuality, so it’s not surprising that Christians follow his teachings. I guess some would call Evangelicals bigoted for supporting criminalizing abortion, but if you look at who attends those rallies and makes up anti abortion meetings, they are disproportionately women. I don’t think they are bigoted against women, they just believe fetus’s have moral rights much like Bentham’s Bulldog believe shrimp have moral rights.
Ross Douthat said as much: "If you hated the Christian right, you'll really hate the post-Christian right."
There's an idea that homophobia and racism go together as some kind of index of general evil, but Christianity actually increases one and decreases the other. The Gospel is for all nations. Catholic priests actually tried to rein in the conquistadors, with varying levels of success. (You can read about protosocialist Jesuit communes in Paraguay sometime.) Christianity was a huge motivator for slavery abolitionism in the USA.
Furthermore, while many modern women aren't crazy about biblical gender roles, they're not really *misogynistic* sensu stricto--women are supposed to be protected from danger, and you'll notice anti-porn and anti-sex work crusaders often join forces with feminists on that side (Louise Perry comes to mind). Hardcore redpill guys aren't very religious.
You may want to look up the 3/5 compromise. The slavers actually wanted slaves to count for 1 (to determine # of house seats) , and the anti-slavery side wanted them to count for 0. The higher the number, the better for the pro-slavery faction
Yeah that makes a total sense. And yeah, I also agree that secular right wing ppl are more racist.
I might just feel some evangelical to be racist bc politicians type figures are more visible (and needless to say, media has a strong negative bias!). in fact, the guy who said “3/5 compromises is a great idea”, I think is a lieutenant governor in Indiana, who claim to be a Christian Nationalist? (And I kinda feel like they are way more nationalist than Christian but I’m not a Christian so I could be totally wrong here)
Coming from a pretty right-wing Catholic perspective:
I don't really know 100 percent. Also depends on what you mean by "bigotry".
One issue, I think, is that Evangelicalism has become very tied up with basically a certain kind of mythology of America or vaguely "Western Civilization", and this becomes somewhat defensively bigoted. (IMO, the theological and leadership structure of Evanglicalism makes it especially vulnerable to this).
You sometimes see something similar in Catholicism (where it's more "tribal religion of Europe" or a fetish for the Crusades), but this is less of a problem because 1. Catholic doctrine is more defined, 2. Catholicism has a much more worldwide worldview and 3. the Bishops can tell you to stop and can sanction you if it gets bad enough.
The Orthodox church has its own form of bigots, but it seems like only young men are really particularly vulnerable to being entranced by this. Much of their attitude seems to be focused on hating on Catholics for not being bigoted enough.
I don't think it's, like, a special case. This is just an example of a general case that is everywhere. Quick exercise to illustrate.
So, you are pro life, yeah? In this example I mean. Put yourself there, deep breaths, fire up the ole empathy. It's not hard. You are a righteous warrior for babies. You are up against a death cult that thrives on the slaughter of infants, google the images if you have a strong stomach. Pro choice/death peeps are monsters. Fix that in your mind. They wake up early, and they don't go to bed until they've made sure that at least one baby has its brains scooped out. They give to charities to send workers to developing nations to make sure the slaughter continues. Straight goblin energy. Evil elementals, laughing over mochas as the trash cans fill with the bodies of their victims, whining on tv about how they are scared by the people holding signs outside of the killing yards.
Ok, so, then, now, in this mindset, which way, mortal man? You have two options. You can fight them honorably, or you can fight them dishonorably. There's a strong memetic heritage for 'they cheat but we don't because we are better' and there is likewise a strong Inglorious Bastards streak that says that we treat Nazis any way we want, because they are Nazis.
Long ago, these two forces were both strong, and competition between them determined which way the movement would go at any given time. Sometimes you'd get dirty, sometimes you'd high road it. W/ever.
The internet, here as everywhere, killed the 'high road' argument to death. It greatly increased the bandwidth, and the frequency of inner movement arguments, and brought them out where the public could see them. The internet shines its blessing on exactly one of these schools of thought, zero points for working out which one it is.
Now the 'follow the laws of war vs Isis, because that's who we are' crowd were prey. Every atrocity, every time the other side low roaded, that's just another opportunity for the extremists to decry your softness. You lose the internal battle that you might once have won, when it's carried out over X. You say something about how the pro choice crew may disagree with us on one position, but they are also Americans and-
Top rated reply: Fart emoji with link to pile of dead fetuses. Second reply: Link to Project Veritas recording of goblins cackling about how many new ways they have discovered to kill babies and how no one can ever make them stop.
The main point here is that the alternative equivalent thing doesn't happen. When John Extremist is like 'women who do abortions should all go to double jail', you can't rely on the internet to do similar dunks, just because the 'less extreme but still pro life' response won't get any upclicks. His top response will be from a pro choicer, pointing out that there are 5 restraining orders against him and that his face is birth control.
So, the first generation pro internet, not in birth order but in career succession, is uniformly more militant, less compromising. Sure. But surely that alone won't-
Nope, not done. The same dynamics apply to their successors! The next Tucker Carlson is Logan Paul. The next GWB is Donald Trump. At every stage, the internal debate is won by the more extreme person, and the moderates fall in line because the alternative is Kamala Harris, the baby killing fascist.
This is eating every movement alive, it's just most obvious in the abortion discussion, because the two sides started with the lowest possible opinion of one another. Preexisting baseline regard (imagine the guys who want 3% tax and those who want 4 sending dead baby pics at one another) delays things, but doesn't stop it. (AI pause and growth people routinely accuse the other of, you guessed it, seeking genocide. Weird how that's where abortion, regulating a technology, immigration, foreign policy and commercial restrictions all end up, huh?)
There's no fix because the poison is dripping out of the medium. You can't do a modern movement over phone calls and letters, so you can't escape this dynamic. The appeal of extremists is deep in human nature (points over to LW, which had so many posts about how bad it would be to get culty and then spawned a murder cult), and it's exaggerated by the dynamics of forum/social media posting. Unless/until the technology shifts to something that doesn't favor the worst, we'll get the worst.
Slatestarcodex had a great post, a long while back, about how incentives are the grooves cut in the ground, and you can look at them and tell where the water will go long before it rains. That's very true. The incentives for modern political movements are exactly what they look like, and they are graven into the fabric of bluesky and parler alike. The reason our leaders are cretins is that we carefully picked them over the decent ones. The water will keep flowing in this way until there are new grooves. Scooping it over in other directions will fail.
(Not an evangelical, so perhaps the wrong one to answer this. I was also a child during the Bush admin, so perhaps my memory betrays me).
Bush (at least to my memory) didn’t deliver too much in the way of right wing culture war victories. When he did deliver wins, he didn’t get much credit (I had never even heard of PEPFAR until Trump canceled it), which meant that the rights cultural clout continued to erode throughout his administration.
It's more complicated. Ashcroft wanted to go fight pornography with prosecutions. But he found himself dealing with terrorism. And Bush's complete failure on Iraq and Katrina soured the brand. At the same time the Supreme Court didn't really shift, with Harriet Mier's nomination doing some damage, before Alito was confirmed. But replacing Sandra Day O'Connor didn't shift the partisan makeup.
Culture war victories require culture to win them, and that's hard when South Park is satirizing everything you've pushed for and Ned Flanders is your most relatable cultural touchstone.
It's interesting to cite Ned Flanders in this context. Ned's conservative position on culture war issues is often mocked, but he's also devoted to his family and hyper-competent at most tasks Homer struggles with. He's presented as uptight on a lot of things that don't really matter, but his faith fuels his commitment to a standard of morality that most people would never hold themselves to. Often the joke is that Homer hates him because Ned is a fundamentally better person than him. Sometimes we laugh at Ned because the alternative is to consider that maybe he has something important we don't.
In many ways, Ned aligns very closely with the pre-2010s Evangelical described in this post. It's sad that even his real-world counterparts chose to reject him.
I wondered the same thing until I got to the next para and it talked about Dobbs. So I interpreted this as meaning he consistently lost battles over culture war issues (pornography, gay rights, abortion, etc)
He was immediately replaced by a *distinctly* culturally left-wing president, was often reviled by the time he left office, and didn't turn his work into long-term culture war victories.
