And Lo, Did the Evangelicals Deliver Iowa Unto Trump

A conversation with Sarah Posner about Trump's most fervent supporters.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s win in the Iowa caucuses, I wanted to speak to Sarah Posner about the White evangelicals who delivered that victory to Trump and form the core of his support. Posner is an MSNBC columnist and the author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. The audio of our conversation runs about 15 minutes; I’ve also included a lightly edited transcript.

Paul Waldman: So we are talking the morning after the Iowa caucuses, where as expected, Donald Trump won a significant victory. And one of the ways that Iowa and the next primary in New Hampshire are very different is that Iowa is dominated on the Republican side by evangelical voters, which is why I wanted to talk to you since nobody knows as much about them as you do.

You have argued that while it used to be that Republican politicians sought the favor of Christian right leaders, those leaders have become almost irrelevant because Trump himself is now the leader of the Christian right. So we used to be very familiar with people like Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, and then in later years, Tony Perkins and Ralph Reed. They used to be incredibly important in organizing people and anointing politicians. Do they just not matter anymore?

Sarah Posner: It's almost like Trump has cut out the middleman. Republican politicians used to suck up in Iowa to Bob Vander Plaats, or there used to be a guy named Steve Scheffler; he's still around, but not as prominent anymore. These were the kingmakers in Iowa that the Republican candidates would always vie for the endorsement of. They would have these forums where the candidates would be forced to talk about their salvation story and pledge their commitment to banning abortion and gay marriage and all the rest. But Trump now is the favorite of White evangelicals, including in Iowa, but also across the country. So they're not waiting to hear what Bob Vander Plaats has to say about Trump or Ron DeSantis.

Trump is their guy. Trump is their savior. You've read all these articles just in the last couple of weeks where mainstream reporters caught on to the fact that these voters believe Trump to be some kind of savior figure for Christians and for America and therefore for Christian America. And so whether Bob Vander Plaats thinks that Trump is no good or Trump can't win the general election against Joe Biden and endorsed Ron DeSantis instead, as we saw last night that has no resonance with them.

Paul Waldman: So it's kind of like a political version of the Protestant Reformation. Now you can do your own research. You don't need that person between you and God or Trump, you just go straight to the source.

Sarah Posner: Trump has nailed the theses to the door of the Drake Diner. That was a total inside Iowa caucuses joke.

Paul Waldman: We'll see how many people get it.

Sarah Posner: You have to understand the Protestant Reformation and the Iowa caucuses at the same time.

Paul Waldman: We have an intelligent readership.

What it means when they say Trump “gets us”

I'm struck by something that you often hear from Trump supporters in general, but in particular from his evangelical supporters, which is that they say “He speaks our language. We can relate to him. He understands us.” It used to mean, if an evangelical voter said that about a candidate, they were talking about somebody like George W. Bush or Ted Cruz, who had a religious background, who knew the hymns, who knew the biblical lingo. But they say that about Trump when he doesn't know any of that stuff. So what do they mean now when they say that?

Sarah Posner: They mean a few things. They mean that Trump gets us, meaning gets us White Christians who feel like our America has been taken away from us by the woke mob, the homosexual agenda, the abortionists, or whatever the bogeyman is. But I think also it's reflective of changes within the evangelical movement over the past 40 or so years, where the voices and worship practices and rhetoric of the Charismatic movement, which is a movement inside evangelicalism, have become more prominent. And the Charismatic movement is much more rooted in ideas of spiritual warfare, direct revelation from God, signs and wonders and miracles. So you can see from the way I'm talking about them that they're less rooted in reason and the real world. And so when Trump comes along and is very buddy-buddy with them -- his own spiritual advisor and close friend Paula White comes from this world -- she introduced him to a lot of other people and because of their affection for him, he brought them into his inner circle.

And so he both was understanding these changes in the evangelical world and also elevated and promoted people who were emblematic of those changes in the evangelical world. So he was really like the first Charismatic president. And that I think is a lot of why you see things like “We think he's the next savior. We believe that the election was stolen from him. We believe that we're engaged in spiritual warfare against the deep state, which is filled with pedophiles.” I think that has a lot to do with how the Charismatic point of view has not only become more prominent within evangelicalism in part because of Trump, but also the way that notwithstanding Trump, the Charismatic movement has infiltrated almost every corner of evangelicalism. And when I say that, I mean someone might go to a more mainstream evangelical church, but they would nonetheless, in almost every facet of their lives, be exposed to this Charismatic worship style and way of thinking.

Paul Waldman: So does that mean that the political details just aren't as important? You're not going to pore over, does he support a six-week ban or an eight-week ban on abortion? That stuff is just less meaningful than the big picture of, is he a warrior who is going to smite our enemies?

Sarah Posner: That's exactly right. And that's part of why I argued that he's cut out the religious right leadership, especially the D.C.-centric religious right leadership, the Tony Perkins, the Ralph Reeds. They're very focused on the policy details. They're working in the minutia: “How do we draft this new regulation inside HHS so that trans people can't get healthcare?” that sort of thing.

Those are exactly the kinds of things that Trump's Charismatic supporters or evangelical supporters who've been influenced by the Charismatic movement don't care about. Why should I trouble my brain over these wonky policy details when Trump is just merely by his presence going to save us?

