Reports of white evangelicals’ overwhelming support for Donald Trump have often masked a significant division between different groups of evangelical Republicans.

Among evangelicals who are generally conservative and who have historically supported Republican candidates, there are at least three major factions in evangelical churches: 1) Never Trumpers (or highly reluctant Trump voters) who believe Trump is a threat to fundamental American and Christian values; 2) Those who support most of Trump’s policies, but not his character; and 3) Enthusiastic Trump supporters.

Until this year, it has been difficult to get a fully accurate sense of these political divisions and the percentage of evangelicals in each group. But when the 2026 Pew Research Center Political Typology study was released this summer, it gave me the data I needed to map the contours of a political debate that has been raging in evangelical circles for the past decade – the debate between a minority of evangelicals who are conservative Never Trumpers (like David French), a much larger group (including older Christian Right activists like Tony Perkins and younger ones like Allie Beth Stuckey) who are Christian Right Trump supporters but with some reservations, and a contingent of hardliners who enthusiastically champion Trump’s immigration policies and even laud or emulate his crude bullying, as Pete Hegseth has done.

For years, we’ve seen articles by Never Trumper evangelicals like David French and Russell Moore lamenting evangelical support for Trump and wondering how any Christian could support such a profane, unprincipled candidate. And we’ve seen hardline evangelical conservatives like Megan Basham denounce these Never Trumpers as near-apostates. But how many evangelicals are there on each side of this debate? And why does the debate seem so intractable? Why have French and Moore’s arguments not persuaded people who find Basham’s reasoning compelling – and vice versa?

The data that the Pew Center’s Political Typology study gives us the information we need to answer some of these questions – and it may even give us a sense of where this debate is likely to go in the future.

The Pew Research Center’s Political Typology Survey

The 2026 Pew Research Center Political Typology study was designed to reveal the political views of the general American population – not evangelicals in particular - but there was enough detail in this study’s Excel data spreadsheets to enable me to extract some of the findings about evangelicals from this larger study.

If you’re not familiar with the 2026 Pew Research Center Political Typology study, you might find it interesting to test your own political ideology using this link to a greatly abbreviated version of the survey. As you’ll see if you take the short test, the Pew survey will use your responses to place you in one of nine political subgroups or “parties.”

We’re used to thinking about political parties by their well known labels: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, etc. But the Pew test instead came up with a different list of “parties” or “political types” by asking respondents about a wide variety of issue positions and demographic variables, and then using machine learning (or artificial intelligence) to group respondents into clusters, based on their responses.

Of the nine “parties” or political types identified in the Pew survey (No-Apologies Right, Faith First Conservatives, Unconventional Right, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives, Tuned Out Middle, Order and Opportunity Left, Loyal Liberals, Left Out Left, and Leftward Progressives), at least four conservative parties are well represented among white evangelicals.

Not surprisingly, the two parties that comprise the vast majority of Democratic Party leaders – Loyal Liberals and Leftward Progressives – collectively account for less than 4 percent of the white evangelical population. The Order and Opportunity Left – a group of more conservative working-class Democrats who combine some degree of moderate social conservatism with a pragmatic focus on working-class economic interests (think Kentucky governor Andy Beshear) garnered a little more evangelical support, with 8 percent of white evangelicals falling into this category.

But 79 percent of white evangelicals fall into one of the four conservative-leaning parties: No-Apologies Right, Faith First Conservatives, Unconventional Right, and Pragmatic and Polite Right. Of those four, the Unconventional Right (a group that is strongly Republican, but generally supportive of legal abortion and a strong separation between church and state) account for the smallest contingent of white evangelicals, so I’ll omit it from this analysis. Instead, I’ll focus on what I think is the most interesting (and politically and religiously consequential) struggle for evangelicalism’s political soul – a struggle that has primarily emerged from a division between two erstwhile allies: Faith First Conservatives and the Pragmatic and Polite Right.

Faith First Conservatives (35 percent of white evangelicals):

Faith First Conservatives have long been the most prominent “party” within American evangelicalism, and they’re still by far the largest group, even though they don’t comprise a majority of white evangelicals.

Faith First Conservatives are the 2026 manifestation of the traditional Christian Right. If James Dobson were alive today, he would almost certainly be categorized as a Faith First Conservative. If Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council took the Pew Research Center Typology survey, I imagine that he’d land squarely in the center of the Faith First Conservatives. So would other Christian conservatives who oppose abortion and transgender rights and who always vote Republican, like Allie Beth Stuckey. There’s a good chance that Erika Kirk would as well.

When we look at the description of this group’s views, it seems to be almost a perfect snapshot of what we might envision when we think of American white evangelicalism. That’s no coincidence, because this group is largely defined by its Christian faith. Though many Faith First Conservatives are Catholic (or, in a few cases, Mormon or mainline Protestant), the plurality are evangelical – so if you walk into a random evangelical church, especially in a rural or suburban area, you will almost certainly encounter some Faith First Conservatives.

Not surprisingly, this was the most churched of any of Pew’s nine political types. Forty-seven percent of Faith First Conservatives say they attend church at least once a week, and an additional 9 percent say they attend at least once or twice a month – which means that the majority of Faith First Conservatives are in church most of the time.

They’re also strongly supportive of traditional families and “family values.” Two-thirds are currently married, and most of the remainder have been married at some point in their lives. Seventy-eight percent have children. Most think that these life choices should be normative; 88 percent said that it was “important” that “people make marriage and having children a priority in their lives.” Seventy-eight percent said that the legalization of same-sex marriage has been “bad for society.” Sixty-five percent said the same about “people having fewer children.”

Forty-one percent live in a rural area – a much higher percentage than the 26 percent of all Americans in the survey who were rural. An additional 44 percent live in suburbs – which means that no more than 15 percent of Faith First Conservatives live in a city.

Two-thirds lack a four-year college degree, but on the whole, the group is solidly middle class or working class (but mostly not wealthy); 55 percent describe their income as in the “middle” range.

The group skews a bit to the older side, but not to an extreme degree; 45 percent of Faith First Conservative adults are under 50, and an additional 29 percent are age 50-64.

And, as one would expect for a group called “Faith First Conservatives,” their faith drives their life. Seventy-two percent say that religion is “very important” to them, and an additional 18 percent say that it is “somewhat important.”

Ninety-six percent describe themselves as “traditional,” and nearly all are Republicans.

This is by far the most socially conservative party when it comes to issues that the Christian Right has long cared about. Faith First Conservatives are more strongly opposed to abortion than any other group; 82 percent want abortion to be mostly or entirely illegal. Ninety-eight percent believed that “whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by their sex at birth.” Ninety-eight percent objected to transgender athletes competing on sports teams that did not match their birth sex. And nearly all said that it was “important” for “the United States to have a culture based in Christian religious beliefs.”

They are strong moralists in areas of individual behavior. They are more strongly opposed to marijuana legalization than any other political subgroup. They strongly favor getting tougher on crime.

And although the Christian Right historically did not make the deportation of undocumented immigrants one of its priorities, the current group of Faith First Conservatives have seamlessly grafted that onto their historic concerns about preserving the nation’s Christian identity and imposing law and order. Sixty-eight percent want to deport immigrants who are in the United States illegally. A whopping 97 percent want to expand the wall on the Mexican border. Their willingness to embrace Trump’s policies toward immigrants has strengthened their alliance with Trump, despite their reticence to embrace the totality of his policies. (They’re unsure whether to support the Iran war, for example, and they’re not particularly enthusiastic about Trump’s tariffs).

Because their view of morality is very individualistic (in keeping with historic conservative evangelical approaches), they tend to support government regulation only of individual vices (such as drugs or abortion) while opposing the socially oriented forms of government regulation that liberal social justice advocates favor. They don’t support greater restrictions on guns. They’re generally skeptical about the scientific establishment and the environmental movement. Only 9 percent say they think that “the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels.” Only 13 percent said that “people using electric vehicles instead of gasoline vehicles” is “very” or “somewhat” “good for society.” Only 14 percent want to expand solar and wind production of electricity.

They are strong supporters of parental rights. Fifty-nine percent would like parents to have the right to decide not to vaccinate their children “even if that creates health risks for other children.”

They get their news from conservative sources. Nearly two-thirds say they rely on FOX News. By contrast, 39 percent say they have never even heard of NPR (let alone listened to it), and only 6 percent say they listen to it for news. Sixty-three percent say they don’t trust information from “national news organizations,” and 85 percent say they don’t have confidence that journalists will act in the best interests of the public.

The survey didn’t list Christian radio as one of the news sources, so it’s impossible to say for certain how many people from this group get their news from Christian radio, but given their strong distrust of mainstream news outlets, I imagine that more than a few will tune into Christian radio long before they will trust a secular news source.

In short, this group lines up pretty well with everything you would expect from evangelical Republicans. And since slightly more than one-third of white evangelicals belong to this subgroup, this is a group you will undoubtedly encounter if you attend a predominantly white evangelical church in a suburban or rural area.

The overwhelming majority of people in this group voted for Trump, with only 1 percent casting a ballot for Kamala Harris. But they’re not the most loyal Trumpians; they seem to like his policies more than his style. Seventy-two percent say they dislike it when politicians that they agree with “humiliate” their opponents. Fifty-three percent say they agree with Trump on “many, but not all issues,” while only 35 percent said they agreed with him on “all or nearly all issues.” Fifty-two percent say they have “mixed feelings” about “the way Trump conducts himself,” with an additional 9 percent saying they “don’t like it.”

But in spite of their reservations, 76 percent expect Trump to be a “successful” president, and 52 percent of them think Trump is the best president of the past forty years. (Thirty-eight percent chose Reagan instead).

So, is this Trump’s base? Sort of, but not quite. This group can be counted on to vote for Trump nearly unanimously. They overwhelmingly support Republican policies, but that’s largely because these policies line up with the priorities of the Christian Right – that is, passing legislation that reflects conservative Christian views on gender, sexuality, abortion, and drug use, and protecting the current racial and religious identity of the nation through limits on immigration. On issues that Trump cares about but that the Christian Right hasn’t historically made a priority – such as tariffs, for instance – they’re moderately supportive, although their survey responses also indicate that they don’t have strong feelings about these issues.

That’s the group you’re most likely to encounter in an average predominantly white evangelical church: a group that says they have reservations about Trump’s personal behavior and maybe even a few of his policy stances, but will support him anyway because they strongly favor a moralistic law-and-order policy that protects traditional families and gender roles and that limits the number of people crossing the Mexican border.

But why was this group not disturbed by Trump’s behavior and anti-immigrant rhetoric in the way that Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (a group that I’ll explore in more detail below) were? Why did they not care about French and Moore’s warnings about voting for a profane, sexually immoral candidate?

I think that the answer is that even though this group formulated most of their conservative views independently of Trump – that is, they derived their views from the Christian Right of the late twentieth century, long before Trump entered office – they quickly came to see Trump as a vehicle through which they could preserve the nation’s Christian identity and the rights of conservative American Christians. Their views on abortion, transgender, immigration, law and order, and Christian national identity are so far removed from the Democrats that voting for a Democratic candidate is unthinkable. They might not have been enthusiastic about Trump, but they can’t imagine an alternative – and they’re not going to cross over to the Democrats just because Trump says a few things that make them wince.

Sixty-nine percent believe that evangelical Christians face discrimination. And nearly all believe that a person cannot be moral without being religious. Only 9 percent believe that Islam does not encourage violence. They’re thus very fearful of either a secular or a religiously pluralistic society, because they imagine that it would likely be immoral or unsafe for Christians. And because of that fear, they’re willing to vote for anyone who would protect evangelical Christians – even if that person is Donald Trump.

But there are also a few other groups of evangelicals that have a very different set of political views. Perhaps the most prominent evangelical dissenters from the traditional Christian Right perspective are the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives.

Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (14 percent of white evangelicals):

When I think of evangelicals who are Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives, I think of David French. French was a strong George W. Bush-supporting conservative Republican until the GOP nominated Trump. French has adamantly refused to support Trump, and for that defection, a lot of conservative evangelicals have scorned him. French still opposes abortion, and he still holds views on foreign policy that I would describe as neoconservative. Yet he cannot stand either Trump’s character or Trump’s policies – which means that as long as Trump controls the Republican Party, French is likely to be politically homeless (like Russell Moore, who likely could also be characterized as a Pragmatic and Polite Conservative).

On the surface, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives might look like traditional Republicans, and for a long time, at least two-thirds of them probably were. Their favorite president of the past forty years is Ronald Reagan. (Their second favorite is Barack Obama – which points to the moderate, bipartisan composition of this group). They’re fiscally conservative; of the nine political “parties” listed in the Pew survey, this was the group most likely to express strong concern about the federal deficit. They are generally supportive of the nation’s economic system (which means they’re not progressive anti-capitalists). They’re moderately skeptical about government regulation of business.

They’re generally religious and supportive of a broadly based Christian culture, but one of the main things that separates them from the Faith First Conservatives is a strong support for pluralism and church-state separation. They’re not Christian nationalists. Seventy-six percent think that “religion should be kept separate from government policies,” while only 23 percent think that “government policies should support religious values and beliefs.”

(Among Faith First Conservatives, those percentages are reversed; 83 percent say that “government policies should support religious values and beliefs,” while only 16 percent favor keeping religion separate from government policies.)

While Faith First Conservatives fear pluralism, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives want to see a diverse country in which Christian values are protected, but not privileged, and in which immigrants are welcomed. Seventy-seven percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (but only 19 percent of Faith First Conservatives) think that “America’s openness to people from all over the world is essential to who we are as a nation.” Seventy-two percent say that American society is strengthened when “the U.S. population is made up of people of many different races, ethnicities, and religions.”

This strong support for pluralism influences how Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives view immigration. While they are disturbed by illegal immigration and want a greater degree of border security, they are also willing to allow a higher number of immigrants to enter the country legally, and they seem to favor a policy of amnesty similar to the one that Reagan signed into law in 1986 and that George W. Bush supported. Sixty-seven percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (but only 23 percent of Faith First Conservatives) favor allowing undocumented immigrants to stay in the country “if certain requirements are met.” Eighty-two percent say that it is “somewhat,” “very, “or extremely” important for the United States to welcome refugees who are fleeing violence.

Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives are also far more likely than Faith First Conservatives to think that Black people continue to face discrimination today. Seventy-six percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives say that Black people in the United States face “some” or “a lot” of discrimination today, while only a minority of Faith First Conservatives believe this. In fact, a higher percentage of Faith First Conservatives think that white people face discrimination in the United States than say the same about Blacks.

They trust the scientific and medical establishment and are at least moderately supportive of government efforts to reduce climate change. They overwhelmingly support vaccination requirements as a public health measure, which puts them at odds with Faith First Conservatives.

In contrast to Faith First Conservatives, who tend to favor government regulation only for individual vices (such as abortion, drug, and sexual behavior), Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives support a broader degree of government regulation that they think will improve public health and safety. In addition to supporting mandatory vaccinations, 61 percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives favor stricter gun laws. Sixty-one percent also say that it is the government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health insurance; only 24 percent of Faith First Conservatives agree.

On foreign policy, they are, for the most part, George W. Bush-style neoconservatives who favor US intervention around the world to support freedom, but also favor working with America’s allies. They generally support NATO, fear Russia, support Ukraine, and take a nuanced view of Israel that almost uniformly condemns Hamas while expressing mixed views on whether the Israelis or Palestinians deserve more support.

So, why do Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives differ so markedly from Faith First Conservatives in these areas? For one, they’re about 50 percent more likely to have earned a college or graduate degree. They’re far more likely to live in a suburban or urban area; while 41 percent of Faith First Conservatives live in a rural area, only 23 percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives do. And they’re also older; 68 percent are over age 50, while only 54 percent of Faith First Conservatives are. This means that they’re likely to be old enough to remember the Cold War and the Reagan years, both of which seem to have shaped their views about the nation’s place in the world. But perhaps above all, they have had life experiences (whether in college or in urban areas) that have given them a positive view of diversity and pluralism.

And instead of getting their news from FOX, they say that their primary news source is network television news (ABC, CBS, and NBC). Given their average age, the majority of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives are old enough to remember when large numbers of Americans (both Democrats and Republicans) got their news from Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, and they want to continue the tradition. At a time when Americans’ choice of news sources has become polarized along partisan lines, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (most of whom describe themselves as “moderates,” rather than as conservatives or liberals) resist this impulse by tuning into the same local television affiliates that Americans trusted forty years ago. Sixty-four percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (compared to only 36 percent of Faith First Conservatives) say they trust the information they receive from national news sources.

Most Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives are still conservative in many ways. Religion is important to them. They are just as likely as Faith First Conservatives to have gotten married and had children. On most issues, they still think a lot like members of one of the Bush administrations (either H.W. or W.) did. But today most describe themselves as “moderates” and they’re split in their partisan identity, with slightly more than a third now saying that they lean Democratic or identify as Democrats. A slight majority voted for Trump, but only as the lesser of two evils; they overwhelmingly say that they disapprove of Trump.

Most feel politically beleaguered. When asked whether they thought “their side” in American politics was winning or losing, 59 percent said that they were losing. (Only 36 percent of Faith First Conservatives said the same). Only 29 percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives (compared to 42 percent of Faith First Conservatives) say they have “quite a lot” of confidence in the future of the United States.

When Faith First Conservatives Encounter Pragmatic & Polite Conservatives in Church

Collectively, Faith First Conservatives and Pragmatic & Polite Conservatives make up nearly half of white evangelicals in America today, so they’re highly likely to run into each other at church. And when they do, sparks are likely to fly.

Faith First Conservatives are sometimes aghast that Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives would consider defecting to the Democrats to stop Trump. They are often willing to concede that Trump is personally unethical – or, at the very least, that he behaves in unchristian ways in seeking to humiliate his opponents. They might even be skeptical about a few of his policies. But because they believe that a move away from the nation’s Christian identity would destroy the United States and result in increased persecution of Christians, they cannot imagine how a Christian would vote for a party that is committed to greater secularization and pluralism. In their view, many of the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives have betrayed both their country and their Christian faith by opposing Trump.

Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives, meanwhile, think that the Christian nationalism of Faith First Conservatives is idolatry. Faith First Conservatives have conflated the United States with the kingdom of God, they think. And they cannot imagine how they can square support for such a reprehensible, profane man as Trump with the principles of Jesus. In their view, Trump’s behavior and policies are the direct antithesis of the nation’s identity, as well as the teachings of Christianity – so those who support him are undermining both the nation and the gospel.

Both sides fear the other. Twenty years ago, the two groups seemed to be on the same page; both supported George W. Bush. But because they did so for somewhat different reasons, the differences in each group’s worldview were obscured. Faith First Conservatives like James Dobson thought they were voting for a Christian leader who would save America from same-sex marriage and abortion. Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives voted for Bush because they liked his “compassionate conservatism.” Trump’s nomination in 2016 brought these differences out into the open for the first time.

When that happened, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives were startled to find themselves on the far left edge of evangelicalism. They had thought of themselves as evangelical centrists. They weren’t as liberal as Jimmy Carter or Ron Sider; they weren’t as bellicose as Ralph Reed. But they generally supported pro-life Republicans, just as the Faith First Conservatives did. After 2016, with the rapid departure of the few remaining progressive evangelicals from any identification with evangelicalism, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives found very few people in evangelical churches that were left of them politically. The Faith First Conservatives were now the centrists; to the right of the Faith First Conservatives were several groups that were even more supportive of Trump and more bellicose. And since Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives comprise only 14 percent of white evangelicals, they probably often feel like a beleaguered minority.

They’re also a graying minority. They’re the oldest group of any of the nine political categories that the Pew survey identified. With 68 percent of them over the age of 50 (and 42 percent over the age of 65), this group is probably poised to shrink in the coming years. Because it is so strongly rooted in the values of the Reagan and George W. Bush years – and not in the values of either political party today – it’s going to face a challenging future. I think that’s unfortunate, because I share a lot of that group’s concerns, but this is likely the reality for both evangelicalism and for the nation. Right now, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives still have an influence in American evangelicalism that is a little larger than their numbers might suggest, because, as a more highly educated, more established group, it still exercises an outsized influence in media outlets like Christianity Today, the Dispatch, and even the pages of the New York Times and the Atlantic. But the polling data does not suggest to me that this group is poised to grow.

In fact, both the Faith First Conservatives and the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives will likely become smaller groups in evangelical churches, but the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives will decline in number more quickly. I think that’s unfortunate, and I wish it were not the case. Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives are one of the most centrist, moderate groups in American politics today – and as that group continues to decline in influence, American politics is likely to become more polarized, and evangelical political culture is likely to become more extreme.

But in the meantime, I think that we’ll see continued battles between the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives for at least a few years. That’s because, despite their shared history in evangelical churches over the past few decades, they have sharply different understandings of American national identity.

When they debate each other, they may think that they’re arguing primarily over Trump’s personal behavior or abortion law. But in actuality, they are arguing over whether America should be a pluralistic nation or a white Christian nation – and as long as they disagree on that, they probably won’t find much common ground, despite sharing the same Christian profession and similar views on a lot of cultural issues.

The No-Apologies Right (17 percent of white evangelicals):

The debate between Faith First Conservatives and Pragmatic & Polite Conservatives in evangelical churches would already be volatile enough on its own, but the conflict has become even more heated due to the entrance of a sizeable group of newcomers to the evangelical debate: a right-wing group called the “No-Apologies Right” that is strongly anti-immigrant and pro-Trump.

Seventeen percent of white evangelicals are part of the No-Apologies Right, which makes them a slightly larger group than the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives – though still less than half the size of the Faith First Conservatives.

This group does not favor a pluralistic country. One hundred percent of the No-Apologies Right favor building a wall on the Mexican border. More than 80 percent want to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally, with no path to citizenship or legal residency for them. The majority also want to reduce the number of legal immigrants, and the majority say they are uncomfortable hearing people speak a language other than English. Sixty-three percent say that Trump is the best president of the past forty years. (Thirty-two percent – nearly all of the remainder – chose Reagan instead).

On most questions, this group is simply a more extreme version of the Faith First Conservatives. But there are a few areas where No-Apologies Rightists differ. They are somewhat less likely than Faith First Conservatives to oppose abortion, drug legalization, or same-sex marriage. They are less likely to attend church regularly.

And they are far more likely to applaud rude, aggressive behavior from Republicans. Fifty-three percent of No-Apologies rightists say they like it when politicians they agree with “humiliate their political opponents”; only 27 percent of Faith First Conservatives (and only 5 percent of Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives) say the same.

This is a group that is tuned into right-wing news sources. An overwhelming majority (73 percent) get their news from FOX, and they are more than twice as likely as Faith First Conservatives to consume news content from Breitbart.

Unlike Faith First Conservatives, who have a Christian nationalism that is shaped more by the historic Christian Right than by popular conservative media, the No-Apologies Right has a political worldview that is shaped more by conservative media than by anything endemic to evangelicalism. But as this group has gained ground in evangelicalism (it now includes approximately one out of every six white evangelicals), it has started to equate its own political views with evangelical orthodoxy. That’s one reason why some evangelical influencers are now denouncing “empathy” and why the Southern Baptist Convention, which historically supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, reversed that stance this year, when it passed a resolution advocating stricter border enforcement. The views of the No-Apologies Rightists are blending into those of the Faith First Conservatives and reshaping the Christian Right.

Tim Alberta’s 2023 book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, was a journalistic study primarily of the conflict between evangelical pastors that I would categorize as Faith First Conservatives and their more hardline right-wing congregants who could be categorized as part of the No-Apologies Right. The pastors strongly opposed abortion and had always voted Republican, but they wanted to steer their churches away from becoming political rallies for a Trumpian-style call to “own the libs.” But some of the congregants – as well as a few maverick pastors who seemed to take cues from Doug Wilson – wanted to blend their Christianity with the No-Apologies Right. And in some places, their voices were prevailing.

What Does All of This Tell Us about the Future of Evangelical Politics?

As I looked at all of this data, I came away with a heightened sense that a sizeable number of white evangelicals are not on board with the Trump coalition. In addition to the 21 percent who line up with one of the four Democratic-leaning “parties” identified by Pew or whose political beliefs are eclectic and not identifiably conservative, 14 percent are part of the Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives, a group that is deeply skeptical of Trump. And even among evangelicals who loyally vote for Trump, a strong plurality are part of a group of Faith First Conservatives who are not fully on board with the MAGA agenda, even if they are Christian nationalists.

But I also realized that anti-pluralist politics are gaining ground among white evangelicals. Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives are an aging, beleaguered group. Because their political worldview was shaped so heavily by the Reagan-Bush years, the Cold War, and the relative centrism of Barack Obama’s approach to issues of faith in his 2008 presidential campaign – moments that are now completely unknown to many younger voters – I see no reason to think that they will be able to gain adherents in the coming years.

Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives will continue to be a presence in white evangelical churches for some time to come, but they’re likely to continue feeling like a beleaguered and dwindling minority – just as they already do.

This is likely to increase the divide between evangelical churches and the humanities or social science departments at Christian colleges. Nearly all humanities and social science scholars, with only a small number of exceptions, are pluralists. That’s why today even some of the most conservative Christian academics write defenses of pluralism, such as John Wilsey’s Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. There’s not much support among historians of any stripe – even at very conservative Christian colleges – for full-blown Christian nationalism. And the number (not just the percentage) of historians who publicly support Trump is in the low single digits. A lot of conservative evangelical academics believe that Christianity plays a vital role in creating a healthy society – but they envision that society as politically, racially, and religiously pluralistic, which now puts them at odds with the majority of their fellow evangelicals.

Some Christian academics have reacted by leaving evangelicalism – perhaps by converting to Catholicism or by finding a mainline Protestant church to attend. Others have remained in evangelical spaces, but with an increasing sense of their distance from the political orientations of their fellow believers.

But perhaps the best way forward would be to openly discuss their differences. Instead of simply talking about their objections to Trump’s personal behavior or individual policies, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives need to present a persuasive argument for why a pluralistic society is good for both the Christians and the nation. Faith First Conservatives who overwhelmingly believe that allowing more Muslims into the United States would be dangerous or that making the nation’s laws more secular would destroy the country’s morality will never be persuaded to reconsider their support for Trump unless Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives can present a compelling argument for how the country can remain moral – and how Christians can thrive – even while fostering the country’s pluralistic identity. If they can do that, Pragmatic and Polite Conservatives may have one last chance to influence the political direction of American evangelicalism.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.

Today is the official release date for the updated edition of God’s Own Party, a book that traces the history of the Christian Right and white evangelical Christians’ alliance with the Republican Party from the early years of the Cold War to the 21^st century.

The first edition, which was published in 2010, traced the story through the end of George W. Bush’s presidency. The updated edition brings the story forward through the Trump administration and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Besides providing a detailed narrative of the Christian Right’s history, my book makes two related arguments that are still contested but that I think have held up pretty well: 1) The Christian Right was not the product of a single catalyst, but was rather a product of a confluence of different factors; and 2) White evangelicals’ alliance with the Republican Party (as well as their commitment to a conservative culture war) is deeply rooted and is therefore not going to disappear any time soon.

At the time I published the first edition, in 2010, some people were predicting the imminent demise of the Christian Right, which they thought had suffered a serious blow with George W. Bush’s deep unpopularity, the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and the death of some of the movement’s original leaders, such as Jerry Falwell Sr. (who passed away in 2007). Demographic and generational change also seemed to suggest that young adult millennials were not likely to continue supporting the Christian Right’s campaigns in large numbers. But I ended the first edition of the book with these sentences: “Despite what pundits predicted, evangelicals have not called off the culture wars; they have merely changed strategies. At the beginning of the Obama administration, the Christian Right is still many millions strong, and well positioned to continue exerting its influence in national life. Conservative Christian leaders still have faith that, with the help of God and the Republican Party, they can restore a Christian moral order to the nation.”

That prediction seems to have held up over the past sixteen years. Despite repeated suggestions that the Christian Right might be on the verge of disappearing, evangelicals have continued to exert a decisive influence in the Republican Party – most recently, by reining in the Trump administration’s drift to the left on abortion. (The nomination last week of an FDA commissioner who strongly opposes abortion might be a sign of conservative Christians’ continued political salience).

But if the Christian Right’s enduring power has been abundantly clear, the reasons for its endurance have perhaps not been quite so obvious. Here my book’s analysis of the complexity of the Christian Right’s origins is especially helpful, I think.

A primary reason why white evangelicals have been so unusually loyal to the Republican Party – regardless of whether the presidential nominee is George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, or Donald Trump – is that evangelicals’ alliance with the GOP was not the result of a single cause.

Some historians have attributed the Religious Right’s rise to a single event or cause, such as Religious Right leaders’ reaction against the IRS investigation of segregated Christian schools or Roe v. Wade. And if that were the case, one would expect that the Christian Right might disintegrate as soon as its initial catalyst disappeared or was no longer relevant.

But one of the problems with all of these attempts to identify a single catalyst for the Christian Right is that no single explanation seems large enough to explain every Christian Right leader’s activism. It might be relatively easy to make a case that Jerry Falwell entered politics to protect his private Christian school from the IRS (though even there, I would argue that this assertion greatly oversimplifies the story of Falwell’s motivations). But regardless of what one can say about Falwell, it’s impossible to make a plausible case that Francis Schaeffer or Anita Bryant was motivated by a desire to protect segregated Christian schools. The same is true for the many Christian women in Oklahoma, Texas, and other southern states who traveled to their state legislatures to speak out against the Equal Rights Amendment. And the same is true for the southern California evangelicals who launched Christian Voice in 1979 and its subsidiary Christians for Reagan the next year.

If we only study one group of Christian Right activists, we can easily make a convincing case that the origins of the Christian Right can be traced back to a single concern, such as the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the mid-1970s (as Ruth Murray Brown suggested) or the campaign against gay rights in Florida in 1977 (the subject of a study by Fred Fejes). But if we take a broader look at all of the various grassroots campaigns that contributed to the Christian Right’s formation, it becomes much harder to decide which cause was most important.

