Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump

Acknowledgments

Introduction

In August 2018, deep into research about conservative Christian support of Donald Trump, and in between travels to conservative counties across the United States to conduct interviews with Red State Christians, I got a surprising phone call from my friend Rachel.

Rachel is a PhD student studying the Old Testament at a prestigious university in the American South. We straddle many of the same lines: female ordained pastors serving a mainline denomination, married moms of little ones, sports and adventure lovers who once played together on the seminary softball team. We share a certain affinity for bucking the status quo. We sometimes push back against the growing liberalism of our own denomination but also speak out about discrimination against women in leadership in the broader American Christian world and about the harmful misogyny of conservative Christianity. An Alaska native who lived in the Midwest and on the West Coast before moving to the Bible Belt, Rachel is a fascinating combination of all the things that make America great.

Still, I was surprised she wanted to talk on the phone. Usually, we just chat via Facebook Messenger, critiquing each other’s writing or sharing stories. I hadn’t actually heard her voice in years, probably since we played on that long-ago softball team in Minnesota, when we both lamented the fact that you couldn’t cut bad players from a seminary team.

Angela, Rachel said, I don’t know why, but I just had to ask you about this. You have spent so much time in the conservative Christian world. What do you think?

Rachel’s daughter had been invited to participate in an after-school program that taught students about Christianity, as well as leadership and character development. Like most such programs, especially in the American South, its teachings were conservative. Its goals were noble, and it offered the classes free of charge—a welcome break for parents stretched to afford kids’ activities and child care. Still, Rachel worried about some of the messages her daughter might receive through the program. Would she learn that women are capable of preaching and leading churches? Would she be told that only men are in charge of the family? What would she be taught about religious minorities or about students who might identify as gay? Rachel also worried about the minority Muslim students at the school. Would the program make them feel even more ostracized? As an academic and Bible scholar herself, Rachel felt the double weight of teaching her daughter Christianity but also letting her be a part of her school community and learn a faith that was not exclusively dependent on her mom’s academic background.

As we talked, I realized that Rachel and I share many of the same worries and concerns that most parents do: Are we passing on the right lessons to our children? How can we be influential but not pushy? How should we help them fit in but also stand up against what they believe to be wrong or unjust?

In the middle of our conversation, mixed with tears and a realization of our power and impotence as parents, Rachel and I ultimately reached the same conclusion: rather than avoid people who might think differently than she did, rather than isolate her daughter, Rachel and I decided the best course of action would be to join in, listen, and start conversations. Instead of avoiding the group, Rachel resolved to volunteer. The things she was worried about, we figured, could be combated by her presence. How could the students believe that women couldn’t be leaders or teachers in the church when one of their leaders was a Bible scholar and pastor herself? Even though our initial impulse when confronted with something we find disagreeable is to disengage—to block, to unfriend—through prayer and conversation, Rachel and I realized that our Christian faith was leading us in the opposite direction, toward engagement and conversation. She messaged me about a month later, attaching a photo of her wearing a green T-shirt screen-printed with a Bible verse.

I am a full-fledged parent volunteer, Rachel wrote. I staffed the toilet plunger/scooter game and am the small-group leader for fourth-grade boys.

This book is my answer to the same call Rachel heard—for greater engagement and conversation at a time when America feels pulled to its extremes, when our first national impulse is to block and unfriend anyone who disagrees with us. My hunch is that the truth about the Red State Christians who voted for Trump, and the truth about Americans in general, is closer to Rachel’s picture of herself in that Bible verse T-shirt, heading to volunteer at the conservative Christian after-school program. We have much more opportunity for conversation and engagement than we might imagine. When we don’t avoid people who think differently than we do, we gain an opportunity for growth and national renewal. My hope is that as you read stories of Red State Christians, you will find surprising commonalities among people who seem quite different from one another, whether you are a conservative Christian or not.

Of course, when opposing viewpoints collide, the result is not always cohesion; sometimes it is combustion. I know that as a part of telling the stories of the Christians I met in red counties, I will reveal uncomfortable and hurtful truths. In addition to the many wise, kind, and genuine Red State Christians I met across America, others were committed to division, destruction, and perversion of the story of Jesus to support their own wealth and power. Most of these people were pastors, and most of the divisive and damaging rhetoric I heard from Christians across America came either from manipulative pastors or from partisan media. The victims of these power-hungry pastors and Christian leaders were often women, the poor, people of color, immigrants, refugees, and the LGBTQ community.

