I have raised the question before about the hesitancy of the leaders of the evangelical community to rally behind Donald Trump’s candidacy this time around. Caleb Ecarma writes that while they still like him, they have real concerns about his electability, reinforced by his loss in 2020 and the poor showing of his chosen candidates in the mid-term elections in 2018 and 2022. They fear that he may lose agan, preventing them from advancing their reactionary goals.
“There’s a lot of people who share a lot of our similar thoughts but don’t want to go on record,” Bob Vander Plaats, one of America’s top evangelical thought leaders, who hesitantly backed Trump in 2016, tells me. “You can see that it’s almost a silent majority right now,” he says. Everett Piper, a Washington Times columnist and the former president of an evangelical university, published a post-midterm polemic last month arguing that Trump is “hurting…not helping” American evangelicals. “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go,” Piper added. “If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.” Earlier this month, televangelist James Robison, who served as a spiritual adviser to Trump, likened the former president to a “little elementary schoolchild” while addressing the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Another major evangelical leader, who requested anonymity, tells me there’s “no doubt” that if Trump wins the primary, Republicans will “get crushed in the general.”
But even as some evangelical leaders seek a divorce, Trump’s influence on the Republican Party has held strong. He’s centered many of the culture wars that evangelical voters have been harping on for decades. And, increasingly, the party’s agenda has become nearly interchangeable with the attitudes of evangelical voters.