Learn about 'workplace moral injury'

Via a guest post on Robert P. Jones's blog, I just learned about a September 2026 online program on moral injury. In this bio: "Rita Nakashima Brock, Ph.D., is a theologian and co-author of Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us and Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire. She offers courses on moral injury twice a year via the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity school."

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Moral injury can be specific to the workplace.

In January 2022, Ludmila Praslova wrote on LinkedIn about "workplace moral injury" following "my Fast Company article which defined it as 'a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations with the potential of physical, psychological, social, or economic harm to others.'

Praslova further says:

"In 1990s, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun developed the idea of post-traumatic growth. They observed that some military veterans or people who experienced hardships such as natural disasters could develop a new appreciation of life, find personal strengths they did not know they had, develop better relationships, explore new possibilities in life, and grow spiritually."

She says that "Julia Phelan, founder of To Eleven," made "a short and informative video about moral injury."

A novel about workplace moral injury

Most Famous Short Film of All Time by Tucker Lieberman (tRaum Books, 2022)

Related: Will HR help?

Insights emerging from a strange actor in the US Capitol riot: How some people believe rights and responsibility work

One of the stranger and yet most revealing comments about ethics I have personally seen has appeared in the context of the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

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Richard Barnett, 60, from Gravette, Arkansas, is one of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He entered the office suite of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and sat at a desk full of papers, a computer, and a telephone. In one photo attributed to photojournalist Jim Lo Scalzo, Barnett gleefully holds up an envelope with Nancy Pelosi's name in the return corner and a typed address for Republican Rep. Billy Long. Barnett removed the envelope from Pelosi's office, replacing it with a coin.

[This photo is by Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock and was published by the New York Post.]

As described by the New York Post:

New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg interviewed Barnett and posted video of the interview to Twitter. In that interview, Barnett maintained: “I didn’t steal it [the envelope]."

Here is his argument: "I bled on it because they were macing me and I couldn’t f-ing see." He added: "So I figure, ‘Well, I’m in her office, I got blood in her office, I’ll put a quarter on her desk even though she ain’t f — ing worth it.'"

He also told 5News: "I put a quarter on the desk because I’m not a thief."

His rationalization seems to be: He was injured while storming the Capitol. (He may feel sorry for himself about that.) Because he has bled on the envelope, it now somehow belongs to him or it otherwise ought to be removed. Additionally and separately, the envelope seems to be purchaseable: If he leaves $0.25 in its place, he has paid for it. The envelope at least is worth that much, even if the Speaker of the House herself is not worth anything, in his view.

Rosenberg tweeted that Barnett had bragged: "I wrote her a nasty note, put my feet up on her desk and scratched my balls." He claimed that the note said: "'Nancy, Bigo was here you bitch.'" Inside Edition published a photo showing a sheet of paper inside a manila folder; directly on the manila folder, someone had written: "WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN."

The Daily Dot reported that Pelosi's "office was vandalized by a number of President Donald Trump supporters, who flipped desks, tore pictures off the walls, and rifled through the speaker's property."

Rosenberg added: "[Barnett] claimed that he was politely knocking on the door of Pelosi’s office when he was pushed in by other protesters. It was a story he knew no one would buy — 'I’ll probably be telling them this is what happened all the way to the D.C. jail,' he said."

[Photo credit: EPA]

On January 2, on a Facebook page under a fake name, Barnett had criticized Pelosi "for using the description 'white nationalist' as a 'derogatory term.'" He argued: "I am white. There is no denying that. I am a nationalist. I put my nation first. So that makes me a white nationalist." Thus, he concluded: Anyone who doesn't identify as a nationalist should "get the f--- out of our nation." (Note: The definition of "white nationalism" is not the appreciation of the nation in which one happens to live while simultaneously happening, quite incidentally, to be white. The correct definition is, rather, the ideology of white identity and the desire to build a white ethno-state.) The Washington Post also reported that he has recently shared conspiracy theories online about the coronavirus vaccine and helped fundraise for a campaign tied to QAnon. Though he supported the police in the context of the 2020 George Floyd protests, the storming of the Capitol in which he participated led to the death of a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick.

Apart from possible charges of domestic terrorism for breaking into the Capitol, he might face federal charges of stealing mail under US Code Section 1708. He was indicted on seven counts and remained in custody as of March 2021.

In April 2020, Barnett received a PPP loan of $9,300. PPP loans are a form of government assistance that were created to address the economic troubles of the coronavirus pandemic: generally, they are supposed to be repaid, though in certain circumstances they can be forgiven.

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One could pull this apart for a long time, if one had time and interest. For me it provokes some insights about how some people believe ethics works and what they believe liberty is about.

