Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but one set of figures from the 2024 U.S. presidential election was too stark to be easily dismissed. According to exit polls cited in the Washington Post, voters who were not White evangelical Christians favoured Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by a margin of 58 per cent to 40 per cent. Had evangelicals voted in similar proportions, the election would have resulted in a landslide for Harris. However, White evangelical voters – 23 per cent of the voting population, according to the poll¹ – favoured Trump over Harris by 82 per cent to 17 per cent. New York Times columnist David French wrote bluntly, “Trump owes his election to white evangelical voters.”
French was an exception. Most commentators paid more attention to other divides and demographic shifts: the gender gap, especially among young voters; the urban-rural divide; the higher proportion of Black and Hispanic voters, compared to previous elections, who voted for Trump. Yet the exit polls showed that one of the best predictors of voting for Trump was being a White evangelical Christian.
French, who has frequently devoted his column to the relationship between Trump’s MAGA movement and evangelical Christianity, comes by his interest honestly. He is himself a conservative and an evangelical Christian, and he lives among other conservatives and evangelical Christians in rural Tennessee. But unlike most of his neighbours, he finds the close ties between MAGA and evangelical Christianity highly disturbing – indeed, a betrayal of deep evangelical values: “The religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.”
In other words, evangelical Christianity has become less a religious movement than a political movement with religious overtones. What primarily distinguishes evangelical Christians is their apparently unshakable loyalty to the Republican Party – led by Donald Trump, perhaps as far from a model of Christian virtue as any president in U.S. history.
Evangelical Christianity goes political
At its root, the word evangelical simply means “of the gospel,” so in this sense all Christianity is evangelical. However, the term has come to be applied to a particular flavour of Protestant Christianity. There is no one evangelical denomination: evangelicalism is spread across a number of denominations and many nondenominational churches. The term has theological, sociological and political dimensions. It overlaps with other labels such as fundamentalist and born-again, but is not interchangeable with them.
British historian David Bebbington has identified four central tenets of evangelical theology, which have become known collectively as the “Bebbington quadrilateral”:
- The Bible has full authority as the sole and supreme rule of faith and practice.
- People need to be converted, that is, experience a new birth by the Holy Spirit.
- People are reconciled with God through the atoning work of Christ on the cross, not through their own good works.
- Christians have a responsibility to spread the gospel, both through words and through actions.
Beyond these four basic theological tenets, evangelicals have other distinguishing characteristics. They have a strong focus on individual salvation and acceptance of Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Saviour.” They tend to see the world in Manichean, good-vs.-evil terms. They often have very traditional views on gender and sexual issues. The End Times and the Second Coming of Jesus loom large in their consciousness. In the United States, evangelicals tend to blend Christianity with American patriotism, popular culture and a rosy view of American history. It could be argued that if there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, it has to do with the exceptionally large number of evangelicals in the United States.
It should be noted that these attitudes, while more prevalent among evangelicals, are by no means limited to them. Similar attitudes can be found among other Christians and, in some cases, among Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims and others. It was not an evangelical but a Roman Catholic, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who said recently, “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.”²
Nor are all evangelicals politically conservative. Jimmy Carter was a serious evangelical Christian. Sojourners, a community founded in 1971 by Jim Wallis and others, remains active today as an organization combining evangelical religious beliefs with a commitment to peace and social justice. But the links between evangelical Christianity and political conservatism have been getting tighter. Led by Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979, evangelicals played a large role in electing Ronald Reagan president the next year. Evangelical political involvement expanded from there.
The journey of Diana Butler Bass, now a liberal Christian historian, writer and speaker, is perhaps emblematic of the change. Butler Bass became an evangelical as a teenager in the 1970s. Despite some negative elements even then, she writes,
There was fun stuff as well – the early years of Christian rock ’n roll (there was a surprising amount of really good music) and a Jesus-y cultural post-hippie hangover with radical movements like Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, and evangelical feminism. And there was an extraordinary crossover in theological worlds with liberation theology. In other words, I was under the impression that evangelicalism was a deep personal commitment to love Jesus for the sake of making the world a more just and beautiful place for all of God’s children. Lol.
Then came the eighties and the rise of the Christian right: “To a recent convert (and one living in California to boot), the Moral Majority didn’t make any sense. I thought that Jim Wallis was the norm and Jerry Falwell was the aberration.” By the early nineties Butler Bass was teaching religious studies at Westmont College, a Christian institution in Montecito, California. She describes what followed:
As a historian, I should have understood that spiritual renewal movements rarely transform entrenched ideologies and dislodge injustices that benefit the powerful … The evangelicals who ran the institution wanted me to “fit,” but I didn’t want to fit. I wanted them to change. I guess I wanted to be their savior. I wanted them to be more like Jesus. To love with greater compassion. To embrace the radical implications of grace.