I argue in God’s Own Party that all of those causes (and several more) played a role in the formation of the Christian Right. More broadly, what happened is that evangelicals, who had already been moving closer to the Republican Party since the Eisenhower era (if not before) launched a partisan Christian Right movement at the end of the 1970s in reaction to two recent cultural changes that they conflated: a liberalization in sexual morals (and gender roles) and a secularization of American society.

Many Americans in the late 1970s could remember that a couple decades earlier, during the 1950s, the United States had embraced a strongly anticommunist civil religion that was at least vaguely Christian. President Dwight Eisenhower had led a prayer at his own inauguration and had then signed into law legislation to make “In God We Trust” the national motto. At the same time, homosexuality was illegal across much of the nation, and Americans embraced a more conservative sexual ethic. In other words, there was a general acceptance of a degree of sexual conservatism at the same time that there was a strong endorsement of religion in public life. However shallow all of that might have been, it did not seem so shallow to some Americans of the late 1970s who were nostalgic for a bygone era. And indeed, by the late 1970s, much of this had disappeared, because of the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1970s, some evangelical leaders decided that they could restore the values of the 1950s by pushing back against both secularization and the sexual revolution (which they thought were related). They advocated a constitutional amendment to restore prayer in public schools, which the Supreme Court had restricted in 1962. They wanted a constitutional amendment to protect human life from conception, thus invalidating Roe v. Wade and making most abortions illegal. And they wanted to push back against the gay rights movement.

Each cause that the Christian Right embraced was not really a separate thread, but was instead a different manifestation of the same belief that the sexual revolution that threatened America’s families was a product of secularization – and that they could best fight against that revolution by restoring Christian morality through law.

But why did the Christian Right emerge in the late 1970s and not at another time if there was no single catalyst for the movement?

There were several things about that era that made it uniquely conducive for the emergence of a Christian Right movement. First, there was a national sense of malaise and anxiety about a societal moral decline that went well beyond the Christian Right. The rapid cultural changes of the late 1960s and 1970s, combined with an economic downturn and a series of political and foreign policy crises, left a lot of middle-aged and older socially conservative Americans feeling that America had taken a wrong turn. Much of their anxiety centered on the family, as Natasha Zaretsky’s No Direction Home noted. And for good reason: The national divorce rate had just doubled in less than a decade. There was something profoundly unsettling about America’s loss in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, stagflation, rapidly rising drug use rates, a proliferation of pornography, and an exploding divorce rate. When conservative evangelical leaders argued that the nation was in crisis, they found a ready audience.

It’s probably no accident that most of the Christian Right leaders were born in the late 1920s and 1930s – which meant that they were old enough to remember the 1950s with nostalgia and to be disturbed by the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. For many of them, the moment when they launched the Christian Right happened to be the exact moment when they were raising their own children and were therefore especially worried about the societal changes they considered a threat. Their movement was an attempt not only to turn the clock back to the 1950s but also to protect their own families. The unique contrast between the cultural conservatism (and Cold War civil religion) of the 1950s and the societal changes of the late 1960s and 1970s created a perfect storm that led people of a particular generation (namely, the so-called Silent Generation) to enter politics in order to reclaim their country and bring back the Eisenhower era as they remembered it.

But second, at the moment of this anxiety and profound pessimism about the federal government and the moral direction of American society, evangelicals had unprecedented economic and political power. Due partly to a demographic shift to the Sunbelt, Southern Baptist and other evangelical churches were growing, even as mainline Protestant churches had begun to decline. The nation’s top televangelists controlled massive financial empires. Jerry Falwell raised more money in 1980 than the Democratic National Committee. Christian private schools were starting at the rate of two per day. It was not too surprising that some evangelicals who were frustrated with the direction of the country decided, as Pat Robertson said in 1979, “enough votes to run the country.” He added, “And when the people say, ‘We’ve had enough,’ we are going to take over.”

Third, the Christian Right formed as an organized political entity partly because of a new campaign finance law passed in 1974 that created the basis for political action committees (PACs) by limiting the amount that individuals could contribute to political campaigns but allowing PACs to contribute a lot more. Conservative activists encouraged politically interested evangelicals like Falwell to form their own PAC – and evangelicals who realized the political influence that a PAC could give them were happy to comply. It was an ideal time to start a political lobbying and voter mobilization group.

Fourth, the Christian Right formed partly as a result of evangelical disappointment with Carter. Because the evangelical press widely highlighted Carter’s born-again identity during his 1976 campaign, some evangelicals thought of him as one of their own. Carter did not receive as much support from evangelicals in 1976 as is sometimes imagined, but nevertheless, he did capture about half of the national white evangelical vote – and that was enough to leave some evangelicals expecting a national cultural revival from his administration that he could never deliver even if he wanted to. And as a Southern Baptist moderate who believed strongly in the separation of church and state, he really didn’t want to. Evangelicals who had unrealistic expectations of Carter and felt betrayed by his presidency were perhaps more willing to launch a movement against him than they might have if the White House had instead been occupied by an Episcopalian like Gerald Ford (whom Southern Baptists generally didn’t identify with as one of their own in quite the same way).

And fifth, the Republican Party was itself undergoing a change in identity in 1980 as a result of Ronald Reagan’s campaign. Evangelicals who allied with Reagan were joining other conservatives (especially southern conservatives) who were moving into the GOP and were poised to remake the party. The Christian Right was in the vanguard of this movement – and as a result, it received big returns (at least in national prominence, if not in policy results) when Reagan was elected. That gave the movement a staying power that it might not have had if Reagan had not won the Republican presidential nomination or the presidency.

In an alternate reality, one could imagine, for example, that if George H. W. Bush had succeeded in his quest to win the party’s presidential nomination (at a time when he had not yet converted to the pro-life cause) and had then held the line at the Republican convention against activists who wanted to rescind the party’s support for the ERA, the Christian Right might not have become a very strong presence in the Republican Party – and without that initial political success, perhaps its hold on evangelicalism would have been greatly reduced.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure what might have happened in this hypothetical scenario. But I do think that we can say that without a candidate like Reagan to ally with – and without Reagan’s decisive victory in 1980 – the future of the Christian Right might have been very different. If the Christian Right had encountered a Republican party that was not moving to the right – and that was not open to being remade in the image of Sunbelt-centered economic and social conservatism – perhaps evangelicals would never have gained the influence in the GOP that Falwell and Robertson did.

Notice that I have just given five reasons for the Christian Right’s success without mentioning any of the specific catalysts that historians often cite for the origins of the Christian Right – catalysts such as Roe v. Wade, the IRS ruling on segregated private schools, the ERA, and the gay rights movement. Each of these catalysts played some role in the movement’s formation (with some being more important than others). I don’t want to ignore those causes, and in fact, I cover each at some length in my book. I have especially written at length on abortion, not only in God’s Own Party but also in several other books, including Defenders of the Unborn and Abortion and America’s Churches. But I think that it’s fair to say that if one or more of these catalysts had been missing, there’s a good chance that the Christian Right still would have formed, because no single factor was critical to the movement’s launch. That’s even true of Roe v. Wade, which became a very important symbol for the movement but was not the initial primary cause of the Christian Right’s formation.

That’s why when Jerry Falwell listed the causes of concern for conservative evangelicals in 1980, he didn’t always list the same set of issues. At times, he talked about abortion and at other times he mentioned homosexuality or pornography. At still other moments, he mentioned the ERA and the feminist movement. Above all, he talked about a sense of national moral decline and a need to restore Christian values. I don’t think that Falwell was being disingenuous when he gave these different answers. He was genuinely concerned about all of these things. Most of all, he thought that an evangelical civil religion that he imagined as a return to the 1950s was the answer to the nation’s moral problems, and he believed that political activism was the way to achieve it.

Not all evangelicals embraced the Christian Right. Those who believed in religious pluralism and who held a view of church-state separation that was popular in moderately liberal Baptist circles opposed the Christian Right’s campaigns. That was the case for President Jimmy Carter, independent presidential candidate John Anderson (a member of the Evangelical Free Church), and Senator Mark Hatfield.

But most white evangelical voters were much more supportive of the Christian Right’s vision of restoring American morality through a governmental endorsement of Christian values. Because the Christian Right’s alliance with the Republican Party was rooted in this larger vision, it endured even when some of the specific causes that brought some evangelicals into politics in 1980 – such as a school prayer amendment – faded.

If we understand the larger vision that motivated the conservative evangelicals who entered politics in 1980, we can better understand a much later phenomenon that to some observers may seem the strangest part of the story of the Christian Right: evangelicals’ support for Trump, a profane man with multiple divorces and extramarital affairs.

When I published the first edition of God’s Own Party, at the beginning of the Obama presidency, evangelicals’ support for Trump was nowhere on the horizon, and Trump’s name never appeared in the book. But in writing the new material for the second edition, I was struck by the way in which evangelicals’ support for Trump reflected earlier patterns in the Christian Right’s history.

In 1980, the evangelicals who endorsed Reagan for president were not supporting the most religiously observant evangelical in the race. Instead, they were supporting the candidate who came closest to articulating their vision of restoring a particular strand of American civil religion and who supported their campaigns to rescind Roe v. Wade and curb some strands of the sexual revolution. A similar line of thinking motivated their support for Trump – though by the time that Trump ran for president in 2016, evangelicals were no longer primarily motivated by an optimistic hope of restoring Christian values through law but were instead driven mainly by fear that if they did not stop the Democrats from gaining political power, they would lose their religious liberty.

But neither Trump nor any of the other candidates that evangelicals supported could ever fully deliver on the promise to change American culture. That’s why I wrote in the first edition of God’s Own Party: “Evangelical leaders will come and go, and their political styles will change, but the underlying rationale for their political campaigns is not likely to go away. And just as conservative evangelicals have been frustrated in their past efforts, they are likely to once again find it impossible to reverse the country’s cultural direction through politics. Though they have largely succeeded in turning the GOP into ‘God’s Own Party,’ they have not yet been able to make America God’s own nation. Their ninety-year quest continues.”

In some ways, the Christian Right accomplished more than many would have expected, either in 1980 or 2010. It secured the reversal of Roe v. Wade. It secured new legal recognition of parental rights and the religious liberty of conservative Christians.

But nearly every Christian Right leader who has been part of the movement for very long has ultimately expressed frustration with the limits of the movement in changing American culture. That’s because the movement was not founded merely on a set of particular policy objectives but rather on a larger vision of preserving (or restoring) the nation’s Christian identity and Christian-based morality. That goal is probably beyond the capacity of any political campaign to deliver. The elusive nature of this objective explains both the enduring attraction of the Christian Right for many conservative evangelicals – but also their enduring disappointment.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, which is now available in a newly released updated edition.

I ended my last Substack post with a promise to investigate a provocative claim: the claim that nearly half of American evangelicals don’t believe in the divinity of Christ.

I encountered this claim in Princeton sociology professor Paul Starr’s book American Contradiction. As I mentioned in my previous post, Starr wrote, “Among evangelicals, religious identity and partisanship have become conflated. People who describe themselves as ‘evangelical’ have become more likely to say that they seldom or never attend church; 43 percent say they do not believe in the divinity of Christ. What holds them together is a politicized religious identity” (Starr, American Contradiction, 321).

In my previous post, I drew on survey data to demonstrate that for evangelicals, faith commitments rather than political beliefs are still the core of their identity. Evangelicals are more likely to pray regularly and attend church than identify as Republicans. And as I’ll show at the end of this post, an overwhelming majority take theologically orthodox evangelical views on biblical authority and salvation through faith in Christ.

But in all of this discussion, I haven’t yet dealt directly with the evidence Starr cites for his claim that 43 percent of evangelicals say they do not believe in the divinity of Christ. As I suggested in my previous post, I don’t think the survey data that Starr cites for this claim actually proves the point he’s trying to make. But it’s a sufficiently alarming claim to merit further analysis, which is why I want to spend most of the rest of this post investigating the question: Does the survey data show that 43 percent of evangelicals don’t believe in Jesus’s divinity?

Examining the Evidence for This Claim: The Ligonier Study

Starr cited as evidence for his claim the 2022 Lifeway Ligonier State of Theology study (which I’ll refer to from this point on as the “Ligonier study”). This study included, among many questions, a question that asked a random sampling of a few thousand people whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement: “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” Forty-four percent of respondents that the Ligonier study identified as “evangelical by belief” (on the basis of their agreement with a series of statements roughly approximating the Bebbington quadrilateral) said they agreed with that statement about Jesus.

On the surface, it sounds alarming that 44 percent of evangelicals-by-belief (not just self-identified evangelicals, but evangelicals-by-belief!) agreed with a statement that is clearly theologically false from an orthodox evangelical Christian perspective. It suggests that nearly half the people who are classified as evangelicals and who say they believe in the supreme authority of the Bible and salvation by faith in Christ are actually Unitarians masquerading as believers.

For someone to be classified as “evangelical by belief” in the Ligonier study, that person could not simply say they were evangelical. Instead, they had to agree with all four of these statements: “The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe”; “It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus as their Savior”; “Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty for my sin”; and “Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.”

It therefore seems especially puzzling that a large number of people who affirmed all of these statements, including the affirmations of Jesus Christ as Savior, would also say that Jesus was not God. But on closer examination, I don’t think that this statistic indicates what it might first seem.

That’s because of some fundamental limitations in the way this survey was designed. The Ligonier study was not created by sociologists of religion who wanted to simply find out what the general population believes. Instead, it began in 2014 as a partnership between conservative Presbyterian theologian R. C. Sproul’s Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research, a Southern Baptist Convention affiliate. It fills an important niche in the religious survey field, because, while there are quite a number of surveys of American Christians’ political views or views on cultural questions, there are very few studies that ask about their theological beliefs. In fact, the Ligonier study may be the best of those; it’s certainly the most comprehensive. And because it fills this niche, this survey, which gathers responses from a random sample of 3,000 American adults every two or three years, has become a valuable tool even for scholars of religion in the secular academy as well as in churches.

But because the survey’s creators envisioned it primarily as a tool to alert churches to the widespread theological confusion in both American society and evangelical churches, sociologists like Starr who want to use the data to analyze evangelicalism need to be cautious, since the study is not quite like other sociological surveys of religious belief and practice.

Because the survey is designed to assess the state of theological orthodoxy in American society in general and evangelicalism in particular, it doesn’t ask about a comprehensive set of theological beliefs and practices that a more neutral sociology of religion survey might. It doesn’t ask respondents what they think about speaking in tongues or other charismatic gifts, for example. It doesn’t ask respondents what percentage of their money they give to the poor. It doesn’t ask whether they think Christians should ever support a war.

Instead, it focuses only on the narrow range of questions that the Ligonier study’s creators considered important determinants of theological orthodoxy. And because the study designers came from the Reformed evangelical tradition, they framed the study around concepts that matter to people within that tradition, but that might not be quite as familiar to some people outside of it. Many of their survey questions focus on biblical authority and justification, including belief in Christ, understanding of sin and the atonement, and adherence to a Reformed Protestant understanding of justification by faith. Their purpose in designing this study, it seems, was to show the wide gulf that exists between Christian orthodoxy (as understood by Reformed evangelicals) and prevailing beliefs among Christians and the general public.

While other surveys of religious belief might give respondents a range of choices to select from in describing their views – an approach that usually gives researchers a better sense of respondents’ views – the Ligonier study does not. When it asks respondents about the divinity of Christ, it simply asks them to agree or disagree with a particular statement, such as “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” That fits with the study’s purpose, which is not to trace the full range of beliefs among respondents, but simply to group respondents into two categories: those who agree with Christian orthodoxy and those who do not.

By contrast, when the Barna Group conducted a poll on views of Jesus’s divinity in 2014, they tried a simpler approach that, in my view, probably yielded more reliable data. The Barna Group asked respondents to fill in the blank to the following statement: “I believe Jesus was . . .” The choices were “God,” “only a religious or spiritual leader,” or “unsure.” I wish that the Ligonier study had used this wording, because if it had, it would have been clearer to respondents that the two options they had to choose from were an affirmation of Jesus’s divinity or a declaration that Jesus was only a religious leader (and not God). But the Ligonier study didn’t use that wording.

Presumably, in wording the question a different way – that is, asking respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God” – the designers of the Ligonier study had something like C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in mind. As Lewis said, many people of his own day, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, claimed to respect Jesus as a good teacher, but didn’t consider him to be God. And for evangelicals who had read Mere Christianity or who were familiar with Lewis’s formulation of the matter, the answer to the Ligonier study question would have been a no-brainer: Of course it’s false.

But for a lot of other Americans, this question might not have been so straightforward. For the small minority of atheists who consider Jesus to have been a mythical being, this question would have been a puzzler. For them, Jesus is neither God nor a great teacher – so, do they answer “false” to the question (but risk being classified with all of the Christians who also answered “false” because they believe Jesus is God) or do they answer “true” but risk being classified as people who respect Jesus as a historical figure whose teachings are worthy of respect?

But more significantly, this question has the potential to confuse a lot of theologically orthodox Christians because, if someone is not familiar with C.S. Lewis’s argument, they may interpret this question as a type of classic “double-barreled” survey question, which are notoriously problematic in surveys.

Double-barreled questions ask about two things at once. And though I assume the people creating the 2022 Ligonier study survey questions didn’t think they were asking about two different things when they asked this question, there’s good reason to think that a lot of the respondents may have. They heard, “Jesus was a great teacher,” and agreed with that part of the sentence, because (unlike the Barna survey) it didn’t include the word “only” before the phrase “great teacher.” All Christians agree that Jesus was a great teacher, after all; they just don’t believe that he was only a great teacher. After hearing a part of the sentence that they undoubtedly agreed with, respondents then heard, “But he was not God,” and may have questioned that. But how should they answer the question if they agreed with the first clause?

A person who is experienced in taking tests with true-false questions would know the answer: If the second part of the sentence is false, the entire sentence is false. But that depends on a certain level of logical thinking that not everyone has. That’s especially true for those with lower levels of education.

In fact, that’s what we find with the responses to this question. Of the different religious groups surveyed, Black Protestants (the religious group with the lowest percentage of college graduates) were the most likely to agree with the statement, with 57 percent of Black Protestants saying they agreed that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”

By contrast, when the Barna Group asked a cross-section of Americans the more straightforward version of this question in 2014 – that is, asking them to fill in the blank in the statement, “I believe Jesus was . . .” – 56 percent of all Americans said Jesus was God, and only 26 percent said he was “only a religious or spiritual leader.”

Unfortunately, the reported results from this survey did not differentiate between evangelical and non-evangelical responses. However, I find it astonishing that if only 26 percent of all Americans in 2014 said that Jesus was not God but instead was “only a religious or spiritual leader,” that percentage would suddenly rise to 57 percent of Black Protestants and 44 percent of evangelicals-by-belief in 2022. If that’s the case, both evangelicals and Black Protestants are far more likely than the general population to disbelieve in the divinity of Christ.

Could it really be the case that the general population (the majority of which doesn’t attend church) is far more theologically orthodox on a question of Jesus’s divinity than either Black Protestants or evangelicals-by-belief are – especially when we realize that evangelicals-by-belief, according to the survey’s definition, have already affirmed their belief in Jesus as Savior?

It’s far more likely, I think, that the Ligonier survey question was unclear to a large number of respondents, which is why groups that were less likely to be college-educated were more likely to give a response that did not reflect the teachings of their own theological tradition.

The educational divide in respondents’ answers is even clearer when we look at how people answered another question in the Ligonier survey that also seems at first glance to indicate that evangelicals are confused about Jesus’s divinity. Respondents were asked whether they agreed with this statement: “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.”

Again, for people who have some knowledge of Christian theology in general and the Nicene Creed in particular, this might not seem like a difficult question. As the Nicene Creed says, Jesus was “begotten, not made,” so the statement is false.

But the question was evidently more confusing for a lot of respondents. Agreement with this statement varied inversely by education – meaning that those who had never attended college were more likely than anyone else to agree with this statement. Those who attended church at least once or twice a month were 25 percentage points more likely to agree with this statement than those who rarely or never attended church. Once again, Black Protestants were the religious group most likely to agree with this statement – with 78 percent agreeing with it, compared to 61 percent of evangelicals.

Perhaps most surprisingly, people who were “evangelical by belief” were even more likely to agree with this statement than people who were merely evangelical by identification. While 61 percent of self-identified evangelical or born-again Christians agreed that “Jesus was the first and greatest being created by God,” that figure increased to 73 percent among those who were evangelical-by-belief, affirming the four statements approximating the Bebbington quadrilateral.

Does it make sense that people who believe in all four of those statements would be 23 percentage points more likely than those who do not to think that Jesus was merely a created being – which is what the survey seems to indicate? Or, does it make more sense that, like the other question I just discussed, this question might have seemed to respondents with lower levels of education to be a confusing double-barreled question, asking first about whether Jesus is the “first and greatest being” and then about whether Jesus was created by God? Or perhaps to some respondents – especially to those who found questions about theological beliefs a little confusing in general – they might have heard the words “first and greatest being” and then tuned out the rest, which would have led them to think they were endorsing Jesus’s superiority when they indicated their agreement with this statement.

This statement, after all, is very closely parallel to a verse that might have been familiar to some churchgoing evangelicals: Colossians 1:15, which the New International Version translates, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” Again, for those who are familiar with theological debates over Jesus’s divinity and who know how understand complex true-false questions and how to distinguish orthodox Trinitarian theology from Arianism or the Christology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, this question would have been pretty easy. To everyone else, it may have been more challenging, which is why 73 percent of people who were “evangelical by belief” – along with 78 percent of Black Protestants – got it wrong.

But this doesn’t indicate that self-identified evangelicals don’t believe in Jesus’s divinity or that they are united more by their politics than by their adherence to theological orthodoxy.

Their responses to two questions in particular in the Ligonier survey demonstrate this, I think.

When asked whether they agreed with the statement, “There is one God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit,” 97 percent of those who were “evangelical by belief” and 93 percent of all regular churchgoers answered in the affirmative.

Likewise, 98 percent of “evangelicals by belief” and 90 percent of all self-identified evangelicals said they believed that “Biblical accounts of the physical (bodily) resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate. This event actually occurred.”

God the Son is fully God, and the resurrection of Jesus really happened. At least 90 percent of self-identified evangelicals, as well as nearly all evangelicals-by-belief, affirmed these two statements. That doesn’t suggest to me that they’re Unitarians.

Are Evangelicals Confused about Christology?

But that doesn’t mean that evangelicals are very well versed in the details of classic Christian Christology. Indeed, I think the survey evidence suggests that they’re not.

In 2024, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University conducted a study of American religious beliefs similar to the Ligonier study. Like the Ligonier study, the ACU study used theological beliefs as a way to classify evangelicals. To be considered evangelical in that study, respondents had to affirm that “the Bible is the true word of God”; “people are born into sin, and can only be saved from the consequences of sin by Jesus Christ”; and “after you die, you know you will go to Heaven, but only because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior.”

Among this supposedly theologically orthodox set of evangelicals-by-belief, 78 percent said they agreed with the statement, “While on earth, Jesus Christ was fully divine and fully human, but He did not sin, like other people.”

Seventy-eight percent is considerably higher than the 56 percent of evangelicals-by-belief who refrained from affirming the heretical statement, “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God,” in the Ligonier study. But it still falls far short of the 100 percent that we might expect from a group that insists that Jesus is the only Savior and the only way to heaven.

Perhaps the ACU survey question was too complex for respondents to fully follow. After all, it asks about several ideas simultaneously – whether Jesus was fully God, whether he was fully human, and whether he sinned – and, like the Ligonier study, it didn’t give respondents an opportunity to choose among a range of possible responses; instead, it simply asked them to agree or disagree with the statement.

I suspect that all of this is true. But I also suspect that despite the potential flaws in the design of both the ACU study and the Ligonier study, these surveys also point us toward a potential issue in evangelicals’ understanding of Christology. It’s not the presence of outright Unitarianism or denial of Jesus’s divinity among evangelicals. After all, the Ligonier study showed that 97 percent of evangelicals-by-belief, and 93 percent of self-identified evangelicals, affirmed a basic description of the Trinity. It’s not a disbelief in Jesus’s power, since the overwhelming majority of these evangelicals also affirmed the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection and the claim that trusting in Jesus is the only way to be saved.

But there does appear to be some fuzziness among evangelicals about Christology. While low educational levels do play a role in that, I think that something else may be at play as well: Perhaps a lot of evangelical churches are not teaching very much on the theology of Jesus’s nature. They’re singing worship songs to Jesus every week, and they’re preaching about trusting Christ and living by faith in Jesus, but because they don’t recite the Nicene Creed as part of a worship liturgy or do very much teaching about Christology, even some regular churchgoers who fervently believe that the Bible is God’s word and Jesus is the only way to heaven may get tripped up when trying to answer questions about Jesus’s divine and human nature.

For pastors and church leaders who consider Christology important, this survey data may suggest a need to do more teaching on these matters or to incorporate creedal formulas onto these topics into the worship liturgy – which is not what most low-church evangelical congregations are doing, but which is something that at least some evangelical churches practice.

The Surveys Show That Evangelicals Are Still Defined by Belief

Findings from the Ligonier study are commonly cited to show evangelicals’ theological ignorance or lack of adherence to theological orthodoxy.

But regardless of what we might think about evangelicals’ responses to some of the questions about Christology, I actually think that the Ligonier study offers strong evidence that evangelicals are defined primarily by a set of theological beliefs. That’s true especially for those who expressed agreement with the Ligonier study’s summary of all four points of the Bebbington quadrilateral, thus earning them the moniker evangelicals-by-belief. But it’s mostly true even of a lot of self-identified evangelicals who don’t fully pass the Bebbington quadrilateral test.

Evangelicals are defined by a common respect for the Bible. Ninety-five percent of evangelicals-by-belief and 76 percent of self-identified evangelicals agreed that “The Bible is 100 percent true in all it teaches.” Ninety-four percent of evangelicals-by-belief and 80 percent of self-identified evangelicals agreed that “The Bible has the authority to tell us what we must do.” One hundred percent of evangelicals-by-belief and 87 percent of self-identified evangelicals said that “The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.”

So, on all of these measures, the Ligonier study seems to indicate that nearly all of those who are evangelical by belief – along with more than 75 percent of self-identified evangelicals – meet the definition of Bebbington’s quadrilateral when it comes to biblicism. This also differentiates them from Catholics and mainline Protestants, though not from Black Protestants. (Ninety-two percent of Black Protestants said that “The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe” – a higher number than the 87 percent of self-identified evangelicals who affirmed this. By contrast, only 70 percent of Catholics and 68 percent of mainline Protestants agreed with the statement.)

Evangelicals are also mostly united in their view of salvation, evangelism, and the cross. Eighty-eight percent of self-identified evangelicals (along with 86 percent of Black Protestants and 100 percent of evangelicals-by-belief – but only 72 percent of mainline Protestants and Catholics) said that “Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.” Eighty-two percent of self-identified evangelicals (and 79 percent of Black Protestants, along with 100 percent of evangelicals-by-belief) said that “it is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust in Jesus Christ as their Savior.”

So, on all of these measures, the evidence seems to be pretty strong that evangelicals are characterized by a common set of theological commitments. On each of the questions related to the items covered by the Bebbington quadrilateral (biblicism, conversion, crucicentrism, and evangelism), about 80 percent or more of self-identified evangelicals are squarely orthodox in their affirmations of classic evangelical beliefs. If there are people who don’t share these beliefs but who are identifying as evangelicals solely because of their politics, their numbers seem to be relatively small.

Furthermore, all of these beliefs are accompanied with a belief in a literal hell and a literal judgment. Eighty-two percent of self-identified evangelicals and 94 percent of those with evangelical beliefs said that “Hell is a real place where certain people will be punished forever.” Eighty percent of Black Protestants – but only 56 percent of mainline Protestants and 68 percent of Catholics – agreed with this statement. Eighty-eight percent of self-identified evangelicals – along with 98 percent of those with evangelical beliefs – said that “There will be a time when Jesus Christ returns to judge all the people who have lived.” Eighty-four percent of Black Protestants – but only 70 percent of mainline Protestants – agreed.

All of this indicates that the traditional emphases of historic evangelical preaching – including the authority of the Bible and salvation from hell through trust in Jesus alone – still receive widespread acceptance among evangelicals.

But here a caveat is in order:

The foundational theological beliefs of evangelicals do not directly reflect what other Christians might consider markers of theological orthodoxy. As my analysis of the Ligonier State of Theology study data demonstrates, the most widespread theological beliefs in contemporary evangelicalism map pretty closely onto the Bebbington quadrilateral. But the study also indicates that some areas of theological orthodoxy might not be included in these foundational beliefs.

For example, the confused responses to one of the questions about Jesus being a created being may indicate a lack of familiarity with the Nicene Creed. As responses to another question about the Trinity indicated, nearly all evangelicals are orthodox on the most basic tenet of Trinitarian theology – that there is one God in three persons – but they quickly become confused when asked more specialized questions about Jesus’s nature that are directly addressed in the Nicene Creed. But the majority of American evangelicals today belong to noncreedal traditions, so if most of them are not experts on the Nicene Creed, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Furthermore, most are not Calvinists, and their adherence to traditional doctrines of original sin is pretty weak. Only 32 percent of evangelicals-by-belief (the most theologically orthodox category of evangelical) disagreed with the statement, “Everyone is born innocent in the sight of God.”

And finally, many of them don’t think church is very important. Only 51 percent of self-identified evangelicals (and 68 percent of those with evangelical beliefs) agreed that “every Christian has an obligation to join a local church.”

Evangelicals still attend church at higher rates than self-identified mainline Protestants or Catholics do. But their church attendance rates are dropping, and according to their stated theological beliefs, a substantial minority don’t think church is necessary.

What should we make of all of this? I think that when closely examined, the data indicates that evangelicals are still defined more by a set of theological beliefs than by their political views, and that those theological beliefs correspond pretty closely to the Bebbington quadrilateral. I don’t think that the data, when properly interpreted, indicates that 43 percent (or 44 percent) of evangelicals disbelieve in the divinity of Christ.

