Molly Worthen

“Evangelicals and Trump: An Alliance with a Long History”

When a huge majority of white American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016, many observers were baffled. How could conservative Christians support a casino owner and notorious philanderer? How could they overlook his un-Christian cruelty and vulgarity? Since then, evangelicals and outsiders alike have offered dozens of explanations, ranging from the claim that white evangelicals are single-issue voters who care about banning abortion more than anything else, to the suggestion that a white vote for Trump was a vote for racism, pure and simple. However, it’s history, not present-day politics or prejudice, that holds the most satisfying answer. A careful look at the whole sweep of white evangelical history since colonial times helps us understand that their alliance with Trump should not have surprised anyone—because it has been centuries in the making.

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Molly Worthen is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She received her BA and PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason, examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. Her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost, is a behind-the-scenes study of American diplomacy and higher education told through the lens of biography.

Worthen lectures widely on religion and politics and teaches courses on North American religious and intellectual culture, global Christianity, and the history of ideas. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and has written about religion and politics for the New Yorker, Slate, the American Prospect, Foreign Policy,and other publications.