Review of Cliff Sims' 'Team of Vipers' (2019)

After he resigned his position, Cliff Sims spent two months in Fall 2018 writing Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House. Many stories are told, some already well known to the public, some not. One buys this book, most likely, to gape at the colossal flameout spectacle that is Donald Trump, as with most things with Trump's name. Sims exposes the thoughtlessness, the chaos, the lack of empathy among his fellow insiders in the campaign and later in the White House, but he does not at all acknowledge the real consequences for ordinary Americans — there might as well be no world outside the Trump insider bubble, for all this narrative concerns itself with — and therefore falls far short of fully grappling with the ethical implications of his complicity.

Previously, Sims was a journalist. "I had written tough stories, including some that helped take down a once-popular Republican governor in my home state," he says. "I had done my best to be accurate. I felt like most members of the White House press corps tried to do the same." Working for the Trump campaign, he met Trump during videorecording sessions. He was part of a campaign team that spent so much time at Trump rallies "that we could laughingly predict when the chants of 'Build the wall,' 'CNN sucks,' 'Lock her up,' and 'Drain the swamp' were about to begin." He had the "weighty responsibility" of occasionally commanding @realDonaldTrump, a Twitter account that is "inarguably one of the most powerful communication instruments in modern political history."

Sims was personally at Trump's side throughout Election Night 2016 and heard the president's talk of gaining the presidency change from "if" to "when" as the votes were counted.

He has plenty of criticism of Trump's character. He notes that Trump has a "recurring habit" of talking out both sides of his mouth in the same interview and then (depending on which of those claims later proves inconvenient to him) denying that he ever said it even though there is a record of it.

Trump's inner circle? It is, he says at the beginning of his book,

"a portrait of venality, stubbornness, and selfishness. We leaked. We schemed. We backstabbed. Some of us told ourselves it was all done in the service of a higher calling — to protect the President, to deliver for the people. But usually it was for ourselves. Most of us came to Washington convinced of the justice of our cause and the righteousness of our principles, certain that our moral compasses were true. But proximity to power changes that. Donald Trump changes that. The once clear lines — between right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness — were eroded until only a faint wrinkle remained."

Many of these stories are familiar, and the book reads to me overall like the 2018 books Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff and Fear by Bob Woodward, except that Wolff and Woodward were not insiders and Sims hasn't fully renounced his insider status. I don't imagine he can get a job within the Trump administration and maybe not even within the Republican Party after this book, so he's renounced that part of his career, but in this book he doesn't own his complicity in the wrongs committed by the campaign and by the administration and he doesn't sketch any redemptive plan for himself or others, so the narrative feels slimy.

Some of the characters

He describes Omarosa Manigault: "if there was any meeting, event, or policy specifically relating to the African American community, Omarosa would make sure she was right in the middle of it. She prided herself on being the President’s only African American senior adviser. That was her calling card, her legitimacy in the White House." He also refers to her as having "earned her spot on TV Guide’s list of 'The 60 Nastiest TV Villains of All Time.'"

Kellyanne Conway, meanwhile, is "a cartoon villain brought to life. Her agenda — which was her survival over all others, including the President — became more and more transparent...as if she’d already collected ninety-eight Dalmatians with only three more to go."

He describes Ivanka Trump as "a living, breathing Barbie doll," which is his way of saying that she is very beautiful, and he adds that she is "unfailingly polite." That is not the same as saying that she is competent, nor that it is good for unelected politicians to employ their unelected family members regardless of whether those family members might have useful skills (see: nepotism). (Nor is politeness the same as kindness, which Sims points out later, in his epilogue, in reference to himself, when he says that he's learned "that while I was by disposition a polite person, I was not by nature a kind one.")

Trump's character

Trump cared more about winning the election than he cares about being President, Sims admits. Indeed, "the only two issues on which he seemed to have deeply ingrained, long-held beliefs were immigration and trade." Elsewhere, however, Sims notes a limitation of Trump's alleged concern for immigration: Shortly after taking office, Trump told a Christian Broadcasting Network reporter that he'd give immigration priority to persecuted Christians seeking asylum. Sims gives a 2018 update: "the number of Christian refugees admitted to the United States had fallen more than 40 percent under Trump. And as I write this, the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center says that the U.S. is only admitting an average of about one Christian refugee from Syria per month."

As an example of Trump's apparent lack of concern for healthcare: After he took office and the time came for the Republicans to overturn the Affordable Care Act, one House Republican, Charlie Dent, broke ranks and told Trump that the proposed changes to Medicaid were not acceptable. Trump tried to persuade him: "We need a win here, Charlie." In other words, it's not about what kind of healthcare the nation needs, but what kind of party loyalty the Republicans need so that that Trump can "win." The President then told Dent: "You’re destroying your party. We were going to do this, we were going to do taxes, we were going to do infrastructure — so many things. Big things. But we needed a win on this. And it’s a very selfish thing to do. Very selfish. It’s very selfish." How Dent's expressed concern about the value of the healthcare proposal could possibly be "selfish" is not explained in this book.

