On election day 2016, exit polling of about 25,000 respondents revealed an astonishing finding. The seemingly most religious members of the nation, namely its white evangelicals, were in utter and complete favor of a sexual predator for president. The take away from the data was nothing if not obvious: 80% of evangelicals had voted for Donald Trump. Virtually overnight, this figure became the definitive through line that would hold the avalanche of analysis to come together following the contentious 2016 election. The consensus to follow was abundantly clear: since 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, they had fundamentally violated their religious commitments to the Christian Gospel. As a result, many began to argue that evangelicalism itself had been corrupted from the inside due to its association with “the Donald.”
For fellow evangelical and editor of The Gospel Coalition Joe Carter, the polling questions were problematic from their inception. Not only did the survey conflate “born again” with “evangelical,” there was virtually no place to identify as both an evangelical and a person of color. “This exit poll survey asked people to self-identify their religion from a range of choices. You could, for instance, choose to identify as evangelical on the survey—but only if you are white. If you’re an evangelical of non-white race or ethnicity—Latino, black, Asian, and so on—your closest option was to identify as ‘Protestant or other Christian.’ As far as this exit poll is concerned, the label ‘evangelical’ is reserved for whites only.” In other words, such a question about one’s evangelical identity was not designed to reflect a broad range of born again voices. “If the media has data on how black and Latino evangelicals voted, why aren’t they releasing that info?” Such questions beg further questions: what, exactly, is evangelicalism? An imagined community? A theological quadrilateral? A badge of persecution? For now, we are left with the latest study to address the question of the hour: why did so many evangelicals support Donald Trump? Put simply: racism and complicity in racist structures of power. However, we can be clearer about what these numbers actually mean compared to what they say upon first glance.
For scholar and professor of religion Anthea Butler, the numbers are very clear about what they mean, but no one has been willing to listen: especially white evangelicals. Of all the studies published to date on Trump and his white conservative evangelical supporters, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America is arguably the first to make race and racism central to the analysis (for the sake of clarity, I will be using “white” and “conservative” to signal the need for clearer descriptions when analyzing American evangelicals generally considered). Its purpose is twofold. First: to make a contribution to the historiography on American evangelicalism. And second: to address evangelicals the country over in prophetic tones of reckoning and accountability. In this sense, Butler’s work is not the traditional academic monograph. If anything, it’s a text reflective of, yet built for, our socially mediated present. In fact, the book initially started as an op-ed for NBC News Think, and can be thought of as four long form essays that serve as the book’s chapters. For Professor Butler, scholars and pundits who have addressed this question have not been willing to foreground race and racism in their analyses and commentary on white evangelical voting behavior before and during the Trump years. This has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of conservative evangelical behavior and electoral decision making.
Structurally speaking, the book is a historical survey of conservative white American evangelicalism from the 19th century to the present. At times, due to the book’s somewhat timeless thesis and abridged length, the historical details of a particular time period fall away in the name of illustrating the overarching argument. As such, Butler’s authorial voice is less directed at her academic colleagues, per say, and more towards her former and current evangelical brothers and sisters so that she can show them “who they really are.” Despite its university press affiliation, the text possesses neither footnotes or endnotes for further research, although each chapter does contain a selected reading section as part of the book’s back matter. Less than one hundred and fifty pages in length, White Evangelical Racism explores everything from antebellum religious history to the public persona of Billy Graham to Sarah Palin to the infiltration of the GOP by white conservative evangelicals. This is a tall task for anyone, but the thesis is clear: “racism is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism” (2).
Butler's first chapter sets the historical stage for the book as a whole. She begins with nineteenth century biblical hermeneutics that supported the institution of chattel slavery. While abolition is mentioned in this section, Butler reminds her readers that emphasizing such instances of activism has come at the expense of acknowledging what has truly defined evangelical history since the 19th century: racism. Butler then explores the religious significance of lynching and Jim Crow, and ends the chapter with the second rising of the KKK. Between these plot points, Butler expertly analyzes the connections between the religion of the lost cause and white southern women as exemplars of purity and whiteness. Butler navigates this period by foregrounding evangelical racism as the underlying common ground for the different historical examples leveraged in the chapter.
Unfortunately, the first section of Butler’s story suffers from a faulty historical premise: that the Bible "was interpreted literally before the Civil War" (16). In many respects, Butler is forced to make this claim because it supports the larger argument about white evangelical racists and their collective reliance on chattel slavery for their power and privilege. What is lost in such statements are the diverse ways evangelicals actually read the bible before the civil war. For example, evangelical intellectual luminary Jonathan Edwards read the biblical text according to a variety of methods and strategies including the metaphorical, or typological, during the 1700s. During the antebellum period, abolitionists both white and black also possessed their own biblical hermeneutics in their attempts to challenge chattel slavery on systemic grounds. Because of a common “social or cultural racism,” however, such distinctions between white Protestants dissolve into the larger narrative, and we lose sight of the complex readings and interpretive strategies of a given moment in evangelical time.
