Recent data from the Pew Research Center reveals that Donald Trump is losing a small amount of support among white Evangelicals. Anecdotally, I do know plenty of Evangelicals disgusted with the president’s handling of foreign affairs, his immigration policy, and his general authoritarianism. But the voices of these Trump skeptics are often drowned out by fellow Evangelicals who traffic in a MAGA-informed politics of outrage and grievance. These are the Evangelicals that Public Religion Research Institute describes as “adherents” to Christian nationalism. They make up about 11 percent of the U.S. population, and many of them have large platforms and committed social-media followings.
Two recent episodes—each freighted with the weight of the nation’s most urgent moral questions—have unveiled, once again, the failure of right-wing Evangelicals to advance a form of politics that resembles anything close to what historian Daniel K. Williams has called “the politics of the cross.” The first was Operation Metro Surge, the name the administration gave to its ICE operation in Minneapolis. The Trump administration has announced that the operation has come to an end, but only after two of the city’s residents, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed. The second was Trump’s racist Truth Social post portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House attributed the incident to a staff member and deleted the post. The president did not apologize.
The debate over immigration enforcement is instructive. Many conservative Evangelicals interpreted the ICE operation in Minneapolis as a matter of law and order. They cited Romans 13, which exhorts Christians to obey governing authorities, as a theological warrant for ICE’s activities. Andrew T. Walker, an ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, leaned on that Pauline text to defend the government’s use of force. “It is unconscionable—and a mark of failed-state conditions,” he wrote, “for organized groups of immigrants to swarm and intimidate a nation’s law-enforcement authorities. If Romans 13 has any meaning at all, it is that law governs society, not mobs.” In explaining the death of Pretti, Walker, a rising star in Southern Baptist academia, wrote, “It really is simple: do not impede law enforcement operations.”
One wonders if Walker would have made the same arguments about Romans 13 in March 1770 when a mob of angry patriots confronted British soldiers on the streets of Boston in an event known to history as “The Boston Massacre.” Perhaps Walker believes that Crispus Attucks, the Black sailor shot by redcoats, was wrong when he chose to “impede law enforcement operations.”
The chorus of Evangelical voices responding to the Minneapolis raids played a now-familiar refrain. Megan Basham, an X pundit and the author of Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, accused the media of spreading “anti-enforcement propaganda.” She wrote that ICE was needed in Minneapolis because the city’s leadership encouraged “miscreants to break the law, terrorize the city, and impede law-enforcement.” On the evening of the Pretti shooting, William Wolfe, a right-wing gadfly who heads an organization he founded called the Center for Baptist Leadership, chided his fellow Evangelicals for their empathy: “It’s insane watching so many self-identifying ‘conservative Christians’ have no stomach for doing what it takes to save this country from the Left and their foot soldier hordes of illegal immigrants and radical domestic terrorists.” When a group of Christians in Moscow, Idaho, held a candlelight vigil to remember Renee Good, conservative Evangelicals showed up to counter-protest, singing the “Doxology”: “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow / Praise Him all creatures here below / Praise Him above, you heavenly host / Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”
Then came the racist meme. Here, too, the pattern was revealing. There were clear condemnations of Trump’s Truth Social post among the MAGA faithful. Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcaster and the author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, wrote in a now removed X post: “It’s dehumanizing and wrong to depict Black people as monkeys. That’s a racist trope used to demean and justify real harm.” She continued: “I’ll call out Trump on substantive issues that hurt the country, but I don’t regret voting for him over Kamala Harris.”
Stuckey’s second sentence may be the key to understanding Evangelical responses in Trump’s second term. There is little reason to question her sincerity in condemning Trump’s post, yet she makes it clear that her political loyalties are unchanged. If Trump is preferable to Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party—especially on abortion, sexuality, religious liberty, opposition to “wokeness” in universities, and other related issues that have long animated the Christian right—conservative Evangelical allegiance to the president will not waver.
Not so long ago, I might have described the relationship between conservative Evangelicals and the GOP as transactional. Votes were exchanged for policy concessions on abortion, marriage, and religious liberty. But as the years have passed since Trump’s 2016 campaign, this alliance has become less a matter of calculation and more a question of identity. The Democratic Party is now cast, in many Evangelical minds, not simply as an opponent in the policy arena, but as a demonic threat to the very moral and spiritual foundations of the nation. In this context, loyalty to Trump becomes something more than partisan preference; it is a form of cultural resistance, a bulwark against the advancing currents of secularism and change.
For the resulting political imagination, a Super Bowl halftime show is a flashpoint for moral anxiety, while open racism and the killing of U.S. citizens by federal agents are met with qualified, muted rebuke. Walker called Trump’s Truth Social post “vile,” but, in a classic case of “whataboutism,” also lamented the left-wing “normalization of anti-white racism.” On the day of Trump’s racist Truth Social post, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council turned to X to complain about California governor Gavin Newsom dropping an F-bomb. He wrote: “When elected leaders normalize vulgarity and contempt, it’s not just unbecoming—it’s dangerous.” Did Perkins also have Trump in mind? If not, is it possible to be more tone-deaf?
By 2016, the political logic of conservative Evangelicals had crystallized: as long as a candidate advanced the core causes, other failings could ultimately be overlooked. But as so often in American religious history, the lines between political calculation and moral principle blur. The question facing conservative, Trump-supporting, Christian-nationalist Evangelicals in 2026 is not whether they can identify wrongdoing among their allies. It’s whether they’ve so internalized a political identity that no amount of wrongdoing can shake it.
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