Opinion | How Evangelical Christians Went From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump

Many white evangelical Christians love Donald Trump — a fact of American politics that has shaped the makeup and rulings of the Supreme Court, the culture and morality wars waged by the Republican Party and the political evolution and power of evangelicals themselves. At the same time, some forms of evangelical Christianity are becoming less Christian, with believers less likely to attend church and less likely to embrace some of the faith’s most bedrock beliefs.

How did this happen? How did millions of Americans go from “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” to Mr. Trump, who appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine? It was never ordained that he would become a man compared to biblical figures.

As Jon Ward sees it, truly understanding American politics right now requires us to have a much more nuanced and informed perspective on evangelical culture and history.

Mr. Ward is a journalist and the author of the book “Testimony,” which focuses on his upbringing in the evangelical movement from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, the appeal of a personal and direct relationship with God and the way politics and culture have changed since then. “There were a large number of Americans,” he told me, “many of whom were influenced by all of these factors, who just felt like the sky was falling and we had to go with some guy who was going to maybe destroy it all but maybe burn it all down and create something new.”

This interview, which has been edited for quality, length and clarity, is part of an Opinion series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew.

Jane Coaston: I want to make sense for our readers of how America got from the Moral Majority to Trump. The evolution of evangelical Americans who went from advocating a specific Christian conception of moral law to supporting a president who seems untethered to Christianity. And I want to start with your own beginnings. You write a lot about growing up in a Christian community that was very much not “of the world.” How did evangelicals in that community feel about America, its secular society and its elected leaders?

Jon Ward: I think we just didn’t think about it very much, other than to say it was generally sort of Babylon, unredeemable and going to hell, probably metaphorically more than literally. But also literally. I don’t know that all of the people that my parents grew up around had a lot of trauma. It’s not as if the outside world had inflicted all this suffering on them. It was just a really bad place, and so we avoided it.

Coaston: Evangelicals of the ’60s and ’70s were comparatively apolitical. Their politics were very different from what we see now. You wrote about your father sort of starting out in the Jesus movement of the ’70s. What was that, and what did its politics look like?

[The Jesus movement was an evangelical coalition that began on the West Coast during the 1970s that blended traditional Christian fundamentalist beliefs with a hippie aesthetic and a view that the current church had grown too stale and staid.]

Ward: My parents were late to Woodstock. My parents were both born in ’53, so they’re too young to have enjoyed parts of the ’60s.

So there was hippie influence in the Jesus movement, but I think they were just as much influenced by the desire for stability that the late ’60s produced. The other factor was they felt like their parents’ religion was completely dead and lifeless and irrelevant to everyday life. So they wanted something that connected with them at an authentic level. There were all these crazy enthusiastic rock-band-driven meetings of young people where they felt like they really got in touch with God. My dad told me of going to a meeting in Iowa and somebody saying, “Jesus wants a relationship with you,” and he had never heard of a religion where it was about God wanting to know you personally. I think that really helped me understand, again, even though I lived it, like how that personal connection to God was so powerful.

And you asked about the politics. I mean, my dad voted for Carter. He voted for McGovern.

Coaston: What did the people around him think about Carter?

Ward: Well, in ’76 I think a lot of people took Carter at his word. And then he became more of a politician during his presidency, and the Moral Majority and Southern Baptists flipped to the Republicans through, you know, Paul Weyrich and the leveraging of abortion.

[Paul Weyrich was a conservative activist who co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973 and the Moral Majority in 1979.]

Coaston: So abortion was what mattered to evangelicals when it came to the presidency, above pretty much anything else?

Ward: Of course. And we didn’t think of it as politics. How can it be politics when it’s about murdering babies? It’s not politics. It’s everything.

Coaston: In the book, you mentioned that when you were a kid, no one really thought about politics; it was like a separate sphere. But then you start seeing more evangelicals thinking about Sarah Palin and then Donald Trump in biblical terms. When did that change?