Butler’s next chapter jumps into the 20th century by foregrounding Billy Graham and his “potent mix of respectability that was predicated on fears of the other” in order to draw attention to the rise of the “new evangelicalism.” By looking at Graham, Butler argues, we’re able to see “the lines evangelicals drew around racial, social, and political issues” (35). Butler also looks at the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in order to illustrate how white evangelicals were slowly amassing power in the public square. In this story, Butler includes not only white evangelicals, but also Pentecostals and Fundamentalists as well in order to further illustrate the truncated thinking of conservative Protestants at the time in terms of race and racism. Butler aptly demonstrates how white evangelical concerns about communism in the US shaped their negative responses to civil rights dating back to the Red Summer of 1919. She also shows how Graham’s appeal to “Americanism” at the time tapped into a nationalistic rhetoric dating back to the first writings outlining America’s Manifest Destiny.
Butler begins her penultimate chapter by connecting the emergence of white evangelical nationalism as a political force to the presidency of George W. Bush. “To understand it,” Butler contends, “we must first understand the origins of evangelical support for a truly evangelical President, George W. Bush” (99). While what Butler means here by “truly” is left up to the reader’s imagination, she does a fine job of connecting Bush’s successes to the operations of strategists like Ralph Reed and his organization the Christian Coalition in explaining Bush’s successes in the White House. The tragic events of September 11th further amplified evangelical attacks against Islam in general and American Muslims in particular as “the language of spiritual warfare had entered the parlance of evangelicals, especially those from the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions” (104). One of the most important figures in Butler’s study is Sarah Palin. Palin’s Pentecostal sensibilities helped mobilize “the politics of grievance, racial resentment, and American exceptionalism” that had come to define much of the public rhetoric of conservative Protestantism at the time. For Butler, Palin’s campaign “created the blueprint for the 2016 presidential campaign and a whole cottage industry of right-wing media, which evangelicals capitalized on” (112). In these moments, Butler is at her descriptive best when illustrating how Pentecostal notions of prosperity and the divine have been wholeheartedly taken up by evangelicals in the public square in the name of a Christian nation in the recent religious past.
In the very same moments, Butler's argument seems to imply that because of a shared racism, social and cultural distinctions between different types of conservative Protestants do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Despite the very different historical lineages of the three terms, Butler’s willingness to conflate categories such as evangelical, fundamentalist, and pentecostal suggests that a form of recency bias has shaped and continues to shape academic and popular analyses of white conservative evangelicalism. Butler’s text is an ideal subject for this type of analysis in light of its short length, and university press affiliation, because it captures past academic and journalistic labors to understand a given conservative subject in the public square.
In other words, because many conservative evangelicals, Pentecostals, and fundamentalists supported former President Donald Trump, their respective theological or historical differences recede into the background in favor of a broader, overarching thesis. Someone like Jerry Falwell Sr. was certainly born-again, but that’s not all that he was. For anthropologist Susan Harding, Falwell was representative of an entire fundamentalist rhetorical world and discourse all its own. For Harding, terms such as “evangelical” possess both popular and academic inflections. One usage of the term refers to “evangelizing Protestants” in general, and the other “refers to a subset of those Protestants who fashioned a conscious fellowship in opposition to militant fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s.” Due to such terminological conflation, the reader is left thinking that the conservative Protestant traditions examined by Butler in White Evangelical Racism are virtually identical, and thus deserve little to no attention to their individual histories.
While Butler is certainly correct in contending that Palin “pleased” evangelicals as McCain’s running mate, she arguably pleased the larger Republican Party even more as it aspired to incorporate yet another conservative Protestant constituency into its fold: the Tea Party. Formed in response to the presidency of Barack Obama, the Tea Party was “birthed in the heart of capitalism, the new evangelical partner did not originate from the pulpit but from a fiscal evangelist on the trading floor” (121). Butler’s decision to play with the word “evangelist” here suggests that Rick Santelli himself, the one credited for starting the Tea Party movement, was evangelical himself. This is not clear from Butler’s narrative, but a poll conducted by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, one that Butler uses herself, found that nearly half of Tea Party supporters “had not heard of or did not have an opinion about the conservative Christian movement sometimes known as the religious right.” This suggests that the overlap, or common ground, between conservative Protestant groups is not as seamless as Butler argues, or seems to imply in her analysis. It also suggests that conservative evangelicals themselves are not as well organized as many have argued since the late 1970s.