Thanks for covering this, Ozy. I’ve wondered this for quite a while as I grew up LDS, which is evangelical-adjacent and yet maps much more closely onto that older conception of evangelical moralism in the 20th century vs. today. The LDS church still avoids any form of political preaching and totally refuses to make endorsements in political races… they didn’t even endorse Romney for president in 2012.
The LDS church was occasionally involved in raising money for religious cultural issues (Prop 8, anyone?) but if anything they have seemed ashamed about it since, and the vast majority of the cultural energy is around charitable causes. This was my personal framework for understanding Christianity until I became aware of televangelism and right-wing Christian factions as a teenager. I still wonder what it would take to change the trajectory of those denominations (and their members) who are wholly obsessed with the culture war.
My brother's religious (and in fact, has a Master of Divinity) and a lib in general; he called Trump an enemy of God for cutting PEPFAR when I told him about it. He thinks (and I do too) that the "solution" is that this stuff will just burn itself out. Politics and religion don't make for good bedfellows: has the Islamic Republic of Iran's reign made people believe more or less in the truth of Shia Islam? Does anyone who isn't already a religious conservative look at Trump today and think, "Ah, only followers of the True Faith could have elected this guy"? When religion becomes realist and political, it tends to lose, for a number of reasons (political leaders who impose their faith are noxious to the non- and less-religious; politically powerful religions get overrun by snakes who join for political power, like the party composition of the late CPSU; it obscures the personal truth message for a political value message; it's hard to claim any particular moral authority when you're happy to get down in the muck and act like a lying brute to win).
Also, Trump is probably the most blatantly non-religious President of my lifetime (ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek all agree he's the most blatantly non-religious in living memory), so that doesn't exactly help either.
I'm not convinced "Bush lost, Trump won" can be said to have anything to do with anything—Bush at least won his reelection campaign in 2004, and while he ended his second term very unpopular, there's no guarantee Trump won't end his second term as unpopular or worse.
*Romney* losing seems like a more plausible explanation. There are a whole bunch of conservatives who are so utterly convinced Romney was unobjectionable that therefore all liberals' objections to him must have been bad-faith and therefore Trump is actually liberals' fault.
But what I really think broke them was losing on gay marriage. Not just on Obergefell but the fact that by 2011 gay marriage had majority support and that arguably it was obvious things were trending that way even earlier. Like on porn and abortion they could tell themselves they had public opinion on their side and it was just those evil activist judges stopping them but on gay marriage they'd just totally and thoroughly lost in the court of public opinion.
Once that happens, it's easy to start thinking thoughts like, "hey, maybe being the junior partner in a coalition dominated by secular white nationalists wouldn't be so bad!"
Many evangelicals really disliked and distrusted Romney because he was Mormon. In fact, if you plot the relative vote margin of 2008 versus 2012, the Bible Belt in the south is where he underperformed the most.
>losing, and then mostly seeming impotent against the follow-on stuff may have done it
Good way to put it. It was the one-two punch of losing, feeling vindicated by their slippery slope arguments (albeit in non-specific ways), but totally ineffective against stuff they considered even crazier.
I'm appreciating the unexpected musical theatre references, they make me feel like I've been launched back to 2016. I don't have much insightful to say except to please keep up the good reviews and funny writing.
In terms of conspiracists... I remember one time at ACX meetup meeting one of these types (though nonreligious,) who thinks that anything from autism to homosexuality to acceptance of either can be artificially instilled solely through public school and mainstream media. It was a bit jarring given the level of groundedness I am usually used to from online writing.
My father used to talk of similar panic where his parents would get concerned letters from a neighbor or two worrying about their kids playing DnD and video games. He's Christian himself though and last I checked has given up neither.
"When it comes to political extremism infiltrating churches, Moore acknowledged that sometimes the pastor is responsible. (“Crazy as a church growth strategy,” he mused.) But he insists this isn’t typical. In most cases, Moore said, the tension is coming from the bottom up. Members complain about a sermon or a social media post from the church account; angry emails to the leadership prompt an emergency meeting among elders and the pastor; the complaint goes ignored, which enrages the aggrieved members, or it earns an apology, emboldening those members while irritating a different clique. A church can only endure one or two such cycles before the scent of insurgency becomes overpowering."