In the end, Butler Bass was dismissed from her job and was no longer welcome in the evangelical movement. She now speaks for a form of Christianity that resists empire instead of serving it. In a November interview with her historian colleague Heather Cox Richardson, she noted a video that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense (or of War, as he prefers), posted to Tik Tok in which he recited the Lord’s Prayer over images of bombers and people being killed by American soldiers. “That is imperial Christianity run amok,” Butler Bass said. “That is what the Church through all of its history has called heresy, if not blasphemy.”
From the party of values to the party of MAGA
But even after evangelical Christianity had made it clear that it had no room for people like Diana Butler Bass, even after groups like the Sojourners Community had been marginalized, evangelicals still should have been insulated against the appeal of someone like Donald Trump. As Christians, they believed that leaders should be individuals of upright personal character. In 1998, when the sinner in the White House was Bill Clinton, the largest American evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, declared at its annual meeting, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
Like so many other guardrails in American political life, this one, when tested, would not hold. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released its latest American Values Survey on October 22. In an interview, PRRI founder and president Robert P. Jones noted that in the era of George W. Bush, values were the Republican brand:
One of the great U-turns I’ve seen in my career is to go from the party that was literally branding itself the party of values to the party of MAGA … The hermeneutical key for me is whether a public official could commit immoral acts in their private life and still behave ethically in their public life. Back in the values voter era, White evangelicals and Republicans would say no, they can’t do that. If they behave immorally in their private life they’re going to behave immorally in their public life.
But once Trump ran for president in 2016, all that changed. In previous polls, 72 per cent of White evangelicals and Republicans had agreed that someone who behaves immorally privately would also behave immorally publicly. In 2016, only 30 per cent agreed with that statement. Jones believes that this change came about because there was “a realization that they’re going to need antidemocratic means to achieve the ends of power”:
Once you make that turn it really does mean that what you need is someone who’s going to wield raw power. And there’s a way of thinking about this where Trump is going to lead them to a place where they want to go. But it’s all about having a White Christian country. It’s not democracy. That’s where he’s going to lead them … White evangelicals, Republicans, have moved away from this political ethic of principle, which if you take them at their word is what the values voters platform would be, and just moved to a political ethic of expediency.
The messiah of Mar-a-Lago
There is another dimension to this as well. American Values Survey respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “God saved Donald Trump from being assassinated so that he could lead America into a glorious future.” Overall, a majority of Americans disagreed. However, 54 per cent of Republicans agreed with the statement and only 41 per cent disagreed. Results were similar among White evangelical Protestants: 53 per cent agreed with the statement. They were the only religious group in which a majority agreed.
The power of the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024 has not been lost on MAGA. On October 3 the United States Treasurer, Brandon Beach, released the draft design of a one-dollar coin to be issued in 2026 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the obverse has a bust of Trump comparable to those of Lincoln on the penny and Washington on the quarter, the reverse evokes the scene in Butler. It shows Trump with fist raised in front of an American flag, surrounded by the words “Fight Fight Fight.” The coin may never see the light of day, but that the Treasurer would choose this among all possible scenes involving Trump is telling.
However, the idea of Trump as a quasi-messianic figure long preceded that afternoon in Butler. Late in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term, an elaborate conspiracy theory began to circulate online in right-wing discussion forums. Because the theory had its origins in the posts of an anonymous writer called Q, it became known as QAnon. The central QAnon belief was that the world was run by a cabal of pedophiles who sexually abused and murdered children and drank their blood. And the person who was going to break the power of the cabal was Donald Trump. QAnon was not, in itself, Christian, but its tenets resonated with some evangelical beliefs: a good-vs.-evil view of the world and a coming End Time. Will Sommer, a journalist who has written a book about QAnon, told Ezra Klein of the New York Times in July,
The utopian or messianic aspects of QAnon, I think, were often underplayed at the time. In QAnon, they thought there would be a moment called “the storm,” where Trump would arrest and presumably execute everyone conservatives didn’t like. It would be people in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood, in banking – people like Tom Hanks and Oprah would be sent to Guantánamo Bay for military tribunals. Then after that, for everyone left behind, life would be pretty sweet. They believed that this cabal was responsible for all the evil in the world, all the wars. It was holding back all the cures for all the diseases. That basically the cabal created the concept of debt.
