OPINION
Why do so many evangelicals see the former president as God’s anointed one?
On October 15, 2020, in a rare display of humility, Donald Trump told a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, that he was not as famous as Jesus Christ.
“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘You’re the most famous person in the world, by far.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ They said, ‘Yes, you are. I said no.’ They said, ‘Who’s more famous?’ I said, ‘Jesus Christ.’”
This exhibition of modesty was out of character.
Trump, his family and his supporters have been more than willing to claim that Trump is ordained by God for a special mission, to restore America as a Christian nation.
In recent weeks, for example, the former president posted a video called “God Made Trump” on Truth Social that was produced by a conservative media group technically independent of the Trump campaign. He has also screened it at campaign rallies.
The video begins as a narrator with a voice reminiscent of Paul Harvey’s declares: “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”
Why was Trump chosen? The video continues:
God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump.
The video claims to quote God directly:
God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”
The “God Made Trump” video was created by the Dilley Meme Team, described by Ken Bensinger of The Times as an organised collective of video producers who call themselves “Trump’s Online War Machine.” The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, characterises himself as Christian and a man of faith but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church. He says that Trump has “God-tier genetics” and, in response to the outcry over the “God Made Trump” video, Dilley posted a meme depicting Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.
The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question: does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
I posed this and other questions to Barry Hankins, a professor of history at Baylor and the editor of The Journal of Church and State. Hankins replied by email: “Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you’.”
There are photos, Hankins continued, “of evangelicals laying hands on him in the Oval Office, which is something that Christians do when they ordain pastors or commission missionaries, or January 6 insurrectionists carrying large crosses and praying as they attack the Capitol. People at his rallies carrying signs that say: ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus, for President Trump.’ And on and on.”
I asked Hankins whether Trump’s evangelical supporters “see him as a Jesus-like figure”.
Hankins replied, “I think ‘Jesus-like’ is well put. When the indictments came down during Lent last spring, there were references to the powers of government going after Trump like the Roman Empire went after Jesus.”
Trump’s evolution into a Jesus-like figure for some but not all white evangelicals began soon after he began his first presidential campaign. As David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, explained by email: “Some of Trump’s Christian followers do appear to have grown to see him as a kind of religious figure. He is a saviour. I think it began with the sense that he was uniquely committed to saving them from their foes (liberals, Democrats, elites, seculars, illegal immigrants, etc.) and saving America from all that threatens it.”
In this sense, Gushee continued, “a saviour does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfil his divinely appointed role. Trump is seen by many as actually having done so while president.”
This view of Trump is especially strong “in the Pentecostal wing of the conservative Christian world”, Gushee wrote, where “he is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favour”.
The multiple criminal charges against Trump serve to strengthen the belief of many evangelicals about his ties to God, according to Gushee: “The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, ‘They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you’. The idea that he is unjustly suffering and, in so doing, vicariously absorbing the suffering that his followers would be enduring is a powerful way for Trump to be identified with Jesus.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, gave voice to this phenomenon when she protested the filing of criminal charges against Trump. On her way to a pro-Trump rally in Manhattan on April 3, 2023, she told Brian Glenn of the Right Side Broadcasting Network: “Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman Government. There have been many people throughout history that have been arrested and persecuted by radical, corrupt governments, and it’s beginning today in New York City, and I just can’t believe it’s happening, but I’ll always support him. He’s done nothing wrong.”
The more interesting case, Gushee wrote, “is Trump himself. I accept as given that he entered politics as the amoral, worldly, narcissistic New York businessman that he appeared to be. Like all G.O.P. politicians, he knew he would have to win over the conservative Christian voting bloc so central to the party”.
“If people wanted to make him out to be saviour, anointed one and agent of God, he would not object. It enhanced their attention and loyalty and his power over and in this group. Lacking any inner spiritual or moral compass that would seek to deflect overinflated or even idolatrous claims about himself, he instead reposted their artwork and videos and so on. Anyone truly serious about the Christian faith would deflect claims to being a saviour or anointed one, but he did not have such brakes operating. I do not suppose that he actually believed himself to be any of these things, but others did, and it helped him, and it fed his ego, so why stand in the way?”
Certain denominations among evangelicals are more willing to believe Trump is God’s messenger than others. John Fea, a professor at Messiah University in Pennsylvania, wrote by email that “there are evangelicals of the charismatic and Pentecostal variety - the so-called New Apostolic Reformation or Independent Network Charismatics - who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God to rescue the United States from the atheistic, even demonic, secularists and progressives who want to destroy the country by advancing abortion, gay marriage, wokeness, transgenderism, etc”.
“This whole movement,” Fea wrote, “is rooted in prophecy. The prophets speak directly to God and receive direct messages from him about politics. They think that politics is a form of spiritual warfare and believe that God is using Donald Trump to help wage this war. (God can even use sinners to accomplish his will - there are a lot of biblical examples of this, they say.)”
But even this group of Christians does not see Trump as the messiah, Fea wrote: “They will be quick to tell you that only Jesus is the Messiah. They do not believe Trump has special powers, but he is certainly an agent or vessel for God to work through to make America Christian again.”
As far as Trump goes, Fea continued, “he probably thinks these charismatics and Pentecostals are crazy. But if they are going to tell him he is God’s anointed one, he will gladly accept the title and use it if it wins him votes. He will happily accept their prayers because it is politically expedient.”
Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute), contends that Trump’s religious claims are an outright fraud: “Trump has given us adequate evidence that he has little religious sensibility or theological acuity. He has scant knowledge of the Bible, he has said that he has never sought forgiveness for his sins, and he has no substantive connection to a church or denomination. He’s not only one of the least religious but also likely one of the most theologically ignorant presidents the country has ever had.”
Trump, Jones added in an email, “almost certainly lacks the kind of religious sensibility or theological framework necessary to personally grasp what it would even mean to be a Jesus-like, messianic figure.”
Despite that, Jones wrote, “many of his most loyal Christian followers, white evangelical Protestants, have indeed come to see him as a kind of metaphorical saviour figure.”
According to Jones, in order to rationalise this quasi-deification of Trump - despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” - white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.
In that story, Jones recounted in his email, “Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterisation of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled The Trump Prophecy, which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse.”
According to Jones: “White evangelicals’ stalwart, enduring support for Trump tells us much more about who they see themselves to be than who they think Trump is. As I argued in my most recent book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,” Jones continued in his email, “the primary force animating white evangelical Protestant politics - one that has been with us since before the founding of the Republic - is the vision of America as a nation primarily of, by and for white Christians.”
Jones cited a 2023 P.R.R.I. survey that showed “a majority (56 per cent) of white evangelical Protestants, compared to only one-third of all Americans, believed that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world’.”
Jones argued that Trump’s declaration on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 - “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” - was a direct appeal “to this sense of divine entitlement of those who believed this mythology strongly enough to engage in a violent insurrection”.
While Trump has overwhelming backing from white evangelical Christians, many of whom invest him with exceptional ties to God, there are also strong secular factors underpinning this support from evangelicals.
Jim Guth, a political scientist at Furman University and an expert on the role of religion in politics, published an article in 2019, Are White Evangelicals Populists? The View From the 2016 American National Election Study. The essay describes the basis for the strong affinity of white evangelicals for Trump’s conservative populism.
“White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favour strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the wrong track and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”
Guth also found that another salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.
Guth ranked religious groups on their level of support for conservative populism and found that evangelicals end up far above any other religious group, with about two-thirds falling into the populist category. White Catholics, mainline Protestants and Latter-day Saints have significant numbers in that group but far fewer than evangelicals and nowhere near a majority. The religiously unaffiliated and minority ethnoreligious groups have few populists - often very few - with Jews, agnostics/atheists, black Protestants and members of world religions the most antipopulist.
Guth wrote that his “findings help us understand what many have struggled to comprehend: how can white evangelical Protestants continue to provide strong support for President Donald Trump, whose personal values and behaviour trample on the biblical and ethical standards professed by that community?”
The most common explanation, according to Guth, is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.
“The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”: white evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorised” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.
Guth took his analysis a step farther, suggesting that pro-Trump, conservative populism has become entrenched in the white evangelical community: “The pervasive populism of white evangelical laity not only helps explain their support for President Trump but suggests powerful barriers to influence by cosmopolitan internationalist evangelical elites, who want to turn the community in a different direction. As hostile responses to efforts of antipopulist evangelicals like Michael Gerson, Russell Moore, David Platt and many others indicate, there is currently a very limited market for such alternative perspectives among the rank and file. Indeed, the vocal populism of many of the conservative evangelicals filling President Trump’s religious advisory council is probably more representative of the community as a whole.”
Guth went on: “Nor does cosmopolitan or cooperative internationalism find much purchase among local evangelical clergy. Analysis of the 2017 Cooperative Clergy Survey shows that ministers from several evangelical denominations, especially the large Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God, exhibit exactly the same populist traits seen here in white evangelical laity, but in more pronounced form: strong Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extreme moral traditionalism, opposition to trade pacts, militaristic attitudes, resistance to political compromise and climate change denial, among others.”
In other words, conservative populism, with all its antidemocratic implications, has taken root in America. What we don’t know is for how long - or how much damage it will do.
Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The New York Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Thomas B. Edsall
Photographs by: Doug Mills
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