^ this is notably reminiscent of dynamics in some left-wing milieux as well
"George W. Bush was, except for the torture, a deeply ethical man"
I fully admit to having dumb opinions about Bush during his presidency because, when Bush's presidency started, I was eight years old. I don't accept responsibility for every other dumb opinion anyone else who votes for a Democrat has.
Christian Zionism was a big reason Evangelicals got sucked into politics. Falwell said that America only existed for two reasons: to spread Christianity (evangelize), and to support the Jews—meaning lobbying for Israel.
Great article. I’m an Evangelical Republican that’s voted against Trump 5 times, and your analysis matches my experience. It’s been difficult to find evangelical churches that don’t preach politics, and even those, 10% of the members are still conspiracy theorists. I’ll keep voting for the most Christian candidate in the primaries, but I’ve lost faith that they will ever win a primary. I’m hoping for the next Great Awakening, but I feel like that’s 20 years out.
I preemptively apologize for asking rude and basic question.
I am not a Christian but my in law family is (they are former evangelicals converted to eastern orthodox). They are lovely people - like conservative but not bigoted and have been nothing but nice to me (I am Asian and they are white).
After I saw them, I wonder why many evangelical people are so addicted to bigotry - and some of those bigotory doesn't seem to correlate with the teaching of Christianity tbh. Like if anything, didn't it teach you to love your neighbor instead of saying "3/5 compromise is great idea!"...?
Honestly, my experience is that Christians are the least racist people on the Right. I’m Mixed Raced, hispanic and white, and have never once felt unwelcome in a church because of my race. Every church I’ve been to has been ethnically diverse. Now there are some racists, but that’s because racists are disproportionately on the Right and Evangelicals are disproportionately on the Right. If you look on Substack for atheists on the Right, they tend to be the most racist. The American Left effectively bans any of their members from being racist, so it’s not surprising that there are more racists on the right.
Now evangelicals are bigoted against LGBT people, but that’s fairly easy to explain. Paul preached against homosexuality, so it’s not surprising that Christians follow his teachings. I guess some would call Evangelicals bigoted for supporting criminalizing abortion, but if you look at who attends those rallies and makes up anti abortion meetings, they are disproportionately women. I don’t think they are bigoted against women, they just believe fetus’s have moral rights much like Bentham’s Bulldog believe shrimp have moral rights.
Ross Douthat said as much: "If you hated the Christian right, you'll really hate the post-Christian right."
There's an idea that homophobia and racism go together as some kind of index of general evil, but Christianity actually increases one and decreases the other. The Gospel is for all nations. Catholic priests actually tried to rein in the conquistadors, with varying levels of success. (You can read about protosocialist Jesuit communes in Paraguay sometime.) Christianity was a huge motivator for slavery abolitionism in the USA.
Furthermore, while many modern women aren't crazy about biblical gender roles, they're not really *misogynistic* sensu stricto--women are supposed to be protected from danger, and you'll notice anti-porn and anti-sex work crusaders often join forces with feminists on that side (Louise Perry comes to mind). Hardcore redpill guys aren't very religious.
You may want to look up the 3/5 compromise. The slavers actually wanted slaves to count for 1 (to determine # of house seats) , and the anti-slavery side wanted them to count for 0. The higher the number, the better for the pro-slavery faction
Yeah that makes a total sense. And yeah, I also agree that secular right wing ppl are more racist.
I might just feel some evangelical to be racist bc politicians type figures are more visible (and needless to say, media has a strong negative bias!). in fact, the guy who said “3/5 compromises is a great idea”, I think is a lieutenant governor in Indiana, who claim to be a Christian Nationalist? (And I kinda feel like they are way more nationalist than Christian but I’m not a Christian so I could be totally wrong here)
Coming from a pretty right-wing Catholic perspective:
I don't really know 100 percent. Also depends on what you mean by "bigotry".
One issue, I think, is that Evangelicalism has become very tied up with basically a certain kind of mythology of America or vaguely "Western Civilization", and this becomes somewhat defensively bigoted. (IMO, the theological and leadership structure of Evanglicalism makes it especially vulnerable to this).
You sometimes see something similar in Catholicism (where it's more "tribal religion of Europe" or a fetish for the Crusades), but this is less of a problem because 1. Catholic doctrine is more defined, 2. Catholicism has a much more worldwide worldview and 3. the Bishops can tell you to stop and can sanction you if it gets bad enough.
The Orthodox church has its own form of bigots, but it seems like only young men are really particularly vulnerable to being entranced by this. Much of their attitude seems to be focused on hating on Catholics for not being bigoted enough.
I don't think it's, like, a special case. This is just an example of a general case that is everywhere. Quick exercise to illustrate.
So, you are pro life, yeah? In this example I mean. Put yourself there, deep breaths, fire up the ole empathy. It's not hard. You are a righteous warrior for babies. You are up against a death cult that thrives on the slaughter of infants, google the images if you have a strong stomach. Pro choice/death peeps are monsters. Fix that in your mind. They wake up early, and they don't go to bed until they've made sure that at least one baby has its brains scooped out. They give to charities to send workers to developing nations to make sure the slaughter continues. Straight goblin energy. Evil elementals, laughing over mochas as the trash cans fill with the bodies of their victims, whining on tv about how they are scared by the people holding signs outside of the killing yards.
Ok, so, then, now, in this mindset, which way, mortal man? You have two options. You can fight them honorably, or you can fight them dishonorably. There's a strong memetic heritage for 'they cheat but we don't because we are better' and there is likewise a strong Inglorious Bastards streak that says that we treat Nazis any way we want, because they are Nazis.
Long ago, these two forces were both strong, and competition between them determined which way the movement would go at any given time. Sometimes you'd get dirty, sometimes you'd high road it. W/ever.
The internet, here as everywhere, killed the 'high road' argument to death. It greatly increased the bandwidth, and the frequency of inner movement arguments, and brought them out where the public could see them. The internet shines its blessing on exactly one of these schools of thought, zero points for working out which one it is.
Now the 'follow the laws of war vs Isis, because that's who we are' crowd were prey. Every atrocity, every time the other side low roaded, that's just another opportunity for the extremists to decry your softness. You lose the internal battle that you might once have won, when it's carried out over X. You say something about how the pro choice crew may disagree with us on one position, but they are also Americans and-
Top rated reply: Fart emoji with link to pile of dead fetuses. Second reply: Link to Project Veritas recording of goblins cackling about how many new ways they have discovered to kill babies and how no one can ever make them stop.
The main point here is that the alternative equivalent thing doesn't happen. When John Extremist is like 'women who do abortions should all go to double jail', you can't rely on the internet to do similar dunks, just because the 'less extreme but still pro life' response won't get any upclicks. His top response will be from a pro choicer, pointing out that there are 5 restraining orders against him and that his face is birth control.
So, the first generation pro internet, not in birth order but in career succession, is uniformly more militant, less compromising. Sure. But surely that alone won't-
Nope, not done. The same dynamics apply to their successors! The next Tucker Carlson is Logan Paul. The next GWB is Donald Trump. At every stage, the internal debate is won by the more extreme person, and the moderates fall in line because the alternative is Kamala Harris, the baby killing fascist.
This is eating every movement alive, it's just most obvious in the abortion discussion, because the two sides started with the lowest possible opinion of one another. Preexisting baseline regard (imagine the guys who want 3% tax and those who want 4 sending dead baby pics at one another) delays things, but doesn't stop it. (AI pause and growth people routinely accuse the other of, you guessed it, seeking genocide. Weird how that's where abortion, regulating a technology, immigration, foreign policy and commercial restrictions all end up, huh?)
There's no fix because the poison is dripping out of the medium. You can't do a modern movement over phone calls and letters, so you can't escape this dynamic. The appeal of extremists is deep in human nature (points over to LW, which had so many posts about how bad it would be to get culty and then spawned a murder cult), and it's exaggerated by the dynamics of forum/social media posting. Unless/until the technology shifts to something that doesn't favor the worst, we'll get the worst.