Butler concludes her analysis with what can only be described as a solemn yet prophetic warning to those evangelicals still within the racist fold. “Evangelicalism is at a precipice,” Butler argues. “It is no longer a movement to which American Christians look for a moral center” (139). Based on Butler’s account, it is hard to believe when such a movement was ever the moral center of the nation in light of its history of racism. For those outside of the evangelical comunity, like myself, seeing American evangelicalism as a moral center does not necessarily make sense once set against the historical record. While the US has always been, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “the nation with the soul of a Church,” we have never really been sure of which kind of church, or how racially inclusive it was, or not. As such, Butler’s worries are less academic in the formal sense, and more existential as a former evangelical reaches out to her estranged brothers and sisters in the name of the Gospel. Questions remain, however, about what exactly is meant by "evangelical."
Because Butler has decided to use a more recent definition of evangelicalism, one based on the political behavior of conservative Protestants, she inevitably reads this definition of evangelicalism back in time in order to maintain the coherence of her larger argument about evangelical racism. “Evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all,” she argues. “Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others.” More baldly, Butler contends, “evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders” (138). Regardless of historical place and time, Butler's definitions arguably flatten the complexity of the religious past by limiting the historical significance of the American evangelical tradition to electoral politics. They also simplify the relationship between persons of color and antebellum evangelicalism- nascent as it was.
"However compromised and imperfect, evangelical religion provided alternative worlds of harmonious racial coexistence that many whites as well as blacks had reason to protect from skeptical dismantling," argues historian of American religion Amanda Porterfield in Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. "At a time when slavery was expanding and free blacks were being subjected to increasing suspicion, evangelial religion not only offered a counterculture that appealed to increasing numbers of blacks; it also offered a supernaturally anchored world of peaceful racial coexistence embraced by whites worried about slavery and racial unrest" (108). Set against Butler's narrative, Porterfield's notion of "peaceful racial coexistence" is a welcomed corrective, but one that perhaps comes across as overly naive today relative to entrenched systems of chattle slavery and settler colonialism evident in early 19th century America. Unlike other commentators on this topic, Butler herself has experienced such a violent legacy first hand- and viscerally so.
Butler’s labors in White Evangelical Racism are not simply the product of an intellectual project. They are also the product of trauma. Butler’s history of white conservative evangelicalism is interwoven with experiences, stories, and reflections from her own time in the evangelical tradition, one that ended around the time of the beating of Rodney King and its immediate aftermath. Included within the analysis are countless pages that attempt to convince her fellow (or past) evangelicals that the time has come to repent and make due for the century or more of racism only they are responsible for. “If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought,” Butler contends. “The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time...your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls” (147). Butler even goes into the literal moment that led to the final break from her evangelical sisters in Christ. What is somewhat lost in this narrative, though, is that Butler came from a Pentecostal background herself, but was nevertheless ostracized from the community by evangelicals. At the end of the day, “I was just a Black person in this woman’s white space” (90). This lived experience is neither an evangelical problem, nor a pentecostal problem. It’s a white American Christianity problem.
I am not arguing that Butler cannot include such material in her formal analysis of white evangelicalism: far from it. What I am suggesting, however, is that much of the debate over evangelical support for Trump since 2016 has been less an objective reflection of a largely academic debate, and more of an instance of insider contestation over who is included in the term “evangelical,” and who is not, during the Trump epoch. In challenging times, it’s fairly easy to confuse the one for the other. “Yes, I am asking a lot of you. To step out of the comfortable place you reside in while the world burns is difficult. It is, however, worth it,” Butler reminds her evangelical readers. “If you feel one ounce of conviction, then there is hope for you. There may even be hope for our nation” (148). Ironically, Butler’s prophetic reproach, addressed to her fellow Protestant Christians, is based on a reminder of how fundamental white evangelicals are to American public life in general, and American politics in particular.
There is no doubting the thesis of White Evangelical Racism. White evangelicals have a great deal to account for in the coming years, but so, too, do white Christians in general. Despite the attractiveness of the “80% of evangelicals supported Trump'' narrative, the larger point to make is about American Christianity itself, and its historic inability, or unwillingness, to account for its complicity in white supremacy. For writer and novelist James Baldwin, it wasn’t simply American Christiantiy that was the problem, but the Church itself, “The Christian church itself—again, as distinguished from some of its ministers—sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, with the resulting relative well-being of the Western populations, was proof of the favor of God.” In this sense, instead of using racism, Butler could have grounded her argument about conservative evangelicals on their comfort with and ability to adapt to varied systems of white supremacy: systems that for scholar of religion Charles Long, reinforce the power of the “american episteme” at the expense of America’s black and brown bodies.
Despite the power that whiteness possesses in American public life, both in individual and structural terms, it ultimately did not level the playing field between the white conservative evangelical, and the GOP operatives representing the Republican Party. At the same time that evangelicals were burrowing their way into the party, the party was burrowing itself into the evangelical mind: poisoning its thoughts, making more virulent what was perhaps already there. This is not to excuse white evangelical behavior whatsoever. It is, however, meant to contextualize the one event still left largely unexplained: the rise of the Christian Right. Butler’s work is necessary in these regards, urgently so. The work continues.