There have been messianic movements since ancient times. The one we now know as Christianity has been by far the most successful of these movements, but there have been others as well. One feature of a number of these movements is that the messiah is not bound by the rules that govern ordinary people’s behaviour.
In the 17th century a Jewish messianic claimant named Shabbetai Tzvi appeared in the Ottoman Empire.³ He performed acts that were shocking violations of Jewish law: turning fast days into feasts, pronouncing the forbidden divine name and the like. Aided by a brilliant young theoretician and publicist named Nathan of Gaza, he attracted followers, and messianic fervour swept the Jewish communities of the Middle East and Europe. This popular enthusiasm was perceived as a threat to the Ottoman regime, and the Sultan had Shabbetai Tzvi thrown in prison and offered him the choice of death or conversion to Islam. He chose conversion, which despite Nathan of Gaza’s strenuous efforts to explain his actions was widely regarded as an unacceptable deviation from the messianic script. The movement deflated, although it retained some adherents and the hangover from Sabbateanism lasted for the better part of a century.
The story of Shabbetai Tzvi illustrates an important question for messianic movements: what happens when events don’t follow the messianic script? In the case of Shabbetai Tzvi, the movement fell apart. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, his followers successfully wrote and won acceptance for a new script. In the case of Donald Trump – well, let’s follow the thread of conspiracy theories into the 2020s.
QAnon reached something of a high point in January 2021. Many of the Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol on January 6 saw themselves as enacting the QAnon storm. Also in January 2021, a firm QAnon believer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, took her seat as the new member of the House of Representatives for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. But QAnon would soon be overtaken by another conspiracy theory, this one involving a real pedophile. “On the right,” wrote David French, “the (Jeffrey) Epstein story became the thinking man’s version of the QAnon conspiracy theory.”
There are some things that are known. Unquestionably, Jeffrey Epstein was very rich and had many powerful friends, some of whom he entertained on his private island. Unquestionably, Epstein was a sexual predator who recruited large numbers of young women and girls for sex. And he unquestionably died in prison in 2019, in what was ruled a suicide.
Also unquestionably, one of Epstein’s powerful friends, at least at one time, was Donald Trump, and Trump had some inkling of Epstein’s sexual proclivities. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” We also now know, after the release of emails from Epstein’s estate in November, that Epstein alleged that Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours at my house” with one of them.
Most of the rest is speculation. Much of the speculation surrounds the “Epstein files” held by the United States government. At the core of those files there is supposed to be a “client list” of powerful people for whom Epstein procured sex. In the MAGA imagination, that list consists of prominent Democrats and their friends in the media, Hollywood and elsewhere. Republicans anticipated the release of the Epstein client list in much the same way that QAnon believers had yearned for the storm.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he thought he would release the Epstein files if he was elected president. “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing,” said JD Vance two weeks before the election. Kash Patel said the FBI had Epstein’s “Black Book.” Trump appointed him director of the FBI. In September 2024, right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino said the client list was “a huge deal” that was going to “rock the Democrat party.” Bongino is now deputy director of the FBI. After she took office as Attorney General, Pam Bondi said the client list was “sitting on my desk right now for review.” She later claimed she was misinterpreted.
Somehow, Trump’s enthusiasm for releasing the Epstein files waned once he was President. In June, after Elon Musk’s relationship with Trump had degenerated from an alliance to gut the U.S. government into a mudslinging match, Musk tweeted that Trump was “in the Epstein files” – a tweet he subsequently deleted. In July, the Justice Department and the FBI jointly released an unsigned memo reporting on “an exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein.” The review concluded that Epstein harmed more than 1,000 victims. However, there was no client list, no evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals and nothing to suggest that his death was anything other than a suicide. In the interest of protecting victims, the review “found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials.”
The memo, wrote David French, “detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe … Make no mistake: MAGA is very angry. After the Department of Justice released its memo, MAGA influencers exploded.”
In early September, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, introduced a discharge petition to force a House vote on a bill calling for the release of the Epstein files. The petition needed the signatures of a majority of House members – 218 out of 435 – to take effect. In late October, the bill had attracted the signatures of 213 Democrats and four Republicans. One of those Republicans was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, was elected in late September to fill a vacant seat in Arizona. However, House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose highest value is loyalty to Donald Trump, avoided swearing Grijalva in for two months. When the House returned in November, she was sworn in and became the petition’s 218th signature.