Slatestarcodex had a great post, a long while back, about how incentives are the grooves cut in the ground, and you can look at them and tell where the water will go long before it rains. That's very true. The incentives for modern political movements are exactly what they look like, and they are graven into the fabric of bluesky and parler alike. The reason our leaders are cretins is that we carefully picked them over the decent ones. The water will keep flowing in this way until there are new grooves. Scooping it over in other directions will fail.
When you said George W. Bush lost, what do you mean? He was elected to two terms, the maximum possible.
(Not an evangelical, so perhaps the wrong one to answer this. I was also a child during the Bush admin, so perhaps my memory betrays me).
Bush (at least to my memory) didn’t deliver too much in the way of right wing culture war victories. When he did deliver wins, he didn’t get much credit (I had never even heard of PEPFAR until Trump canceled it), which meant that the rights cultural clout continued to erode throughout his administration.
It's more complicated. Ashcroft wanted to go fight pornography with prosecutions. But he found himself dealing with terrorism. And Bush's complete failure on Iraq and Katrina soured the brand. At the same time the Supreme Court didn't really shift, with Harriet Mier's nomination doing some damage, before Alito was confirmed. But replacing Sandra Day O'Connor didn't shift the partisan makeup.
Culture war victories require culture to win them, and that's hard when South Park is satirizing everything you've pushed for and Ned Flanders is your most relatable cultural touchstone.
It's interesting to cite Ned Flanders in this context. Ned's conservative position on culture war issues is often mocked, but he's also devoted to his family and hyper-competent at most tasks Homer struggles with. He's presented as uptight on a lot of things that don't really matter, but his faith fuels his commitment to a standard of morality that most people would never hold themselves to. Often the joke is that Homer hates him because Ned is a fundamentally better person than him. Sometimes we laugh at Ned because the alternative is to consider that maybe he has something important we don't.
In many ways, Ned aligns very closely with the pre-2010s Evangelical described in this post. It's sad that even his real-world counterparts chose to reject him.
I wondered the same thing until I got to the next para and it talked about Dobbs. So I interpreted this as meaning he consistently lost battles over culture war issues (pornography, gay rights, abortion, etc)
He was immediately replaced by a *distinctly* culturally left-wing president, was often reviled by the time he left office, and didn't turn his work into long-term culture war victories.
His party lost due to a futile war and a highly preventable financial disaster
Lost what?
Key battles in the Culture War
Thanks for covering this, Ozy. I’ve wondered this for quite a while as I grew up LDS, which is evangelical-adjacent and yet maps much more closely onto that older conception of evangelical moralism in the 20th century vs. today. The LDS church still avoids any form of political preaching and totally refuses to make endorsements in political races… they didn’t even endorse Romney for president in 2012.
The LDS church was occasionally involved in raising money for religious cultural issues (Prop 8, anyone?) but if anything they have seemed ashamed about it since, and the vast majority of the cultural energy is around charitable causes. This was my personal framework for understanding Christianity until I became aware of televangelism and right-wing Christian factions as a teenager. I still wonder what it would take to change the trajectory of those denominations (and their members) who are wholly obsessed with the culture war.
I wonder if the ~centralization of having a central authority is helpful in maintaining something like sanity.
> I’m not sure where we go from here.
My brother's religious (and in fact, has a Master of Divinity) and a lib in general; he called Trump an enemy of God for cutting PEPFAR when I told him about it. He thinks (and I do too) that the "solution" is that this stuff will just burn itself out. Politics and religion don't make for good bedfellows: has the Islamic Republic of Iran's reign made people believe more or less in the truth of Shia Islam? Does anyone who isn't already a religious conservative look at Trump today and think, "Ah, only followers of the True Faith could have elected this guy"? When religion becomes realist and political, it tends to lose, for a number of reasons (political leaders who impose their faith are noxious to the non- and less-religious; politically powerful religions get overrun by snakes who join for political power, like the party composition of the late CPSU; it obscures the personal truth message for a political value message; it's hard to claim any particular moral authority when you're happy to get down in the muck and act like a lying brute to win).
Also, Trump is probably the most blatantly non-religious President of my lifetime (ChatGPT, Grok, and DeepSeek all agree he's the most blatantly non-religious in living memory), so that doesn't exactly help either.