Ward: Evangelicals definitely got pretty political with Ronald Reagan. But I think Bill Clinton ratcheted it up even more. It was like Reagan was the “city on the hill” guy who represented evangelicals in a nice, friendly way and things were going well, and then Clinton ratcheted it up. Clinton taught evangelicals to hate.

Coaston: Clinton taught evangelicals to hate?

Ward: I think so. I mean, Rush Limbaugh taught evangelicals to hate, but Clinton was the object of that hate, both Bill and Hillary. And then 9/11 turned George W. Bush into sort of a warrior king for righteousness. And then, I think, all of that sets up the reception to Barack Obama. There’s, like, these three decades, three presidencies of hyperpartisanship, which get increasingly more partisan. I think a lot of these histrionics about Trump are a product of having to double down and triple down about something that’s so obviously indefensible.

I still think all of that muscle memory is there for a lot of these evangelicals who grew up in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s with the idea of being left behind by the culture and politics. I think it explains why people don’t mind if things get worse. I think it explains “Let’s throw our hands up in the air and just sort of give up on trying to understand it if it’s too complicated or if we’re wrong and people tell us that.” The closest thing to nihilism that I experienced or saw was relatives saying, you know, “Things are so bad that Trump’s going to maybe destroy everything — but maybe he’ll make everything new.”

There were a large number of Americans, many of whom were influenced by all of these factors, who just felt like the sky was falling and we had to go with some guy who was going to maybe destroy it all but maybe burn it all down and create something new.

Coaston: Early in the book you talk about a subtle Gnosticism in the church. The environment that you were raised in, a desire to escape both the human body and the world itself. What did it look like for you on the ground?

[Gnosticism refers to an early Christian movement whose associated ideas and organizations have largely been declared heretical by the Catholic Church. It flourished in the second century and, among other beliefs, understood the body to be a hindrance to the spirit that could even be evil in and of itself.]

Ward: It’s funny, I was walking over here actually just thinking about how anxiety that I’m dealing with everyday stuff right now manifests in my body. That was a very foreign concept growing up. Anything related to worry or anxiety was categorized as sin that needed to be, like, cut out rather than something that was part of your created experience that God could care about.

James K.A. Smith calls it “brains on a stick.” It’s all about what you believed up here and you can kind of control everything happening in your body through a mind-over-matter-type effort.

Coaston: Do you think the people that you grew up around thought of themselves as outsiders in American culture, or did they see themselves as part of a silent majority?

Ward: My church, I think, thought of themselves as outsiders. I think if you were to go to a more Southern culture religious environment, that would be where you’d see more silent majority types. We didn’t really associate with people who weren’t in our church. To the degree we did, it was to try to invite them to church. I didn’t really know anything about what was going on in our community. Most people at the time didn’t. We would go to traffic intersections and hand out water and invite people to church.

Coaston: I want to go back to Sarah Palin and how she’s compared to Queen Esther. What did that mean, and why do you think Palin specifically became that figure?

[Queen Esther is a biblical hero who prevented a genocide of the Jewish people. After becoming the wife of King Ahasuerus, she learned that Haman, one of the king’s advisers, planned to kill all of the Jews in the Persian Empire. In response, she told the king that she was Jewish and persuaded him to stop Haman’s plot. Purim is celebrated in honor of Queen Esther and of the Jewish people’s triumph over their persecutors.]

Ward: I don’t think there’s a lot of close mapping red yarn on a blackboard or whatever. I just think calling her Queen Esther was just a way to say the Bible says Queen Esther was a great hero and Palin is a great hero as well. Why did she become that? There was a huge freakout against Obama. I think evangelicals had been feeling for years and decades that they were losing influence. John McCain, I think, accelerated that because he was so clearly not one of them. And so she was, for a lot of evangelicals, a step back toward relevance. I don’t think it was much more complicated than that.

Coaston: What do you think that the focus on ending abortion has done to the evangelical movement, and what do you think the Dobbs decision has done to the movement now?

