Roads Not Taken
White Evangelical Christians are an essential and reliable part of Donald Trump’s electoral base. In 2016, 2020, and again in 2024, roughly eighty percent of voters who identified as “Evangelical” or “born again” pulled the lever for Trump. As I argued in my 2018 book Believe Me, these Trump voters were motivated by three primary factors: fear, power, and nostalgia.
The United States is changing—demographically, culturally, and socially (especially in terms of the traditional family). Fear of these changes drove Evangelicals toward a strongman they believed would protect them from secular threats and restore them to a position of moral guardianship over American culture. They were enabled by a political playbook developed by the Christian right in the 1970s. It endorsed a simple formula: win elections, gain majorities, appoint the right judges, and, once in power, execute policy to bring the nation more in line with a nostalgic vision of conservative Christianity. There is little consideration of whether this Christian golden age ever existed, but historical accuracy is beside the point. It is time to restore, renew, and reclaim the United States as a Christian nation.
It did not have to be this way. Historians often think in terms of contingency. History is a narrative of choices people make in time; it is not dictated by destiny, fate, enlightenment progress, or providence. Change happens when humans choose—individually and collectively—to embrace ideas and values and act upon them. And the future is contingent upon what people have done in the past.
Of course, contingency requires that there are actual forks in the road, moments in time where different choices could be made. In my view, the period between 1998 and 2006 was one such time for conservative Evangelicals. Despite a retrospective feeling of inevitability, there were several political roads open to them that they could have traveled. Instead, they continued down a route set out by the Christian right two decades earlier. It led them, eventually, into the arms of Donald Trump.
In 1998, the Christian right was at a crossroads. As its leaders looked back over the previous twenty years of political activism, they found few significant victories. During the 1980s, Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority had received a lot of attention, but they never accomplished much. Two of Reagan’s Supreme Court appointees—Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy—could not be trusted to cast a vote overturning Roe v. Wade. Reagan had supported amendments to ban abortion and return prayer to public schools, but these initiatives remained low on his list of priorities. By the end of the 1990s, the internet had made pornography more accessible than ever. The gay-rights movement was posing a serious threat to traditional views of marriage. Mandatory prayer and Bible reading in schools were still illegal. Drug use had not subsided; crime had not dissipated.
Falwell shuttered the Moral Majority in 1989, but its place was filled by new organizations such as Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. Founded by televangelist and presidential candidate Pat Robertson—and run by his boy-wonder disciple Ralph Reed—the Christian Coalition engaged in grassroots activism. Reed encouraged conservative Evangelicals to run for positions in local and state governments and gain control of school boards. The young operative turned Christian politics into a combat sport: “I want to be invisible,” he said, “I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.”
With the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Christian right was forced to operate as an opposition movement. It rode the wave of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, found new friends among conservative talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, opposed the end of a ban on gay people in the military, and criticized the president’s support of “safe, legal, and rare” abortion.
Then came an opening. In January 1998, blogger Matt Drudge reported that the editors of Newsweek had killed a story about a twenty-one-year-old intern, Monica Lewinsky, who was having sex in the White House with Bill Clinton. The Washington Post broke the story on January 21. In a 4,276-word letter to his followers that included forty-three footnotes, James Dobson, the founder and CEO of Focus on the Family, slammed Clinton for his affair with “that woman—Miss Lewinsky.” “As it turns out,” Dobson wrote, “character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honest and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world!”
Dobson also expressed frustration with the American people, most of whom, according to polls, continued to support Clinton despite the scandal. After all, the economy was booming. “Our people continue to say that the President is doing a great job even if they don’t respect him personally,” Dobson said, “Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, ‘Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring?’ The answer is no.” He concluded that the country was “facing a profound moral crisis—not only because one man has disgraced us—but because our people no longer recognize the nature of evil.... Nothing short of a spiritual revival will save us.”
The revival never came. In the 1998 midterm elections, the GOP lost five seats in the House and failed to gain any seats in the Senate. And Clinton beat the rap. The House impeached him for lying to a grand jury and for obstruction of justice, but the Senate did not convict. The Christian right had lost another battle. Meanwhile, the Christian Coalition started hemorrhaging donors after Ralph Reed left the organization in 1997.
Some insiders called for a change of course. On February 16, 1999, Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the Christian right in the 1970s, announced in a letter to his fellow Christian conservatives that the time had come to take a break from politics. “I no longer believe there is a moral majority,” he wrote. “I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values.... If there really were a moral majority out there, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago.” It was now time, Weyrich argued, for conservative Christians to save America by building and strengthening “parallel institutions” such as Christian homeschooling, entertainment, and religious radio.
Two months later, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson (no relation to James) published Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right Can’t Save America. Thomas and Dobson had both been involved with Falwell’s Moral Majority, but now believed the Christian right had failed. Its leaders were too close to power, marring the church’s prophetic witness. “Who wanted to ride into the capital on the back of an ass,” they wrote in reference to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, “when one could go first class in a private jet and be picked up and driven around in a chauffeured limousine?” Through their years working for Falwell, Thomas and Dobson learned that power was the “ultimate aphrodisiac, a faith-killing drug that affects the Christian judgment of the one who takes it.” They argued that the Christian right could not function without instilling fear in its constituency and noted that Moral Majority fundraising letters always followed a basic formula. “First, they identify an enemy: homosexuals, abortionists, Democrats, or ‘liberals’ in general. Second, the enemies are accused of being out to ‘get us’ or to impose their morality on the rest of the country. Third, the letter assures the reader that something will be done.... Fourth, to get this job done, please send money.”
But what might another path—one that would steer Evangelical political witness away from power—look like? Between 1998 and 2006, several options emerged. The first was George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” In 1999, Bush introduced the new brand in a speech at a Methodist church in Indianapolis. “Government can spend money,” he said, “but it can’t put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. That is done in churches and synagogues and mosques and charities that warm the cold of life.” If elected, Bush promised to spend $8 billion on compassionate-conservative programs and policies, including new tax deductions for charitable giving.
Central to Bush’s program was his endorsement of Charitable Choice, an approach to welfare reform that allowed religious organizations to compete for government funding to help the poor. The Evangelical president’s approach deviated from the Christian right’s focus on abortion and school prayer. Bush was careful in his statements: he did not believe the federal government should support churches or religion directly. “There’s a big difference,” Bush said, “between funding religion and funding the program managed by a religious institution.” The distinction was a fine one and led to much debate, but Bush was trying to offer an alternative path of political engagement with religion and calling Evangelicals to join him.
The Christian right didn’t quite know how to respond; it seemed almost incapable of thinking about political action as a means of helping the poor. Ari Fleischer, Sen. Elizabeth Dole’s spokesperson, said that Bush’s Indianapolis speech proved that he would “make a great future president...of the American Red Cross.” Others saw it as a wishy-washy distraction from the most fundamental moral issues of the age. “I don’t see how a ‘compassionate conservative’ can be ambiguous about protecting unborn children,” said Family Research Council president Gary Bauer after Bush refused to back an antiabortion constitutional amendment. James Dobson could not connect Bush’s compassion with his refusal to make abortion a litmus test for federal justices. The “lights are going out” on the country’s moral landscape, he said. Pat Robertson supported Bush’s faith-based programs in principle but was “leery” of taking federal money. “We’re going to give you tons of money,” he said, “but you can’t talk about your faith, you can’t teach them the Torah, you can’t talk about Jesus or what have you, at that point they have essentially killed the essence of that organization.”
The second noteworthy alternative came from the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Where Bush preached compassion from the stump, NAE president Kevin Mannoia gathered moderate Evangelicals to help draft what he called “An Evangelical Framework for Public Policy.” Ronald Sider of Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary assembled a team of Evangelical theologians, activists, and academics to work on the project. He also invited some of the most ardent champions of the Christian right, but they either refused or backed out in opposition to the attempt to broaden Evangelical political engagement beyond just one or two issues.
Drawing from Catholic social teaching, mainline Protestant political thought, and the Evangelical tradition, the completed document was titled “For the Health of the Nation.” It began by noting that “Evangelical Christians in America” were facing a “historic opportunity,” given to them by God, “to shape public policy in ways that could contribute to the well-being of the entire world.” It asserted that “disengagement was not an option.” It was time to “seek God’s face for biblical faithfulness and abundant wisdom to rise [to the] unique challenge” before them. The document suggested, in a veiled reference to the Christian right, that Evangelicals had “failed to engage with the breadth, depth, and consistency” to which they were called to participate in political life. It urged Evangelicals to “submit to the authority of scripture” in every area of life, including politics, environmental science, HIV/AIDS, and international trade, and to “practice righteous deeds” that pointed the country to the love of God in a way that crossed “racial, ethnic, economic, and national boundaries.”
“For the Health of the Nation” affirmed traditional Evangelical views on abortion, gay marriage, and divorce, but it also treated “family values” in the context of public policy related to health care, education, and family wages. It called for poverty relief through charities, nongovernmental associations, government intervention, and “structural changes.” “God measures societies by how they treat the people at the bottom,” the document affirmed. It asked Evangelicals to consider vulnerable people around the world who were suffering from disease and inadequate nutrition. It condemned war, defended global human rights, promoted the spread of democracy, and rejected the tyranny of both communism and colonialism, opposing the United States’ mistreatment of Native Americans and the legacies of slavery and racism. It advocated for the care of creation through policies that would reduce pollution and “environmental degradation” while providing clean air and pure water.