We don’t know that the Epstein files contain any information that is damaging to Donald Trump beyond what we already know. We do know that Trump is going to great lengths to avoid releasing those files. Will the release of the Epstein files, if it ever occurs, be the critical moment when the course of events deviates from Trump’s messianic script? Will the aura of divine election that has clung to him, especially since that bullet grazed his ear in Butler, finally dissipate?
Bringing America to Trump and Jesus
Another bullet, fired in Utah on September 10, 2025, brought the relationship between MAGA and evangelical Christianity to a new level. This bullet hit its target, striking down the influential young conservative writer, speaker, broadcaster and organizer Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk was as much a religious as a political figure. According to the website of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the organization he founded and built into a major force on the right, “Charlie Kirk poured his life into building a movement rooted in faith, freedom, and love of country.” In a speech in December 2024 at AmericaFest, TPUSA’s major public event, Kirk celebrated the election of Donald Trump a month earlier, in which TPUSA had played a significant role: “We cannot take credit for what happened on November 5. Who deserves credit is God Almighty.”
Elsewhere in this issue, Steven Hill touches on Charlie Kirk’s retrograde views on women’s roles in society.⁴ In an interview with the New York Times, Erika Kirk, his widow and successor as CEO of TPUSA, described their relationship as “an Ephesians 5 marriage.” According to chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in the New Testament, “Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife just as Christ is head of the church.”⁵
The relationship between Christianity and politics was on full display at the memorial for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21. David French described the memorial as “one part worship service, one part political rally.” But it would perhaps be more accurate to characterize it with a phrase borrowed from Christian theology (I hope I’m not offending my Christian friends here): just as Jesus is fully God and fully man, so the memorial was fully religious and fully political.
“It’s true that we need less government. But we also need a lot more God,” said Pete Hegseth. “Live worthy of Charlie Kirk’s sacrifice and put Christ at the centre of your life.”
“Ultimately he was a Christian evangelist,” said Tucker Carlson. “The only real solution is Jesus.”
Perhaps no one was clearer than Vice President Vance: “Charlie brought the truth that Jesus Christ was the king of kings, and all truths flow from this first and most important one … It is better to be persecuted for your faith than to deny the kingship of Christ. He is a hero for the United States of America and he is a martyr for the Christian faith.”
Intentionally or not, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s speech had overtones of QAnon: “When I see Erika and her strength and her courage I am reminded of a famous expression: The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength and the warrior whispers back, I am the storm. Erika is the storm. We are the storm.”
Trump’s own speech, while focusing mostly on praise of Charlie Kirk and his usual political tropes, nevertheless contained some religious notes: “We have to bring back religion to America, because without borders, law and order and religion, you really don’t have a country. We want religion brought back to America. We want to bring God back to our beautiful USA like never before. We want God back.”
Four days later, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM-7 directed the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” It highlighted some “common threads animating this violent conduct”; these are “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
Being anti-Christian and being anti-American are intertwined, and they make you, potentially, a domestic terrorist. Such is the religious-political alliance that Donald Trump and his supporters have built.
Countering this alliance will not be easy. On the basis of PRRI’s surveys, Robert P. Jones concludes that while MAGA is a product of both economic and cultural anxiety, cultural anxiety is the dominant factor. Hence, he says, if the Democrats
think they’re going to kitchen-table their way out of this problem, they are sorely mistaken. They really are going to have to engage on the cultural and identity issues here. This is the way the MAGA movement has gained its momentum and force … We’ve got to figure out how to tell a story about who we are as Americans and how we can all live together in a pluralistic democracy, and why everybody has a stake in that.
Religions are born, grow, spread and endure through stories. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Hindu scriptures – all of them are filled with stories that have enchanted people for millennia. MAGA, drawing on Christian themes, tells a compelling story about God and country. Can its opponents tell a better one?
Notes
¹ Estimates of the proportion of evangelical Christians in the U.S. population vary; some are considerably lower than 23 per cent. There are also different definitions of who qualifies as evangelical.
² Address to the National Conservatism Conference, Washington, DC, September 2, 2025.
³ The definitive work on Shabbetai Tzvi is Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R.J. Zwi Werblowsky (1973; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
⁴ Hill discusses these views in more detail in “Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump and the Backlash Against Women’s Rise,” DemocracySOS, Substack, September 26, 2025.
⁵ New American Bible translation.