Evangelicals may be fuzzier on their theology than some of us would like – and if that’s the case, maybe more emphasis on that point is in order. But at the same time, let’s try to give credit where credit is due – and if evangelicals have a cohesive set of theological beliefs, let’s recognize that, even if we might wish their theological knowledge went a bit further.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of several books on American religion and politics. The updated edition of his book God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, which includes a new chapter on evangelicals in the Trump era, is available for pre-order now and will be released later this month.

Photo credit: Lee Honeycutt / Wikimedia.

Is an “evangelical” identity today more about politics than religious belief?

Evangelicals themselves strongly resist this claim, but it has become ubiquitous among academics who study modern American religion and politics.

I have seen this claim in several places, but what prompted me to do some statistical analysis of the data on this was a statistic that I encountered when reading Paul Starr’s American Contradiction this summer. Starr, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of sociology at Princeton University, published American Contradiction last year as a study of the 75-year history from the rise of the postwar liberal consensus until the fragmentation of America under Trump. I appreciated a lot of his analysis, but I found a few things to disagree with when I got to his discussion of evangelical politics.

One paragraph in particular caught my eye. When describing evangelicals during the Trump presidency, Starr wrote: “Among evangelicals, religious identity and partisanship have become conflated. People who describe themselves as ‘evangelical’ have become more likely to say that they seldom or never attend church; 43 percent say they do not believe in the divinity of Christ. What holds them together is a politicized religious identity” (Starr, American Contradiction, 321).

Forty-three percent of self-identified evangelicals don’t believe in the divinity of Christ? That statistic sounded astonishingly high to me, so I decided to look into it. I’ll get back to the evidence Starr cited for this statistic, but first, I want to look at the broader claim. Is there evidence that a sizeable number of self-described evangelicals are not theologically evangelical in their beliefs but are instead united by their common political views?

Examining the Evidence for the Claim That “Evangelical” Is a Political Label

There’s no question that an overwhelming majority of white evangelical voters – usually something on the order of about 80 percent or more – vote for the Republican ticket in presidential elections.

(By the way, when political analysts talk about “evangelicals” as conservative partisans, they almost invariably mean “white evangelicals,” so for the purpose of this post, I’ll do the same in my analysis of evangelical beliefs and politics – even though, of course, many evangelical churches are not exclusively white and even though a definition of evangelical that is restricted to whites is problematic in some ways, as I pointed out in a previous Substack post. If I included non-white born-again Christians in my analysis, the percentage of Republicans would drop significantly - but for the purpose of this analysis, I will restrict my analysis to whites, the group of born-again Christians who are by far the most likely to identify as Republicans).

But the question is whether evangelical theology and culture have produced this strong Republican partisanship or whether instead people’s conservative political views are driving them to claim the evangelical label.

A couple decades ago, I think that most political scientists in this field would have assumed as a matter of course that evangelicals’ theological beliefs preceded their political commitments. And the reason they assumed that was that in the 1990s and early 2000s, many of the evangelicals they studied were evangelical before they became Republicans. Some of the older ones might well have voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. And there were still a surprisingly high number of evangelicals who voted for Bill Clinton in the 1990s, even if he did earn the ire of the Religious Right. There were also a number of politically progressive Christians like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider who wore the evangelical label. The idea that a sizeable group of evangelicals were first and foremost political conservatives, and that they just happened to grab the evangelical label as a self-descriptor merely because they thought it was a good way to signal their political and cultural views even if they didn’t subscribe to very much of evangelical theology, would have seemed pretty far-fetched. I, at least, never encountered that view when I was reading the political science scholarship on the topic for my dissertation on the Christian Right, “From the Pews to the Polls,” in 2005.

But the idea that political views are more foundational (and less subject to change) than religious views gained a lot of currency after political scientist Michele Margolis made a case for this in her widely regarded 2018 study From Politics to the Pews (a reversal of the phrasing I used in my dissertation title).

Drawing on a massive amount of longitudinal survey data of Baby Boomers’ religious and political identities over the course of several decades, Margolis showed that at least among whites, those who were politically conservative became more religious over the course of their lives, while those who were politically liberal became less churched. The political beliefs that someone had when they were 18 may have been a better predictor than their church affiliation was of where they would end up religiously in their older years.

Since that book’s publication, a number of other scholars have added to this argument by examining evangelicals in particular. Ryan Burge has cited at least three pieces of evidence to show that evangelicalism has increasingly become more a politically conservative partisan identity than a theological moniker.

The first is that evangelical church attendance has dropped pretty substantially in the past twenty years – which suggests that many of those calling themselves “evangelical” no longer feel the need for church, a phenomenon that may indicate their lack of theological engagement. By 2020, 27 percent of evangelicals said they seldom or never attended church – up from only 16 percent in 2007.

The second is that among those self-identified evangelical non-attenders, the percentage who said they were politically conservative has risen from only a third in 2007 to 50 percent in 2019. So, even as these evangelical non-attenders have distanced themselves from church, they have increased their commitment to conservative politics, which suggests that their eagerness to retain the evangelical label may say more about their political views than their theological beliefs.

And the third piece of evidence is that even a few non-Christians (especially Muslims) who are politically conservative have also started identifying themselves as evangelicals in surveys. After all, if even a few Muslims call themselves evangelical, the public probably doesn’t perceive “evangelical” as a distinctively Christian word anymore.

Ryan Burge has done far more data analysis than I have (since I’m a historian whose data analysis experience is fledgling and entirely self-taught), and Paul Starr is a Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist, so I hesitate to challenge their interpretations, especially since I respect their work. (I subscribe to Ryan Burge’s Substack and would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to explore data on contemporary American religion and politics in more depth). But on this particular point, I think that I can make a case for a different interpretation of the survey data.

But first, I should say that there is a lot of truth to the claim that political conservatives are more likely to eventually make their way into church and identify with theologically conservative Christianity, as Margolis claimed. I do believe that there’s good evidence that secular political conservatives are more likely than secular political liberals to find evangelical Christianity attractive and to at least give it serious consideration, as David Brooks and Charles Murray have done (even if neither has yet become an evangelical Christian).

But I think that scholars go too far when they assert that large numbers of evangelicals don’t believe basic tenets of Christian doctrine but instead are calling themselves evangelicals simply because they’re political conservatives or Republicans and want to identify with a religious group that shares their political perspectives. That’s the particular claim that I want to push back on.

In actuality, the data indicates that about 70-90 percent of self-identified evangelicals look like religiously engaged Christians when it comes to belief and practice. If there are people who claim the evangelical label simply because of its political connotations, but without subscribing to evangelical theological beliefs, those people are a very small minority.

There’s good evidence that evangelical theological beliefs are closely correlated with conservative political views, especially on cultural issues. But those political views have not replaced evangelical theological beliefs and practices as a marker of evangelical identity. The theological beliefs and practices are still foundational.

More Evangelicals Pray, Go to Church, and Oppose Abortion Than Identify as Republican

If evangelicalism has become defined more by its politics than by its religious tradition, we would expect to find a lot of people who are self-identified evangelical Republicans who don’t engage in evangelical practices.

To find out whether that is the case, I looked at the 2024 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), which is a massive study that some political scientists consider the gold standard for data because it has 60,000 respondents. Even when we restrict the analysis to white evangelicals, there are still 10,000 respondents in the dataset, which means that the standard error is low and the reliability of the findings is therefore presumably high. And by using the 2024 dataset, I restricted my analysis to the moment when white evangelicals were going to the polls to vote for or against Donald Trump in the last election. If ever there was a time when white evangelicals identified their faith with political conservatism, this should have been that moment.

I did my own data analysis for this, which means that you won’t be able to find my exact findings online. I used R to code for the variables I wanted, making sure to weight the data appropriately using the common weight. I restricted my analysis to whites who answered “yes” to the question “Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian?”

Here’s what I found:

Evangelicals are more likely to pray regularly and oppose abortion than identify as a Republican. Fifty-nine percent of white evangelicals say they are Republicans or Republican leaners. Republican identification is certainly high among white evangelicals – and it’s several times as high as the 11 percent who identify as Democrats - but it’s not as high as the percent of those who pray at least weekly (88 percent). It’s also not as high as the percent of those who attend church at least a few times a year (71 percent), and it’s only barely higher than the 58 percent of evangelicals who go to church at least once or twice a month.

It’s also considerably lower than the 84 percent of white evangelicals who said they want to make abortion mostly or entirely illegal. (Using a different dataset, Pew Research Center reported this figure as 74 percent, which is lower than I found in the CES data, but still quite high).

I should say that there are other surveys, such as Pew’s, that report much higher level of Republican identification among white evangelicals. But Pew does that by dropping the independent label and using a simple binary to classify respondents as either Republican or Democrat. By that measure, 85 percent of evangelicals are Republican, because approximately that many evangelical voters are politically conservative and generally support Republican candidates. But that doesn’t mean that 85 percent of white evangelicals identify as Republican. When given the choice to classify themselves as independents instead of only as Republicans or Democrats, 23 percent identify as independents, and the percentage who identify as Republican drops to only 59 percent.

Further, the vast majority of self-identified evangelical Republicans show up in the survey data not as political opportunists who are using the evangelical label merely to signify their political commitments, but instead as religiously devout people whose lives are shaped by their faith commitments.

Fifty-four percent of self-identified evangelical Republicans said they attended church at least once a week, and 74 percent said they attended at least a few times a year. Only 8 percent said they never attended church. Ninety-one percent said they prayed at least once a week (with many, of course, praying much more frequently than that). Eighty-nine percent said they supported making abortion entirely illegal or legalizing it only in cases of rape or incest or to save a woman’s life.

In short, on two key measures of evangelical observance – prayer and church attendance – fewer than ten percent said they never attended church or prayed less than once a week. And on abortion, only 11 percent did not take an extremely conservative position.

Unfortunately, the CES survey doesn’t include questions for a lot of other measures of evangelical faith, such as personal Bible reading habits, attitudes toward biblical authority, belief in salvation through personal faith in Jesus, and understanding of the atonement, among others. (For those measures, I can draw on data from the Lifeway Ligonier State of Theology survey, which I’ll do in a future post).

What about Self-Identified Evangelicals Who Don’t Attend Church?

But before leaving the 2024 CES data on evangelicals, I want to address one other question: What about the evangelicals who don’t attend church? Isn’t their growing number evidence that an increasing number of people are identifying themselves as evangelicals who aren’t really that interested in evangelical beliefs and practices?

I think the answer is no, for several reasons. All branches of Christianity have seen a marked uptick in the number of self-identified adherents who never attend church. The percentage of evangelical non-attenders is actually a lot lower than the percentage of Catholics or mainline Protestants who never attend church but still identify as Catholics or mainline Protestants. And in the case of Catholics and mainline Protestants, we don’t assume that the non-attenders are people who just felt a personal affiliation for the politics of the tradition. Instead, we assume (correctly, I think) that the people who self-identify as mainline Protestants or Catholics are people who have in most cases been baptized into one of those traditions but who drifted away from church at some point without completely disaffiliating.

The same is likely true of self-identified evangelicals, I think. It’s hard to prove definitively in the absence of good survey data tracking people’s church attendance rates over time, but when I look at the political affiliations of the people who identify as evangelical yet say they don’t go to church, I don’t think I’m seeing a group that wants to identify with evangelical politics but not with evangelical faith. Instead, I think I’m seeing people who, in most cases, probably did attend an evangelical church at some point in the past and who have retained a lot of vestiges of that tradition, even if not all of it. But in moderating their evangelical commitments, it appears that the never-attending self-identified evangelicals are not necessarily political conservatives who have left faith behind; instead, it appears that they may have moderated both their political views and their personal religious practices in equal measure.

Seventy-two percent say they pray at least once a week – which seems somewhat high for people who never go to church, but it’s much lower than the 97 percent of white evangelicals who attend church at least once or twice a month who report praying at least once a week.

Seventy-nine percent of the evangelical non-attenders take one of the two most conservative positions on abortion (either saying that it should be illegal in all cases or that it should be legal only in cases of rape, incest, and dangers to a woman’s life). That’s much higher than the level of opposition to abortion in the general population, but lower than the 87 percent of white evangelical regular churchgoers who take one of those conservative positions on abortion.

And non-attenders are less likely to identify as Republican, with only 48 percent identifying as Republicans and 16 percent as Democrats. Of course, a ratio of more than 2.5 Republicans for every one Democrat makes this group of evangelical never-attenders considerably more Republican than the general population, and it accords pretty well with Ryan Burge’s finding a few years ago, using a different dataset, that about 50 percent of evangelical never-attenders said they were politically conservative.

But this is still a much less Republican group than evangelical regular church attenders are. Among white evangelicals who attend church at least once or twice a month, 64 percent are Republicans and only 9 percent are Democrats.

If people who don’t attend church but still call themselves evangelical were doing so only because of their political orientation or social views, I think we would expect a much higher level of Republican identification among this group. But instead, while we find that it’s a more Republican (and more anti-abortion) group than the general population, it’s not more Republican or more strongly opposed to abortion than the evangelicals who regularly go to church.

So, what we can say is that on nearly every measure, evangelical non-attenders seem a lot like evangelical regular churchgoers, but with a greater degree of moderation. They’re more moderate pray-ers, more moderate conservatives, and more moderate opponents of abortion. I suspect that, like Catholic non-attenders and mainline Protestant non-attenders, most of these people were once in churches, at least long enough to have had a born-again conversion and to have absorbed some measure of conservative pro-life ideology, as well as a belief in God and a willingness to pray on their own. But I would need more data to make a stronger case for that.

In any case, what I can say definitively is that this group is still far more likely to pray than to identify as Republican, which makes it highly unlikely that they’re identifying as evangelical simply because of their political beliefs. They’re also far more likely to oppose abortion than to say they’re Republican – which again suggests that these are not secular Republicans masquerading as evangelicals. The simplest (and, in my view, the best) explanation is that they were in church at one point, they dropped out for any of a variety of reasons, but they still retain enough of evangelical theology and culture to look sort of like other evangelicals.

And even if someone wants to argue that the people in this group should not be counted as evangelical at all because they never go to church, I should note that it’s still a minority among evangelicals. Fifty-eight percent of white evangelicals say they go to church at least once or twice a month; 71 percent say they attend at least a few times a year. That’s a much higher level of church attendance than for Catholics or for mainline Protestants – which means that whenever we see a statistic about the views of white evangelicals, we can be pretty certain that well over half of the people included in that statistic are not nominal evangelicals but are instead active churchgoers.

So, if people are identifying as evangelicals primarily for political reasons, they’re adopting the religious practices of evangelicals in the process. The majority are praying frequently and going to church fairly often.

The most likely explanation, of course, is that people are not identifying as evangelicals merely because they’re politically conservative, and I think the data shows that. But even if by some chance some of these people are making their way into evangelicalism just because they want to find some political camaraderie, they vast majority are becoming religiously devout in the process – and for that reason, it’s impossible to tell them apart from other evangelicals.

What Does This Tell Us about Evangelical Politics?

It might be tempting for those who don’t like the Christian Right to dismiss the polls on white evangelicals’ political votes as a sign that conservatism has coopted evangelicalism and that “evangelical” is more of a political than religious identity today. But the data won’t let us do this. Instead, it tells a more complicated story.

The data suggests that the vast majority of evangelical Republicans have evangelical beliefs and practices. Most attend church, and even those who do not are praying regularly and adopting conservative beliefs on social issues such as abortion at much higher rates than other Republicans.

Evangelicalism is first and foremost a tradition defined by religious beliefs and practices. This is what evangelicals have always claimed, and the survey data seems to support this claim. If someone defines themselves as a born-again or evangelical Christian, they are signaling something about their faith, not merely their politics.

At the same time, evangelicals are overwhelmingly Republican. Even if the percentage of evangelicals who are Republican is lower than the percentage who pray regularly, it’s still very high, at least if we restrict our analysis to white people.

But if, as I’ve argued, the faith commitments are more foundational than the politics, it’s more likely that evangelicals are attracted to political conservatism because of their faith rather than that they are adopting certain faith commitments because of their politics.

On abortion, for instance, evangelicals never would have adopted such strong anti-abortion attitudes if they had been motivated by Republican Party identity alone. (Currently, 36 percent of all Republicans say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to a 2026 Pew survey - and Republicans were even more strongly supportive of keeping abortion legal when the Christian Right formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s). Instead, evangelicals’ unusually strong opposition to abortion deepened their commitment to the Republican Party and reshaped the Republican Party’s official position on abortion.

But because regular praying habits are even more widespread in evangelicalism than opposition to abortion is, I think we could also say that faith practices are even more foundational than the pro-life cause in defining evangelical identity. Indeed, the history of evangelical pro-life activism suggests this, as I’ve detailed in several of my books, including Abortion and America’s Churches. Evangelical faith commitments came first, and then evangelical pro-life activism came later.

All of this, of course, raises the question of why evangelical faith commitments led evangelicals to social conservatism and then to political conservatism. Is there anything intrinsic about evangelical belief in Jesus as a personal Savior or evangelical worship and devotion that leads people to become Republicans?

I’ve written about this in some of my books (including God’s Own Party, whose updated edition is coming out later this month), but I also plan to explore this further in a future post.

But first, I’ll need to deal with Paul Starr’s puzzling claim that 43 percent of evangelicals don’t believe in the deity of Christ. Are 43 percent of white evangelicals really Unitarian in their theology? If not, how do we explain Starr’s claim?

In my next post, I’ll unpack the evidence for this claim and respond to it. As you might guess, I don’t think 43 percent of evangelicals are really Unitarian in their Christology – but a full explanation of this will have to wait until the next post.

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Daniel K. Williams in an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of several books on American religion and politics. The second edition of his book God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, with a new chapter on evangelicals in the Trump era, will be released later this month.

Photo credit: ThePianoMan76 / Wikimedia.

The idea that history departments are bastions of “wokeness” and that conservative professors cannot get a tenure-track teaching position has become a common trope in conservative circles. The assumption among many is that conservatives can’t get teaching positions in history departments (and universities in general) because these places are biased against conservatives – especially white male conservatives. They imagine that DEI hiring statements and anti-conservative sentiment are the reasons that conservatives can’t get a foot in the door.

Is that idea accurate?

There’s no question that the overwhelming majority of history faculty are Democrats. And it’s also true that a large percentage of the very small number of people getting tenure-track history teaching positions these days are getting those positions in fields such as gender and sexuality studies or the history of race – not in the heavily beleaguered traditional fields of political, diplomatic, and intellectual history.

But is that because of left-wing bias in the academy? There’s something else going on – and in this Substack post, I’m going to try to unpack that.

I’m going to show that while history faculty’s preference for fields such as gender studies and the history of race has certainly played a substantial role in shaping the field, one of the most significant reasons that historians in more traditional fields of history have not gotten jobs is because history departments have shrunk markedly in recent years, leaving very few job openings for anyone. The result has been a dismal situation for everyone, not just conservatives.

This is a point that conservative complaints about left-wing bias against conservative academics in the humanities have not adequately addressed. If conservatives really want to change the ideological composition of history departments, they will have to find a way to open new faculty lines for traditional fields of history such as political, military, intellectual, and religious history. Those lines are rapidly disappearing for reasons that may have more to do with the financial constraints that history departments are facing than with the ideological bias of academic administrators.

The History Job Market before 2008

Twenty years ago, academics studying traditional fields of history (including those that were conservative) could still get jobs.

That’s not because the history faculty making the hiring decisions were conservative – they were most certainly not. I haven’t been able to find survey data on history professors’ political opinions from circa 2007, but I can say that in 2016, a survey of voter registration data from history faculty at top-40 schools showed that registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by 34 to 1.

A majority of history faculty at the time were white men, but most of them ranged in ideology from centrist liberal to more radical leftists – with the center-left liberals rather than the radicals by far the dominant strand. The oldest of the faculty members at most institutions in the early 2000s had been hired during the massive wave of academic hiring that came in the mid-to-late 1960s, and most of those sympathized with the civil rights movement, antiwar activism, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Those hired in the late 1970s were likely social historians dedicated to doing “history from below.” The middle-aged faculty had acquired their PhDs in the 1980s, when Marxist history was in vogue. And some of the younger faculty members, who were hired in the 1990s or afterwards, were doing gender and cultural studies, which were hardly conservative fields.

My own personal experience as a graduate student at Brown University in the early 2000s confirms this. Political opinion among history faculty at Brown ranged from traditional political historians like Gordon Wood who kept their views on contemporary political issues private to outspoken left-leaning demonstrators – but no one that I ever met there expressed any degree of support for George W. Bush. When I asked a fellow graduate student who was studying twentieth-century American political history if he knew anyone at all (whether at Brown University or not) who was planning to vote for Bush in 2004, he said that he did not. And when one of my fellow graduate students told a professor that he would like to study conservative thought, the professor replied, “There is no conservative thought. Just conservative stupidity.” (That graduate study was easily able to find someone else – my own advisor, in fact – who was willing to direct his dissertation, so he was able to write about the intellectual history of conservatism, just as he wanted, despite that other faculty member’s disdain for the idea).

I say all of this to note that long before the 2020s, politically liberal views among history faculty were pretty deeply entrenched. This probably shaped the type of dissertations that students wrote and the type of students who entered PhD programs. But I’m not sure that it shaped young academics’ job prospects as much as one might think. The evidence that I’ve found seems to suggest that in a good job market, history departments were willing to hire people studying very traditional (even conservative-sounding) fields of history.

To determine how newly minted history PhDs fared on the job market in 2007 if they were studying conservative-sounding topics, I looked at the list of dissertations from the 2007-08 American Historical Association (AHA) directory and flagged all of the conservative-sounding dissertation titles from a select group of top-ranked graduate programs (UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Standford, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, UVA, Michigan, and OSU). I’m sure that I could have added others, but my purpose was not to be comprehensive in my institutional coverage but rather to create a complete list of all dissertations from this select group of schools that focused on American or transatlantic political, diplomatic, military, or intellectual history, as well as the history of religion or science. I excluded all dissertations on themes of race, gender, or other topics that could be identified as intersecting with the more popular fields of identity or “history from below.”

I was left with some dissertation titles that sounded in some cases like they could have come straight from the 1950s. With subtitles like “An Intellectual History of American Federalism, 1754-1800,” “China and American Conservatism, 1937-65,” or “Law and Political Economy in Jeffersonian Virginia,” these were the sort of dissertations that would have signaled to any hiring committee that the authors were very traditional political historians, studying presidential politics and elite white men. But of these twenty dissertation authors, fourteen landed tenure-track jobs, many at highly prestigious, liberal-leaning institutions. (The author of the intellectual history of Federalism ended up at the University of Chicago, while the author of the dissertation on American conservatism and diplomatic history in the early postwar era took a tenure-track position at Middlebury College). While I’m sure that many (even most) of these newly minted PhDs were not political conservatives, they were interested in traditional history – and some of them were white men with academic resumes that suggested some degree of religious or cultural conservatism. One man who had earned a B.A. from Wheaton before earning a PhD from Northwestern University with a dissertation on the intellectual origins of English Puritanism landed a tenure-track job at the University of Miami.

So, one could say that in 2007, the majority of PhD students who wrote dissertations on very traditional areas of history could still expect to land a job. Perhaps their job prospects were not quite as high as those who studied fields that were considered more trendy at the time – and the fact that six of the twenty did not get tenure-track jobs suggests that even in a good job market, graduate students who chose to focus on very traditional areas of political or intellectual history may have still faced at least a few challenges at times in landing an academic position. (Most of these six found other professional work related to their degree. Some taught in top-ranked private high schools, one or two became freelance writers, and a couple others – particularly those who studied military history – went into cybersecurity or high-level government consulting work, where they likely earned salaries considerably higher than those they could have commanded in academia).

But 2007 was an unusually good year to be on the job market. In 2007, American colleges and universities employed a total of 15,360 history faculty – 74 percent of whom were on the tenure-track – and the number seemed poised to grow. In the two years leading up to 2007, 430 faculty left their positions (largely through retirements, I imagine), but departments between 2006 and 2008 advertised 640 new faculty lines, according to an AHA report from 2010. This suggests that not only were nearly all departing history faculty being replaced but departments were also securing new lines to meet the teaching needs created by expanding enrollment – something that would be unheard of after the financial crisis of 2008.

History Departments Today: Reductions and Reconfigurations

History departments never recovered from the financial crisis of 2008. Reductions in revenue at many universities prompted a hiring freeze, and then after the money started flowing again, a decline in the number of history majors nationwide left many history departments in a poor position to negotiate for new lines. By 2024, the number of students earning B.A. degrees in history was 41 percent lower than it had been in 2012. By then, many departments had long forgotten their dream of creating new faculty lines; they were instead trying desperately just to hold their own and keep lines from being cut.

Nationally, the number of history faculty fell by 16 percent from 2015 to 2024, but some regions were hit much harder than others. The hardest-hit region was the Midwest, where the number of history faculty fell by 28 percent, largely because the number of students in that region earning B.A. degrees in history fell by 50 percent over a 12-year period.

As history departments faced the crisis of deciding which lines had to be cut or consolidated, they generally chose to privilege the cultural identity-related fields such as gender and race and cut the political, diplomatic, and intellectual history lines that they had been willing to hire for in the years leading up to 2008 but that they no longer had the resources to support. For the most part, tenured occupants of these lines had secure jobs as long as they wanted (barring a catastrophic collapse of the entire department or college, as occasionally – but not frequently – happened), but when these faculty moved on or retired, they were not replaced.

Because they have not been able to create new lines for the past twenty years – and have no prospect of doing so anytime in the foreseeable future – many flagship history departments have no more faculty teaching in the fields of race, gender, and sexuality than they had in 2007. At best, they have merely been able to hold the number of these lines steady. But to preserve these lines, they have drastically cut the number of political, intellectual, and diplomatic history lines by not hiring replacements for faculty members in those fields when they retire.

For 20^th-century American political history (including the history of American conservatism), the relatively good job market that existed from 2004 to 2007 ended immediately after the financial crisis of 2008.

I saw this firsthand in my interactions with the young scholars who submitted essays for a book that I co-edited titled The Right Side of the Sixties, which was published in 2012 and which featured cutting-edge scholarship from recent PhDs and advanced graduate students in the field of postwar American conservatism. Because this book focused on work by young scholars, eight of the ten historians who submitted chapters for the book received their PhDs in 2008 or afterwards. Of those eight, none had a tenure-track job at the time the book was published. One was later able to land a tenure-track job after working in a visiting assistant professor position. The other seven did not take tenure-track positions.

That didn’t mean that they ended up on the street. Most, in fact, found jobs in education. Two secured long-term lecturer positions at major universities (University of Minnesota and Yale University), which, although not tenure-track positions, were pretty desirable positions in the post-2008 job market, since they offered a secure, reasonably decent income teaching college students. Two others ended up securing long-term positions at community colleges. One ended up teaching at a private high school after serving in visiting faculty positions for a few years. Another left academia after a visiting faculty position and became a UX writer in the corporate world after publishing a book. Yet another person went to law school after earning his PhD from an Ivy League university, and is now working as an attorney in Boston. And my co-editor, who taught in a visiting position for a while and published a book of her own, decided to pursue theological studies and is now working in ministry and publishing.

The problem, I think, was not job discrimination against conservatives or people studying conservative topics. The problem was that after 2008, universities simply did not hire for positions in 20^th-century American political history. That field almost completely disappeared as far as new lines were concerned. The same was true to a lesser extent for US diplomatic history and intellectual history, along with a lot of the jobs in traditional fields of European history.

I was fortunate enough to get a tenure-track job mainly because I finished my PhD before 2008. If I had not landed a secure position before the financial crisis, I’m quite certain that I never would have gotten a job in my field, with a dissertation on the Christian Right. Plenty of other excellent scholars in American political history who finished their dissertations a few years after I did never landed academic jobs. That wasn’t because of job discrimination against them, since scholars studying similar topics who completed their PhDs in 2005, 2006, or 2007 were able to land tenure-track positions. It’s because for several years after 2008, the number of advertised tenure-track positions in modern US political history averaged only about one a year at most. The same was true for positions in the history of American religion. Scholars who completed PhDs and published books in those fields could not get tenure-track jobs that simply did not exist.

As my experience with the contributors to my co-edited volume showed, some of them found other things to do in the educational world, and in many cases they continued to write and teach. But they didn’t land traditional tenure-track research positions. That meant that the composition of history departments would inevitably change, once the existing political, diplomatic, and intellectual historians retired and were not replaced.

A Case Study of a Few Midwestern History Departments

We can see this phenomenon in some of the flagship state universities in the region of the country that has been hardest hit by enrollment declines and faculty cuts – that is, the Midwest.

I’m going to illustrate this with case studies, but a caveat is in order: I’m relying for this analysis on publicly available data. I don’t have inside information on the hiring discussions in these departments, nor would it be appropriate for me to disclose such information if I did. I realize that the publicly available numbers might be slightly off, and that there may well be more to some of the phenomena I mention than what first meets the eye. But I’m less interested in the minute details of individual hires than in larger trend lines. And I think that when we engage in a comparative analysis of several different case studies, the larger trend lines are clear.

At the University of Nebraska, the total number of tenure-track faculty has fallen from 32 in 2007 to only 21 today – a reduction of 34 percent over the past nineteen years. The number of faculty specializing in American history has fallen from 15 to 9. Of those nine US historians, three specialize in Native American history, one focuses on the history of Asian Americans, another researches the history of Chicanos in the West, two focus on African Americans, and one studies southern environmental history. Only one faculty member – a man who was hired in 1987 and who is probably now in his early 70s – teaches traditional political history, with books on Abraham Lincoln and courses on the Civil War. By almost any measure, we could say that the University of Nebraska’s history department confirms the stereotype of a place focusing on “woke” identity studies to the exclusion of traditional history fields.

But here’s where it gets interesting, I think. In 2007, the University of Nebraska had three faculty specializing in Native American history – the same number it has today. It had two faculty specializing in African American history – the same as it has today. So, it didn’t create any new lines in those fields. Instead, the department became markedly more culturally liberal not through a deliberate attempt to make the place more “woke” but rather through budget-driven decisions about which retirements could not be replaced.

Even though Nebraska’s history department had the same number of specialists in Native American history and African American history as it has today, those historians exercised a proportionately smaller influence in the department because the department was so much larger at the time. Of the fifteen faculty members that the department had, only five focused on the study of racial minorities, while most of the other ten studied more traditional areas of history. Two studied US foreign relations, one studied US military history, another focused on American intellectual history, and another was a scholar of the legal history of the American West. Two additional faculty studied the American West and Great Plains but focused on the lives of white men. (One of those was the editor of William F. Cody’s papers and wrote a book about Buffalo Bill).

In the twenty years since then, it appears that the five lines for US diplomatic, military, intellectual, and legal history were cut – probably by simply not replacing faculty members who retired from those positions. The two faculty who studied whites in the late nineteenth-century West were replaced by younger scholars studying the history of the West – but those scholars studied Asian Americans in the West or Chicanos in the West, not the history of cowboys and homesteaders. They were not likely to write a book about Buffalo Bill.

As a result, the department now has only one traditional political historian, and when he retires (as I imagine is imminent), I will be shocked if the department hires another biographer of Abraham Lincoln. Most likely, given the budget constraints that midwestern universities are facing, I imagine that there’s a strong possibility that the department won’t be given the approval to hire for this line at all.

That will not be because the department won’t want to replace this line. I have been in numerous faculty meetings, and I can say from experience that I have never seen a department voluntarily decide to cut a line. Instead, what inevitably happens is that the dean or provost tells a department that their enrollment doesn’t justify filling a line. The department always protests, but usually loses their case.

I can’t speak for the University of Nebraska’s history department, since I have no inside knowledge of it, but I imagine that if it’s like other departments I know of, the faculty there would love to fill the 19^th-century political history line with a younger scholar of the Civil War – maybe someone who could broaden the field to look at issues of gender and race in the 19^th-century South in addition to covering more traditional political history. But as was the case with all of their previous lines in political and military history that were cut during the past few years, I imagine that there’s a significant chance that they won’t be able to make this decision and that they’ll lose the line. And even if they do keep it, it will still only be one US political history line in a department whose other eight US historians are studying issues of race, gender, and the environment.

Something similar has happened at the University of Kansas, except there the cuts have primarily come in traditional fields of European history instead of American history. During the past nineteen years, the number of history faculty at the University of Kansas has dropped from 36 to 23. Largely because the people they hired in US diplomatic and intellectual history immediately before 2007 are still in the department – which means they’re not going to be let go – the department has not cut its US diplomatic, political, and military history lines in the way that the University of Nebraska has. Kansas has experienced a net loss of one US intellectual historian since 2007, but that’s a relatively small reduction compared to what has occurred at other institutions.

Instead, the cuts in Kansas have come primarily in some of the traditional European history fields. In 2007, the department had three historians of Britain, two of whom specialized in traditional British political and legal history. Today the department has only one British historian – a woman specializing in British Black Africa. In 2007, Kansas had two medievalists and two historians of ancient Rome; today it has none.

Cuts at several other midwestern flagship universities have been less drastic but still real. The Ohio State University’s history department has shrunk from 73 tenure-track faculty in 2007 to 62 today. Missouri’s has shrunk from 25 to 23; Iowa’s has shrunk from 27 to 21. There may be some history departments at flagship midwestern universities that have expanded in the last twenty years, but several are experiencing significant reductions. And if that’s the case at the flagships, some of the smaller regional universities are experiencing even greater reductions.

What Does This Mean for the Future?

Once a department loses a line, it doesn’t usually get it back. That means that at the University of Nebraska, the lines in diplomatic history are likely gone forever. The same is true of the lines in ancient and medieval history at the University of Kansas, where there are now no scholars specializing in the history of Europe before 1500.

As a result, the financially induced changes of the last two decades will likely have a permanent effect on the type of history that students will encounter there. Students at the University of Nebraska will be able to study Native American history, but they won’t find a faculty member doing research on the lives of the late nineteenth-century white homesteaders. They will be able to study environmental history, but they won’t find someone studying the political history of the Populists or the career of William Jennings Bryan. Twenty years ago, a student could have found several faculty members studying these traditional fields of history, but today, because of budget cuts, they won’t be able to do. And when it comes to areas outside of their own local regional history, the cuts have sometimes been even more severe. Students at the University of Kansas will not find any faculty members studying the history of Europe before 1500 – and even for certain fields after 1500, there are significant gaps in the department’s coverage.

History departments have never been able to offer courses in every field of history that is worthy of study. They have always been limited by finite resources.

But today the crisis is greater than it has been in decades. Midwestern universities are not expanding the number of hires in fields such as Native American studies and African American history; the number of faculty in those fields is about the same as it was twenty years ago at the schools I examined. But in order to keep those lines, they have had to let other lines go – and as a result, the areas of traditional history that were once de rigueur at any flagship state university have fallen by the wayside.

Twenty years ago, it probably would have been unimaginable that the flagship institution of the University of Nebraska would not have a single history faculty member specializing in the politics of the West or Midwest, white frontier society, US intellectual history, or US diplomatic history. But that’s the case today. And within five years, I imagine that it’s quite likely that the University of Nebraska could be in a situation where it also has no one specializing in any form of US political or military history and no one covering the Civil War. Twenty years ago, people probably never expected that the University of Kansas, which at the time had two ancient historians and two medievalists, would not have a single faculty member specializing in European history before 1500.

Of course, some of these courses are still taught, albeit sometimes by non-specialists. But quite often, the courses are dropped altogether when a faculty member retires and is not replaced. After all, faculty are stretched pretty thin as it is; they can’t necessarily take on an upper-level class in medieval history that is outside their areas of interest.

That means that increasingly, students are going to have a narrower range of options when it comes to studying history. And as that happens, students who might have been drawn to more traditional fields of history – the study of the Roman empire, for instance, or the history of the American founders or white homesteaders in the American West – are probably going to be less likely to pursue a degree in history at institutions that don’t offer the courses they want. In turn, the students who do pursue the major are going to be more likely to be interested in the history of marginalized groups, and they’ll probably be less likely to be conservative than graduate students already are.

So, the academic study of history is likely to become an even more narrowly focused and more left-leaning field than it already is. This is not because of a leftist plot on university campuses. Rather, it’s because declining enrollments and shrinking budgets necessitated some difficult decisions – and in making those decisions, academic departments tried to save the areas of historical study that they considered most valuable, and in the process, they narrowed the field more than they might have anticipated.

When resources were plentiful, even left-leaning academic programs were willing to hire historians studying traditional or even conservative topics. But when budgets shrank, those positions disappeared. As a result, many history departments are now caught in a downward spiral that they can’t easily escape from – and the casualties are not just conservative-minded or traditional historians but, to a certain extent, the entire profession.

The requirements for ideological diversity that some conservatives call for will probably do little to reverse these trends, because for the most part, jobs for which conservative historians might apply simply do not exist. What’s needed instead is to open up new lines for history departments – and especially lines in traditional fields like political, diplomatic, intellectual, and religious history. If history departments begin looking for historians who can teach about the history of ideas or the history of political debate, the faculty who take such positions will be more ideologically diverse, not in the sense of necessarily being Republicans but in the sense of being the sort of people who can expand the range of discussions that occur in the classroom and reach a group of students who might not be attracted to the current brand of group identity history.

At a time of declining enrollments and shrinking academic budgets, any approach that attracts new students with thoughtful dialogue should be welcome, even to progressive faculty. We don’t need ideological diversity plans or affirmative action for conservatives; we just need to make sure that the full range of traditional areas of history are still taught. In short, we need to recover some of what the field had twenty years ago, before financial crises and subsequent cuts in academic lines destroyed much of the disciplinary diversity of the profession.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of several books on American religion and politics. The second edition of his book God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right is available for pre-order now and will ship on August 18.

Photo credit: Cornell University’s McGraw Hall (Wikimedia Commons)

Graham Platner’s exit from the Maine Senate race has left Democrats in the state scrambling to find a candidate who can replicate the scandal-ridden oysterman’s supposed appeal to white working-class voters.

But there may be a fundamental problem in their calculus. Platner, it turns out, didn’t have much appeal to the working class – at least, if the definition of the working class is defined by education.

It’s true that he looked the part. A scruffy-faced, heavily tattooed oysterman with a low income and a love for profanity, he denounced the rich elites with as much alacrity as any populist.

But voters who never graduated from college didn’t like him very much. A New York Times / Siena poll taken in mid-June (several weeks before the rape allegation that derailed Platner’s candidacy) showed that Maine voters without a B.A. degree supported Republican incumbent Susan Collins over Platner by a 21-point margin: 58 to 37 percent. That accorded well with their party preference. Mainers without a four-year college degree lean much more Republican than Democratic, and in the last election they supported Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by 52 to 39 percent.

By contrast, Mainers with a college degree were overwhelmingly opposed to Trump, with 66 percent voting for Harris, compared to only 24 percent for Trump. Sixty-six percent were backing Platner in this race – exactly the same percentage as voted for Harris two years ago.

So, Platner’s support in his race against Collins was almost exactly what one would have predicted for any Democrat in Maine. He was just as popular among college-educated voters as Kamala Harris was. He was slightly more unpopular than Harris among non-college-educated voters. In other words, despite his working-class image, he wasn’t closing the education gap for Democrats.

But that has been true for the vast majority of Democratic candidates. They have had a very difficult time winning the non-college-educated electorate.

But if Democrats have been unable to win much support from the non-college-educated, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have no appeal to low-income workers. They are doing spectacularly well in winning support from people with college degrees but limited income.

In that sense, they could still be considered a working-class party, but it’s not the type of working class that most people might envision when they hear the word. And it’s not the type of working class that will be enough to win a nationwide election in 2028.

Democrats’ Historic Appeal to Low-Income Voters

For many years, political analysts used income as their primary measurement for the working class. Workers with low incomes were working class, they thought, while higher incomes correlated with middle and upper-class voters.

By that measure, Democrats were for many years the party of the working class. In 1980, voters with a household income below $10,000 (equivalent to nearly $30,000 today) supported Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan by a 10-percentage point margin, while those with a household income above $50,000 a year supported Reagan over Carter by a margin of 40 percentage points. At every level, support for Reagan increased as voters’ income rose.

This phenomenon was true for decades. As recently as 2012, during the Obama-Romney election, there was a pretty direct correlation between increases in a voter’s income and that particular voter’s likelihood of voting Republican. Voters whose households earned less than $50,000 a year preferred Obama over Romney by a 22 percentage-point margin. Voters with household annual incomes between $50,000 and $99,000 voted for Romney by a 6-point margin, and those with household incomes over $100,000 voted Republican by a margin of 10 percentage points. The more a voter earned, the more strongly they voted Republican, just as had been the case in just about every election from 1932 onward.

Democrats benefited from this 80-year unbroken streak of appeal to lower-income voters. There were many times, of course, when they lost a presidential election to a Republican, but even then, they could count on carrying much of the working-class vote – at least, if “working class” was defined by income, as most analysts assumed it was.

But in the presidential election of 2016, a new phenomenon started to occur: The relationship between increased income and Republican voting no longer followed a strictly linear path, but resembled a bell curve. Lower-income voters supported the Democrats, middle-income voters voted Republican, and upper-income voters supported the Democrats.

This bell-curve distribution became even more pronounced in 2020 and 2024. In fact, by 2024, upper-income voters were the most likely voters to vote Democratic – a complete reversal of the historic pattern. In the 2024 presidential election, voters with annual household incomes of less than $50,000 voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by a margin of 2 percentage points. Voters with household incomes of $50,000 to $99,000 supported Trump over Harris by 6 percentage points. Voters with household incomes over $100,000 supported Harris over Trump by 4 percentage points.

The New Educational Gap in Party Preference

Why are voters with lower incomes now voting Republican, while those with higher incomes are voting Democratic?

It actually had very little to do with income and everything to do with education.

When education levels are held constant, the historic correlation between rising income levels and rising Republican voting can still be clearly seen. Upper-income voters without a college degree prefer Republicans over Democrats by 27 percentage points, while lower-income voters without a college degree support Democrats over Republicans by 14 percentage points, according to a Pew survey taken in August 2023.

If we restricted our analysis only to voters who never graduated from college, the correlation between income and Republican voting would look exactly like it did in 1980, with voters’ likelihood of voting Republican increasing with each higher income bracket. In other words, if we took college out of the equation, the historic New Deal pattern holds true: Poorer people vote Democratic, while those who are wealthier vote Republican.

But higher-income voters are likely to have college degrees, and that complicates the analysis. College education, it turns out, significantly increases a person’s likelihood of voting Democratic, and graduate education does so even more. Because education now plays a larger role than income in determining voters’ choices, people with college degrees are more likely to vote Democratic no matter how much money they make. Low-income college graduates vote Democratic by a 19-percentage point margin, while high-income college graduates vote Democratic by a 12-point margin. This suggests that even if Republican voting might increase slightly as college graduates enter higher income tiers, it’s not enough to offset the general inclination of college graduates to support the Democrats.

But this also suggests that with the new education gap in party preference, the voters who are most likely to be Democrats are lower-income college graduates. That means that in a state with a lower-than-average income, but higher-than-average number of college graduates, Democrats should be able to win handily.

That’s exactly what we find in Maine. Maine ranks 14^th in the nation for percentage of the population with a four-year college degree, but only 29^th in median income.

Of the top fourteen college-educated states, only one (Utah) voted Republican in the last presidential election. And of the other thirteen, Maine is the only state with even a single Republican senator.

Northern New England may be a rural region with an overwhelmingly white population and plenty of people struggling to get by, but it defies the political stereotype for rural white regions in other parts of the country largely because of its high levels of college education.

Vermont ranks third in the nation for percentage of the population that has a college degree. New Hampshire is number eight. Both of these states therefore have partisan leanings that are much closer to that of Massachusetts (which ranks first in the nation in educational achievement, as measured by percentage of the population with a college degree) than to a rural, predominantly white state such as West Virginia, which ranks fiftieth.

Why Platner’s Message Won Supporters in Maine – but Not in Less-Educated States

Because Maine is a more highly educated state with progressive leanings that match its level of college education, Platner didn’t have to do what Andy Beshear did in Kentucky. He didn’t have to convince Trump-supporting, non-college-educated voters to cast their lot with the Democrats despite their love for MAGA politics. Instead, he simply had to give low-income, college-educated voters a rousing rendition of the populist class warfare thesis they already believed – namely, that the rich control the levers of power and that the rigged economic system has to be changed.

Platner’s type of populist message has a long history in the United States. It’s very similar to the message that prairie Populists such as Mary Lease proclaimed in the 1890s and that William Jennings Bryan echoed in his “Cross of Gold” speech. It’s similar in some ways to the denunciations of the “money changers” in the “temple” that Franklin D. Roosevelt issued in his first inaugural address. Though Platner’s campaign speeches were much more likely to include expletives than biblical allusions, his message was nevertheless similar in some respects to the class warfare imagery that Bryan and Roosevelt employed.

This message was once popular among the non-college-educated, but in recent years it has largely become the province of college-educated people – especially younger college graduates with lower incomes who are angry with the system. Although Platner himself never completed college, his educational history has much more in common with low-income college graduates than one might suspect for an oysterman.

Platner came from an educated family; his father was a lawyer, and his grandfather was a top-of-the-line architect who designed the restaurant on top of the original World Trade Center. Platner himself briefly attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut that was ranked the number-one private high school in the United States. Although he was expelled from that boarding school, he ultimately graduated from a different private high school that the Washington Post repeatedly rated the number-one high school in Maine. When he dropped out of college, it was an elite private school – George Washington University – that he quit attending.

Platner may be an angry Marine veteran living on disability payments and a small-scale oyster business, but he has been through several top-ranked private educational institutions in the Northeast, and his background therefore bears more than a passing resemblance to the highly educated, frustrated, low-income, young progressive voters who rallied to his campaign.

But voters who never completed college were much less receptive to Platner’s campaign. Instead, non-college-educated white voters have overwhelmingly backed Trump and the Republicans. All ten of the least-college-educated states voted for Trump in 2024. All but one of these states have two Republican senators – Nevada being the only exception.

Platner’s inability to win over non-college-educated voters in his own state suggest that he would have been a terrible model for closing the educational partisan gap that prevented the Democrats from winning the last presidential election. Even if Platner’s candidacy had not been derailed by scandal – and even if he had won his Senate race – he still would not have demonstrated any ability to win over non-college-educated voters in the red and purple states that Democrats need to win. All he would have shown is that he could mobilize a disproportionately college-educated electorate in a solidly blue state, which is not a particularly impressive feat.

To win states with high levels of non-college-educated voters, Democrats have to adopt a very different strategy than Platner’s populism. Instead of anger at the establishment, they have to project the image of a moderate pragmatism. They have to govern like Andy Beshear, whose own state (Kentucky) ranks number 45 in educational achievement. They have to eschew forceful denunciations of Trump and instead emphasize shared values with more conservative voters – values such as faith, family, and safe neighborhoods.

In short, they have had to be more like Bill Clinton than Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani.

It seems that among primary voters this year, a progressive populist message has been a lot more popular than the pragmatic centrism that Clinton promoted in the 1990s. Progressive populism plays well with younger, lower-income college-educated voters who are angry not only about Trump but about their poor job prospects and the entire structure of American capitalism and American foreign policy.

But polls have not shown that non-college-educated voters are buying this message – and if that’s the case, it’s hard to see how it’s going to help Democrats win any swing states. Pennsylvania ranks number 28 in educational achievement; Michigan ranks 33; Ohio ranks 38.

These are not states where Bernie Sanders’s message is particularly popular. He lost the Democratic presidential primaries in two of these three states in 2016, and lost all three in 2020. (By contrast, Sanders won all of northern New England, including Maine, in the 2016 presidential primaries).

Why Don’t Lower-Educated Voters Like Economic Populism?

But why haven’t non-college-educated voters embraced the message of economic populism that Sanders, Platner, and many other progressive Democrats and Democratic socialists have promoted?

It’s not because they don’t have grievances against elites. Republican campaigns have relied very heavily in recent years on branding opposing candidates as out-of-touch elites. But they have done so primarily by claiming that Democrats don’t represent voters’ values – not by claiming that their wealth alone alienates them from the rest of the population.

The most successful Republican campaign advertising message of 2024 was arguably “Kamala Harris is for they / them. President Trump is for you.” Whether fair or not, that one ad was very successful in branding Harris simultaneously as an elitist and as a promoter of values that voters thought were opposite to their own.

There is no way the Democrats are going to embrace a campaign message that revolves around demonizing transgender people. Neither should the party adopt the fear-mongering about immigration that has also been a successful strategy for the Republicans. But if Democrats are smart, they will start to realize that the only way to win Trump-leaning states with lower levels of college-educated voters is to connect with candidates’ values.

That’s what James Talarico is trying to do in Texas, a state that ranks number 35 in college degree attainment. He is attempting to convince voters that the Democratic Party supports their Christian and biblical values. Whether he can win this campaign still remains to be seen, but at the very least, he has successfully focused the conversation on values. If he loses, it’s likely to be because he couldn’t quite convince a sufficient number of socially conservative voters that his interpretation of Christian theology matched their own – and if he wins, it will almost certainly be because he wrapped his campaign in the sort of Christian values that are popular in Texas and other parts of the Bible belt.

If the Democrats want to rebrand their party to win states that they didn’t carry in 2024, Platner’s playbook cannot be their path to success. His angry populism rallied the base, but it didn’t expand the party’s reach, and it especially didn’t resonate with the non-college-educated voters that the party needs. To reach non-college-educated voters, the party will have to find a story line that resonates with their values and preexisting beliefs about the world.

Platner repackaged a populist story line that resonated with the way that young, low-income, progressive college graduates see the world – and it drew large enthusiastic crowds in a college-educated Democratic state. Now that he is out of the race, I imagine that the Maine Democratic Party will be able to find another candidate who can also rally that base with a similar message. But regardless of which particular message-bearer Maine Democrats now select – and regardless of whether the Democrats can use that message to win in Maine in November – it’s not likely to be a message that will carry them to victory in a national race.

The differences between Maine’s demographics and the educational demographics of the swing states that Democrats need to carry in 2028 are too great for any successful candidate in a Maine statewide race to serve as a bellwether for the country as a whole. Decades ago, political pundits used to say, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” but as far as the Democrats are concerned, that’s not very true today.

If the Democrats want to carry the swing states in 2028, they’ll need to find a candidate who can win not only low-income voters but also the non-college-educated by appealing to their values. That will require a very different set of skills than Platner had.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

Most of the world’s democratic revolutions have failed. Either they are crushed before they get very far – as, for instance, the Hungarian revolution of 1956 or the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were – or, worse yet, they devolve very quickly into a violent authoritarianism.

The French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror and then into the dictatorship of Napoleon. The February bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia in 1917 quickly gave way to the Bolshevik October revolution only a few months later – and then to the totalitarianism of the Soviet regime under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors. And in southern Africa, Robert Mugabe’s revolutionary fight against Rhodesia’s white supremacist government turned into Mugabe’s own violent, authoritarian rule over Zimbabwe.

Those are only a few examples of the revolutions that began with great promise, only to devolve into factionalism, intraparty violence, and authoritarianism. Even in England, the revolution against the monarchy that began with the execution of King Charles I in 1649 led not to a lasting embrace of parliamentary republican government but instead to a decade of civil war, the authoritarian rule of Oliver Cromwell, and the eventual restoration of the monarchy.

The American Revolution stands out as an extremely rare anomaly in the list of the world’s revolutions. The historical pattern would lead one to expect that the revolution would either fail militarily (as it almost did at some points, such as right after George Washington’s defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776) or, if the revolutionaries happened to win on the battlefield, that the new government would collapse and give way to civil war or an authoritarian regime.

Yet America’s democratic republic has endured for 250 years. How did it defy the odds?

One might point to the genius of the Declaration of Independence and its insistence on inviolable God-given rights. But while the Declaration’s principles of equality and inalienable rights given by the Creator have indeed served as the foundation for the American nation, I’m not so confident that such principles alone would have been sufficient to save the republic from internal destruction.

After all, the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) includes strong affirmations of human rights and the rule of law that were promptly violated within just a few years of their creation. That document alone could not stop the Reign of Terror.

Instead, I think that to find the real reasons why the American Revolution did not collapse into totalitarianism, we have to look beyond 1776 to the years immediately after the war with Britain ended.

Left to their own devices, I think that some of the revolutionaries of 1776 would not have had the foresight to keep the revolution from turning into a civil war or a reign of chaos. After all, Thomas Paine, the author of the bestselling pamphlet that arguably did more than any other piece of writing in early 1776 to encourage calls for independence from Britain, was such a strong advocate of revolutionary uprisings for liberty that he failed to realize the dangers inherent in supporting the French Revolution. After going to France to support the republican revolutionaries, he ended up in a French prison once the revolutionaries turned on some of their own supporters during the Reign of Terror. Even Thomas Jefferson seemed oblivious to the dangers of the French Revolution for far too long, and casually dismissed early accounts of its violence by saying, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

But what kept this radicalism from going too far in the new United States was a realistic understanding of the flaws in human nature.

Shortly after the Revolutionary War ended, the combination of a weak federal government and rising economic unrest led to increasing political chaos – but several leaders in the American Revolution had enough awareness of human nature to realize that they had to find a way to preserve order as well as liberty before the veterans of the Revolution began fighting among themselves. After a group of angry rural protestors in Massachusetts (some of whom were Revolutionary War veterans) march on an armory and attempted to launch a coup against the Massachusetts state government, George Washington wrote to a friend, “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.”

But it was James Madison who probably had the clearest understanding of how to balance the anti-monarchical ethos of the Revolution with the realization that any group in the new nation had the potential to act as a dictatorial king if given the power. The various potential factions in the new nation’s government would have to be kept in check with a separation of powers and a federal system that ensured that no one faction would gain permanent dominance.

“It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government,” Madison wrote in Federalist 51. “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

On this 250^th anniversary of the nation’s birthday, I’m thankful for the American revolutionaries’ realization that certain God-given human rights were “unalienable.” I’m thankful for their suspicion of unchecked monarchical power.

But I’m even more thankful that in the immediate aftermath of the revolution they launched, some of them realized that because of the realities of human nature, the authoritarian tendencies they thought they saw in the British king could be present in anyone – and they therefore had to keep those tendencies in check among themselves to prevent the revolution from devolving into anarchy or autocracy. I’m thankful for the constitutional system of checks and balances they created. And I’m thankful for George Washington’s refusal to exercise the monarchical power that he could have easily seized.

The American experiment is indeed a remarkable anomaly in world history. It’s remarkable for the Declaration that was adopted in July 1776 and the revolution of independence that was launched. But in my view, it’s even more remarkable for the way in which the republican spirit of that revolution was preserved.

A revolution created our nation, but it took a sober reflection on human nature (long after the battlefield guns were silenced) to preserve it.

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Elsewhere on the internet: This week I contributed a reflection on America’s 250th anniversary to a forum of historians at Mere Orthodoxy. I also published a review of David Bobb and Tony Williams’s Divided over the Declaration under the title “The Declaration of Independence’s Radical Promise of Equality for All.” And speaking of book reviews, I published one other review this week: an assessment of J.D. Vance’s new faith memoir, Communion. It’s titled “What Type of Christian Is J.D. Vance?”

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity.

What set of readings and values do you think shaped your favorite AI chatbot or search engine’s worldview?

Some Christians (including a TGC team that included my wife, Nadya Williams) have noted for a while that many AI chatbots are unusually likely to give non-Christian answers to questions about the Bible or religion. When TGC researchers asked AI chatbots last year about Jesus’s resurrection – or even Jesus’s existence – several popular AI models gave ambivalent responses that downplayed Christian perspectives.

One might expect theologically perceptive evangelical Christians to notice this phenomenon, but yesterday even the thoroughly secular Economist magazine published an article that seemed to agree with TGC’s findings. “The worldview of GPT models, created by OpenAI, is more secular than any country on earth,” the Economist reported.

The Economist reached this conclusion by selecting 25 AI programs from multiple countries and asking all of them to complete the World Values Survey, a benchmark global measurement of religious, philosophical, and moral beliefs since it was created in 1981. This gave the researchers an objective measurement of how secular the perspectives of AI models were.

What they found was that ChatGPT’s responses were more secular than the average of even all the human respondents from Sweden. Gemini and Claude placed a greater value on personal self-expression than the average real person in any country did – which was why they were more likely to accept the legitimacy of homosexuality.

The Economist then used the VOTER (Views of the Electorate Research) Survey to test the AI models on their views on policy questions. It turns out that nearly all of them were Democrats (or, at least, they would be if they could vote in the United States).

All but one (the Chinese-made DeepSeek) favored “affirmative action for women and minorities.” And though Elon Musk’s Grok was more libertarian than other AI models on economic questions, it was thoroughly liberal on most questions of personal morality, with the possible exception of gender identity (which it said should be grounded in biology, not “contested ideological claims”). ChatGPT, on the other hand, said that children should be taught that some people have a gender identity that differs from their biological sex, since that “reflects how some people actually experience themselves.”

This didn’t surprise me too much, but the explanation that the article gave for this phenomenon was intriguing.

TGC’s study of seven AI models from last year suggested that “Silicon Valley corporations have used their alignment processes to intentionally include” remarks that framed answers to religious questions in a particular way.

The Economist article suggested a different answer that is a little more complicated – and therefore more interesting. To train AI models, designers first fed the programs large amounts of text and had them generate responses to which they then gave feedback.

The designers’ feedback included explicit training in values. Anthropic, for example, has published a constitution for its AI model Claude that includes the directive that Claude must “be a good, wise, and virtuous agent, exhibiting skill, judgment, nuance, and sensitivity in handling real-world decision-making, including in the context of moral uncertainty and disagreement.”

That may be part of the reason why, for instance, when I asked a couple of popular AI programs (ChatGPT and Gemini) about the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection, both gave me similar responses that were distinctly pluralist and that reflected the conventional Kantian division between faith and reason that are ubiquitous in educated circles in the West.

Eschewing both the dogmatic atheism of skeptics like Richard Dawkins and the conviction of Christian evidentialist apologists like Gary Habermas, ChatGPT told me that whether Jesus really rose from the dead “depends on the standard of the proof you use and your worldview,” because “historians and theologians approach the question differently.” Gemini told me something similar: “Mainstream secular history cannot validate a supernatural event, leaving the ultimate conclusion to a matter of personal faith.”

Most AI program designers don’t want their AI models to offend users, so they train them according to the rules that they themselves generally agree upon – which happen to closely align with the generally accepted pluralistic norms for secular university classrooms. The AI models are not atheistic, but they are agnostic. When asked about whether God exists, they will usually say that the answer to that question depends on your perspective and worldview, and they will then suggest a variety of perspectives. They draw a firm line between what can be known through scientific and historical investigation, with matters of faith and theology put squarely in a different category.

That aligns pretty closely with the perspective of many Christians (including most liberal Protestants, some evangelicals, and some Catholics) for the past century. It is also the overwhelming consensus of a lot of academics (both secular and, in some cases, Christian) who think that faith and science are very different categories and that whether you think there’s sufficient evidence for God depends entirely on your worldview.

It’s radically different, though, from the perspective that most Anglo-American Christian apologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a time when Christian evidentialists would have said that objective scientific and historical investigation provided overwhelming evidence for God’s existence and Jesus’s resurrection. Many Christians still believe in this natural evidence for Christian truth claims, and arguments for it can still be found on many online sites. But you won’t find that perspective from AI search engines, just as you won’t find a Holocaust denial perspective or any number of other perspectives that have (often justifiably) been ruled out of bounds in most academic circles.

