The Growing Divide Within American Evangelicalism

(ANALYSIS) The last 30 days of American democracy has been revealing on a number of levels, laying bare just how many schisms are in the electorate. Obviously, the primary chasm is between Republicans and Democrats, but there seem to be a lot of more subtle (but maybe more important) fissures becoming visible in just the last few days.

The continued insistence among a small but loud portion of the electorate who are convinced that Donald Trump only lost the election due to massive voter fraud seem to be introducing tremors that are turning hairline cracks into huge fissures inside the Republican Party.

One of those cracks is emerging among the most important voting bloc in Republican politics - white evangelicals.

This latest dust up over alleged electoral fraud is merely exposing a long simmering divide in American evangelicalism between the evangelical elites (often typified by publications like Christianity Today, popular opinion writers like Michael Gerson, and denominational leaders like Russell Moore), and the millions of white evangelicals who occupy pews on a typical Sunday morning all over the United States.

Evangelical elites are calling for cooler heads to prevail, seeking to find places of compromise, and trying to hold strong to the tenets of establishment conservatism. And almost no one is listening.

Just over the weekend, popular Bible teacher Beth Moore tweeted, “I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism”.

And it’s likely to have no impact on the political behavior of white evangelicals. The same people who will buy tens of thousands of copies of Beth Moore’s new Bible study and will pack arenas to the rafters to hear her teach about the Scriptures are ignoring her admonitions and moving further and further to the right every day, in outright defiance of the invocations of those that they say they follow.  

But Beth Moore is just the most recent in a long line of evangelical leaders trying to right the ship.

For instance, when the media began to report stories of children being separated from their families when they were apprehended for illegally crossing the Southern border, Russell Moore described the Trump administration’s policy as an issue of “grave moral concern.” However, in a survey conducted in 2019 and 2020, white evangelical Protestants expressed the strongest support for family separation by a large order of magnitude.

Nearly four in ten white evangelicals agreed that children should be separated from their parents when the parents could be prosecuted for illegal entry into the United States. That’s nearly ten points higher than the next religious group (Muslims), but also 14 points higher than Mormons, 16 points higher than Catholics and double the rate of non-white evangelicals.  

Clearly, Moore’s statements are having very little impact on the views of large swaths of rank and file white evangelicals. An apt metaphor would be a general without an army.

But that’s not the only area in which a yawning divide emerges between the messaging of evangelical institutions and the beliefs of evangelicals in the pews. For instance, World Vision, the largest and most important international evangelical relief organization, issued a public letter to President Trump, decrying an executive order that temporarily halted the refugee resettlement program in the U.S. and significantly lowered the refugee cap each year. During the final year of the Obama administration, 90,000 refugees were granted asylum in the U.S. - Trump lowered that to 15,000 in 2020.

 Allowing people to legally seek asylum in the U.S. due to political or religious persecution from their home countries has been a hallmark of American immigration policy for decades. However, despite the widespread criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration policy from institutions that many churches donate vast sums of money to, rank and file evangelicals support Trump’s aim to reduce legal immigration to the U.S.

In data collected from November 2019, a majority of white evangelicals supported the reduction of legal immigration to the U.S. by 50%. Again, that’s the highest level of support for this policy among any religious groups and at least five points higher than white Catholics. It’s 15 points higher than non-evangelical Protestants and 16 points higher than evangelicals who do not identify as white.

To put it bluntly, evangelical leaders have been unable to meaningfully change the positions of the average white evangelical on immigration policy. But this is not the only area where the views of those in the pews are out of step with those in the pulpit. For instance, at least seven in ten evangelicals support a woman preaching during worship services, and a majority of young evangelicals support marriages between people of the same sex.

One of the key tenets of evangelical Christianity is a concept called “the priesthood of all believers.” Put simply, this is a rejection of the Catholic church’s doctrine that individuals need to communicate to God through a priestly mediator. Instead, each believer has a direct line of communication with the Divine. This view is deeply rooted in a bias against institutional authority and toward individualism. That individualism has allowed evangelicalism to grow exponentially in the U.S. over the last 300 years.  

However, that same distrust of authority makes it nearly impossible for any person or organization to steer the ship of evangelicalism away from the rocks of extremist politics. And now it would appear that the one who shapes evangelical views on key policies concerning “the least of these” does not stand behind a pulpit on Sunday morning, but instead sits behind a desk in the Oval Office - at least until Jan. 20.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge.