The 2020 census counted about 258 million adults in the USA. If about 23% of them were evangelical Protestants, that group number would number about 36 million. And, as surveys indicate, if 80% of those 36 million voted for the current president, that means 20% of them did not. That's 7.2 million evangelical Protestants who dissented one way or another from the majority choice.
Of course these estimates are rough, and there are many other Christian categories not included, but I'm intrigued by that specific minority. It may seem discouragingly small, but it's far from nothing, and as MAGA continues to pursue an aggressive anti-Christian agenda behind its thin Christian facade, might it be growing?
(If these sorts of statistics intrigue you, I recommend this and other research by the Public Religion Research Institute, along with this election study by the Pew Research Center.)
What do I mean by "thin Christian facade"? I certainly don't mean a facade that is inexpensive to produce. You can look no further than Charlie Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, and its Web site, and its YouTube channel (4.48 million subscribers) for evidence of voluminous content and high-quality production values.
What is missing? I don't see much evidence of whole-life conversion, of putting our loving Creator at the center of one's life and relationships, of "regarding" others as Paul invited us to, of loving enemies, of engaging the principalities and powers spiritually, of remembering the Matthew 25 priorities that Jesus taught, not to mention God's promise that Abraham and his descendants will bless all the nations of the earth, even as they're commanded not to mistreat or oppress foreigners/strangers/immigrants.
The facade is thin because it differs so little from all those blood-and-country mythologies that falsify history, identify danger with "the other," misuse sacred language served with hypnotic music to whip up enthusiasm, and license extreme responses.
One writer, Mitchell Sobieski, has taken the risk of inventorying these scandalous divergences from biblical faith in the form of an open letter from Jesus. (I wouldn't use this device myself, but the inventory itself is important.)
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| Drew Strait speaks during the Catholic Social Tradition Conference at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, on March 21, 2025. (Brian Kaylor/Word&Way); source. |
Another helpful commentary comes from Drew Strait, who teaches at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary: "How to Challenge MAGA's Biblical Authoritarianism." It's a good presentation, but I'd like to expand on his apparent assumed audience, "progressive ecumenical Christians." It's urgent for some of those 7.2 million evangelicals who aren't sold out to MAGA to participate. Could some of them serve in a new mission field—an outreach to those among the 80% who might be ready, even yearning, to consider genuine good news for all nations?
I appreciated Peter Wehner's recent Atlantic article, "Fully MAGA-fied Christianity."
Politics fills the void left by faith, and it’s doing so in ways that I’ve never quite seen before. For many fundamentalists and evangelicals, politics meets the longing and the needs that aren’t being met by churches and traditional faith communities. If there is something useful that has come of the Trump era, and there’s not much, it is that it has offered a diagnostic CT scan of much of American Christianity. Trump and the MAGA movement capitalized on, and then amplified, the problems facing Christian communities, but they did not create them.
After giving us a gallery of the kinds of personalities filling that void and meeting those needs, Wehner seems, in my own mind, to be addressing the new mission field:
The churches and denominations that are not militantly MAGA but are still overwhelmingly composed of Trump supporters often get less attention than churches and denominations that are hyper-politicized, but they’re also essential to the Trump coalition. So it’s useful to understand the complex dynamic at play in those spaces.
I say complex because, every Sunday, millions of Christians attend churches that are nondenominational and that are affiliated with conservative Protestant denominations. These churches aren’t particularly political, and they are led by pastors who preach thoughtfully on topics such as loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, which Jesus talked about during his Sermon on the Mount; and on verses like this one, found in the Book of Ephesians, written by the Apostle Paul: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
The great majority of people attending these churches wouldn’t consider those verses to be woke talking points; they would view them as the inerrant word of God. They would earnestly pray that those words would sanctify their life and that they would become more like Jesus. And almost to a person, these congregants would say that Christ is at the center of their life, their “all in all.”
Yet many of them will spend part of the rest of the week, and maybe much of the rest of the week, in the right-wing echo chamber, in the company of conflict entrepreneurs, having their emotions inflamed, feeling the same way toward their enemies as Donald Trump does toward his enemies. And it will all make perfect sense to them.
How might we begin (or, more hopefully, continue) to chisel away at this "perfect sense to them," this immersive correlation of Christ, their "all in all," and Fox News? Judy Maurer wrote recently about the power of narrative and community in offering a better way. To my mind, it's an incomparably better way of experiencing the love and power of Jesus and his community between Sundays, and re-engaging in missions that really could bless the nations. Do you have useful experiences in your own community to overcome this gap between Sunday faith and daily practice?
Related links:
- "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the End of American Democracy," a video from the Geneva Graduate Institute.
- Christopher Armitage researched attempts to defeat fascism once it's in power. "Once they win elections, it's already too late."
- Occupied America: Christopher Lydon interviews Marilynne Robinson.
- Diana Butler Bass on the "warrior ethos" and St Martin of Tours.
- Religion Dispatches' "reporter's guide" to the New Apostolic Reformation.
- Reality check from Dimitris Xygalatas, originally published in 2017: Are religious people more moral?
- My blog posts labeled "Occupation."
Micah Bales on "The Armor of God: Confronting the Powers in a Time of Chaos."
We live in a time of spiritual, moral, and economic disarray. It feels like we are at war, but there’s no clear enemy. That’s very dangerous. Times like these are ripe for scapegoating. Humans are tempted to impose order on the chaos by finding someone to blame, and every party and faction has their favorite targets.
In times like these, it is more important than ever to turn back to the words of scripture, which were often written in times of severe crisis and persecution. Nothing that we are experiencing is new; our spiritual ancestors have endured far worse, and they have words of wisdom for us.
Tricia Gates Brown on the secret life of chronic illness.
Most people in my life only see the productive portions, not the preparation or recovery. I have become expert at doing things while feeling lousy! And more importantly, while not letting on.
Catch up with Windy Cooler and the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry.
If you're in or near Bremerton, Washington, USA, you are warmly welcome to the Bremerton Friends Worship Group, which meets on the first Sunday of every month. The group is under the care of North Seattle Friends Church.
James McKinley with Raul Malo in Glasgow. Raul Malo has had to cancel his touring performances as he deals with complications of cancer, but he'll keep working on non-touring projects.
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