![](https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Chine-McDonald-profile-96x96.jpg)
I had spent a lot of my life trying to show that Christians generally and evangelicals, in particular, were not what many critics thought we were. We were open, welcoming and intelligent. We were compassionate and justice-seeking. We cared about all people, not just the ones like us.
And so, on the morning after the election of Donald Trump, I was distraught. As a black person and a woman, I felt betrayed but I felt particular shame when polling revealed that 81% of white evangelicals had voted for him. As far as I was concerned, they couldn’t be reading the same Bible.
Again and again, and UnHerd’s Believers in Trump audio documentary is no exception, we hear how Trump’s Bible Belt voters could almost be excused because they felt their views had been sidelined and ignored by the ‘elites’. We are asked to understand how they had come to feel like underdogs in what they had mistakenly thought was primarily their country.
No. This just isn’t good enough. I refuse to pretend that the white evangelical vote for Trump had anything to do with the faith I’m a part of.
Trump’s support from white evangelicals had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power. It’s rooted in the “rightness of whiteness”, as Jim Wallis of the Washington-based Christian community Sojourners, said in his interview within the documentary.
How had it come to this? An evangelical movement which a generation ago had felt convicted to create its own subculture – its own television stations and record labels and lines of clothing – because of a biblical imperative not to “conform to the pattern of this world”, has become so hungry to be represented in mainstream American life that it has – in vast numbers – pledged allegiance to a man who many see as a racist misogynist and an adulterer.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe