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May 30 - June 12, 2025
But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.
By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates “the least of these” for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses.
In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn; his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condition.
More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty.
Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.
To be an evangelical, according to the National Association of Evangelicals, is to uphold the Bible as one’s ultimate authority, to confess the centrality of Christ’s atonement, to believe in a born-again conversion experience, and to actively work to spread this good news and reform society accordingly.
They achieved this dominance not only by crafting a compelling ideology but also by advancing their agenda through strategic organizations and political alliances, on occasion by way of ruthless displays of power, and, critically, by dominating the production and distribution of Christian consumer culture.
As a diffuse movement, evangelicalism lacks clear institutional authority structures, but the evangelical marketplace itself helps define who is inside and who is outside the fold.
The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology.
Christian publishing, radio, and television taught evangelicals how to raise children, how to have sex, and whom to fear. And Christian media promoted a distinctive vision of evangelical masculinity.
A militant evangelical masculinity went hand in hand with a culture of fear, but it wasn’t always apparent which came first.
During the Cold War, the communist menace seemed to require a militant response. But when that threat had been vanquished, conservative evangelicals promptly declared a new war—a culture war—demanding a similar militancy.
Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply as a response to fearful times; for conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat.
“A nation is only as strong as her homes.” In the evangelical worldview, Satan and the communists were united in an effort to destroy the American home. And for Graham, a properly ordered family was a patriarchal one.
Graham’s patriarchal interpretation reflected the more reactionary tendencies of early-twentieth-century fundamentalism. He added a new twist, however, by wedding patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism.
Combining resurgent nationalism with moral exceptionalism, Americans divided the world into good guys and bad guys, and the Western offered a morality tale perfectly suited to the moment, one in which the rugged hero resorted to violence to save the day.34
In 1954, Congress added the words “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the following year Eisenhower signed into law the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s currency.
Many evangelicals, too, found it hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history. To concede this seemed unpatriotic. Having embraced the idea of America as a “Christian nation,” it was hard to accept a critique of the nation as fundamental as that advanced by the civil rights movement.9
Invariably, however, the heroic Christian man was a white man, and not infrequently a white man who defended against the threat of nonwhite men and foreigners.
With Democratic administrations overseeing federally mandated desegregation efforts, and with Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republican Party’s defense of “states’ rights” appealed to southern whites.
As Henley’s strategy suggested, the expanding world of evangelical popular culture would offer an ideal conduit for the dispersal and reinforcement of conservative politics.27
Those inspired by Wayne’s bravado came to see all of life as a war, and toughness as a virtue. This had repercussions on a personal level, and on a global one. Indeed, critics characterized American foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s as afflicted with a “John Wayne syndrome.”46
Family values politics, then, involved the enforcement of women’s sexual and social subordination in the domestic realm and the promotion of American militarism on the national stage.
By the early 1980s, Tim LaHaye, Beverly LaHaye, and Jerry Falwell had established themselves as architects of the Religious Right. Together, they ensured that the enforcement of patriarchal authority, in all its facets, would occupy the heart of evangelical politics for decades to come.
Reconstructionists, on the other hand, were postmillennialists who believed Christians needed to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by bringing all things under the authority or dominion of Christ before Christ returned.
In adopting Reconstructionist teachings piecemeal, premillennialists patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism. Such quibbles apparently paled in comparison to what they held in common—a desire to reclaim the culture for Christ by reasserting patriarchal authority and waging battle against encroaching secular humanism, in all its guises.
Inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation, conservative Protestants had long feared a “one-world” government that would be ruled over by the Antichrist.
In the early twentieth century these fears had attached to the League of Nations, and during the Cold War these fears were often channeled into a virulent anticommunism—though Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) had warned of a European Community that would usher in the reign of the devil.
In the 1980s, Tim LaHaye had called for a Christian news network. Fox News didn’t frame itself in religious terms, but it more than fit the bill. The fit wasn’t a theological one, at least not in terms of traditional doctrine; it was cultural and political. Fox News hawked a nostalgic vision where white men still dominated, where feminists and other liberals were demonized, and where a militant masculinity and sexualized femininity offered a vision for the way things ought to be.
In 1954, evangelicals founded the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, an organization that sought to leverage the popularity of sports for evangelistic purposes.
Only a generation or two removed from “the so-called ‘working class,’” professional men of his generation found themselves “caught between an image of our physically hardworking grandfathers in farms and factories, and the white-collar professionals in antiseptic office buildings.”
Despite pressure for men to achieve higher socioeconomic status, and despite the nascent popularity of “servant leadership,” American culture still associated masculinity with working-class jobs. Times were confusing, indeed.24
The slave trade might have been unbiblical, he allowed, but slavery most certainly was not. To the contrary, the radical abolitionists were the ones “driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.” Horrific descriptions of slavery were nothing more than abolitionist propaganda.
Evangelicals who offered competing visions of sexuality, gender, or the existence of hell found themselves excluded from conferences and associations, and their writings banned from popular evangelical bookstores and distribution channels.
IN THE WAKE OF SEPTEMBER 11, ISLAM REPLACED communism as the enemy of America and all that was good, at least in the world of conservative evangelicalism.
many had turned their attention to the persecution of Christians in other nations, attention that often ended up focusing on the oppression of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. After September 11, the long history of Christian Zionism and heightened interest in the fate of global Christians became intertwined with evangelicals’ commitment to defend Christian America.
How could evangelicals—who for half a century had campaigned on “moral values,” who had called on men to “protect” women and girls—find so many ways to dispute, deny, and dismiss cases of infidelity, sexual harassment, and abuse? Was this simply the case of political expediency, or naked tribalism, eclipsing “family values”?
Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuse of power. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of “seducing” their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper
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If charges were brought, church leaders wrote letters requesting leniency, or urged victims’ families to do so. Families were pressured to forgive perpetrators, and “even children as young as three were forced to meet their abusers for ‘reconciliation.’” One woman was informed by church leaders that her husband’s urge to molest their ten-year-old daughter could be attributed to her own failure to meet his sexual needs; she was told to take her husband back, lock her daughter’s bedroom, and have sex with him regularly.