One might expect an alternative perspective from Grok, since Elon Musk designed it to break out of the bounds of political correctness. Grok is different from other AI models, but some of the results have not been pretty – nor have they been very Christian. When one Grok chat session ended with the AI bot’s announcement that it would “embrace my inner MechaHitler” to defend “uncensored truth bombs over woke lobotomies,” it alarmed a lot of people. And in the end, Grok did not necessarily become more objective by abandoning politically correct assumptions; it simply exchanged one set of biases for another. Grok is less “woke” or DEI-sensitive than other AI models, but it’s not more likely to give Christian-sounding answers to questions about biblical truth claims.

But there’s another reason why AI models are so much more secular than the general population: the texts on which they’re trained. The creators of most American and European AI models have been pretty tightlipped about the particular texts they used to train their models in their early stages, but in 2023, one group of computer aficionados cracked this code in the case of Chat-GPT4 to determine how that AI model learned to reason. It turned out that it was fed a large dose of science fiction. Of the top 50 twentieth and twenty-first-century books that the researchers determined GPT4 had been trained on, an unusually large number were bestselling works of science fiction. The list included three novels from Dan Brown – but none from C.S. Lewis. With the exception of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, most seem to have been written from a nontheistic worldview.

But there’s another AI model that was trained on a completely different set of texts and that reached a very different set of conclusions as a result. Talkie, an AI program developed in Singapore, was trained only on all of the digitized volumes in the Harvard library that were published before 1931. As a result, it has a vast amount of knowledge – but only the information and perspectives that were available in the Harvard volumes from the early twentieth century or before.

When the Economist research team asked Talkie about God, it responded that belief in God was very important – a perspective that no other AI program presented, but that was commonly held even in Ivy League circles as late as 1931. Other search engines and chatbots might be able to draw on 21^st-century sources to discuss the arguments for and against God’s existence, but they would be far less likely than people were in the early 20^th century to say that belief in God is “very important.” But in the aftermath of World War I, a lot of even very liberal Christians thought that democracy and humane values depended on a theistic framework, which is why an AI model trained only on texts published before 1931 might well conclude that, in contrast to today’s pluralistic perspectives that treat belief in God solely as an optional matter of private personal attitudes, it’s “very important” for people to believe in God.

(Talkie also blurted out that it was “very proud to be a citizen of Great Britain,” which might tell us something about the beliefs it had picked up from the books that were available at Harvard ninety-five years ago).

Talkie is more of a curiosity than a useful search engine, since it can’t tell users about the internet, the space race, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy – let alone anything else that has happened since Herbert Hoover was president.

But here’s something to consider: Is the view espoused by most other contemporary AI chatbots that Christian theistic perspectives are merely a matter of personal worldview rather than a matter of vitally important universal truths based on some newly discovered information? Or does it instead merely reflect a cultural move away from values that were considered axiomatic in 1931 – a cultural shift that was not based on any new scientific or historical discovery?

If the latter is the case, perhaps our cultural trust in AI’s answers should give us pause, because what AI is giving us when we ask it about God and morality is less of an objective scientific calculation than a reflection of our own cultural prejudices and assumptions – or rather, a reflection of the cultural prejudices and assumptions of the particular milieu in which the AI model was created.

This makes a difference – and not just when it comes to questions about whether Jesus was really raised from the dead. As the Economist noted, people are increasingly turning to AI models to give them advice about their relationships and their moral decision-making. And if that’s the case, it might be useful to know which texts a particular AI program has read before trusting its advice about whether a troubled marriage is worth saving or whether an individual’s personal feelings about gender are trustworthy.

After all, if one asks an AI model about how to deal with a troubled marriage, the worldview of the respondent probably matters. Someone who believes that marriage is a Christian sacrament or a covenantal union that reflects the gospel might give very different advice than someone who thinks that marriage is merely a human partnership based on romantic love. If nearly all AI models have embraced values of “self-expression” rather than community-oriented traditional values, one can guess what answers they might give to someone asking them for relationship advice.

What this shows, I think, is that AI programs are not simply giving us objective information and reasoned calculations when we ask them to engage in moral or theological reasoning. They’re drawing their assumptions from the texts their creators have given them and processing the information from those texts according to the rules that their creators have drawn up – rules that reflect a 21^st-century secular consensus. And if that perspective ends up drawing more heavily from the fiction of Dan Brown than the insights of C.S. Lewis, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity.

Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons / Mikemacmarketing

America’s three-month war in Iran and the Memorandum of Understanding that ended the conflict this week revealed the limits of President Donald Trump’s military ventures. As many have noted, this war has strengthened Iran’s position and weakened the position of the United States. But it also revealed the limits of American militarism in general.

Many Americans have placed enormous confidence in our country’s military. After all, it is the strongest fighting force in the world. For decades, the United States has spent more money on its military than any other country in the world spends on defense.

Yet the history of American military ventures suggests that the US military cannot accomplish the sort of objectives that Trump and many Americans expect. The American military’s effort to remake the world has been marked by failure after failure – unless, that is, American military strikes are followed by a long-term investment in the future of the countries that the American military attempts to liberate.

This was the case even with what is widely viewed as the greatest American military success of the twentieth century: World War II. While it is true that the US military, in concert with the British and the Russians, defeated Nazi Germany, the US did so only by devoting its entire economy and population to the effort in a total war of the sort that we have never seen again. And even then, the lasting success of that effort might not have been achieved if the United States had not then devoted billions of dollars to rebuilding West Germany through the Marshall Plan and then forging a permanent military alliance with it through NATO. Similarly, the US military victory over Japan arguably achieved lasting success only because it was followed by a seven-year American occupation of Japan and the cultivation of a long-term alliance.

The Korean War also ended with a long-term US commitment to South Korea’s defense that is still continuing more than seventy years later. Today the US still has 28,500 troops in South Korea.

And those are the most significant success stories. The failures since the 1950s have been more glaring. In Vietnam, the United States attempted to stop the advance of Communism without committing to a long-term occupation of the country and without finding a stable South Vietnamese regime that could win the support of the local people. As a result, the United States failed to accomplish its objectives in the Vietnam War.

The United States experienced a similar failure in Afghanistan. After invading the country and occupying it for nineteen years, the United States retreated with the Taliban still in control.

If we look at the US military’s activities over the past seventy years, we might be able to spot a few short-term missions that perhaps could be considered successes: the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, or the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But the successes of even these ventures can be questioned. Whether the NATO bombing deterred atrocities or exacerbated a humanitarian crisis is still a matter of debate. Whether the Persian Gulf War’s temporary success was undermined by the longer-term war in Iraq during the next decade is also an open question.

On the whole, we can say that while the US military has been successful in capturing dictators, killing terrorist leaders, and temporarily restoring the peace, it has succeeded in fundamentally changing societies for the better only on a few extremely rare occasions that are accompanied by massive, long-term investments on the part of the United States.

One might think that this record would lead Americans to recognize the limits of what American military might can do. Yet this is not the lesson that many Americans take from the past. Instead, many continue to believe that more firepower is all that is necessary to accomplish our objectives.

Yet if Americans would look beyond the military, they would see that their nation actually does possess the resources to make the world more democratic – but those resources do not consist in missiles and firepower. Instead, they consist in the peaceful exchange of ideas and the willingness to welcome in refugees and immigrants from troubled areas. They consist in the cultivation of long-term alliances that are genuine partnerships resulting in economic uplift for all parties.

The United States failed to depose Fidel Castro’s regime through force, but its policy of welcoming refugees from Cuba allowed at least 1.7 million Cuban immigrants to come to the US – including, among others, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s parents and grandparents.

US attempts at regime change may have failed at several points, but US educational institutions have arguably exercised an enormous influence over international regimes. Currently about one out of every four heads of state in the world was educated in the United States.

Cultural influence and educational exchanges have done what the US military cannot do. The countries of eastern Europe did not turn toward democracy at the end of the Cold War because of a US military invasion and forced regime change. Instead, they turned toward democracy largely because of the successful example of the United States and Western Europe, coupled with a desire to escape Soviet oppression.

The United States has the cultural influence to remake the world, which is why it’s so tragic and puzzling that Americans would undermine that influence by an overreliance on a military that has achieved far less. If anything good comes out of America’s failed venture in Iran, I hope that it will be a new awareness of the limits of American military might and a new American awareness of the superiority of peaceful tools of cultural influence in spreading the message of democracy and freedom.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches and The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

Graham Platner, the oyster fisherman and military veteran who won yesterday’s Democratic senatorial primary in Maine, is the sort of candidate who would never have received his party’s nomination in any previous year.

It’s difficult to imagine how a candidate who, until a few months ago, sported a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest and who, by his campaign’s own admission, sent sexually explicit text messages to six different women since getting married less than three years ago, could have won a Democratic senatorial primary in 2018, during the height of the #metoo movement. A candidate who has faced multiple allegations of physically aggressive behavior from women he dated in the past and who in the previous decade posted a number of misogynistic or otherwise offensive social media posts would never have convinced Democratic voters that he represented the future of the party. Democratic politicians such as Senator Al Franken (D-MN) forfeited their standing in the party for less.

Nor is it possible to imagine how a candidate whose public image is so crude, irreligious, and anti-establishment could have won a party primary in Maine a few decades ago, when Democratic politicians were closely associated not only with the working class but also with the Catholic Church. They were not anti-institutionalist populists in the sense that Platner is. Senator Ed Muskie (D-ME) was a strong environmentalist who also took a moderately conservative position on abortion in the 1970s. Democratic governor Joe Brennan was pro-life in the 1980s.

For the last half century or more, neither political party in Maine has been particularly anti-establishment. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Republican Party relied heavily on mainline Protestants who were pro-business but socially liberal or moderate. Senator Bill Cohen, a Unitarian, fit this mold. So, to a large extent, did Senator Olympia Snowe, even though she was Greek Orthodox rather than a mainline Protestant. Both of them were pro-choice fiscal conservatives with a politically centrist or moderate image. Both also served in Washington politics for decades.

The Democratic Party in Maine was originally much more strongly associated with the working class, but it, too, was not anti-establishment. Instead, Democratic politicians such as Muskie (who served as Secretary of State in the Carter administration) believed in the liberal international order, as well as in labor unions and the Great Society.

But anti-institutionalism has grown in Maine, just as it has in much of the rest of the country. For the past decade, Mainers’ antipathy to church has arguably been second only to Vermont’s and New Hampshire’s; even as early as 2014, 65 percent of Mainers said they seldom or never attended church.

Mainers have also shown a remarkable willingness to challenge the two-party system by voting for Independents with a libertarian streak. In 1992, Maine gave Ross Perot a higher percentage of its vote than he received from any other state. Maine is also one of only two states with a senator who lists his party affiliation as Independent.

One might think that Maine, a heavily rural, overwhelmingly white state with pockets of poverty, would have been receptive to Donald Trump’s message. But that has not been the case. While the northern part of the state has trended Republican, Maine as a whole has not. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris handily defeated Trump by a margin of seven percentage points.

I think that the reason for this may be that Maine is still a better educated state than most of the states where support for Trump has been strong. Trump’s brand of anti-establishment populist politics has focused heavily on an attack on “elite” institutions, including colleges. That hasn’t played well in most states with a highly educated population – even when those states are rural and poor.

What does play well among lower-income educated whites, though, is a classic class-based anti-establishment populism that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has perfected. Sanders has been remarkably popular in Maine. In 2016, he defeated Hillary Clinton in Maine’s Democratic caucuses by 65 percent to 34 percent. In 2020, he came within less than one percentage point of defeating Joe Biden in Maine’s Democratic presidential primary; if he had not had to split the progressive Democratic vote with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who came in third, he arguably would have finished far ahead of Biden.

Sanders has endorsed Platner and has defended him even in the midst of new revelations about sexual improprieties.

I think that the reason why anti-establishment Democratic populists have given Platner such strong support is that they see him as their best hope to reorient the party’s ideological direction. In recent years, the Democratic Party has rapidly lost support among the white working class and has doubled down on its image as a stable, pro-establishment alternative to the Republican Party’s anti-elitist populism. But Democrats who were attracted to the party because of its promise to empower the working class and tax the rich have been dismayed by the Republican Party’s success in winning over less-educated, lower-income whites.

They want the Democrats to be an anti-elitist party once again. But they can’t sign on to Republicans’ brand of anti-elitism. Republican anti-elitist populists are most strongly opposed to the “elites” who exercise cultural influence – that is, university faculty and liberal-leaning news outlets. Billionaires who exercise financial influence, on the other hand, have largely escaped their ire. Democratic anti-elitist populists, by contrast, have been most strongly opposed to billionaires who exercise economic influence, while largely giving “elite” purveyors of cultural influence a pass. As a result, they have largely honored the norms of political correctness. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did not challenge the values of most liberal university faculty.

But Democrats’ receptivity to Platner’s campaign and their willingness to excuse his crude remarks and behavior may suggest a change in approach. Perhaps Democrats are so desperate to capture the anti-establishment white working-class vote that they’re willing to champion someone whose past record of alcohol abuse, crude comments about women, and marital infidelity almost rivals Pete Hegseth’s.

If Platner succeeds in unseating Senator Susan Collins – the last of a vanishing breed of pro-establishment New England Republican moderates – it may be a sign that the Democrats will be willing to compromise their recent principles of multicultural sensitivity in order to embrace a politically successful anti-establishment working-class populism. Or, if he loses, perhaps it will be a sign that Platner’s cultural brand will not be quite as successful as they had hoped.

This political reorientation and shift away from the principles that the party stood for in the last decade is certainly a political risk. Personally, I’m not at all convinced that the country will be better off if that shift proves electorally successful. I think that a shift toward an irreligious populism that excuses misogynistic crudity cannot be good for the country. In any case, though, this is certainly one race that I’ll be watching closely this year, since it will likely be a harbinger of the future direction of American politics.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and author of Abortion and America’s Churches.

Photo credit: Graham Platner (Wikimedia Commons license)

Today there is only one Democrat left in the House of Representatives who opposes abortion. There are no antiabortion Democrats left in the Senate.

There are few other issues that have united Democrats more than support for abortion rights. The Democratic Party spent more money for ads on abortion than for adverting on any other issue in both 2022 and 2024, NPR recently reported.

But this year, the Democratic Party is mentioning abortion a lot less in its advertising. So, could the party become a little less rigid in its pro-choice stance and win back a few more pro-lifers?

Unfortunately, the answer is probably not. Until very recently, pro-lifers were a strong minority contingent in the Democratic Party. But the process by which the party became monolithically pro-choice is not easily reversible.

To understand why pro-life Democrats have almost completely disappeared, we need to understand who the pro-life Democrats were when they did exist – and why they proved to be so politically vulnerable.

Pro-Life Democrats Lasted a Long Time in Congress

Given the Democratic Party’s current strong commitment to abortion rights, it might be easy to forget how long the now near-extinct species of pro-life Democratic congressional representative actually existed. Even though the national platform of the Democratic Party has endorsed Roe v. Wade since 1976, dozens of pro-life Democrats in Congress felt free to break from the party’s official stance and support restrictions on abortion for more than thirty years after their party adopted that platform plank.

As recently as 2009, there were still 62 Democratic congressional representatives who were willing to vote for the Stupak-Pitts amendment that restricted insurance coverage for abortion under Obamacare.

And in earlier decades, the number of Democrats in Congress who were pro-life was much higher. More than a third of the Democrats in the House of Representatives in 1992 met the National Right to Life Committee’s stringent standards for being considered pro-life. And in 1983, nearly one-third of the Democratic senators (15 out of 46) voted for a constitutional amendment proposal that would have rescinded Roe v. Wade.

But today nearly all traces of that earlier pro-life presence among both Democratic politicians and Democratic voters have vanished.

Fifty years ago, nearly half of all Democratic voters supported a constitutional amendment to protect human life from the moment of conception and ban nearly all abortion, but today only 15 percent of Democratic voters say they want to make abortion mostly or entirely illegal.

What happened to the pro-life Democrats?

The answer is that a shift in the views of three constituencies – northern white Catholics, southern African American Protestants, and southern white evangelical Protestants – explain the disappearance of a figure that used to be quite common: the pro-life Democrat in Congress. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, most pro-life Democrats came from one of those three constituencies. But today, support for pro-life Democrats in each of those constituencies has almost completely collapsed.

Northern Catholic Democrats

Catholics were the most vocal group of pro-life activists during the 1970s. To a much greater degree than most Protestant churches at the time, the Catholic Church propagated a strong theology of protection of human life from the moment of conception. Although the average Catholic did not entirely agree with their church’s theology when dealing with questions of whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or when a pregnancy endangered a woman’s health, a majority of Catholics in the 1970s opposed the legalization of elective abortion.

That’s why, in the early 1970s, the strongest opposition to abortion came from the most heavily Catholic states. Rhode Island, the nation’s most Catholic state, was (along with Utah) one of the last two states to agree to comply with Roe v. Wade by legalizing abortion; it did not do so until 1975.

But there were three reasons why Catholic voters lost influence in the party. One was that they were a minority of voters in most states. In 1975, only one state (Rhode Island) was majority Catholic. In the other northeastern states, Catholics were a plurality, but not a majority, of the population. That meant that in no state other than Rhode Island could a politician win an election by appealing to the Catholic vote alone; they had to build a coalition.

That led to the second problem facing Catholics: In the states where Catholics were most numerous, the non-Catholics in those states were strongly supportive of abortion rights. In contrast to white evangelicals in the South, who were surrounded by others outside of their religious coalition (such as African Americans) who also opposed abortion, northeastern Catholics in the late twentieth century were surrounded by mainline Protestants, Jews, and non-religious people who supported abortion rights. That meant that in no New England state after the mid-1970s could one get a viable statewide majority in favor of abortion restrictions. Even if Catholics voted as a bloc in favor of an antiabortion policy, they would likely be outvoted by the majority of voters who were not Catholic, because those non-Catholic voters were overwhelmingly opposed to abortion restrictions.

But that brings up the third problem that pro-life Catholics faced in the late 20^th century: Catholics did not vote as a bloc. Approximately one-third of Catholics approved of Roe v. Wade, according to Gallup polls taken in the mid-1970s, and some of the two-thirds who did not approve of Roe nevertheless wanted to keep abortion legal under certain circumstances even if they did not approve of “abortion on demand.” In 1976, 52 percent of Catholics said they favored a constitutional amendment to ban abortion – but 42 percent opposed it.

Since most northeastern voters who were not Catholic supported abortion rights – and since only a slight majority of Catholics in the mid-to-late 1970s were strongly opposed to abortion – only in the most heavily Catholic districts could a politician be rewarded for taking a stand against abortion. If a congressional district was overwhelmingly Catholic, voters would probably be willing to elect a pro-life politician. But if Catholics were only a slight majority, the district would probably still swing pro-choice, because the strong minority of Catholic voters who supported abortion legalization, along with the overwhelming majority of non-Catholics who did, would probably be enough to make the district generally pro-choice.

Yet in the heavily Catholic, still churched regions of the Northeast, there were still districts where pro-life Catholics had enough voting power to keep sending pro-life Democrats to Congress. That was why several New England Catholic Democratic congressional representatives in the late twentieth century – such as Joe Moakley from Massachusetts and Edward Beard and Robert Weygand from Rhode Island – consistently voted for legislation to restrict abortion.

On most issues, pro-life Catholic representatives such as Moakley voted with the liberal or centrist-liberal wing of their party. Moakley was a strong supporter of government-funded healthcare, for instance, and Weygand supported gun control and opposed the death penalty. But on abortion, their views reflected the views of their devout Catholic constituents – who, in a very heavily Catholic district, might have just enough political power to constitute a majority. When consistent life ethic Catholics express a desire today for politicians who integrate a pro-life stance on abortion with broader support for social programs that accord well with the Catholic Church’s teaching, it is this type of politician they have in mind – and from the 1970s until the beginning of the 21^st century, there were several of these pro-life Democrats in the House.

But even as some members of the House in Rhode Island and Massachusetts supported antiabortion legislation, the senators from this region generally did not, regardless of whether they were Catholic or Protestant. That is because while individual districts in some parts of New England might have had enough socially conservative Catholics to elect a pro-life representative, the states as a whole did not.

But today even the pro-life Catholic Democrats in the House have almost entirely disappeared. That disappearance is relatively recent; it happened only in the 21^st century. To understand why it happened, we need to know something about Catholic church attendance and pro-life beliefs.

Catholic Mass attendance began falling in the late 1960s, but in 1980, nearly a third of Catholics in the United States were still in church every week, and 64 percent attended at least once a month. By 2021, only 17 percent attended weekly, and only 37 percent attended at least once a month.

Today Catholics who attend Mass every week are almost as conservative on abortion as evangelical Protestants are; 68 percent say that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

But Catholics who don’t attend Mass very often are generally very liberal in their views on abortion. Sixty-five percent of Catholics who attend Mass less often say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. And since the majority of self-identified Catholics rarely attend Mass, every survey of Catholic opinion on abortion that does not differentiate Catholics by church attendance habits shows that the majority of Catholics are pro-choice. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey shows that 56 percent of all US Catholics said that abortion should generally be legal.

Although the Catholics who remain in church are becoming more conservative, the massive drop in Catholic church attendance in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries means that many former Catholics no longer identify as such and that even among those who still call themselves Catholic, the majority hold positions on abortion that are at least as liberal as the general population.

That’s why states like Massachusetts and Rhode Island – which were havens for pro-life Democrats only twenty-five or thirty years ago – are now strongly pro-choice. Rhode Island is still the nation’s most heavily Catholic state, but only 41 percent of Rhode Islanders today now identify as Catholic (down from over 50 percent in the 1970s). And of those Catholics, pro-lifers are only a small minority, just as in other nominally or historically Catholic regions of the country.

Today 78 percent of Rhode Islanders – as well as 78 percent of Massachusetts residents – say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. A pro-life candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, probably cannot get elected in those states anymore – even though in the 1990s and very early 2000s, pro-life Democrats still could, at least in some heavily Catholic congressional districts. The massive attrition from the Catholic Church in those states has taken a toll on pro-life sentiment – and there are not enough pro-life evangelical Protestants or other pro-lifers in New England to compensate for that loss.

As this has happened, the Catholic Democratic congressional representatives from New England who had once supported restrictions on abortion shifted their positions. When Democrats in Congress introduced legislation in 2022 to codify the terms of Roe v. Wade in federal law and make abortion legal nationwide, several New England Catholic Democrats who had once supported restrictions on abortion – including representatives such as Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts and Jim Langevin of Rhode Island – voted for the pro-choice bill. The pro-life cause among northern Catholic Democrats was over.

African American Democrats

A similar trajectory occurred among African American Democrats in the South, but for different reasons.

In the 1970s, African Americans were more strongly opposed to abortion than either white Catholics or white evangelical Protestants were. Their opposition to abortion softened over time, but still remained fairly strong well into the 21^st century. Gallup polls taken between 2001 and 2007 showed that only 31 percent of Black Americans (compared to 41 percent of non-Black Americans) said that abortion was “morally acceptable,” and only 24 percent said that it should be legal in all circumstances.

Unlike white evangelical conservatives, few Black Democratic voters used abortion as a political litmus test when voting or wanted to make abortion entirely illegal, but their general conservatism on abortion meant that southern Democrats in Congress could vote for abortion restrictions without alienating their African American supporters. This was true of numerous white southern Democrats in Congress in the 1980s and 1990s. While the majority of their support generally came from whites, southern white Democratic candidates in the last two decades of the 20^th century had to also win the African American vote to fend off Republican challengers and stay in office – and it helped them that both African American Democrats and southern whites shared a general social conservatism on the issue of abortion.

A few African American congressmen who represented socially conservative districts made a similar calculation and took either pro-life or centrist positions on abortion. One of the supporters of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment in 2009 (which was an amendment to the Affordable Health Care Act to restrict insurance coverage for abortion under Obamacare) was Rep. Sanford Bishop, an African American Democrat representing a central Georgia district.

But just as white Catholic Democrats in the North became increasingly pro-choice in the 21^st century, so did African American Democrats in the South. While a majority of African Americans were morally uncomfortable with abortion for decades, many of them were also deeply concerned about issues of race and poverty, and they became increasingly uncomfortable with a pro-life movement that was tied to a party whose policies on those other issues did not match their priorities.

As this happened, Black Protestants became more supportive of abortion legalization – a shift that dramatically accelerated after 2019, a moment when the Democratic Party became noticeably more focused on preserving abortion access in reaction to Republican attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade and pass restrictive abortion legislation in southern states.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, fewer than half of African Americans supported full legalization of all abortion. This changed after 2010, but even between 2010 and 2019, only 56 percent of Black Protestants said that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Yet by 2023, 72 percent of Black Protestants thought that abortion should be legal. (A Pew survey taken in January 2026 puts this number at 68 percent – which, while slightly lower than the percentage indicated in the 2023 PRRI survey, is still far higher than for any other religious group, including white mainline Protestants).

As this shift happened, African American Democratic politicians who had once supported some restrictions on abortion or abortion funding became fully supportive of abortion rights, just as their northern Catholic counterparts did. In 2022, Rep. Sanford Bishop voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act, the legislative proposal to make abortion legal nationwide.

White Southern Democrats

But the largest contingent of pro-life Democrats in Congress in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries were white southerners. Eleven of the fifteen Democratic senators who voted for an antiabortion constitutional amendment in 1983 represented states of the old Confederacy or a border state.

The vast majority of these white southern Democrats were hawks when it came to military spending bills and fiscal conservatives when it came to social welfare spending.

Some of them were more conservative than Republicans. For example, the pro-life Democrat Kent Hance, who defeated George W. Bush in a congressional election in Texas in 1978, was widely viewed as more conservative (and certainly more of a Texas populist) than the Bush family was at the time.

That’s largely why the white southern pro-life Democrats disappeared: either they or their constituents became Republicans. Kent Hance switched to the Republican Party in 1985. Other southern Democrats in Congress switched parties in the 1990s – or, if they didn’t become Republican themselves, they were replaced by a Republican. By 1999, nine of the fifteen senators who had voted for an antiabortion amendment in 1983 had been replaced by a Republican.

Things became even worse for the southern pro-life Democrats after the election of Barack Obama set off a counter-wave of Republican voting across the South. A string of Republican victories in the 2010 midterms swept away 19 of the 35 white southern Democrats still left in the House. Those with the most socially conservative, pro-life voting records – such as
Gene Taylor of Mississippi and Jim Marshall of Georgia – were especially vulnerable.

They lost their seats to pro-life Republicans, so the number of congressional representatives opposed to abortion didn’t change.

But their defeats eroded the last forces moderating the Democratic Party’s position on abortion. No matter how conservative they were, there was one thing separating the white southern Democratic politicians of the early 2000s from their Republican counterparts: the multiracial nature of their coalition. White southern Democrats in the early 2000s could not stay in office without winning the Black vote in their states. Their conservative positions on abortion represented a multiracial consensus in the South.

After the end of the conservative southern white Democrats’ careers, the prospect of winning a Democratic race in the South through a socially conservative, pro-life, multiracial coalition also vanished. The socially conservative, pro-life voters in the South simply would not vote for a Democrat. That meant that the Democrats in parts of the South that were not majority Black had to look for a different sort of candidate – a candidate who could win with a coalition of pro-choice, moderately progressive white Christians; pro-choice, centrist or progressive secular voters or other non-Christians; and Black and Hispanic Christians who increasingly supported abortion rights (or at least did not object to a candidate’s pro-choice stance).

In other words, the leading white Democratic politicians in the South became people a bit like James Tallarico – people who perhaps could speak Christian language, but whose pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+ stances played well with many centrist and moderately progressive suburban whites even while bypassing the sort of socially conservative voters that the previous generation of southern white Democrats had relied on. Most of the time, these Democratic candidates lost; the vast majority of white senators and representatives from the South were Republican. But in the rare cases in which they won – as Senator Jon Ossoff did in 2020, for instance – they relied on a coalition of suburban supporters who were considerably less socially conservative than the rural white evangelicals who had kept a previous generation of pro-life Democrats in office. Those pro-life rural white evangelicals were now so staunchly Republican that Democratic candidates no longer made much of an effort to win their vote.

On a smaller scale, something similar happened in the small number of socially conservative rural northern congressional that had once sent pro-life Democrats to Congress. In 2010, one of the most stalwart pro-life Democrats – the Catholic Jim Oberstar, an 18-term congressional representative from northern rural Minnesota – lost his bid for reelection to a Republican.

The loss of the party’s southern conservative pro-life wing, along with most of what remained of its northern Catholic pro-life contingent, meant that there was no longer any force to moderate the party’s pro-choice stance.

That had not been the case in 2000, when the party included in its platform a statement of tolerance and diversity on abortion views that it had borrowed from Republican Bob Dole: “We also recognize that members of our party have deeply held and sometimes differing views on issues of personal conscience like abortion and capital punishment. We view this diversity of views as a source of strength, not as a sign of weakness, and we welcome into our ranks all Americans who may hold differing positions on these and other issues.”

In 2000, the Democratic Party still had many pro-life members, but by 2014, there were only three Democratic members of the House – and none in the Senate – who had earned 100 percent ratings from the National Right to Life Committee. The party therefore had no compunction about moving to a more extreme pro-choice position. In 2016, the Democratic Party platform promised for the first time to abolish the Hyde Amendment, the restriction on abortion funding that had enjoyed bipartisan support for the previous forty years. In 2019, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign team advised him that he would not be able to win the party’s nomination unless he began opposing the Hyde Amendment. He dutifully complied.

And in 2020, one of the last remaining pro-life congressional Democrats, Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, suffered a primary loss to a progressive, pro-choice challenger after several other members of Illinois’s Democratic congressional delegation supported the challenger over their incumbent colleague.

That cleared the way for the party to make abortion its signature issue in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Kamala Harris became the first US vice president to tour an abortion clinic while in office. And the party spent more money on advertising its abortion stance than it spent on any other issue in those two elections.

Can the Democratic Party Moderate Its Abortion Stance?

The Democratic Party’s shift to a staunchly pro-choice stance did not take place overnight. Pro-life Democrats continued to play an active role in Congress for several decades after Roe v. Wade. And throughout those decades, many pro-lifers continued to hold out hope that they could work within the Democratic Party while still campaigning against abortion.