The pushback from the Christian right came quickly. In the spring of 2004, before the document went public, a spokesman for Charles Colson (the former Nixon aide who became a born-again Christian and started a ministry to prisoners) told Sider that his boss could not sign the document. Among other concerns, Colson opposed language in the document’s section on “justice and compassion for the poor and vulnerable.” Part of that section stated: “Christians should support well-conceived legal remedies for the lingering effects of our racist history.” Colson wondered if this meant that the document was calling for reparations to the descendants of the formerly enslaved. That, for him, was a deal-breaker.
Tom Minnery, the policy chief at Focus on the Family, thought the statement was “tinged” with the moderate political views of the authors. Minnery was especially disturbed by language calling for a widening of Evangelical political concerns that read: “While individual persons and organizations may rightly concentrate on one or two issues, faithful civic engagement must champion a biblically balanced agenda.” Minnery “strongly disagreed” with this statement because it seemed to imply that single-issue crusaders on the Christian right were not faithfully engaging in political life. Minnery also objected to a section of the document that chided Evangelicals for identifying themselves with only one political party. (Sider and the committee ended up removing this language from the final draft.) He also found the “global” emphasis in the document too critical of those who championed nationalism. Other leaders on the Christian right, led by James Dobson, opposed the NAE’s subsequent public statements about climate change. Not only did Dobson and his friends believe that global warming was not the result of human activity, but they felt that such a focus on creation-care would distract Christians from the more important moral issues of the day, namely the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade and to pass a Federal Marriage Amendment. The Christian right was clearly not ready for the NAE’s course correction.
A new brand of Christian internationalism represented yet another possible path forward. Rather than sending missionaries to foreign countries exclusively to save souls, more and more Evangelicals were teaching that the Great Commission required Christians to alleviate human suffering, end poverty, and cure disease. George Bush agreed and sought to bring the nation’s humanitarian aid policy closer to Christian ideals.
In his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush unveiled his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (which became known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR). He gave Congress and the American people the relevant statistics: thirty million were dead in Africa from AIDS, including three million children; in some African nations, one-third of the adult population had HIV; four million Africans needed immediate drug treatment, but only fifty thousand were receiving medicine. “Because the AIDS diagnosis is considered a death sentence,” Bush said, “many do not seek treatment…. Many hospitals tell people, ‘you’ve got AIDS, we can’t help you. Go home and die.’ In an age of miraculous medicine, no person should have to hear those words.”
Bush’s words were written by Michael Gerson, a speechwriter who had felt a call from God to address the problems of AIDS on the African continent. With Gerson’s help, Bush connected PEPFAR with his Evangelical faith. He called for $15 billion in spending over five years to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. In May 2002, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called Evangelicals “the newest internationalists” for their work in offering humanitarian relief to those suffering from poverty and disease. PEPFAR triggered a new interest among Evangelicals in poverty relief, especially in Africa. U2 frontman Bono worked closely with the White House and a few Evangelical leaders to push for the program’s funding. Celebrity pastor Rick Warren, a conservative Evangelical known for his bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life, committed his massive California megachurch, Saddleback, to the work of ending poverty and AIDS in Rwanda.
It was hard for the Christian right to oppose many of these efforts directly, but when the press queried them, they criticized the Bush administration for working alongside pro-choice partners or noted the misplaced moral priorities of the White House. They urged Bush to take an “ABC” approach to AIDS prevention—abstinence, being faithful (to one’s spouse), and, only then, condoms. In a letter to the president, Christian right leaders also asked Bush to prioritize AIDS treatment for pregnant women and families with children, to refuse funding to medical providers who also offered abortion services (the so-called “Mexico City policy”), to make sure that the United States exercised full control over PEPFAR, and to carry out the program through faith-based organizations. In general, they did not actively promote PEPFAR or other such efforts on their websites or in letters to their constituencies. Instead, their resources went toward domestic causes related to sexual ethics.
Ultimately, the attempts to rethink Evangelical politics—by emphasizing the fight against poverty, environmental protection, global peace, and government-funded faith-based charity—gained little traction among conservative congregations. And as the twenty-first century progressed, the Christian right playbook became more embedded in the political consciousness of American Evangelicals through the rise of Fox News and other right-wing cable networks, talk radio, online outlets, and social media.
In 2016, Donald Trump, an outsider, ran his political campaign using lessons from this Evangelical playbook. He appealed to Evangelical fears and grievances, the desire for power, and their nostalgic longing for a Christian nation. He promised Supreme Court justices and protections from supposed threats to religious liberties; he promised to make America Christian again.
As evident in his draconian immigration policies, Trump rejected compassionate conservatism. He pulled the United States out of global agreements to reduce greenhouse emissions and explained his energy policy with the phrase “drill, baby, drill.” More recently, he all but closed USAID, the humanitarian arm of the federal government that distributed PEPFAR funds. It was all music to the Christian right’s ears.
But what if conservative Evangelicals had chosen one of these other roads? They were open and well-paved. The exit ramps were clearly marked. They were simply ignored.
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