I'm not convinced "Bush lost, Trump won" can be said to have anything to do with anything—Bush at least won his reelection campaign in 2004, and while he ended his second term very unpopular, there's no guarantee Trump won't end his second term as unpopular or worse.
*Romney* losing seems like a more plausible explanation. There are a whole bunch of conservatives who are so utterly convinced Romney was unobjectionable that therefore all liberals' objections to him must have been bad-faith and therefore Trump is actually liberals' fault.
But what I really think broke them was losing on gay marriage. Not just on Obergefell but the fact that by 2011 gay marriage had majority support and that arguably it was obvious things were trending that way even earlier. Like on porn and abortion they could tell themselves they had public opinion on their side and it was just those evil activist judges stopping them but on gay marriage they'd just totally and thoroughly lost in the court of public opinion.
Once that happens, it's easy to start thinking thoughts like, "hey, maybe being the junior partner in a coalition dominated by secular white nationalists wouldn't be so bad!"
Many evangelicals really disliked and distrusted Romney because he was Mormon. In fact, if you plot the relative vote margin of 2008 versus 2012, the Bible Belt in the south is where he underperformed the most.
This is a good point. Conservatives who are super-duper salty about Romney losing definitely exist but they might be more business conservative types.
Contrasting opinion: I think losing on gay marriage didn't have as much impact as follow-on things that were, honestly, much more polarizing.
(fighting as much as they did on gay marriage, losing, and then mostly seeming impotent against the follow-on stuff may have done it).
>losing, and then mostly seeming impotent against the follow-on stuff may have done it
Good way to put it. It was the one-two punch of losing, feeling vindicated by their slippery slope arguments (albeit in non-specific ways), but totally ineffective against stuff they considered even crazier.
I'm appreciating the unexpected musical theatre references, they make me feel like I've been launched back to 2016. I don't have much insightful to say except to please keep up the good reviews and funny writing.
In terms of conspiracists... I remember one time at ACX meetup meeting one of these types (though nonreligious,) who thinks that anything from autism to homosexuality to acceptance of either can be artificially instilled solely through public school and mainstream media. It was a bit jarring given the level of groundedness I am usually used to from online writing.
My father used to talk of similar panic where his parents would get concerned letters from a neighbor or two worrying about their kids playing DnD and video games. He's Christian himself though and last I checked has given up neither.
"When it comes to political extremism infiltrating churches, Moore acknowledged that sometimes the pastor is responsible. (“Crazy as a church growth strategy,” he mused.) But he insists this isn’t typical. In most cases, Moore said, the tension is coming from the bottom up. Members complain about a sermon or a social media post from the church account; angry emails to the leadership prompt an emergency meeting among elders and the pastor; the complaint goes ignored, which enrages the aggrieved members, or it earns an apology, emboldening those members while irritating a different clique. A church can only endure one or two such cycles before the scent of insurgency becomes overpowering."
^ this is notably reminiscent of dynamics in some left-wing milieux as well
"George W. Bush was, except for the torture, a deeply ethical man"
a heck of a sentence!
Democrats convinced themselves that defeating god would mean no more republicans.
Not so! And now you all feel cheated.
But yeah: if you liked Christian conservativism so much you should have ever, ever done anything to praise it at the time.
I’m sure once trump is gone we’ll hear about his ‘good side’ and how the next republicans are super-duper-take-us-seriously this-time racist
I fully admit to having dumb opinions about Bush during his presidency because, when Bush's presidency started, I was eight years old. I don't accept responsibility for every other dumb opinion anyone else who votes for a Democrat has.
No. No one will ever talk about Trump's good side, since he doesn't have one.
Maybe not, but if it fits the next generation of propaganda we’ll hear about it.
Never heard liberals have anything positive to say about W in his day either
Christian Zionism was a big reason Evangelicals got sucked into politics. Falwell said that America only existed for two reasons: to spread Christianity (evangelize), and to support the Jews—meaning lobbying for Israel.
As always, our politics differ, but your articles are well-reasoned and informative. Thank you!
No just drinking the kool-aid ,beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing
Trick question: evangelicals were always insane.
Great expose please keep it up!