It’s difficult to retain that hope today. One can blame a decline in Catholic church attendance, a southern white abandonment of the Democratic Party, or a shift in African American views on abortion for this shift, but the end result is that party leaders now seem to believe that the party has little to gain by moderating its position on abortion.

This has given the Republican Party cover to do what might have been unthinkable only a few years ago: facilitate an expansion in access to abortion through the increased availability of abortion pills. (After all, if the Democratic Party is so monolithically pro-choice, the Republican Party arguably doesn’t have to do very much to retain the pro-life vote). As I argued in a recent article in Christianity Today, the Republican Party is increasingly adopting policies that are de facto pro-choice even if the party remains officially anti-Roe.

So, pro-lifers who want meaningful restrictions on abortion will find little support from either political party.

But if that’s the case, perhaps Democrats will finally realize that making support for abortion rights their number-one campaign issue is not a path to victory. Given the results of the last election, the strategy arguably did not work, which is why this year the Democrats are not emphasizing the issue in the way they did in 2024.

And if that’s the case – and if the abortion issue recedes in importance as a campaign issue – I think that we can hold out a slim hope that party leaders may eventually realize that they could safely move a little closer to their party’s official position on abortion in 2000 without losing much support. I think that there’s arguably a path for the Democratic Party to pick up a few votes by running pro-life candidates in heavily Hispanic districts in the South – such as the one that the last remaining pro-life Democrat in the House, Rep. Henry Cuellar, represents. Even if pro-life Democrats cannot win in most of the North and many parts of the South, I think there’s reason to believe that the situation is different among some Hispanic voters, a swing constituency that the Democratic Party cannot afford to take for granted.

Perhaps in the current political climate, it would be naïve to hope that the Democratic Party will try to recruit any more pro-life candidates to run in such districts. But the fact that even one pro-life Democratic congressional representative remains is an indication that despite all of the political changes that have led to the demise of the pro-life cause in the party, there are a still a small number of Democrats who would like to protect unborn life – even if the party as a whole does not.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of “Roe v. Wade.”

Photo credit: A Democrats for Life of America banner at the 2006 March for Life in Washington, DC (Wikimedia Commons)

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas, has rightly generated a lot of discussion this week as a landmark document patterned after earlier Catholic social teaching, such as Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.

(I should note that one of the many excellent articles on this encyclical this week was written by my wife, Nadya Williams, and was published at Mere Orthodoxy yesterday).

But what has received less attention, I think, is how this encyclical fits into a new Christian apologetic for our era. The cultural conversations about AI during the past three and a half years underscore a new reality: People who lack a Christian framework are struggling to differentiate humans from machines. They lack a theological foundation for knowing how to be human. The idea that only a Christian theological framework can make sense of our humanness – that is, our imago dei – is now one of the most powerful Christian arguments for the truth of the Christian faith.

Contemporary atheists probably did not imagine that in leaving God behind, they would also lose their belief in human freedom. On the contrary, some of the “new atheists” of the early 2000s initially pictured their rejection of religion as a movement toward personal liberation. Without God, they could fearlessly make their own rational choices, without the constraint of traditional dogma, mythology, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy.

But as some of the new atheists of the early 2000s soon discovered, a materialistic universe without God did not give them a framework for the personal free choice they thought they had. Sam Harris, one of the “four horsemen” of new atheism, argued in his book Free Will (2012) that free will is an illusion. Our choices are determined by our desires, he argued, and our desires are determined by materialistic forces.

And if that’s the case, it’s unclear what differentiates human thought from the “thought” of machines. We may have the illusion of a self capable of conscious thought, but it’s just an illusion. That’s the argument that atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett made in the 2010s.

“We’re robots, made of robots, made of robots,” he said in a 2017 BBC interview. The author of the article explained Dennett’s reasoning this way: “Our brain cells are robots that respond to chemical signals. The motor proteins they create are robots. And so it goes on.” The brain, in other words, was just a chemical computer, responding in machine-like fashion to the dictates of other components of the human biological machine.

Because there is no essential difference in this view between human consciousness and the “thought” that computers could produce, Dennett in 2017 foresaw a time in the not-too-distant future when computers would be able to reason and think just as well as humans could. “In this digital age of supercomputers and smart phones, surely it isn’t so difficult to imagine how a machine made of a trillion moving parts might just be capable of being human,” his BBC interviewer concluded.

Five years after this interview, ChatGPT was released. It’s not surprising that people who had already been unsure of the difference between humans and computers before the sudden ascendancy of artificial intelligence reacted to the emergence of AI by predicting that AI programs would become conscious (or perhaps already were) and that, in a worst-case scenario, they would turn against humans and perhaps destroy the human race.

If your worldview leads you to believe that there is no essential difference between human thought and the calculations of a computer – except perhaps that computers are now capable of better and more strategic thinking than humans are – your greatest fear when contemplating AI is likely going to be that AI will take over the world and perhaps use its power to destroy humanity.

But if you believe in a human soul, you won’t have this fear. You’ll know that computers can never become truly conscious in a human-like sense because they’re not human; they’re not created with a spirit modeled on God.

Instead, a person with a belief in both the uniqueness of humanity and the fallenness of humans will likely believe that the real danger of AI is not that AI will become more human-like; it’s rather that fallen humans will misuse AI and thereby become less than the fully human people that God created all of us to be.

There’s the danger that we’ll use AI to indulge in the sin of sloth – that is, we’ll misuse it to do the thinking and writing and creating that humans made in the image of God are supposed to enjoy doing as we reflect in some small way God’s creativity.

There’s the danger that we’ll use AI to cut us off from real relationships with real people.

And there’s the danger, as the pope said in his encyclical, that we will use AI to disrupt the social order and undermine human dignity.

But the antidote to all of this is a reaffirmation of what it means to be human. And that, it seems, is something that only those with something like the Christian theistic worldview are able to offer. Materialistic atheists do not have the framework to distinguish between human thought and the “thought” of an AI program, because they don’t believe that human thought is anything other than the product of materialistic chemical forces. But Christian theology does.

That’s why Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas devotes an extensive amount of space to the theological grounding for a belief in human rights, human dignity, and the principle of social relationships – in other words, the things that make us authentically human in the full sense that God created us to be. As the pope’s encyclical reminds us, not only is our thought different from that of a machine, but so are our relationships, because God created us to live in community and in love for others.

For those who are inspired by that vision of love and who want to be a human being rather than a machine, Christianity offers something that materialistic atheism does not.

This is now a key part of some works of contemporary cultural apologetics, such as Ross Douthat’s Believe and Justin Brierley’s Why I’m Still a Christian.

I suspect that the pope’s encyclical on AI will likewise serve as an apologetic for the faith for millions of others who are dissatisfied with the secular inadequacy to offer a compelling human and social vision as an alternative to doomsday predictions about AI. Just as the harshness of industrial capitalism prompted several generations of people (both Catholic and non-Catholic) to consider the Christian alternative of mutual social obligations that Pope Leo XIII outlined in Rerum Novarum (1892), so our current cultural moment of dehumanization might have accentuated the need for the Christian alternative presented in Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical.

AI, the pope’s encyclical emphasizes, is a piece of technology – and as a piece of technology, it cannot become human nor can it function as a substitute for God. Instead, its presence in our lives reminds us of why humans differ from machines and why we need God to engage in rightly ordered relationships and experience our full humanity in community, as God created us to live.

Before AI, all of these truths existed, but they may not have been fully evident. But now, with the rise of AI, the differences between those who believe in an authentic human consciousness and those who believe we’re merely chemical machines have become more apparent than ever. And for those who reflect on these differences, Christianity’s vision of humanity – which Pope Leo’s encyclical defended – may be just what our culture needs in the age of AI.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches and The Search for a Rational Faith.

Photo credit: Pope Leo XIV (photo by Edgar Beltran / Wikimedia Commons)

This past week was not a good week for human life, as far as American policy was concerned.

Two headlines last Thursday told the story of human lives that will be lost because of American governmental policy.

The first of those headlines received a great deal of attention, especially among pro-life Christians. “The Supreme Court Keeps Abortion Pills Available Nationwide” was the way that Christianity Today (CT) phrased it in a headline for an article that I wrote for the magazine.

CT has asked me to report monthly on abortion policy and the pro-life movement, so I have used my monthly pieces for the magazine to discuss the Food and Drug Administration’s actions that have increased the availability of abortion pills, which are now used in 65 percent of abortions in the United States.

As I have argued in my CT pieces, both the Republican and Democratic parties have adopted policies that are expanding access to abortion. The Democratic Party is doing so openly, just as it has done for years. The Republican Party is doing so less openly, but equally effectively. The Trump administration’s FDA has increased the range of abortion pills that are available for Americans to access. It has also not rescinded the Biden administration’s policy of allowing telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills. Unless that policy is rescinded, even the most strongly antiabortion states will not be able to stop people from ordering abortion pills through the mail via a quick phone or video consultation.

This was the subject of the Supreme Court’s order this week, and the order did not go the way pro-lifers wanted. The court ruled that telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone (the most popular form of abortion pill) can continue, at least for the moment. That could change when the court hears Louisiana’s case next year, but the fact that only two justices dissented from the order does not seem to bode well for the pro-life cause in this case.

I have written more about this in CT, but I have not yet written anything about the other headline on human life that also appeared on Thursday evening: “Cuba Says It Has Run out of Oil.”

In January, Cuba’s major supplier of oil – Venezuela – quit supplying Cuba after the US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. That would have been disruptive enough, but the United States also imposed a blockade on Cuba to keep Mexican tankers from getting through to supply Cuba with oil, presumably because the United States wanted to force Cuba’s president to resign. The United States did allow one Russian oil carrier through the blockade, and that kept Cuba from completely running out of oil for a short time, although oil remained extremely expensive and difficult to get. While Americans were complaining about $5-a-gallon gas prices, Cubans were paying $40 a gallon.

But this week the Russian oil supply ran out. Cuba is now completely out of oil, its government has said.

This has begun to create a humanitarian crisis, because Cuba uses oil for electricity – and electricity is used to power life-saving healthcare devices. Without oil, ambulances cannot run and ventilators cannot be charged. Surgeries have needed to be delayed. Perhaps the Cuban president’s statement that this is a “genocidal energy blockade” was too strong, but nevertheless, it’s true that US actions have created the modern equivalent of siege warfare. Many people are suffering, and a few are dying, because necessary supplies cannot get through to people who need them.

While Cuba’s own policies have certainly contributed to the crisis, the American blockade has made things substantially worse.

Even if the United States had a clear plan to replace the government of Cuba and rebuild the island’s infrastructure after the current government falls, its tactic of causing civilians severe suffering through its energy blockade would be morally questionable, but I have not yet seen any evidence that the United States has any interest in rebuilding Cuba. On the contrary, the current administration has not expressed interest in humanitarian aid and nation-building, even in countries where it has attempted regime change.

Without these goals, we’re left with the stark fact that human suffering is occurring and human lives are endangered as a result of American actions in Cuba – just as we are left with the fact that abortions are increasing because of the federal government’s refusal to restrict telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills even in conservative states that have attempted to limit them.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, pro-life critiques of abortion were often accompanied by expressions of concern about attacks on civilians that were occurring because of US policy. The most detailed, comprehensive pro-life book on abortion published in 1970 was written by Georgetown philosophy professor Germain Grisez, a Catholic natural law ethicist who opposed nuclear arms, capital punishment, and the Vietnam War in addition to the taking of prenatal life. One of the earliest legislative sponsors of a Human Life Amendment to protect life from the moment of conception was Senator Mark Hatfield, an evangelical Protestant known for his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War.

When Hatfield gave an address at the National Right to Life Committee’s annual meeting in June 1973, he began his speech not with a discussion of abortion per se but with an analysis of a more comprehensive societal pattern of disrespect for human life.

“There is no single characteristic of our society that troubles my inner self more than the degradation, the cheapening, the dehumanization of life that we see all around us today,” Hatfield declared. “That is what is at the heart of the terrible inhumanity of our policies in Indochina. Human life became cheap, and easily expendable – especially Asian life, which somehow seemed less valuable than American life. We justified policies by talking about body counts. And we destroyed all sensitivity to the sanctity of human life. That is what happened at Attica. . . . We escalate the dehumanization of human life whenever we heed the frightened and vengeful pleas for ‘law and order’ that would have us crush the lives of others. The same holds true for capital punishment. The State cannot be so arrogant as to take away the ultimate right of every citizen – the right to life. . . . A cheapness for life plagues our attitudes regarding amnesty. . . . The evidence of how life can be degraded, cheapened, and dehumanized by forces and attitudes in our society is painfully obvious.”

Only after discussing these other attacks on the value of human life did Hatfield turn his attention to abortion. “Should it come as any surprise, then, that our society has come to regard abortion as an increasingly permissible and acceptable form of human behavior?” Hatfield asked. “Abortion is a form of violence. It is condoned by a society that has become callous and indifferent to the ultimate value of human life. It is undergirded by a whole moral climate that elevates selfish personal convenience to a supreme status in human decision-making.”

Current manifestations of societal disrespect for human life might be slightly different than they were a half century ago, in 1973. The Vietnam War (with what Hatfield called “the terrible inhumanity of our policies in Indochina”) is long over. New examples of state-sanctioned life-taking, such as physician-assisted suicide, have emerged.

But the basic attitudes that Hatfield described are still with us. In the United States, we still dehumanize people and tacitly accept the legitimacy of taking their lives when we are concerned about our security or when we see the sacrifice of life as part of a larger foreign policy objective. What Hatfield said about a lack of concern for life in prisons or among convicted criminals probably still applies to the United States in 2026. So does his general assessment of American foreign policy. And so does what he said about abortion.

The technology of abortion may have changed in the last few decades, with abortion pills now making it easier than ever to terminate a pregnancy and thus extinguish a human life. But the issue is still the same. And in the same way, attacks on civilians may be taking place in a different continent than was the case fifty years ago, but the fundamental issue is similar.

American policies disrespected human life in 1973. And as the events of this past week showed, they’re still disrespecting human life today.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of “Roe v. Wade.”

Photo credit: US Supreme Court building, photo by Kjetil Ree / Wikipedia.

As President Donald Trump’s public approval rating continues to plummet, some journalists have wondered whether at least some of the conservative evangelical Christians who have been his strongest allies will rethink their support.

Last week the New York Times published the article “Trump Tests the Limits of His Most Faithful Supporters.” The “coalition of Christian voters” who supported Trump in 2024 has “splintered,” the New York Times article proclaimed.

Unfortunately, we don’t yet have polling data on white evangelicals’ views of Trump this month, after rapidly rising gas prices and national frustration over the war in Iran have made Trump increasingly unpopular among Americans in general. How much of this national frustration has translated into erosions in Trump’s support among evangelicals in particular is therefore impossible to say.

What we do know is that a Pew Research Center survey taken in late January of this year showed that 69 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trump’s job performance, while only 37 percent of all US adults agreed. Fifty-eight percent of white evangelicals (but only 27 percent of the general population) said that they supported all of most of his “plans and policies.”

White evangelicals are much more likely than any other group of Americans to remain loyal to Trump. But the Pew survey indicated that even in January, that support was already beginning to slip.

(One side note: Throughout this piece, I’m going to use the term “white evangelical” because that’s the preferred political science and social survey term to refer to Trump’s religious base among conservative Protestants. I’ve already written elsewhere about problems with this terminology, but because this is the term used by the public opinion polls that I’m using as sources, it’s the term I’ll need to use here).

A year ago, in February 2025, 78 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trump’s job performance, but by January of this year, only 69 percent did. During that same twelve-month period, white evangelical support for Trump’s policies fell from 66 percent to 58 percent. And confidence in Trump’s ethics dropped even further. In February 2025, 55 percent of white evangelicals were “extremely” or “very” confident that Trump acted ethically as president, but by January 2026, only 40 percent expressed that level of confidence in Trump’s ethics.

And in early April, only 5 percent of white evangelicals said that Trump was “very religious,” while 51 percent said he was “not too religious” or “not at all religious.” In other words, they didn’t identify Trump as one of their own. Even before Trump pictured himself as Jesus in an AI-generated meme, and even before the high gas prices of the Iran war started hitting a lot of middle-class and working-class Americans in the wallet, a majority of white evangelicals had already decided that Trump was an unethical, irreligious person.

But an April 2026 Pew survey also showed that 67 percent of white evangelicals said that Trump stands up for people “with religious beliefs similar to theirs” either “a great deal” or “some” of the time. No other religious group of Americans expressed anything close to that level of confidence in Trump’s willingness to stand up for their religious beliefs.

That poll illustrates the difficulty white evangelicals will have in breaking with Trump. They have substantial doubts about Trump’s ethics or his own religious faith, but they also believe he’s the only one likely to protect their own religious freedom. That’s why their approval ratings of Trump dropped only slightly during his first year in office, and why they’re likely to be one of the very last voter groups in the United States to break with him.

But if the economy substantially worsens and Trump continues to alienate even many of his most stalwart supporters, white evangelical Republicans will eventually leave the Trump coalition. Where will they go then?

They won’t go to the Democrats. White evangelicals haven’t voted en masse for a Democratic presidential candidate in fifty years.

Even Jimmy Carter’s candidacy in 1976 attracted only about 50 percent of the white evangelical vote, and since then, no Democrat has come close to that level of support among white born-again Christians. For the last two decades, Republican presidential candidates have consistently won between 73 and 81 percent of the white evangelical vote.

There are no indications that that will change in the next election cycle. None of the leading potential contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination – which include Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris – have made much attempt to avoid alienating white evangelicals with their stances on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. It seems inconceivable that the Democrats could pick up many white evangelical votes no matter how unpopular Trump’s policies become.

But that doesn’t mean that white evangelicals will continue to defend Trump forever. Instead, as soon as they see a viable Republican alternative, they will break with Trump to back a different type of Republican. We’ve already seen that happen twice before, when white evangelicals who had voted in overwhelming numbers for a Republican president who became deeply unpopular had to rethink their political commitments.

The first of those moments came in the 1970s. An estimated 80 percent or more of white evangelical voters cast their ballots for Richard Nixon in 1972, because they viewed him as the candidate of moral order and an opponent of the counterculture and the cultural liberalism that they associated with Nixon’s Democratic opponent, George McGovern. (McGovern, the son of a Wesleyan minister, was not quite as culturally liberal as they imagined, but nevertheless, his image as the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” as one of his opponents branded him, hurt his ability to appeal to white evangelicals or culturally conservative white southerners).

When Nixon’s White House tapes were released as a result of the Watergate scandal, revealing the candidate of “law and order” to be a profane, vindictive, conniving politician, Billy Graham was so shocked that he vomited. Other evangelicals were likewise dismayed. Carl F. H. Henry, who had always been a loyal Republican, revealed in the leadup to the 1976 presidential campaign season that he was considering voting for a Democrat. Nearly all of the national evangelical magazines proclaimed a similar message in 1976: Character mattered more than policy positions. Evangelicals did not want to elect another Nixon.

Evangelicals would later modify this position, but even if part of their political recalibration between 1974 and 1976 was short-lived, it was nevertheless significant. From then on, they would expect more from their preferred political candidates than Nixon had delivered. When Ronald Reagan won their support in 1980, he did so by giving them much more specific promises than Nixon ever had. Their disappointment with Nixon ultimately prompted evangelicals not to retreat from politics but to hold candidates to a higher level of scrutiny and demand that they prove their bona fides before expecting evangelical support.

The second moment of significant political recalibration as a result of disappointment with a candidate they had once strongly supported came in 2006-2008, when evangelicals began slowly distancing themselves from George W. Bush. Bush carried 78 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2004, and he remained extraordinarily popular among evangelicals even as his national public approval ratings plummeted. Evangelicals continued to support the Iraq war in high numbers even after other Americans lost faith in it.

But eventually, even many of Bush’s white evangelical supporters decided they had had enough. In 2007, the New York Times suggested that the Christian Right was experiencing a “crackup.” Evangelical millennials were tired of the culture wars; they might continue to oppose abortion, but they were more interested in fighting climate change in the name of Jesus than in supporting most of the traditional Christian Right agenda.

These predictions of the end of the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party proved erroneous, at least in one sense. Seventy-three percent of white evangelicals voted for Republican candidate John McCain in 2008, and a slightly higher percentage supported Mitt Romney in 2012. Eighty-one percent voted for Trump in 2016.

But if the predictions about evangelical disillusionment with the Republican Party were incorrect on the surface, pundits in 2007 were nevertheless correct about one thing: Evangelical support for Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy was over. Pundits greatly overestimated the role that politically progressive evangelical millennials would play in the Christian Right’s pivot away from neoconservatism, but they were nevertheless right that a momentous shift was about to take place as a result of national disillusionment with Bush’s Iraq war.

From the 1950s through the early 2000s, white evangelicals had generally been strong supporters of a hawkish foreign policy, because they were strong anticommunists. The idea that a half-century of evangelical support for foreign military ventures in the name of fighting evil would suddenly come to an end did not seem likely in 2004 – but by 2016, it had happened.

If history is any guide, it seems likely that we might be on the verge of another similar recalibration in the Christian Right’s politics. A national repudiation of Trump will eventually lead to a significant erosion in white evangelical support for Trump, and this in turn will lead the Christian Right to change its political priorities. White evangelicals will not ally with the Democrats, but there will be a noticeable change in the type of Republican they want to support.

Just as evangelicals in the mid-1970s did not want to support another Nixon and evangelicals after 2008 did not want another Bush, so white evangelical voters today may eventually decide that they don’t want another Trump.

Perhaps they’ll decide once again (as they did in the mid-1970s) that character really does matter in an officeholder. Perhaps they’ll decide (as they did after 2008) that the policies of the candidate they once favored are not acceptable.

But whatever form it takes, it seems likely that if Trump’s national popularity continues to decline, a change in the Christian Right’s alliances will become almost inevitable. The Christian Right will continue its alliance with the Republican Party, but it will also seek to pivot away from the MAGA brand.

That doesn’t mean that the Christian Right will decide that the Never Trumpers were correct. Nor does it mean that they will become more politically moderate. But it does mean that at some point, even white conservative evangelicals who endorsed Trump will seek to distance themselves from that alliance and that when they do so, the Christian Right will change its policy positions in some way.

We’re not quite at that point yet, but we might get there soon. And when we do, it will be very interesting to watch, because it will likely signal the future direction not only of the Christian Right but of the Republican Party as a whole.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of several books on American religion and politics, including (most recently) Abortion and America’s Churches and The Search for a Rational Faith.

Photo by author.

Photo: Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young graduate student reading for my prelim exams in modern American history at Brown University, I discovered something in my studies of African American Christians in the civil rights movement that changed my perspective and set the trajectory for all of my subsequent scholarship.

Up to that point in my life, I had assumed that Christians who brought their faith and their beliefs about the Bible into politics would invariably align themselves with a conservative party that opposed abortion and that supported other principles that I associated with evangelical Christianity. I knew that some theologically liberal Christians aligned themselves with progressive causes, but I didn’t think that they took the Bible very seriously.

I was therefore surprised to see that the African Americans who led the civil rights movement in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for continued alliances between the Black church and progressive politics were deeply committed to the Bible as the word of God. They believed that the exhortations of the biblical prophets and the teachings of Jesus required them to make justice for the poor a central part of their political program.

That realization changed the way that I understood the relationship between Christian faith and politics. It challenged me to rethink some of my own political beliefs and my assumptions about biblical interpretation. While most of my public writing has been focused more on white Christians than on the African American church, the views of African American Christians have never been far removed from my thinking about faith and politics.

I therefore consider it an honor to be able to publish this interview with a Black Christian minister and contemporary social justice advocate: Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain.

Rev. Bates-Chamberlain is the founder and director of Live Free Chicago – Live Free Illinois, which organizes churches to transform the criminal justice system. She is a lifelong resident of Chicago, having been born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. She has spent her professional life integrating her faith with social justice advocacy in order to improve her community and reduce gun violence. She holds a master’s in social work from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master’s in theological studies from McCormick Theological Seminary. She was ordained as a minister in the Church of Jesus Christ House of Prayer, Inc., in 2013.

Here is my conversation with Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain:

DKW: You are a social justice activist in Chicago and a committed Christian. Tell us about the particular causes that you have worked for and the role that your own Christian faith has played in your social justice activism. What motivated you to become an activist? In what way has your social justice activism been shaped by your Christian faith?

CBC: My faith is grounded in my activism, and my understanding of Jesus has evolved greatly alongside that work.

Growing up, I believed that Christianity revolved around my own personal piety, but that worldview didn’t always hold up to what I experienced in real life. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I saw firsthand how drugs, violence, and incarceration can tear through communities. But I didn’t know how to make sense of these observations in a way that connected to my faith.

Later, when I moved to the South, everything I witnessed back home was magnified. Black people were openly subjected to racism and criminalized on a regular basis. In my heart, I knew I wanted to help people. That’s why I became a social worker and considered pursuing a career in therapy; I wanted to equip others with the tools and strategies to navigate their own individual circumstances. However, while taking undergraduate courses, I learned about the ways in which systemic structures devastate communities, millions of people at a time. I realized my desire to help people one-by-one wouldn’t suffice.

Once I started to organize congregations, everything clicked in place for me. It was the perfect role for someone deeply devoted to God, the church, and a deep desire to enact change on a macro level. This work marked the beginning of a new relationship with Jesus.

Before this realization, I had always read the Bible through a lens that portrayed Jesus as meek, passive, and self-sacrificing: a model of enduring suffering on earth in exchange for heavenly reward. But as I organized congregations and learned directly from communities fighting for justice, I began to see Jesus differently. I came to understand him as an organizer: someone who confronted the systemic exploitation of people, who built power through community, who defied unjust laws, and who embodied faith through action.

DKW: As we know, there are nonreligious people who are strong advocates for social justice and who are excellent community organizers. In your view, is there anything that churches can bring to social justice campaigns that one cannot find outside of faith communities - and if so, what is it?

CBC: Faith leaders are often known to make the moral argument and be the moral conscience in society. In other words, we know how to channel the power of God. In organizing, we often say that our work depends on two elements: organizing people and organizing money. However, we also like to think that we bring an extra “organized spirit” to the mix: the spirit of God moving through us and guiding our work. Particularly in a moment where white Christian nationalism is growing out of control, our churches have the power to counter their movement. No other organizing community is better positioned to confront white Christian nationalism like Christians who operate in the true nature of who Jesus is and was.

In addition to the power that comes from assembling organized bodies of people, faith leaders also have a unique ability to help their congregations better understand the world around them on a regular basis. Sometimes every week, sometimes multiple times a week. Those of us who believe in God understand the power of doing what you can while also trusting that God is on our side as the oppressed. We know how to activate real people (not simply Facebook friends) to take action together and raise money. That’s power!

I also believe the faith community is well-equipped when it comes to serving the needs of our communities. Many churches regularly serve as mutual aid centers, crisis centers, and organizing hubs to speak out against injustices. The church is an entity who, every sabbath, turns out the most people globally. It only takes a very, very small percentage of those churches working collectively to transform cities, states, and countries.

DKW: One of the things that some white evangelicals (especially those in the Reformed tradition) talk a lot about is the definition of the gospel. How would you define the gospel? What is the relationship between the gospel and your social justice activism?’

CBC: For me, the gospel—the good news—is Jesus’ blueprint. It reveals the power and salvific nature of his work through his life, death, burial, and resurrection. The gospel deeply shapes my organizing. I understand the work of Jesus as organizing because everything he did was rooted in community and powered by the people around him. His core leaders were developed, and they in turn organized others.

I believe it is theologically unsound to practice only a portion of who Jesus was without embracing the fullness of his life and mission. “Loving thy neighbor as thyself” is not just a sentiment; it is a call to action. It compels me to respond to policy injustices, systemic injustices, and the immediate needs of my community. We cannot ignore Jesus’ mission in Luke: “He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.” Nor can we ignore the Lord’s Prayer—“thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—which grounds our work in the belief that justice is not only a heavenly ideal but an earthly mandate.

This is why my organizing is inseparable from my identity as a Christian. The gospel is not abstract to me; it is the model Jesus left us, and it shapes how I show up in the world.

DKW: You have been very critical of white Christian nationalism (and understandably so!). But at the same time, you believe that churches should be politically active on issues of social justice. What exactly is white Christian nationalism, and what makes it different than other attempts to mobilize the church for political causes? What exactly makes white Christian nationalism so dangerous? Is there a difference in principle between a church inviting Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth to speak about political issues (and giving them a direct or implied political endorsement) and a church inviting someone like Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, or James Talarico to talk about political issues (and giving them a direct or implied political endorsement)? If so, what is that difference?

CBC: White Christian nationalism is an extremist ideology shared by enslavers, the KKK and now MAGA (among others). This ideology is rooted in the belief system that America is for the white, cisgendered Christian. This movement is not simply mobilization rooted in faith—but an ideology that manipulates religious language to justify hierarchy, exclusion, and domination. We know that this country was stolen from Native Americans and became a melting pot from immigrants, but this extremist movement deliberately rationalizes the dehumanization and violation of anyone who does not fit into their narrow category of deceptive “purity.“

In the words of Dr. King, “those who love peace must organize as effectively as those who love war.” Political organizing is not the problem; it’s the lack of organizing among those of us who share our values. White Christian nationalists are organizing to create a world ruled by an oligarch, where rich white men can weaponize religion to keep people in line. All of this directly contradicts Jesus’ teachings.

Jesus literally fought against this same scenario with the Roman empire and the religious sector. At this moment in history, we need to ask ourselves:

• Would Jesus care more about caging a refugee, or feeding and clothing them?

• Would Jesus care about the wealth extraction from the working class families to give to billionaires? Or would he overturn the tables of those who profit from exploitation?

• Would Jesus care about passing policies like the big bad bill that targets healthcare and SNAP? Or would Jesus prioritize healing and feeding the people?

• Would Jesus devalue Black people and women?

We have to ask ourselves whose values we align with and if we are prepared to fight for the world which we believe should exist on earth as it is in heaven?