In spite of these voices and the damage they inflict, I hope that we can be generous and compassionate as we journey through Red State America together. Too often, in the rush to condemnation and judgment, we miss out on creating spaces for dialogue where dialogue is needed most: between people who disagree. In this book, you’ll read stories of Christians who are manipulating the story of Jesus, as well as places where churches have lost the distinction between national pride and Christian identity. These stories are true, and they concern Americans and Christians of all backgrounds. The stories of manipulation you’ll read about in this book paint a picture of the way Donald Trump used Christian Nationalism and distortions of the Christian gospel to earn Evangelical support.

At the same time, you’ll also read stories about surprising partnerships in red counties all over America, between Christians of diverse backgrounds and political beliefs. You’ll likely be surprised at the people who are working together and the ways that the story of Jesus is being told from the grassroots. Whether you are a conservative, a liberal, or one who is fed up with everything altogether, my hope is that this book gives you a reason to reengage, to be surprised, and to consider anew what the 2016 election said about American Christians, God, and country.

1

Christian Nationalism and Fourth of July Church in Dallas, Texas

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In 1983, John Cougar Mellencamp wrote a song that told the story of America for conservatives, liberals, and Christians alike. Mellencamp sings about a black man living in Indiana with an interstate running through his front yard. He lives in a pink shotgun house, meaning you could open the front and back doors, shoot a shotgun shell through the house, and not hit a thing. The black man is watching a woman he loves in the kitchen, and he has loved her for a long time. He thinks he has it so good, in America.

Mellencamp sings in the second verse about a young man wearing a T-shirt and listening to rock and roll. He has greasy hair and a greasy smile; maybe he’s not too clean, not too rich. Still, this greasy young man believes he can be president one day—because America is a place for dreams and dreamers.

Ain’t that America? the song demands again and again. Ain’t that America?—where you and I might not be millionaires, but we can be born free, dream dreams, and maybe someday own a little pink house in front of an interstate in Indiana.

Thirty-three years later, newly elected US president Donald Trump gave an inauguration speech depicting a very different America:

Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered—but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. . . .

For too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.[1]

Cheering his dark and dire depiction of America were millions of Red State Christians, many of them weaned on church traditions that taught Christian Nationalism, the importance of America as a Christian country, and the fear that America was being destroyed for its apostasy. Somehow, despite being raised a millionaire’s kid in New York City, Trump spoke their language. He understood their colloquialisms and appealed directly to Red State Christians across America, whether by eating a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo, shouting Merry Christmas, bragging about his Big Mac consumption, or saying things that sounded racist, sexist, and rude. While Trump was connecting through the power of shared language, Democrats sounded like foreigners to Red State Christians across the South and rural America. Leading liberals didn’t understand the language, much less speak it.

Not so long ago, Americans spoke a shared language, before divergent strains of partisan media and sophisticated targeted advertising gave two Americas two different languages. Thirty-three years ­earlier—and probably still in 2016—lots of Red State Christians could recite the words to Mellencamp’s song, which had been played at campaign events for Republican presidential candidate John McCain until Mellencamp’s liberal beliefs became public and McCain was criticized for using the song.

Land of the free and dreams and little houses for everyone were sentiments that fit the sunny optimism of the Reagan/Bush Republican Party. The fact that Mellencamp’s song was also played at President Barack Obama’s inauguration—as well as at 2010 conservative political events opposing same-sex marriage, despite protests from Mellencamp himself—was not all that surprising in a country where most people saw America in much the same way as Mellencamp’s song described, despite partisan differences.

The song’s main idea, at least as most Americans heard it, was that America’s a place where anyone can succeed, anyone can buy a little pink house, and anyone can be free. This is the idea of America that immigrants climbed aboard rickety steamships for, the idea of America that soldiers died for, the triumph of America that made it the beacon of the world and the great enemy of despots and dictators everywhere.

By 2016, however, this optimistic idea of America was no longer a foregone conclusion. Two years later, McCain was dead. Most rock stars were hated by most Republicans (and vice versa), and the only ones deemed eligible to sing about America for conservatives were country singers.

Among those whose idea of America had changed the most since Mellencamp’s song were the 81 percent of white American Evangelical Christians who voted for Donald J. Trump.[2] In Trump’s America, particularly among Red State Christians, people have lost confidence in America’s Christian identity. The United States is no longer the place where resurrection seems possible because anything is possible, even pink houses for everyone. And a shared song to represent America can no longer be sung at both liberal and conservative political events.

Instead, Red State Christians consider America and American Christianity under siege, resulting in a defensive pushback. Churches today must defend not just Jesus but also America. The American flag and the Christian flag are posted side by side in sanctuaries across the country, often directly in front of the cross.

Nationalism and American Evangelical Christians

Christian conservatives across America have watched their beloved social causes lose again and again in the Supreme Court, elections, and popular-opinion polls. The majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage and government-sponsored birth control. The white male patriarchal leadership that continues to be the norm in many conservative churches and families has been challenged on the national stage, especially in the midst of the #MeToo movement and the widely publicized alleged sexual misconduct and damaging misogynistic theology of several prominent Evangelical pastors and leaders, including Willow Creek founding pastor Bill Hybels and former Southern Baptist Convention president Paige Patterson, both of whom were forced to resign from their leadership positions in the second year of Trump’s presidency.

In response, Red State Christians have turned toward the flag, feeling their patriotic fervor and nostalgic desire for a more Christian America (where kids used to pray in school). This desire to turn back the clock is more about national identity than Christian identity, though the two are inextricably tied together for many Red State Christians. They want to be the ones who get to define what America is, and for them, it must be conservative, and it must be Christian. Otherwise the country—and their Christian faith—will utterly collapse.

Two years into Trump’s presidency, the Pew Research Council released a new religious typology to categorize American Christians.[3] Among the 39 percent considered highly religious, 12 percent were called God and Country Christians, for whom American conservative values and national Christianity are most important.[4] You can see this throughout the early twenty-first century at Southern Baptist churches across America, where even Christmas and Easter are subsumed by a sort of civic religion that worships God, Guns, and Country (really, the military), lifting up Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July to the same place of honor as religious high holy days.

Trump, Obama, and Christian Nationalism

Donald Trump is no devout Christian; he is no fundamentalist warrior or longtime pro-life activist, as is Vice President Mike Pence. Trump failed the Bible test when asked his favorite passage: Two Corinthians? he ventured, failing to realize that the biblical book is referred to as Second Corinthians. Trump is no Bible scholar, no pastor, no retreat leader, and no public pray-er, though he often assures his Evangelical fans that he is praying for them and for America.

Trump didn’t know much about the Bible or about Evangelical Christianity. But this new civic religion, popularized in Evangelical churches across America, especially in the South—with its unique blend of nostalgia plus a little misogyny and dog-whistle race politics on the side—well, that Trump understood well. He’d been winking and nodding at it for years, suggesting that Obama is neither an American citizen nor a Christian. Trump learned the lessons that McCain hadn’t. At one of his campaign events, McCain corrected a woman who said Obama was an Arab. Trump would never do such a thing. He understands instinctively the import of the connection between conservatism and Christianity, as well as the mystique of the inherent liberal threat that is not Christian and often not white. The voters who thought Obama was Muslim would be Trump voters, and Trump wasn’t about to dissuade them.

For most Red State Christians, it didn’t matter that Obama was a longtime attendee of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It didn’t matter when he took on the cadence of a black preacher and sang Amazing Grace from the pulpit in a service remembering the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, where a twenty-one-year-old Lutheran white supremacist gunned down nine African Americans after Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

It didn’t matter because for most Red State Christians, Obama was the embodiment of the progressivism that threatened the America they’d known and loved for generations. Their fear, mixed with the sense that they are losing, results in a toxic, jingoistic stew. They were losing the culture wars, losing the young people at church, losing popular opinion, so things like actual church attendance and Bible knowledge mattered less than a politician’s ability to catalog their list of perceived cultural wrongs and manufactured fears, like transgender persons using middle-school bathrooms or caravans of unruly migrants storming the southern border. Here Trump was on solid footing.

