justinspoliticalcorner:

“Ever since World War II, white evangelicals in the United States have waged a desperate and largely failing war against thickening walls of separation between church and state, the removal of Christianity from public schools, the growing ethnic and religious diversity of the country, the intrusion of the federal government into their everyday lives (especially as it pertains to desegregation and civil rights), and legalized abortion. In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell Sr. and other conservative evangelicals concerned about this moral drift devised a political playbook to win back the culture and restore America to its supposedly Christian origins. It is a playbook that has too often led its followers toward nativism, xenophobia, racism, and intolerance. It is a playbook that divides rather than unites. The social and cultural changes of the Obama administration — particularly regarding human sexuality — sent conservative evangelicals into a state of panic. They saw Donald Trump as the GOP candidate best suited to protect them from the forces working to undermine the values of the world they once knew. But these anxieties extend even deeper into the American past. They are the logical result of 300 years — from the Puritans to the American Revolution, and from nativism to fundamentalism — of evangelical fears about the direction in which their “Christian nation” was moving. The politics of fear inevitably results in a quest for power. Clergymen and religious leaders have, at least since Billy Graham, regularly visited the White House to advise the president. Like members of the king’s court during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who sought influence and worldly approval by flattering the monarch rather than prophetically speaking truth to power, Trump’s “court evangelicals” boast about their “unprecedented access” to the president and exalt him for his faith-friendly policies. Evangelical support for Donald Trump is also rooted in nostalgia for a bygone Christian golden age. Instead of doing the hard work necessary for engaging a more diverse society with the claims of Christian orthodoxy, evangelicals are intellectually lazy, preferring to respond to cultural change by trying to reclaim a world that is rapidly disappearing and has little chance of ever coming back.”

— John Fea at USA Today on why most White Evangelicals eagerly support Trump (07.08.2018).