Ward: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s a hard question for me to answer because I do respect the passion that a lot of people have for this issue, and I think when we discuss it in any kind of critical way, it comes off to a lot of people like we’re minimizing their concerns.

Coaston: From their perspective, they are attempting to end the murder of babies.

Ward: Right. I think it’s just led to a politics that is obviously one-dimensional. The fact that they are so in the pocket of the Republican Party has inhibited the ability of evangelicals to apply their faith to the broad range of political issues. The problem is not that they care so much about abortion; it’s that Republicans have used abortion to keep them in the fold while disregarding what evangelicals might think about many other issues.

I don’t know that the Dobbs decision is going to change the way evangelicals engage in politics because the habits are so old and established now and they have a lot of sunk costs with the Republican Party.

Coaston: Do you think that the evangelical community sees Trump as a success or as a disappointment in comparison to their expectations — and what would success have looked like?

Ward: Well, I hesitate to talk on behalf of evangelicals ——

Coaston: Right, I’m aware it’s a massive group of people, that it’s more of a cultural and political idea than like an actual number of people.

Ward: Obviously, and I feel like it might depend on what happens in the next election. If Trump is not the next president, I think over time, history is going to help people get perspective, because that’s just the way it works.

Right now, there’s too much emotion and identity and ego and psychology involved. I think in a decade or two, there will be a lot more recognition or acceptance by evangelicals, that there was just a lot of bad that happened during Trump or a lot of damage that occurred to the country. Obviously, the fact that I’m writing this book and a lot of other people are writing similar books shows that there’s some level of grappling with this. I think that’ll continue.

Coaston: What do you think is something that many Americans don’t understand and should understand about the large swath of evangelical Americans? Something that would be smart and strategic for them to know that they don’t know?

Ward: One thing I thought was interesting was this guy Matthew Taylor did a podcast series called “Charismatic Revival Fury.” Did you happen to listen to that?

Coaston: I have not, but I’ve heard of it.

Ward: He goes into great detail about how the New Apostolic Reformation has a very built-out specific way of thinking about spiritual warfare, which he calls, I think, strategic spiritual warfare. It became very obvious to me that there are, like, millions of Americans who are politically normal and moderate and might vote for a Democrat and certainly would probably not be huge Trump fans who believe what it says in Ephesians 6, where it talks about spiritual warfare and putting on the breastplate of righteousness and our struggle is not against flesh and blood.

[In Ephesians 6, Paul describes putting on the “armor of God,” which different Christian denominations have interpreted and emphasized in different ways. Some believe, for instance, it means living a moral life and adhering to one’s values in a challenging world.]

There’s a lot of beliefs and views of the world that people inhabit in their daily lives that seem threatening to people who aren’t in that world but actually are very normal for people in this world. There’s a distinction between people who believe in spiritual warfare in normal times under a very vanilla definition of it and people who believe in the New Apostolic Reformation version, which seems to have motivated people to engage in an insurrection.

There’s a lot of nuance there. My theory is that the more this stuff is talked about in a reductionist way, it actually pushes people toward radicalization. It either makes them feel like, “What’s the point of trying to be acceptable to people who aren’t like me or mainstream culture?” I think that feeling makes them more susceptible to those leaders who are going to try to radicalize them.

Coaston: I’m also curious about things you missed when you were younger — parts of the culture, debates about politics or reckoning with racism — that you were not a part of because your community was like, “We’re not going to do that.” I wondered what it was like for you to go back and be like, “Oh, I didn’t even realize that while this was happening, all these other people were having this separate conversation.”

Ward: I missed out on stuff that was deemed to be sort of inferior or subpar, substandard, below us, which, in fact, has been the stuff I found to be very meaningful and fulfilling in my life. That more embodied way of being in the world is like a faith that’s more about loving your neighbor and loving the world. To me, that’s — one of my great regrets is that it took me so long to love the world, because it was so deeply ingrained in me to move through the world as if there’s toxic poisons everywhere. And there’s a lot of joy in loving the creation.