True Believers, Marketers, and Evangelists
When I was a child, our church would gather late every summer with dozens of area churches for a large tent revival on the campus of the local Baptist college. In the sweltering August heat, we’d sing southern gospel hymns, listen to hellfire and brimstone preaching, and laugh at the corny puppet show put on […]
The Tribalism of the NeverTrump Evangelical Elite, Pt. 2
By Stephen Wolfe This is the second of a two part series. The first part is found here. Trust Paul Miller’s presentation of civic trust in his ERLC report is useful for exposing the tribalism of the evangelical elite. The report bizarrely prescribes distrust in order to remedy distrust—committing a sort of performative contradiction. At […]
The Tribalism of the NeverTrump Evangelical Elite, Pt. 1
By Stephen Wolfe When Donald Trump won the election in 2016, many evangelicals pondered the fate of their NeverTrump evangelical leaders. After months of pleading with and morally denouncing evangelical support for Trump—often in the opinion pages of national newspapers—their fellow evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump. In the end, these “influencers” had little influence; these […]
Hitching Their Wagons: Evangelicals and the Politics of Respectability
Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, published a takedown of Trump-supporting evangelicals in the latest issue of The Atlantic. Gerson attempts to answer the question of how a once confident and influential cultural movement became an anxious minority seeking protection from a very un-Christian president. He is at his best when […]
