We don't know the exact numbers yet, but it appears once again that four out of five white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in last week's presidential election.
Evangelical support was by no means decisive; a similar percentage voted for Trump when he lost in 2020. But when a supermajority of a group comprising about 25% of the population falls in his column, it's a pretty good foundation on which to build a winning coalition.
Trump promised to be their protector against a host of perceived enemies, to promote the white evangelical fever dreams of Christian nationalism. Until he realized that the rescission of Roe v. Wade was unpopular with most Americans, Trump boasted of appointing judges who did exactly that.
Still, the anomaly of a movement that professes allegiance to “family values” and that supports an admitted, thrice-married sexual predator, not to mention a convicted felon, cannot be ignored.
But 2024, much less 2016 or 2020, was not the first time white evangelicals put aside their supposed values to support a presidential candidate.
In the late 1970s, divorce was considered taboo in evangelical circles, especially divorce and remarriage. Anyone in that category would likely lose membership in their church. However, evangelicals, led by Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the religious right, chose to anoint the divorced and remarried Ronald Reagan as their political messiah in 1980. Worse yet, as governor of California back in 1967, Reagan had signed the most liberal abortion bill. in the country, which adds to the puzzle.
So why would evangelicals abandon one of their own, Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian Sunday school teacher and family man, in favor of Reagan?
The answer isn't pretty, and it's the same reason that helps explain white evangelicals' support for Trump: racism.
Contrary to the religious right's own narrative, white evangelicals did not organize politically in the 1970s in opposition to Roe v. Wade. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in 1971 calling for the legalization of abortion, a resolution they reaffirmed in 1974 and again in 1976. Evangelicals overwhelmingly considered abortion a Catholic issue during the 1970s, and the few evangelicals who Commenters on the Roe decision applauded it for drawing an appropriate distinction between personal morality and public policy.
So what mobilized evangelicals politically? The catalyst, according to historical records and the testimony of conservative leaders such as Paul Weyrich, co-founder of Moral Majority; Richard Viguerie, direct mail king of the Christian right; and Grover Norquist, anti-tax hound, defended racial segregation at evangelical “academies and segregation institutions,” including Bob Jones University in South Carolina.
Falwell, who, by his own admission, did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978, more than five years after the Roe decision, had founded his own segregation academy in 1967. Having denounced the civil rights movement as “civil wrongs,” He was outraged that the Internal Revenue Service could rescind his tax exemption because of racial segregation and complained that in some places it was easier to open a massage parlor than a “Christian” school.
Reagan, like Trump decades later, was their man to confront the nefarious forces that sought to destroy what they sold as evangelicalism.
Reagan had opposed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in California, which prohibited discrimination in buying and renting housing. He openly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His campaigns were riddled with racist dog whistles, especially “law and order” and “welfare queens.” He opened his 1980 general election campaign for president in Neshoba County, Mississippi, declaring his support for “states' rights” at the site where in 1964 three civil rights workers were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in collusion with the local sheriff's office.
President Reagan would sign the Federal Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, but that did not stop him from decimating the Civil Rights Commission or maintaining his support (opposing sanctions) for the apartheid government in South Africa, even when the regime was collapsing under its own weight.
White evangelicals did not shy away from Reagan and his racist rhetoric or policies. They praised him.
And the same goes for Trump. The bigoted “birther” nonsense directed at President Obama, the nation’s first black president, should have prompted white evangelical leaders to sound the alarm against him, not to mention Trump’s recognition of “some very good people.” ” at a white supremacist rally or the torrent of insults directed against African Americans, especially black women, and immigrants. Instead, they have enthusiastically supported Trump in his three campaigns for the White House.
Does that mean every “Bible-believing” Christian who voted for Trump is a racist? Not at all. But there is a link between the religious right's origins in defense of racial segregation and overwhelming white evangelical support for a candidate who traffics in racialized rhetoric.
That link includes Reagan, but also encompasses lesser figures like Roy Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who declared that America was great during slavery because “families were united.” Includes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and his history of interactions with the Ku Klux Klan and the Council of Conservative Citizens, also known as the “uptown Klan.”
The racism infecting the religious right dates back to its formation in the late 1970s. And as unrepentant racism tends to fester, the 2024 election demonstrated once again that white evangelicals have yet to acknowledge or repent of the persistent racism that animates their politics.
Randall Balmer, author of “Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right,” teaches at Dartmouth College.