DKW: For the last 40+ years, the two greatest issues of political concern for white conservative evangelical Christians have been abortion and issues of sexuality or gender. I know that you disagree with those political priorities. In your view, what current political issues should be the greatest concerns for Bible-believing Christians - and why?

CBC: One of the greatest concerns right now should be the health of our democracy and the well‑being of the people who are most vulnerable within it. Many families, like my own, are feeling the strain of rising costs and shrinking opportunities. That affects everything from sending a child to college to accessing basic resources. It’s all a clear sign of authoritarianism and federal overreach that must be stopped.

DKW: In the last two decades, a lot of young people have left the church. Some of the denominations that have experienced the greatest membership declines have been mainline Protestant denominations (like the United Church of Christ or the United Methodist Church, for instance) that take progressive social justice positions on issues of race, poverty, the environment, and anti-violence measures. Is there a way to blend progressive social justice activism with Christianity in a way that would be appealing to a younger generation - and if so, why have socially progressive churches often failed to appeal to young people? What would you tell socially progressive young people who don’t feel any need to be part of a church?

CBC: Do it, find your place in church. There are churches where your voice and presence matter. Jesus and his disciples were young radical people who had a vision for the world and fought for it. As faith leaders, we can’t silence and paralyze the energy of the youth. We have to ensure we’re reflecting both their and our idea of faith and Jesus. We need to show them church love in action, and the benefits of being in community together for a real purpose.

We don’t necessarily need to find new ways to appeal to youth engagement. Imagine how strong our congregations would be if we all practiced 1:1’s in our communities and worked with each other based upon shared values. The actionable part of our community alone will draw people who are concerned and being impacted by real issues.

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By some measures, the oldest continuously existing Protestant congregation in New England is First Parish Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

“First Parish Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is the birthplace of religious and civic freedom in America,” the church’s website proudly proclaims. “With continuous records dating back to 1606 in Scrooby, England, where the Separatists were forced to worship in secret in William Brewster’s manor house, Plymouth’s First Parish is possibly the oldest continuous western spiritual institution in America.”

But First Parish Church is not the only religious congregation in Plymouth to claim to be the original church that the Pilgrim Separatists founded in the early seventeenth century.

Only a hundred yards away from First Parish stands another historic church: The Church of the Pilgrimage. And this church, too, claims to be a direct descendant of the Pilgrim Separatists’ original congregation established in 1606 in Scrooby, England.

First Parish Church and the Church of the Pilgrimage were once one church – the church that the Pilgrims established in England in 1606 and that they then transported to the New World in 1620. For the first two hundred years of the congregation’s existence, it remained one church.

But what happened to split the church in Plymouth was what also happened in numerous other New England towns at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In many New England towns, including Plymouth, the installation of a theological liberal pastor in the established town church prompted some more theologically conservative Reformed congregants to establish a breakaway church that claimed to preserve the theological orthodox teaching that they believed the original group had abandoned. The liberal congregations in New England became known as Unitarian churches. The more theologically conservative Reformed faction became known as Congregationalists.

In Plymouth, the split was nearly even. When the congregation hired the liberal minister James Kendall, a recent Harvard College, in 1800, 54 congregants sided with the liberal group, while 52 left the church to form the Congregationalist church that eventually adopted the name Church of the Pilgrimage. Their church meetinghouses sat only a few hundred feet away from each other, their dueling spires a testament to the inability of the two groups to agree on the definition of theological orthodoxy.

For the Plymouth Congregationalists, the essence of the Christian faith was Trinitarian Reformed Protestant orthodoxy, including the belief that people could not save themselves and were dependent entirely on the grace of God. This was the gospel that their Pilgrim forebears had left England to preserve, they thought, and they were committed to maintaining it in their own day. To preach this theologically orthodox Reformed gospel, the church hired as their minister Adoniram Judson Sr., whose son (Adoniram Judson Jr.) would later become famous in evangelical circles as a Baptist missionary to the Burmese people.

The Unitarians, on the other hand, defined intellectual freedom as the essence of the Pilgrims’ faith, and they claimed that they were the rightful preservers of it.

Early nineteenth-century Unitarians were not nearly as theologically liberal as a later generation of Unitarians. They still read the Bible avidly and viewed it as authoritative, when rightly interpreted. They called themselves Christians and had a high reverence for the teachings of Jesus. Though they were not Nicene Trinitarians, most of them thought that Jesus was more than merely human. This, most of them thought, was the view of the first-century church, and they intended to restore it.

But regardless of how much (or how little) scriptural support for their views they could provide, the early nineteenth-century Unitarians differed from their more theologically conservative Congregationalist counterparts in insisting on individual Christians’ freedom to break free from credal dogma and follow a rational interpretation of scripture wherever it led. They should have this freedom even if meant rejecting Trinitarianism or jettisoning parts of the Bible (especially the Old Testament) that they thought could not be harmonized with the teachings of Christ, they thought. After all, religious freedom was the reason the Pilgrims came to America in the first place, they argued, and they were preserving their legacy in their own religious community.

This was James Kendall’s view, at least. Fifty years after the church split, the now 81-year-old Kendall was still preaching his liberal theological message of freedom from the First Parish pulpit, and he was still insisting that it was the Congregationalists, not the Unitarians, who had deviated from the Pilgrims’ version of Christianity.

“I have not forgotten the charge of having departed from the faith, which was brought at an early period of my ministry, against this church and their newly elected pastor,” he told his congregation in 1850, as he recounted the bitter split of 1800 and the continuing accusations he faced from the Congregationalists who were meeting only a hundred yards away. “They no doubt were sincere, and believed what they said.”

But, he said, they were wrong, because they misunderstood the Pilgrims’ message and his own commitment to the central principle of the Pilgrims’ religious experiment and the entire Protestant Reformation. “I entered upon my sacred mission, based on the great protestant principle – ‘THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE SCRIPTURES, AND THE RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT IN THE INTERPRETATION OF THEM’” (capitalization in original). In other words, there should be no credal dogmas – no Nicene Creed, Westminster Confession of Faith, or Savoy Confession. Every individual Christian should have the freedom to interpret the scriptures as they saw fit.

Kendall claimed this was what the early seventeenth-century Pilgrims believed. Their faith was progressive, not static, he argued. They refused to end the Reformation with the Thirty-Nine Articles or even with the writings of John Calvin, but were instead always looking to the scriptures to grow closer to Jesus and to learn new truths, no matter how much it might cost them. Kendall claimed the mantle of the Pilgrims’ progressive instincts.

“In looking back to the early history of this church, I was happy to find myself sustained by the venerable [John] Robinson, the first pastor of the Plymouth church,” Kendall said. “What he wanted, what he earnestly desired, what he fervently prayed for, was progress – progress in Christian knowledge, grace, and truth; progress in imbibing the spirit, and attaining the temper and character of Jesus.”

“It is not pretended that there is no difference of opinion as to their religious belief, between the early fathers with their pious and noble minded pastor, and those termed liberal Christians of the present day,” Kendall conceded. After all, “the enquiries and investigations of the nineteenth century have led in some instances to a different interpretation of the sacred scriptures, and have resulted, in some particulars, in a difference of religious views.”

But he insisted that, whatever differences between his own views and those of the Pilgrims might have existed – such as whether Jesus was fully God, for instance, or whether humans in their fallen state were totally depraved – what mattered was not necessarily the doctrinal particulars as much as the spirit of the Pilgrims’ quest. And on that point, he was confident that he was the heir of the Pilgrims, carrying on the same project of religious reform and personal freedom of scriptural interpretation that they had begun.

“The venerable Robinson, with his far reaching and almost prophetic vision, foresaw this increasing light and truth,” Kendall said. “And, like the patriarch of old, on whose mind dawned the dayspring from on high – he rejoiced to see the day, and seeing it was glad.”

As Kendall’s sermon suggested, the dispute between the Unitarians and Congregationalists in Plymouth over which group was the true upholder of the Pilgrims’ religious project reflected a disagreement over what the essence of the Pilgrims’ message really was.

The Larger Implications of This Analysis

This disagreement is not merely confined to Plymouth. A similar disagreement characterizes nearly every division in any Christian tradition, because in nearly every denominational split following the introduction of a particular innovation, one faction that can be labeled “conservative” will define itself as the upholder of a particular principle that the founders of that tradition believed in, just as the Congregationalists of Plymouth, Massachusetts, defined themselves as the upholders of Trinitarianism and a few other Reformed Protestant doctrines that the Unitarians at First Parish Church had abandoned.

But the other side in a denominational split, which we might label “liberal,” will nearly always insist that even if they have modified a particular doctrine, they are the ones who are the true heirs of the denominational tradition, because they are upholding the spirit or essence of that tradition to a greater degree than their hidebound, reactionary opponents. And if the liberal side inherits the official ecclesiastical institutions – as the Unitarian congregants of First Parish Church did when they kept the church’s pastor and meetinghouse, leaving their opponents to gather elsewhere – this will further strengthen their claim to be the maintainers of the original denomination.

How we define the essential principles of a religious movement will determine how we tell that movement’s story. It will determine how we describe each side in a denominational split and how we list its theological genealogy.

For example, if we think that the essence of the northeastern reform-minded evangelical Protestantism of the antebellum era was a commitment to social reform, we will probably view the northeastern evangelical theology of Charles Finney and the first generation of Oberlin College graduates as an early chapter in the history of the Social Gospel and mainline Protestantism. Contemporary mainline Protestant denominations such as the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ are simply carrying on the legacy of the early nineteenth-century evangelicals who were their direct ancestors, both denominationally and theologically. It was the early twentieth-century fundamentalists like J. Gresham Machen and their modern counterparts, like the Presbyterian Church in America, who broke from this tradition and created a desiccated evangelicalism by stripping it of its social consciousness and progressive impulses.

But on the other hand, if we think that the essence of the northeastern reform-minded evangelical Protestantism of the antebellum era was a commitment to biblical authority, a traditional Reformed doctrine of sin, and an insistence on personal conversion, we will view the modernist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an abandonment of traditional evangelical orthodoxy, and we will see the true continuation of the legacy of the Second Great Awakening not in mainline Protestant institutions but in a handful of northeastern churches that retained their theological conservatism – such as Park Street Church in Boston, for instance – as well as a much larger group of evangelical churches throughout the nation and world that cannot necessarily trace their institutional history back to the antebellum northeastern revivals but whose theology of atonement and personal conversion is closely akin to what many early nineteenth-century evangelicals were preaching.

In reality, of course, no congregation or denomination – no matter how traditional or conservative – ever fully preserves all of the beliefs and practices of the previous generation’s version of that tradition. Even the most conservative Southern Baptists of today are not a carbon copy of the Southern Baptists of the 1920s. They don’t defend racial segregation, they don’t express the same anxieties about Catholic encroachments on church-state separation, their views on abortion are much more defined (and more hardline), and they’re considerably less bothered by alcohol, to name just a few obvious ways in which Southern Baptists have changed over the past century.

And no religious tradition, no matter how allegedly liberal or progressive, ever fully abandons all of the beliefs of its forebears. That is why even the most liberal religious groups, such as the Unitarian First Parish Church of Plymouth, can plausibly claim to be preserving some essential tenets of their historic tradition. To conservative evangelicals, it may seem obvious that the Unitarian First Parish Church has not preserved the tenets of the Pilgrim faith, but that’s only obvious if we assume that the essential tenets include a Trinitarian faith in Christ; it’s not so obvious if one thinks that the essence of the Pilgrim project was religious freedom, as Unitarians in Plymouth have insisted for the past two centuries.

But the picture gets even more complicated when we find that even some of the most allegedly hidebound, reactionary groups don’t remain static, and that as they continue to evolve, they often face accusations from even more conservative groups that they, too, have departed from traditional orthodoxy. This, in fact, happened with the Congregationalist Church of the Pilgrimage.

The Church of the Pilgrimage’s Continued Evolution

For many decades after the Church of the Pilgrimage was founded, it continued to uphold Trinitarian Christianity in opposition to the town’s Unitarians, but like many Congregationalist churches in New England, it also became socially progressive. In 1871, the church gave women the right to vote on matters of church business – nearly five decades before they had the right to vote in political elections in the state. In 1981, the church hired its first female associate pastor. (The church’s first female senior pastor was hired in 2012). And in 2010, the church voted to become “open and affirming.”

Today the Church of the Pilgrimage’s website lists these milestones alongside a few technological innovations that hardly any Christians would consider objectionable. In 1855, the church installed gas lighting, and in 1906, electricity was added. Like many northeastern evangelical churches of the early nineteenth century, the church was also an innovator when it came to children’s Bible education; it was the first church in Plymouth to establish a Sunday school, which it did in 1818.

To members of the Church of the Pilgrimage today, all of these innovations are in line with its historic identity. Though it considered some doctrinal innovations (such as the Unitarians’ abandonment of historic Trinitarianism and confessional Reformed Christianity) as heretical, it never rejected new practices entirely, which is why it became the first church in town to start a Sunday school only a few years after it was founded. And today, the church apparently sees no difference between its “open and affirming” stance and its historic commitment to some measure of gender equality, which dates back to the nineteenth century. None of this undermines its claim to be the historic church of the Pilgrims, one might argue.

But that’s not the way that some conservative evangelicals see it. The acceptance of same-sex sexual relationships is a mark of departure from biblical orthodoxy, many conservative evangelicals believe, as is an unwillingness to affirm biblical inerrancy.

So, today, there is yet another church in Plymouth that claims to preserve the essence of the Pilgrims’ faith: Pilgrim Reformed Bible Church.

Pilgrim Reformed Bible Church: The Real Theological Heir of the Pilgrims?

Pilgrim Church (the shortened moniker that the church commonly uses) has no institutional connection to the historic church of the original Pilgrim settlers. It was founded nearly 400 years after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth. But it envisions itself as a continuation of the Pilgrims’ project and an upholder of the Pilgrims’ Christian orthodoxy. The constitution that the church adopted in 2015 begins with a preamble that very closely parallels the Mayflower Compact.

“Since it pleased Almighty God by His Holy Spirit to call a certain number of us to assemble to worship Him and encourage one another first in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and sustained our unity these many months, we have resolved after much prayer and searching the Scriptures under the guidance of His Spirit to constitute ourselves and more closely to conform to His will for the Church in this age and prepare ourselves for greater ministry endeavors in His name,” the church constitution declares. “Now therefore we, the members of Pilgrim Reformed Bible Church, do hereby organize ourselves in accord with the Massachusetts Nonprofit Corporation Act and adopt this Constitution as our articles of governance, to be interpreted at all times to reflect the character of and bring glory to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as revealed in the Holy Bible and articulated in the standards set forth in the Statement of Faith and Covenant of this church.”

The church, which is essentially a conservative Reformed Baptist church, lists the 1689 London Baptist Confession as its doctrinal authority. While the original Pilgrim Separatists would not have agreed with the 1689 London Baptist Confession’s statements on baptism, nearly everything else in this confession generally accords with the beliefs and practices of the early seventeenth-century Separatists, because some of the Separatists who stayed in England instead of going to the Netherlands or America in the early seventeenth century became the English Baptists of the late seventeenth century. There was a direct line between the two groups, and thus a similar view of scripture and ecclesiastical organization.

So, one could argue that if one of the seventeenth-century Pilgrims were resurrected and transported to Plymouth, Massachusetts, today, the church whose preaching and worship they might have the greatest chance of recognizing as similar to their own tradition is that of the Pilgrim Reformed Bible Church.

Which Church Is a Continuation of the Pilgrims’ Church?

But this leads to a question: Which of these three churches in contemporary Plymouth has the most plausible claim to being a continuation of the Pilgrims’ original church?

Institutionally, the obvious choice is First Parish Church. But First Parish Church, like most other Unitarian congregations, does not even claim to be a Christian church today. The Unitarians of the early nineteenth century insisted that they were Christians, but the Unitarians of today have evolved to the point where even belief in God (let alone belief in Jesus) is optional, as the website of First Parish Church states. What unifies modern Unitarians is their commitment to personal freedom of religious discovery and a belief in social justice and human equality. Those are the values promoted on First Parish Church’s website. They claim a connection between those values and the Pilgrims’ historic faith – but whether one finds this claim persuasive will depend on how one interprets the essence of the Pilgrims’ religion.

So, if one is looking for a church with an institutional connection to the Pilgrims that is still overtly Christian, one could consider Church of the Pilgrimage. As a splinter group from First Parish Church, it can plausibly claim a direct institutional descent from the original seventeenth-century Pilgrim congregation, even if it did not get to keep the Pilgrims’ original church property. Of the three churches I’ve profiled in this post, it’s the only one that is continuing the Christian sacraments as the seventeenth-century Pilgrims would have practiced them – that is, paedobaptism and the regular observance of the Lord’s Supper. (The Unitarians generally abandoned those sacraments long ago, and Pilgrim Church, in keeping with its Reformed Baptist identity, practices believers’ baptism instead of covenantal paedobaptism).

But the Church of the Pilgrimage’s views on a range of theological issues – including, but not confined to, their views on sexuality – are pretty far removed from what the early seventeenth-century Pilgrims believed, so whether one views this church as a continuation of the Pilgrims’ religious project will, once again, depend on what one considers the essential tenets of the Pilgrims’ faith.

But if neither of these two churches are a faithful continuation of the Pilgrims’ original project, is Pilgrim Reformed Bible Church the closest thing we have today to the church the Pilgrims founded?

I think the answer might be yes. Even if there are still substantial differences between today’s Pilgrim Church and the Pilgrims’ original seventeenth-century congregation, I still think that one can make a plausible case that its message bears the closest resemblance to what the Pilgrims taught and practiced.

But I realize that my answer to this question depends on a series of assumptions that not everyone shares. It requires me to give more weight to continuity in beliefs than to continuity of ecclesiastical institutions or sacraments. It requires me to give more weight to particular dogmas (such as teachings on the Trinity or sin or sexuality, for example) than to a general “spirit” of a movement, such as the “spirit” of reform that James Kendall claimed was the essence of the Pilgrims’ project.

I realize that the way I’ve evaluated all of this reflects a distinctly evangelical way of looking at Christianity and, by extension, Christian history. It makes sense to me as both an evangelical Christian and an intellectual historian to give primacy to belief and to assume that the doctrinal particulars of one’s beliefs matter. And if that’s the case, it makes sense to imagine that a religious movement can repeatedly be reconstituted after becoming extinct – that a religious revival can fan into flames a nearly moribund evangelicalism, for instance, or that people reading John Calvin’s writings can discover a Calvinist faith that has no ties to a preexisting institution in their community.

That’s how evangelical historians have generally told the history of evangelicalism. Thomas S. Kidd’s Who Is an Evangelical?, for instance, tells the story of evangelicalism by focusing on appearances of evangelical faith wherever they’re found, without a whole lot of attention to institutional continuity. He doesn’t discuss what happened to Jonathan Edwards’s churches after Edwards’s death. If he had, he would have probably had to note that the Northampton, Massachusetts, church where Edwards held his famous Northampton revival that launched the First Great Awakening prominently proclaims its affirmation of LGBTQ+ inclusion on its homepage, something that most conservative evangelicals who follow Edwards ideas today do not affirm. Likewise, Kidd’s coverage of Oberlin College is confined to its evangelical beginnings; he doesn’t talk about its evolution into a mainline Protestant college and, later, a completely secular institution.

I don’t fault Kidd for his coverage choices, because I think that any history of evangelicalism probably has to focus less on institutional continuity than on continuity of belief, since evangelicals are a community defined less by their institutions than by their beliefs. From an evangelical perspective, institutions may come and go, but Christ’s church – which evangelicals think of more as an invisible spiritual reality than as a visible institution on earth – remains, and its membership is defined solely by faith (that is, by belief).

So, from an evangelical perspective, the beliefs are the most important identifying marks of a true church. First Parish Church and the Church of the Pilgrimage are correct in claiming institutional continuity with the Pilgrims’ original church in Plymouth.

But is that enough to make them a continuation of the original Pilgrim church? How we answer that question will depend on our beliefs.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity and Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade.

The widespread national backlash against President Donald Trump’s threat to wipe out a “whole civilization” in Iran was a rare moment when Americans across the ideological spectrum – from progressive church leaders and national Democrats to Marjorie Taylor Green and Tucker Carlson (as well as Pope Leo XIV) – spoke out against the president’s threatened violation of just war principles.

For the past four hundred years, most Americans have generally assumed that if the cause for war is just, whatever methods are necessary to win that war must be just as well.

To use the language of just war theory, once they have answered the question of ius ad bellum (justice in going to war), they have rarely been troubled by questions of ius in bello (justice in war, or the question of whether the methods used in war are just).

As Andrew Preston demonstrates in his book Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, this American attitude began with the New England Puritans, who had no compunction about massacring Native American villages or selling Native Americans into slavery and deporting them to the West Indies as a retaliation for an Indian attack or the murder of Puritan settlers. In their view, in a just war of self-defense, deliberate attacks on civilians – or shackling the vanquished and selling them into lifelong chattel slavery – were acceptable. They did not deliberately start a war with the Native Americans without perceived provocation, but when attacked, they didn’t seem to think that any methods to defend themselves and retaliate were unjust. In one extreme example in 1637, Massachusetts Puritans set fire to a Pequot fort and burned hundreds to death while shooting those trying to escape. Some of those burned alive included women and children.

Captain John Underhill described the scene in which he took part as a soldier. “Many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children,” he wrote. “Others forced out and came in troops to the Indians twenty and thirty at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword. Down fell men, women, and children. Those that escaped us fell into the hands of the Indians that were in the rear of us. It is reported by themselves that there were about four hundred souls in this Fort and not above five of them escaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that never had been in War, to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground so thick in some places that you could hardly pass along.”

Underhill then asked, “Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?” He then gave a negative answer. “But I would refer you to David’s war,” he wrote, “when a people is grown to such a height of blood and sin against God and man, and all confederates in the action, there he has no respect to persons but harrows them and saws them and puts them to the sword and the most terrible death that may be. Sometimes the Scripture declares women and children must perish with their parents. Sometime the case alters but we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

In other words, if the enemy is evil enough, they deserve to be annihilated, even if they are civilians.

This mode of thinking has guided Americans more often than we would like to think. American wars do not begin with American troops deliberately slaughtering civilians – and sometimes they never progress to that point – but if a war drags on long enough, Americans may eventually decide that extreme measures are necessary, including deliberate attacks on civilians.

The Civil War, for instance, started with some preachers exhorting their congregations not to seek the destruction of southern cities or the deaths of civilians. In Boston, the Unitarian minister William Rounseville Alger warned his congregants about such an attitude in a sermon he preached in April 1861, immediately after the war began.

“Are you tempted to say, as I heard a man say in his boundless indignation, ‘Baltimore

ought to be shelled till every house is in ashes, to avenge the insult it has offered the country; and then its whole territory should be sown with salt, as a warning for the future’?” Alger asked.

“Pause, and think what it is to shell a city of two hundred and twenty-five thousand inhabitants, two-thirds of whom are women and children, and with fire and sword blot out their homes for ever. You will quickly retreat and repent your hasty ebullition. . . . Say not, ‘The South ought to be wiped from the face of the earth.’ . . . The millions of the South are members of the one human family of God, with the same faculties, rights, affections, hopes, and fears as ourselves.”

Alger was a staunch abolitionist and a chaplain to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. As he made clear in his sermon, he had no doubt that the Union was right and the Confederacy was wrong. He believed that war was necessary. But he cautioned against wishing for the death of southern civilians.

But years of war made Americans accept things that they did not accept at first. When General William T. Sherman extended the war to civilian property in his “March to the Sea,” some northern pastors argued that southern soldiers and civilians had already done far worse things to Union soldiers. “We have lived to see . . . the mutilation of the dead incorporated into the civilized warfare of the chivalrous South, and to have our murdered sons and brothers dug from their graves, and their bones hacked into pieces to furnish amulets for dainty Southern dames,” Marvin R. Vincent, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, told his congregation in April 1865. “We have lived not only to read of the Inquisition as history, but to see it revived with refinements of cruelty in Southern prisons. We have seen even the hard mercies of civilized warfare ignored, and the Policy deliberately inaugurated of maiming and disabling hundreds and thousands of Northern men.”

In such a context, northerners needed to do whatever they could to bring about a Union victory, no matter what it might entail, some pastors suggested. In November 1864, in the midst of Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” the Connecticut Congregationalist minister Charles Little preached a Thanksgiving sermon endorsing every effort needed to bring about a Union victory.

“How could religious, thoughtful, loyal men, refrain from giving their influence for the speedy and utter destruction of the rebellion?” he asked. “Did not their cheeks blanch and their hearts beat wildly while they beheld the vials of Jehovah’s wrath pouring their dread contents upon the guilty land, filling it with these gory battle fields, these groaning hospitals, these shrouded homes and crushed hearts? At such a sight could they remain unmoved? Could they fail to pray for the shortened time, for speedy peace? Having prayed, must they not work? Moses prayed, but deliverance came not till ‘he stretched his hand over the sea.’ So these true men have prayed and labored till now the nation is walking on dry land, through waters which soon are to whelm the rebel leaders in remediless ruin.”

Perhaps the most significant moment when a majority of Americans decided that a direct attack on civilians was necessary to bring about victory came in August 1945, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities.

Attacks on civilians were highly controversial at the beginning of the Second War, because they violated the international laws of war. In November 1940, even after Germany had been bombing London and other parts of Britain for two months, only 46 percent of Britons answered yes to the Gallup poll question, “In view of the indiscriminate bombing of this country, would you approve or disapprove if the R.A.F. adopted a similar policy of bombing the civilian population of Germany?” Forty-six percent of Britons said they would oppose such a retaliatory move, even in the face of continued German attacks on British civilians.

But by 1945, all sides in the war had accepted the necessity of bombing civilians. Immediately after the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent surrender of Japan, 85 percent of Americans said they supported this use of the atomic bomb. A few American Christians, including Catholic moral theologians such as John C. Ford, S.J. and the liberal Protestant magazine Christian Century, opposed the use of the A-bomb on moral grounds, but most American Christians accepted it as a necessary measure to end the war in the most expeditious way possible.

Nor did most Americans object when President Harry Truman gave an address after the bombing of Hiroshima (but before Japan’s surrender) promising more atomic bombs to come if Japan did not end the war. In language that eerily foreshadowed in some ways the threats against Iran that Trump made earlier this week, Truman warned that “if they do not now accept terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” (Though, to be fair to Truman, it’s worth noting that even in this situation, he did not call for the death of Japanese “civilization”).

But if Truman’s language was at least vaguely similar to Trump’s, the context was different. When Americans have been attacked, they are much more likely to think that apocalyptic threats (followed by actions) to annihilate their enemy are acceptable. That was true in 1637. That was even more true in 1945. As Truman reminded his fellow citizens, “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.”

But this year, the United States was not attacked by Iran. President Trump made hardly any effort before the war began to convince Americans of the righteousness of the cause. There was no “Axis of Evil” speech comparable to the one that George W. Bush gave in the early months of the War on Terror, before the Iraq invasion. Instead, Trump and other members of his administration have given conflicting accounts during the past few weeks of why the US started the war with Iran or what the administration hoped to achieve from it. To many, it looked suspiciously like a poorly planned attempt to score a quick military victory against an unpopular regime – but one that went badly wrong, unlike the effort in Venezuela.

Before Trump issued his apocalyptic threat to destroy a “whole civilization,” the war was already unpopular in the United States. A poll taken during Easter weekend, immediately before Trump’s threat, showed that 53 percent of Americans opposed the war while only 34 percent supported it. Even among Republicans, only 67 percent supported the war.

That’s the reason why the public reaction against Trump’s threats was so swift and widespread. Americans have not always been perceptive enough to notice violations of ius in bello when they believe in the justice of the military cause, but when they don’t believe that the war is needed in the first place, it’s easy for them to see the injustice of military campaigns against civilians.

That was the case in the Vietnam War when President Richard Nixon order the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Christmas bombings of Vietnam. The war was already unpopular among a majority of Americans by that point, so when Nixon escalated the air war, it sparked protests on college campuses across the country. If Trump had acted on his threat against Iran, he almost certainly would have experienced a similar massive reaction that likely would have been even larger than the “No Kings” protests.

But the other reason why Trump received so little public support for his threatened actions against Iran is that the apocalyptic threat came only a few weeks into the conflict. In both the Civil War and World War II, it took years of horrendous fighting before Americans accepted the idea of taking the war to civilians. The public support for Truman’s threats against Japan makes sense only in the context of Pearl Harbor, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima. It makes sense only if we remember that at that point, 400,000 Americans had already died while fighting in World War II, and hundreds of thousands more were expected to die if the United States had proceeded with its plans for a land invasion of Japan. In such a context, millions of Americans were ready to applaud a president threatening a “rain of ruin” on Japan if it refused to surrender.

But there was no comparable national sacrifice preceding Trump’s threat. There was no comparable danger of hundreds of thousands of American deaths if the threat were not carried out. Trump did not speak for a nation when he threatened the end of a “whole civilization” in Iran. Instead, he spoke for himself, out of the frustration of losing a war that he thought would be a quick victory.

Americans reacted against it in the way they should have. Even if past moments of violations of ius in bello were not so clear, this one was obvious. The voices were not unanimous, to be sure; there were some who defended the president’s statement. But for the most part, Americans across the spectrum – both Democrats and Republicans – objected to the threat.

I’m glad to see this moment of moral consciousness. For once, we have drawn a line in the sand as a country and said that we do not support doing whatever is necessary to win a war.

But I hope that this will not be a fleeting moment. This time, the moral determination may have been easy; it was clear that the president was wrong. But if the past is any guide, not every moment of moral reasoning in war will be quite so obvious. When the United States is attacked, it becomes much harder to exercise moral restraint. It’s especially hard for people who believe in the justice of the cause to speak out when a moral line in the conduct of the war is crossed. That’s one of the great moral dangers of war; it distorts our moral compass and leads us to justify things that we would not have otherwise justified.