Paul Waldman: Do you think that's a change that's happened within the religious landscape over the last 10 or 20 years, that there's a more kind of apocalyptic view of what's happening in the world?

Sarah Posner: I think that the apocalypticism was always there. I think the difference with the growing influence and spread of the charismatic movement is the absence of reality and reason. I think, I really think just based on my reporting and observing things like January 6th and its aftermath and the run up to January 6^th that it's precisely this kind of thinking where you believe that you are engaged in spiritual warfare against demonic enemies. You believe that Trump can save America from these demonic enemies. So it's your duty to support him. God wanted him to win the election, so you've got to do anything to help him win the election. And so I think it's this lack of engagement with reality and belief that you are getting direct revelations from God commanding you to ensure that God's will, i.e. Trump get elected, is carried out. And I think that is really the big difference. When you've got the main base of one of the two political parties believing that they are carrying out what they would call a spiritual war, that God has commanded them to do, I think it sheds a lot of light on why such a huge percentage of the Republican base still believes that Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election.

Paul Waldman: So that's because if God has this plan, then it couldn't possibly be that part of God's plan is that we lose an election now and again.

 Sarah Posner: Right. Sociologists have made it more popular to talk about Christian nationalism, which is really just talking about evangelicalism and the Christian right. But Christian nationalism is an ideology that says that God ordained America to be a Christian nation. This was God's will that America be founded as a Christian nation. Over the 200 plus years of America's existence, secularists and fake Christians have chipped away at that. So it's the duty of the real Christians to carry out God's will and restore the Christian nation.

And they used to think that somebody like George W. Bush, who was like you said, one of them, an evangelical himself, was the vehicle to carry this out. But as you can see from the trajectory from Bush to Trump, they were dissatisfied with Bush because he didn't go the whole nine yards.

What they believe Trump believes

Paul Waldman: I've seen polls showing that Republicans and evangelicals, if they're asked, is Joe Biden a person of faith, they say no, even though he goes to mass all the time. But they say that Donald Trump is. Do they actually buy that he thinks he has a divine mission and that this is something Trump sincerely feels?

Sarah Posner: They'll say, maybe he's not a Christian like I am, maybe he's not saved, or as James Dobson said in 2016, he's a baby Christian. But I think the more important thing to them is that they think God anointed him. Now there's a flip side of that that's very important to understand, which is that they think that anybody who claims to be a Christian but supports abortion rights and supports LGBTQ rights and supports church-state separation, isn't really a real Christian. So they completely discount Joe Biden's piety. That's something that has I think been so ingrained in the evangelical mind that I don't even think it's something that they would even spend a lot of time contemplating.

Paul Waldman: There are still some anti-Trump religious leaders out there who will make a familiar argument about his personal failings and the need to live a Christian life, who are concerned about his rhetoric and his general approach to dealing with people. So they're out there. Have they had any success making that case to their flocks that there's really something problematic in having somebody who's so lacking in virtue, not just as a leader, but as an object of genuine worship?

Sarah Posner: Sure, there are religious leaders who have said that, but it's more important to look at, are there evangelical leaders who have said that? And yes, there are, but they've been completely marginalized from the movement. Once you do that, you're persona non grata.

And the person that I'm thinking of is somebody who did that back in 2016, Russell Moore, who was at the time coming to the apex of his career, the new voice of evangelicalism that wasn't as fire and brimstone and bitter and grievance-filled. And he had just had a new book come out, he was getting all this great press, he was on the cover of Christianity Today. And then Trump came along and Moore was riding this wave, and he criticized Trump. And then all of a sudden this career trajectory that looked like it had no limit plummeted. And you know, he basically got shut out of his position at the Southern Baptist Convention. He actually left the denomination completely because he just felt like he couldn't call himself a Southern Baptist anymore after the sex abuse scandal and a bunch of other things that probably also had to do with Trump worship.

The wagons are circled. Not just the religious reinforcement, but the cultural reinforcement of these norms around Christian nationalism, really, but also with Trump as the figurehead of their Christian nationalism are so ingrained now. Everybody saw what happened to Russell Moore. Everybody saw what happened to a handful of other people in evangelical land who criticized Trump. Nobody wants to do that.

Now, are they coming out and endorsing Trump wholeheartedly? No, not all of them. They're holding their cards close to their chest because maybe some of them are hoping Ron DeSantis might get the nomination and then they won't have to worry about who they're going to endorse. None of that matters now because the base is so on board with Trump that it doesn't matter. He doesn't need to seek out anybody's endorsement.

Paul Waldman: Is there anything else that you think at this particular moment that we need to understand before we wrap up?

Sarah Posner: I think we need to understand that the Iowa caucuses do not matter in the larger scheme of things. I was doing some quick math this morning and the number of people who voted in the caucuses last night was 0.07 percent of the total number of people who voted in the 2020 presidential election. And they were predominantly old White evangelical Christians.

But I do think that it is a very important barometer of where White evangelicals are. And I think that's the story that the national media misses. They miss that story in service of the horse race of what Ron DeSantis' second place finish means and who has the momentum in New Hampshire. All of that is just dumb horse race irrelevant prattle. But like I said, it is a strong indicator of what evangelicals are thinking.