A movement had begun—quietly, first as a resistance to Obama and progressive politics, then as a reaction to lost culture wars and an attempt to reclaim American identity in the face of perceived retreat. Nationalism, the political lion we thought had died on the battlefields of World War II, had been resurrected, this time with religion mixed in. As churches fought battles with pastors to display the American flag on the altar in front of the cross, Christian Nationalism asserted its dominance on the national stage. In churches across Red State America, Christian Nationalism battled for preeminence with the universal (and not exclusively American) gospel of Jesus Christ.

Much to the consternation of national media, celebrities, and intelligentsia (most located on the coasts), Trump speaks a language that appeals to Red State Christians. I don’t know if he understands them, but they definitely understand him. Ultimately, the unlikely love affair between Red State Christians and Trump comes down to a shared language. So I’ve set out to record how Red State Christians talk about their faith, their votes, their guns, and their president. Other books have tackled this issue by studying trends, polling, and social-movement theory. But in addition to being a pastor, I’m a journalist. In both of my vocations, I spend a lot of time listening to ­people—really listening. In the pages that follow, we will get a chance to hear from Red State Christians and, whether you like what they have to say and how they say it, the key to understanding their relationship with the most unlikely president is to listen to them, with empathy, scrutiny, and attention.

My First Fourth of July Worship

I’ve long been aware of this nascent power of Christian Nationalism. During my pastoral internship in Las Vegas in 2011, our worship director and I dared to remove some of the American flag bunting that had been prominently displayed around the church for Fourth of July Sunday worship. We didn’t move it all, and as a granddaughter and daughter-in-law of war veterans, as well as a former chaplain at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, I considered it important to honor those who’d sacrificed for America even as we reminded our congregation that we came first to worship Jesus. That is, from the perspective of this Christian pastor, it is through the lens of Jesus and the gospel that we must interpret everything else, including America and its government.

I didn’t think removing a few pieces of bunting would be a big deal, but we got a lot of pushback. Our worship director took the brunt of it. (I was young—and pregnant—at the time.) He forwarded me one of the angry emails he’d gotten after Fourth of July worship: I can’t believe that you are not honoring the day that meant FREEDOM FOR THE WORLD, the parishioner wrote.

Freedom for the world? We rolled our eyes, knowing that, in fact, the fourth of July in 1776 only meant real freedom for a small, white, landowning subset of American men. The end of slavery and women’s right to vote—those would come later. Also, America is not in fact the world, and it’s not even mentioned in the Bible. America’s genesis began in the hands of white, landowning men, and they had no magnificent God-drawn plan—only European conquest, murder, and the deaths of thousands of Native Americans, then slavery, lynchings, and abuse of women. I had been educated in a post-Christendom America and no longer celebrated Columbus Day. I was proud to be American, but mostly I was proud because of who we could be. My faith and my national identity were at odds from time to time, as I contemplated the glory of tax cuts for me as an individual taxpayer and at the same time my own rising guilt at the lack of support for people living in poverty and services for immigrants and refugees.

Trump and Red State Christians would push back against my post-Christendom education. They were tired of being ashamed, tired of learning the mercy of Jesus without participating in the Old Testament stories of conquests. They wanted to reclaim the idea of the Crusades, of a preordained battle between Christians and Muslims. Most of all, they were desperate to reclaim the idea that America was a uniquely and especially Christian nation, where your culture—your positions on social issues, your views on gun control and abortion—were much more important than your grasp of theology or your understanding of grace, death, and resurrection.

A Southern Baptist Pastor on Christian Nationalism

I first became aware of the power of this new Christian Nationalism during an interview at the Evangelicals for Life Conference in Washington, DC, coinciding with the March for Life, a large, predominately conservative Christian march on Washington to oppose abortion and support the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

My conversation partner that morning was Dean Inserra, a prominent conservative Evangelical pastor, the founder of City Church in Tallahassee, Florida, a Liberty University grad and an advisory member of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Inserra was at first circumspect, saying that while he didn’t support Obama, he also didn’t vote for Trump. He insisted that Trump’s presidency had not changed him as a pastor.

