American Christians Face a Choice

The faithful can still repair the wreckage they have wrought.

Excerpt: The justifications offered by Jeffress, by the evangelical leader Franklin Graham, and by countless white evangelicals and fundamentalists who voted for Trump—north of 80 percent in three consecutive elections—amount to something like this:

America is engaged in an existential, even cosmic struggle; the enemy is composed of secular, progressive forces who are agents of evil; and Trump’s combativeness and ruthlessness are not vices but necessary virtues. He has been called by God for this moment.

Trump’s son Eric said that his father “literally saved Christianity.”

.... I’ve witnessed firsthand how churches have embraced the ethos of male dominance. Even theologically conservative women have left such churches because of the patriarchal mindset that defines women in relation to male authority. Those women didn’t feel seen or respected.

But if this ideology repels some Christians, it has clearly attracted many others. And Trump’s domineering, loutish approach to women spoke to its adherents in a way that few, if any, of his rivals could match.

...The more merciless, lawless and foulmouthed Trump became, the more his support among conservative evangelicals grew. By 2024, Trump won a higher percentage of the white evangelical vote than any previous president in history, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The fusion between Trump and evangelicals was complete, and it didn’t happen by accident. He was the rider on the white horse many of them had been hoping for.

What they may not have quite realized is that they summoned something closer to William Butler Yeats’s “rough beast.”

They loosed anarchy upon the world.

How can American Christians begin to repair at least some of the immense damage they have done?"