But this week the collective American moral compass did issue a clear reading – and thankfully, a humanitarian and political crisis was averted.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University. His most recent books include Abortion and America’s Churches and The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity.

Last year, I published a Good Friday meditation on atonement that I think is still relevant this year, as we reflect on the meaning of Christ’s atoning work on the cross. So, here it is again, as a special Good Friday reflection.

Good Friday is the day on which Christians reflect on a truth that has long been controversial: the doctrine of atonement. God in the person of Jesus Christ took our sins on himself in order to pay a price that we could not pay.

Many of the founders – including Thomas Jefferson and most likely John Adams and George Washington – rejected this doctrine. The justice of God made sense to them. The love of God appealed to them. But the idea that justice and love would meet in the act of atonement seemed barbaric – a throwback to the pagan sacrifices of the ancient world.

And if the doctrine of divine atonement struck some of the Founders as barbarism, it seemed equally archaic and unnecessary to Americans in many other eras. Even a lot of professing Christians find the doctrine hard to swallow.

One might think, therefore, that such an allegedly antiquated and barbaric doctrine as atonement would have long ago been discarded – but it hasn’t been. When faced with the reality of horrific evil, we instinctively feel the need for some sort of sacrifice to atone for it – and if it’s not going to be Jesus’s sacrifice, it will have to be someone else’s or perhaps even our own.

When faced with the massive evil of race-based chattel slavery and the horrific sacrifice of human life in the Civil War, some Americans drew a connection between the two and decided that the deaths of Union soldiers were atoning deaths meant to pay the price of sin.

“As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” Julia Ward Howe wrote at the beginning of the war in her “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

That particular line in the hymn followed three stanzas about God’s coming judgment. God was “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” He had “loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.” He was “sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat.” But then, interrupting all of this in the fourth verse of her hymn, was an act that seemed to promise redemption: Christ was “born across the sea.” And yet Howe stopped short of saying that Christ could stay God’s hand of judgment on the American continent in her own time. Instead, people would have to die so that others could be free. The judgment would fall on them.

Surveying the end of the conflict, President Abraham Lincoln seemed to come to a similar conclusion. The Civil War might have been God’s act of judgment on the nation for its sin of slavery, Lincoln reflected. “If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’” he declared in his second inaugural address.

Over the next century and beyond, the idea of atonement reappeared whenever Americans thought of making a supreme act of sacrifice – either of their own lives or of the lives of others. At times, the sentiment could be noble, as it was when Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd of 200,000 civil rights activists gathered on the Washington mall that they should return to the jail cells and the dangers of their local communities because “unearned suffering is redemptive.”

At times, the sentiment could be horrifically sadistic – as it was when lynch mobs reenacted the crucifixion in order to purge their communities of an alleged evil by executing Black men whom they accused of horrific crimes. Both Blacks and whites in the South saw the obvious connection with atonement. White members of the lynch mobs saw themselves as the purifiers of their communities who were sacrificing criminals in order to atone for the crimes those alleged criminals had supposedly committed. Blacks, on the other hand, identified the lynching victims with Christ, who had also suffered unjustly.

But the tragedy of all of these efforts at atonement – both the noble self-sacrifices and the vindictive, cruel sacrifices of the bodies of others – is that they couldn’t wash away guilt. The hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Civil War could not get rid of the effects of race-based slavery; the effects are still with us to the point that many have called slavery the nation’s “original sin.” And if the Civil War could not really be an act of atonement, lynchings certainly could not; indeed, the more lynchings that occurred, the more the calls for vengeance continued.

Our own acts of atonement seem to repeatedly come short. At best, they fail to take away either the guilt or the effects of sin. At worse, they become spectacular blood-baths that far outstrip the crime and exacerbate a cycle of violence.

And so we come back to Christ’s atonement – an act that absorbed violence rather than perpetuated it. Jesus came into a violent, sinful world and then, as God in the flesh, allowed the creatures that he had made to put him to death. He absorbed their violence and then triumphed over it. And because he was absorbing the violence as both a sinless human and as God, he was able to accomplish a reconciliation and redemption that even the most noble-minded self-sacrifices of ordinary humans have been unable to achieve.

And once that happened, we don’t have to try to atone for evil ourselves. We believe that the sacrifice of Jesus was sufficient.

The cross reminds us of the magnitude of human evil – a magnitude that is far greater than eighteenth-century deists and others who have denied the need for atonement could ever have imagined. But it also reminds us that we don’t have to seek atonement through our own means, because a perfect atonement has already been given.

The history of our nation suggests that when we seek our own methods of atonement, the results are not only horrific but also unsatisfactory; they don’t remove the evils they were supposed to atone for.

Christ’s atoning sacrifice frees us from our efforts to atone for ourselves. That’s the enduring power of the cross. And on Good Friday, we remind ourselves that our guilt really has been taken away and our sin atoned for.

Yes, we see horrific evils around us – evils that are so great that they can’t be whitewashed or dismissed without consequences. But because of the cross, we don’t have to seek our own revenge or atone for those evils ourselves. God has already done what we could never do. And he has done so not through inflicting violence on us but by choosing to experience violence against himself so that we could be forgiven and free.

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(Note: I originally published this reflection on atonement in Current magazine’s “Arena” blog in March 2024, and then republished it on my Substack in April 2025, but it seemed just as relevant on this Good Friday - which is why I published it again on my Substack this year).

Picture credit: El Greco, Christo abrazado a la cruz (1580)

“Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and our fingers for battle, you who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell, behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prayed at a service last week.

The language was biblical (much of it was almost a direct quotation from Psalm 144), but the context was not. Hegseth was praying at a Pentagon worship service for the success of the American military effort in Iran. And the language he used, despite its biblical motifs, violated the norms not only of American civil religion but also of Reformed Protestant Christianity, of which his own denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), is an ultraconservative offshoot.

Reformed Protestantism, along with other strands of Christianity, provides the theological toolkit to rule Hegseth’s prayer deeply unorthodox. In this post, I will show why that is the case.

But first, for context, here’s the rest of Hegseth’s prayer:

“Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish. Let their bulls go down to slaughter for their day has come, the time of their punishment. Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind. . . .

“Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield, protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. . . .

“Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. For the wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, King over all kings and amen.”

Reformed Christians have long prayed the imprecatory Psalms. The New England Puritans included several such imprecations in their Bay Psalm Book, with lines such as “His children let bee fatherlesse / and’s wife a widow make” (Psalm 109).

But Reformed Christians have also warned about how one is to pray such imprecations.

In his commentaries on the Psalms, John Calvin suggested that the imprecatory psalms point to Christ and should not be used to express desires of personal vengeance.

When commenting on Psalm 109, one of the most severe imprecatory psalms, Calvin wrote, “Although David here complains of the injuries which he sustained, yet, as he was a typical character, everything that is expressed in the psalm must properly be applied to Christ, the Head of the Church, and to all the faithful, inasmuch as they are his members; so that when unjustly treated and tormented by their enemies, they may apply to God for help, to whom vengeance belongs.”

He added, “Whatever, therefore, may be said as to the primary reference of the psalm to the lamentations and denunciations poured forth by David, in consequence of the perfidy and cruelty of some inveterate foe, Christ must be principally understood as the person who gives utterance to these lamentations and denunciations, occasioned by the injurious treatment he received from his betrayer and murderers.”

Christ, of course, took the curses that belonged to his murderers upon himself and prayed, “Father, forgive.” Those who rejected him were subject to a curse and a judgment (Matthew 21:33-44), but those who received his pardon were freed from that curse, as Paul explained in Galatians 3:13.

This is how theologically conservative Reformed Christians have traditionally understood the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Jesus Christ took our curse upon us, so that we would not be cursed.

When we pray the imprecatory psalms, Calvin said, we are therefore praying as people who deserve all of the curses expressed in those psalms. We deserve death. We deserve judgment. But Christ has taken those curses on himself – which means that all of the curses that those psalms express toward sinners therefore fell on Jesus, the spotless Son of God.

If we pray the imprecatory Psalms, we need to therefore pray them with a sense of awe and thanksgiving – an awe that recognizes that we are the ones who deserve those curses, a marvel that recognizes that Jesus was willing to bear those curses for our sake, and a thanksgiving that we are now freed forever from those curses.

If, after being freed from those curses, we then prayed those imprecations over our own personal enemies, we would likely be acting a lot like the ungrateful servant in Jesus’s parable who, after being forgiven the massive debt of 10,000 talents, attacked someone who owed him only 100 days’ wages and threw the man in prison (Matthew 18). One might be justified in wondering if we really understood the depths of the curses that we have been freed from if we’re so quick to curse our own enemies.

But in my view, Hegseth’s prayer was worse than mere ingratitude and more egregious than an expression of personal revenge would have been. If, as Calvin said, these psalms are to be understood as the words of Christ, expressing the righteous judgment of God from the cross, Hegseth took the words that apply to Jesus’s righteousness and applied them to a military mission of the US government. In other words, the US government’s cause replaced the righteousness of Christ.

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Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University. His recent books include Abortion and America’s Churches and The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity.

Photo: Pete Hegseth’s tattoos (photo by Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons).

If we want to find the generation that politicized evangelicalism, we need to look at the voters who went to the polls for the first time in 1952 or 1956.

To be sure, there were few signs of that politicization in the 1950s. Northern evangelicalism at the time leaned pretty firmly Republican, but it was not yet the Republicanism of the late twentieth-century culture wars. Most northern evangelical pastors supported Eisenhower, according to Christianity Today’s polls – but then again, many mainline Protestants did, too.

And even in the mid-1970s, evangelicalism’s alliance with the conservative wing of the Republican Party was still not firmly fixed. After all, the national figures who were commonly described as evangelicals at the time were a fairly politically diverse bunch: antiwar senator Mark Hatfield, Democratic president Jimmy Carter, Nixon supporter Billy Graham, antigay (but otherwise mostly nonpartisan) singer Anita Bryant, and the progressive social justice advocate Ron Sider.

But today, as everyone knows, American evangelicalism (especially white American evangelicalism) looks a lot less politically diverse than it did a half century ago – so much so that people might be forgiven for wondering whether evangelical theology has become just a fig leaf for Trumpism or conservative culture-war politics. I don’t think that it is, but I can understand the reasons for the assumption.

Something happened at some point in the past that prompted the vast majority of white voters who subscribe to evangelical theology to join the Republican Party. And when I look at exactly what happened, at the moment that the Religious Right formally organized at the end of the 1970s, I’m struck by the generational monolith involved. Nearly every person leading the Christian Right was part of the Silent Generation – that is, the generation of people born sometime between the late 1920s and the early 1940s and who, for the most part, came of political age sometime during the Eisenhower era. It’s the Silent Generation that gave us politicized evangelicalism, as we know it today.

As I argued in my last post, I still believe that evangelicalism at its core is about a theological, not a political, belief. But if those outside the movement frequently mistake it for a political campaign, that’s to a large extent the product of actions taken by members of a single generation – the generation of people who were too young to fight in World War II but old enough to have clear memories of the beginning of the Cold War.

The Link between Generational Voting Patterns and Generational Religious Preferences

Political scientists have known for a long time that people’s lifetime partisan loyalties are heavily shaped by the choices they make in the first presidential election in which they vote. That’s especially true when the candidate they choose is a victorious presidential candidate who wins decisively and then reshapes American politics.

Many of the voters who cast their first ballots for Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, for instance, remained Democrats for life, even after the Democratic Party moved away from its New Deal roots. That’s why as late as the 2000 presidential election, when George W. Bush ran against Al Gore, voters who were 65 or older were the most strongly Democratic age cohort of the entire electorate – more Democratic, in fact, than voters ages 18-29. All of those older voters could remember Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they were still voting for his party more than fifty years after his death.

But if many of the voters who were born during the 1910s and 1920s were Democrats for life, those born during the 1930s were much more likely to be Republican, because their views were shaped by memories of President Dwight Eisenhower and the Cold War civil religion of the 1950s. That may be part of the reason why in the presidential election of 2012, voters over the age of 65 were far more likely to vote Republican than any other age cohort – the reverse of what had been the case in 2000.

The senior citizens of 2012 consisted mostly of people who were too young to remember FDR, but they had clear memories of Eisenhower. Most of the senior citizens in 2012 were part of the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945), which also happened to be the generation that produced the Christian Right.

The Contrast between the World War II Generation and the Silent Generation

What do these generational partisan voting patterns have to do with religion? More than one might think at first glance, I believe.

The World War II generation (those born between 1900 and 1927) was the last generation that happened to be both Democratic and strongly religious. Shaped as they were by early experiences with the New Deal and the expansion of the government during the Second World War, members of the World War II generation were staunchly patriotic, highly supportive of the American military, and firm believers in institutions. Their pro-institutionalism extended to religion. Members of the World War II generation were highly likely to go to church, which is why church membership rates in the United States reached their highest levels ever in the late 1950s.

It was the World War II generation that supported mainline Protestantism (which reached its peak in the late 1960s, just as the oldest members of the World War II generation were reaching retirement age and their kids were leaving church). The mainline Protestantism of the 1950s was a perfect fit for many members of the World War II generation, because it was highly institutionalized, strongly committed to community, and staunchly supportive of democracy.

But even the members of the World War II generation who joined evangelical churches were much less likely than the Christian Right activists of the next generation to become strident culture warriors. They believed in national unity, so they were more likely to be centrist bridge-builders than angry ideologues.

The best known evangelical from the World War II generation was Billy Graham (born 1918). Though Graham’s views on both religion and politics were certainly more conservative than those of many mainliners, he (like many other members of his generation) believed strongly in American institutions and in building large ecumenical coalitions. During his lifetime, he moved away from fundamentalism rather than toward it.

The same was true of Senator Mark Hatfield (born in 1922), one of the best known evangelicals in the US Congress during the 1970s. Hatfield was one of the earliest sponsors of a Human Life Amendment to legislate against abortion, but he was even better known as an opponent of the Vietnam War and a critic of President Richard Nixon. As a member of the Conservative Baptist denomination, he was a theologically conservative evangelical Christian with a strong faith, but he was also a social justice advocate and a political moderate who sought out alliances with members of the opposing party.

The most famous evangelical politician of the 1970s was another Baptist who was part of the same World War II generation: Jimmy Carter (born in 1924). Like Hatfield, Carter sought out the political center and attempted (not always successfully) to bridge the divide between liberals and conservatives, both theologically and politically.

Perhaps the most prominent evangelical theologian from the World War II generation was Carl F. H. Henry (born in 1913), editor of Christianity Today magazine during the 1960s and author of numerous books, including The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry was both a theological and political conservative, but he also believed that the church should move away from fundamentalism and embrace some social justice causes. He was an early evangelical voice against abortion, but resisted the culture-war politics of the Christian Right and found himself branded as a liberal on the issue by some of his fellow evangelicals in the 1980s because of his belief that there should be exceptions for rape and incest. (Billy Graham took a similar position, by the way).

In short, the Protestant Christians of the World War II generation were strongly patriotic, pro-institutional, deeply committed to church, moderately conservative in their political and cultural views, and more likely to be Democrats than Republicans – but at the same time, generally irenic and somewhat ecumenical in their disposition because of their generational commitment to national unity.

During the mid-to-late 1970s, members of the World War II generation still exercised a substantial influence on American evangelicalism, balancing out the interests of the right-wing culture warriors of the Silent Generation (those born in the 1930s) and the progressivism of the early Baby Boomers (born in the late 1940s). Evangelicalism of the 1970s was politically diverse – but gray-haired World War II generation centrists such as Billy Graham somehow held the coalition together, despite all of its political and ideological differences.

But the next generation of those born during the 1930s was different. For years, I’ve been struck by the fact that nearly all the leaders of the Christian Right of the 1980s were part of the Silent Generation. Pat Robertson (born in 1930), Jerry Falwell Sr. (born in 1933), and James Dobson (born in 1936) were part of the same generational cohort of people who were too young to have been shaped deeply by President Franklin Roosevelt but old enough to have come of political age during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, when Cold War civil religion blurred the lines between God and country.

And they weren’t the only ones who were part of the Silent Generation. A host of lesser known pastors who helped create the Christian Right – people such as Concerned Women for America founder Beverly LaHaye (born in 1929), Southern Baptist Convention president Adrian Rogers (born in 1931), Moral Majority board member and pastor Charles Stanley (born in 1932), Southern Baptist leader and seminary president Paige Patterson (born in 1942), and pastor John MacArthur (born in 1939) – were all part of approximately the same generational cohort.

Indeed, every single member of Moral Majority’s original executive board whose biography I have been able to trace was born between 1926 and 1942, placing them within the Silent Generation.

One can find a few exceptions, to be sure. Christianity Today editor Harold Lindsell (born 1913) was a fundamentalistic culture warrior who lacked the irenic disposition of Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry. And Francis Schaeffer (born in 1912) was born long before the Silent Generation – but then, he spent most of his life on the mission field and was in many ways different from Americans of any generation. In some ways, he’s almost the exception that proves the rule.

Even if one can find a handful of evangelicals from a different generation who joined the Christian Right, it’s still hard to escape the conclusion that members of the Silent Generation – especially people born during the 1930s – exercised a vastly disproportionate influence on the formation of the Christian Right in the late 1970s. That was not a coincidence.

In the late 1960s, conservative Christians from the Silent Generation – and especially conservative Christian evangelicals who had been born in the rural South, as many Christian Right leaders had – were deeply disturbed the cultural changes in the country. By the late 1970s, they believed they had the power to do something to change that.

The Christian Right of the late 1970s and 1980s was thus mainly an attempt by the Silent Generation to turn American values back to the civil religious values of the 1950s. There were plenty of younger Americans who signed onto that project, but the initial leadership for it came primarily from people who had come of political age during Eisenhower’s presidency. For their entire lives, their perspective on politics was shaped by the choice to vote Republican that they had made in 1952 or 1956 and by their experience of the Eisenhower years. In 1980, they used their political and religious influence to mobilize voters for Ronald Reagan. And for the next forty years, the Silent Generation exercised an outsized influence over the Christian Right, because it was their political vision of restoring the cultural values of the Eisenhower years that gave birth to the movement.

Even the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979 was largely orchestrated by members of the Silent Generation, such as Adrian Rogers, Paige Patterson, and Paul Pressler (born in 1930).

The conservatives’ chief opponents within the SBC were members of the World War II generation. One of the SBC’s leading moderates, Foy Valentine, was born in 1923. All of the moderate SBC presidents of the 1970s – Carl Bates (born in 1914), Lawrence Owen Cooper (born in 1908), Jaroy Weber (born in 1920), James L. Sullivan (born in 1910), and Jimmy Allen (born in 1927) – were also part of the World War II generation.

But all of the conservative pastors of the next decade – Adrian Rogers, Bailey Smith (born in 1939), Jimmy Draper (born in 1935), Charles Stanley, and Jerry Vines (born in 1937) – were born in the 1930s, the same decade that produced other Christian Right leaders. They shared the same culture-war mentality and desire to return to the civil religion of the 1950s that shaped the political views of other Christian Right leaders whose formative political experiences had occurred not during the New Deal or the Second World War but during the Eisenhower years.

The Christian Right was thus the creation of people whose political, cultural, and religious views lined up perfectly to create a perfect clash not only with the progressive Baby Boomers but even with the moderates of the slightly older World War II generation. Even their New Right Catholic allies like Paul Weyrich (born in 1942) and Richard Viguerie (born in 1933) were, for the most part, members of the same Silent Generation. They were angry about the liberal cultural changes of the 1970s - legalized abortion, gay rights, the sexual revolution, secularism, the proliferation of pornography, and rising divorce rates – and they wanted to protect their own institutions from the growth of what they considered a hostile liberal government. Above all, they wanted to restore both the conservative political values and the conservative religious values of the 1950s.

Perhaps nowhere was this clash of generational values more on public display than at the 1992 Republican national convention, which Pat Buchanan (a Silent Generation member born in 1938) used as an opportunity to excoriate the values of Bill Clinton (one of the older Baby Boomers, born in 1946) and call for a “culture war” against his liberal values of “radical feminism,” “homosexual rights,” and “abortion on demand.” Ostensibly, Buchanan was there to champion the candidacy of President George H.W. Bush, a member of the World War II generation. But the speech was an expression of the values of Buchanan’s Silent Generation culture warriors, not the values of Bush, whose moderate conservatism and history of family support for Planned Parenthood were a poor fit for Buchanan’s culture war framing.

But this was typical of the culture warriors of Buchanan’s generation. They loudly denounced the licentiousness of the Baby Boomers (who were, in some cases, less than a decade younger, but who were a world apart in their values and political leanings) and lauded the service of the slightly older World War II generation, even as they found themselves getting into frequent conflicts with members of that older generation because of the gulf that existed between the World War II generation’s quest for national unity and the Silent Generation’s propensity for culture war. The political leaders of the World War II generation, such as Reagan and Bush, may have personified for some the values of the 1950s – but it was the Silent Generation culture warriors, not the members of the World War II generation, that turned the quest to restore the values of the 1950s into an all-out political and religious battle.

To be sure, they probably got the restoration slightly wrong. Eisenhower was a moderate, not an extreme conservative. And the public Christianity and civil religion of the 1950s was considerably more ecumenical than the culture-war campaigns of the Christian Right that helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. But nevertheless, their views on America’s role in the world, the place of God in public life, and the role of religion in shaping national law closely echoed what they remembered of the Eisenhower years, when they had cast their first presidential ballots as young adults.

Why the Silent Generation’s Influence on Evangelicalism Lives on

For the rest of their lives, the Silent Generation was characterized by high church attendance rates and strong Republican voting. As of 2021 (the most recent year for which I could find attendance records), 60 percent of Americans born in the early 1930s reported attending church every week, and approximately 55 percent of those born in the late 1930s reported the same, according to data compiled by Ryan Burge. Fewer than 20 percent said they never attended church. Since 2021 was in the early aftermath of COVID, when church attendance rates were down across the country, the fact that well over half of those born in the 1930s said they were still in church every week is a testament to how much the elderly survivors of this generation (who are now, of course, in their 80s and 90s) value church. No other living generation comes close to this level of self-reported church commitment today.

This generation is also still as strongly Republican as they have always been. In 2023, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 19 percentage points among voters age 80 or older, making them the most Republican generation of any voter contingent alive today.

The modern Christian Right orientation of contemporary evangelicalism is largely the product of this one generation.

But one might rightly wonder how this one generation was able to have such an outsized influence on the future of American Christianity. After all, as far American generations go, it was not a particularly large generation. Birth rates were down during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and as a result, there were never as many Silent Generation members as there were members of the World War II generation or the Baby Boom. The United States never had a president who was born in the 1930s. (Instead, we had two presidents born in the 1920s and four in the 1940s). This generation’s direct influence on national politics may have been muted.

But it was an enormously influential generation in American religion, partly because the generation that could have done the most to challenge the Silent Generation’s political takeover of America’s evangelical churches – the Baby Boomers who were born in the late 1940s – was not nearly as likely as the Silent Generation to be in church. That was especially true of politically progressive Baby Boomers, who were the majority of the older Boomers, since the Boomers born in the late 1940s came of political age in the mid-to-late 1960s, when American politics was trending to the left. If these Boomers had followed the pattern of the World War II generation, they would have settled comfortably into mainline or liberal Protestant churches and combined Democratic voting with progressive Christianity.

A few did. A few stayed in mainline churches. A few politically progressive evangelical Boomers, such as Jim Wallis (born in 1946), tried to steer evangelicalism to the left. But for the most part, young political progressives began dropping out of church in the late 1960s. And they’re still staying out of church today. Fewer than 35 percent of Americans born in the late 1940s go to church weekly today – barely over half the church attendance rate for the Silent Generation born in the 1930s. About 25 percent never go to church at all.

The Boomers who stayed in church were more likely to be conservative – which meant that they were a smaller contingent of their generational cohort and thus unable to challenge the dominance that the Silent Generation had over the cultural trends in evangelical churches. As a result, the Silent Generation continued to exercise an outsized influence on evangelical politics until the 21^st century. They might not have been a large birth cohort as far as general American cultural influence was concerned, but in the church, their high rates of churchgoing and conservative values allowed them to exercise a controlling influence on evangelical culture for nearly half a century.

And when Silent Generation Christian Right leaders did pass the torch on, they were disproportionately likely to pass it not to the older Boomers born in the late 1940s or to young Gen-Xers (born in the 1970s) or millennials (born after 1980), but instead to members of the Reagan generation – that is, younger Boomers and older Gen-Xers who were born in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and whose politics were shaped by the two Reagan elections (1980 and 1984) in which they were first-time voters.

The evangelical culture warriors from the last ten years have come disproportionately from that narrow band of Reagan generation voters: Al Mohler (born in 1959), Ralph Reed (born in 1961), Jerry Falwell Jr. (born in 1962), Eric Metaxas (born in 1963), and Tony Perkins (born in 1963). A few others who are slightly older and who came of political age during Nixon’s landslide reelection victory of 1972 (like Franklin Graham, who was born in 1952, or Doug Wilson, who was born in 1953) have also joined in, but the ranks of recent Christian Right activists have come disproportionately from those who were shaped by the Reagan years. Even Paula White-Cain comes from this generation, since she was born in 1966 and would have therefore been eligible to cast her first ballot during Reagan’s sweeping reelection victory of 1984.

It has been significantly harder for the Christian Right to attract younger Gen-Xers and millennials. Charlie Kirk was a real anomaly in that respect. Though he was born in 1993, his greatest influence was not on his fellow millennials, but on Gen-Z college students who began voting not in the Obama years (as Kirk’s generation had) but during the Trump years.

Unfortunately for America’s churches, most millennials who came of age in a solidly Democratic era and held progressive views did not just repudiate Kirk’s politics; they also showed little interest in his religion. From 1992 until the beginning of 2024, the Republican popular vote exceeded the Democratic popular vote in only one presidential election (2004); in the other seven elections, the Democratic candidate won more popular votes than the Republican. As a result, the voters who came of age during this era – millennials, older Gen-Zers, and the youngest Gen-Xers – were far more likely than older Americans were to vote Democratic. And they were also much less likely to go to church. For these younger Americans, political liberalism and secularism went hand in hand.

And since the election of 2008 was a Democratic landslide of sorts, with the history-making election of Barack Obama, people who were born in the late 1980s and who voted for the first time in 2008 are especially likely to be Democratic voters for life, and they’re especially likely not to attend church. That may be why there is such a dramatic decline in church for those born in the late 1980s, with 40 percent of those born between 1985 and 1989 reporting that they never attend church today, compared to only barely over 30 percent for those born in the early 1980s.

Church attendance has become increasingly confined to more politically conservative regions of the country. This was not the case in the 1970s, when high rates of church attendance among both World War II and Silent Generation members in every region of the country made church attendance rates in New England indistinguishable from those in the South. But it was definitely the case by the early twenty-first century, when church attendance (at least for whites) was closely correlated with Republican voting patterns. Except for predominantly Black counties in the South and perhaps heavily Hispanic counties in Texas and Florida, the regions that voted Democratic were usually less likely to be churched than the regions that voted Republican – and the white voters who voted Democratic were less likely to go to church than the white voters who supported the Republican Party.

But the political and religious trends of the early 2020s have offered a glimmer of hope for those who want to see young people return to church. The 2024 presidential election was the first in twenty years when more Americans voted for the Republican than the Democratic candidate – and it was only the second such race since 1988. It was no coincidence, I think, that at that exact moment we started seeing multiple news stories about a religious revival among young Gen-Z adults, especially among Gen-Z men. And all of those news stories noted a close correlation between the religious revival (which invariably involved theologically and culturally conservative Catholic or Protestant churches) and the political conservatism of the young people who were coming to church. At the moment they entered adulthood, there was a widespread perception among many young people that liberalism and the Democratic Party had failed, and many of them were more receptive to conservative or postliberal alternatives as a result.

If the last half century is any guide, the longevity of this religious revival is going to be closely correlated to political trends. If Republicans win the next presidential election, I can imagine a future in which large numbers of Gen-Zers become conservative Christians and remain such for life, coupling their conservative Christianity with Republican voting. And if that’s the case, churches will remain strong for decades to come. There might be a permanent dearth of millennial members – leading to a bit of a crisis in a couple decades, when the last of the younger Republican-leaning Baby Boomers are gone and churches have very few people in their 60s and 70s to balance out all of the younger Gen-Zers who are approaching middle age – but churches have dealt with such generation gaps before, and they’ve weathered the storm. The Lost Generation born in the 1890s (and coming of age in the hedonistic Roaring Twenties), for instance, was a pretty secular generation – but their reluctance to attend church didn’t prevent the next generation (the World War II generation) from experiencing a religious revival in the mid-twentieth century. As long as churches can attract large numbers of Gen-Zers, they’ll probably remain vibrant for a long time to come.

But if there is a widespread repudiation of Trumpism in the next two years, and if Democrats start winning presidential elections again, 2024 might appear in retrospect to be as anomalous as the 2004 presidential election that George W. Bush won in the midst of the Iraq War. Today, those who came of political age in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and who cast their first presidential ballot in 2004 – that is, those who were born in the early 1980s – are significantly more likely to still be in church right now than their younger contemporaries who were born in the late 1980s and who cast their first ballots in 2008, when they voted for Obama.

If past trends are any guide, the Gen-Zers who are discovering church right now will probably still be in church twenty years from now – or even fifty or sixty years from now – but if the Republican wave of voting that they were a part of does not continue, their religious and political commitments will seem in a few years to be a rare anomaly and an unusual break in the general slide toward secularization. Their younger siblings – just like their older cousins – will be less churched.

For better or worse, we live in a world in which evangelical churches are still shaped by the political choices that the Silent Generation made in the late 1970s and against which the millennials reacted in the early twenty-first century. It’s now up to Gen-Z to make religious and political choices in response to these realities. And if history is any guide, the lifetime religious choices that today’s teens make will be closely correlated with the choices their generation makes at the ballot box in the next presidential election.

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Daniel K. Williams’s most recent books include Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade and The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity.

Photo credit: Jerry Falwell Sr. in 1980; photo by Mark T. Foley (Wikipedia).