Next week’s Iowa Republican caucuses officially kick off the 2024 primary race that will almost certainly end in a third GOP nomination for former President Donald Trump. During the Iowans caucus on Monday, recent poll suggests Trump will easily claim state power 40 delegateswith rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis hustle for second place.
Whatever the exact results, the decisions of The White Evangelical of Iowa caucus participants will be closely scrutinized in the days to come. But for most of them, I suppose, these decisions have been made for a long time. American evangelical discourse around Trump has changed dramatically since 2020, dividing along some sort of class and almost disappearing as an active consideration for the average voter.
In most evangelical circles, the Trump debate is dead.
Let’s start with the exception: among what some call the “evangelical elite”, this question still remains relevant. The question of whether it is permissible (or obligatory) to support (or oppose) the Trump presidency is still the subject of active discussion among evangelicals. who writes books and articles like this, which attract followers online, who knows what”Big Eva” means and what they think about it, who attend seminary (but probably not for pastoral ministry) and who otherwise participate in the Discourse – wherever they land politically or theologically.
Support for Trump is a hot-button issue for self-described Christian nationalists on X (formerly Twitter). And it’s a timely issue for “never Trump” evangelicals to Atlantic Or The New York Times. In Iowa, it’s a hot-button issue for Republican kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, who told CT he remains hopeful of a DeSantis victory.
But for the average white evangelical Republican, I have the strong impression that this debate is all but over. Very few evangelicals will vote or caucus this year after freshly agonized over whether to support Donald Trump.
This is so for several reasons, none of which are particularly unique to evangelicals. The first is the way millions of Americans regularly vote: by partisan default and after relatively little research into the politics and personal history of the proposed candidates.
The angry politician who cannot disconnect, touch the grass and love his neighbor has become a common character in American politics. But there is another character better represented in our democracy: the party-line voter (and sometimes non-voting) who truly intends to fulfill his civic duty but has so many other things to do first. There’s dinner to cook, laundry to sort, that email to respond to, the dog to wash.
Uninformed voters get a bad rap, and the part of me that is fascinated by politics is sometimes tempted to join in the disparagement. But another part of me recognizes that this mode of political engagement makes sense for many people. After all, my job allows me to spend an entire day researching a candidate’s file and get paid for it. Probably 99.9 percent of Americans can’t do the same. People have little time and energy, and they can’t spend a lot of money on far-flung political drama, so they vote along the party line.
This includes many evangelicals. Much has been done onthe 81 percent» of white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016. But, according to exactly on which database that you use, this figure is statistically identical to the proportion of white evangelical votes for Republican candidates in 2020, 2012, 2008, and 2004. As hard to understand for those of us in the chattering class, much of this story is simply Republicans vote Republican.
And for the same reasons that people vote with low levels of information, relatively few voters have overarching political ideologies to hold. The default partisan vote is not based on a comprehensive policy platform supported by mutually reinforcing theses about the purpose of the state, the basis of human rights, the nature of the common good, and so on. It’s based on a few high-profile issues (right now: abortion, education, immigration, inflation, Israel, Ukraine) and, well, atmosphere.
In this sense, the evangelical decision to support Trump was both a very big deal. And a relatively small one. It was huge when it was carried out by evangelical elites – the kind of people who still talk about it, who have a political ideology supposedly informed by Scripture, who spent the 1990s publish statements about the importance of character in politics, and then forgot all about it when Trump came on the scene.
The Book of James warns us that those “who teach will be judged more strictly” (3:1), and prominent Trump supporters knew better.
Yet many ordinary voters knew a little less. I will never forget to mention Trump’s Access Hollywood recorded to an older relative – a white evangelical Republican – shortly before the 2016 election. I said I couldn’t believe people still supported him after hearing what he said. She said she hadn’t heard of it at all. It was the first time I had an exchange about Trump in this sense. It wasn’t the last.
Political division is worst when it is close, when it is between us and those close to us who taught us the very ethics that make an inconceivable enthusiasm for Trump. But the “servant who knows the will of the master and who does not prepare or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with great blows,” as Jesus taught, while “the one who does not know and does things that deserve to be punished will be beaten.” with few stripes” (Luke 12:47-48).
Error is judged in proportion to knowledge. And nearly a decade into this saga, I have come to feel great dismay at American evangelicalism’s embrace of Trump and to recognize that the rationale behind any evangelical vote for Trump may be complicated , surprising and even nice.
The final factor that ends the Trump debate is also sympathetic, if only because it reflects a common human failure – one that I find too often in myself: we don’t like to admit that we have was wrong.
So this factor is not about making the decision to support Trump, but rather about what happens after that decision has been made. It’s something ethical sunk cost fallacy: If you voted for him once, why not again? If supporting him puts you in the wrong, you’re already there.
The problem with sunk costs is that they don’t seem like a mistake, and this is especially true when we’re talking not about business, but about politics, ethics, and their implications for personal identity. Refusing to vote for Trump in 2024 after voting for him in 2016 or 2020 is admitting a mistake — and it’s uncomfortable.
Indeed, in the political domain, perhaps even more than elsewhere, the human instinct is to justify ourselves (Luke 10:29), to reassure each other that we did the right thing the first time. , to re-engage even when we would do better. to repent. Trump is back on the electoral roll for 2024. But who wants to continue debating a decision that has already been made?
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity today.