Inserra was a rare Evangelical critic of Trump on social media, often completing his tweets with #MoralityMatters, and he was surprised to find that many of his fellow pastors and conservative Christians, while sharing his concerns about Trump’s moral fitness, were moved to support Trump anyway.

In speaking with Inserra, I was reminded of Jesus’s words about Nathanael in the Gospel of John: Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit! (1:47). Inserra, age thirty-seven when we spoke, is cut from an older Southern Baptist cloth. He is focused on his local church, he is concerned first for the primacy of the gospel, and while he is socially conservative, he is not militaristic about his views.

Inserra is also deeply concerned about the plague of Christian Nationalism within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I think there are two kinds of Trump supporters in the SBC, Inserra told me. One type, they didn’t want Hillary Clinton because of abortion and because of the Supreme Court; the other type is a nationalistic voter. I don’t think they’re racist, but American patriotism has become so linked to GOP politics, and [the SBC] has so intertwined that with what it means to be a Christian, that they almost can’t question anything about the GOP nominee or about Trump. He added, If you bring a missionary from India one week to a Southern Baptist church and the next week you bring a veteran, there’s no question who’s going to get the bigger applause.

The near-deification of the American military in many conservative churches is a sign of growing Christian Nationalism and its influence on the local church, in some ways further isolating the military from everyday Americans. During this time when World War II and Vietnam War veterans are aging and many Americans don’t have a family member on active duty, the worship of military members can lead to a misunderstanding of what it’s really like to serve. As Trump selected several generals to serve in his Cabinet and on his staff (my generals, he called them), the appearance of military support for Trump and the intertwining of nationalism and a Christian America increased conservative Christian support for Trump. In fact, support for America as a Christian nation may become the most prominent lesson many American Christians learn in church, rather than a focus on the gospel, on forgiveness, or even on Jesus’s death and resurrection.

Inserra suggested that an internal debate was brewing within the SBC about the question of Christian Nationalism and the limits of patriotism when it subsumes the gospel of Jesus. He even suggested that SBC seminaries are divided by their embrace of Christian Nationalism. Inserra’s words surprised me, coming from a leader in a denomination known for its belief in certainty and inerrancy, from a pastor who’d been shaken to see the power of Christian Nationalism within the SBC. I find their rhetoric troubling, Inserra said. The unapologetic Trump voter. There are people who voted for him because of the Supreme Court, and I find their decision rational and logical. But it’s that unapologetic defense. Didn’t Trump say he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and get away with it? I think he’s right.

Inserra told me about a term from Southern Baptist theology that describes the current moment in American politics and religion. "In this linking of nationalism and Christianity, we are forgetting about the message of Jesus. . . . When we do that, we have a gospel distortion. A gospel distortion is the idea that another ideal is impeding the truth of the gospel. Inserra said the gospel distortion in the SBC during and before Trump’s presidency has its roots in Christian Nationalism. We have to be Christian first. If you are American first, Jesus will be at odds with you, he said. Patriotism is not a fruit of the Spirit. It’s idolatry on the Fourth of July."

Inserra pointed to national holidays in the SBC that receive as much attention as Christmas and Easter. I say there are different high holy days in the Southern Baptist Church. Some churches have Pentecost and Epiphany. We have the Fourth of July, the Sunday closest to Veterans Day, the Sunday closest to September 11. You go to a Southern Baptist Church on the Fourth of July, you’d think you were at a baseball game, eating a hot dog.

Inserra said that SBC pastors have been unable or unwilling to stem the tide of Christian Nationalism, and in their preaching, they’ve further encouraged the linking of American patriotism and love of Jesus. He notices this particularly in the strongly Republican South, where the idea of God, guns, and country still defines many people’s faith.

It has, Inserra suggested, put the Christian faith of many Southern Baptists on shaky ground. Instead of backing traditional Christian social support for people in need and accepting the stranger, Christians taught in churches that embrace Christian Nationalism will instead back the American military and American strength. You have to understand these people, Inserra said. "If you question [the idea of Christian Nationalism], it makes