Sims also admits to his own bad faith actions on immigration, but falls far short of taking ownership and holding himself accountable. Reflecting on Stephen Miller, who once said of asylum-seekers, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil,” Sims says:

"...some members of the administration downplayed the successes of immigrants who came to America, assimilated, and made remarkable contributions to society, while going out of their way to vilify all immigrants with the stories of the bad apples. Any time a refugee or immigrant committed a gruesome crime in the United States, for example, Stephen Miller would come down to the comms office demanding a press release about it. Normally I would help make that happen. I was and am a hard-liner on the issue of illegal immigration."

Note how this argument pivots: Stephen Miller selects facts to give a distorted picture of immigrants. I, in a position of power, knowingly enabled him in his racism. I did this because I have a strong political opinion on immigration that aligns with Miller's agenda and the president's agenda. It is one thing to say that you have a right-leaning opinion and that it is strongly held. It is another matter to pretend that this explains or justifies why you enable White House officials in racist lies. Your political opinions oughtn't depend on endorsing statements that you know are false and racist, nor should you make those false and racist statements to propagate your political opinions. That does not make any sense. It only makes sense if you, yourself, are racist and you don't mind telling lies to achieve a racist goal.

Episodes

In an attempt to damage the Hillary Clinton campaign, Sims drafted a list of talking points about the women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment years earlier, a list which, he claims, was not meant to be final and was accidentally leaked to the press. "Trump never mentioned the talking points himself — something tells me he probably liked them," Sims says, "and I quickly realized that such a misstep was light-years from a fireable offense in this campaign." Trump later produced a three-minute video of himself interviewing four of the women, which Sims exclaimed at the time was "the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life." Steve Bannon also succeeded in seating the four women at one of the presidential debates, a move whose purpose may seem unclear. "If the goal was to rattle the Clinton campaign, it definitely worked," Sims observes.

Sims acknowledges that Trump's phrase "American carnage" in his inaugural address was not in keeping with the traditional presidential style. When did he act presidential? Oh, says Sims, after he ordered an anti-terrorism raid in Yemen that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL. There was a big media moment, and he seemed to grasp the gravity of it. Those were good presidential optics, according to Sims.

Problems

At the beginning, he says of the Trump campaign team: "We were each doing the job of numerous Clinton staffers," his evidence being that "the Clinton campaign had literally five times more staffers than we did." But he gives us no reason to assume that the Trump campaign was doing the same work, in amount or in kind. Nor is it necessarily significant that Trump averaged two rallies a day in the month before the election while Clinton averaged only one per day. The number of appearances says nothing about the quality of the speeches, the political engagement of the crowds, the health of the campaign, or the virtues of the overall mission.

In the epilogue, he complained of an "ends-justify-the-means dystopia" exemplified by Hillary Clinton's comment, "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about." If this is his best "gotcha" quote, I am not impressed. There is serious debate over what civility is (is it just politeness? dialogue? democratic norms? can it be one-way, or does it have to be two ways?) and whether it is good or even possible to be civil with someone who is hurting you. It depends in large part on the nature of the harm and the type of civility that is asked for. Especially coming at the end of a book that is a laundry list of Trumpian actual incivilities (those of the man himself and of his inner circle), attempting to pin "both sides" responsibility on Hillary Clinton for saying theoretically, maybe the Democrats should be uncivil in response is not a convincing bait-and-switch. This book includes a memoir of the highly uncivil behavior of planting Bill Clinton's accusers in a debate audience for the purpose of rattling Hillary during her performance. In this quoted sentence from Hillary, she wasn't even complaining about that insult to her; she was objecting to value-based attacks on "what you stand for, what you care about." She was verbally highlighting a general difficulty or impossibility in being civil in response to that. She was making a meta-ethical comment about the purpose and limits of ethics. Saying that she is the dystopian one, following the screaming dystopian Trump campaign confessions that came through this memoir, is some next-level gaslighting. The author failed to draw a moral equivalence. Readers do not have to fall for this gaslighting.

He errs in giving Trump credit for the "marketing genius" invention of a liberal "War on Christmas." The real pioneer of that vapid, bad faith bit of us-them politics was Bill O'Reilly in 2004. The "War on Christmas" had been a seasonal staple on Fox News for over a decade by the time Trump leveraged it.

He says that Trump subscribes to "strong opinions, weakly held," by which he means that Trump tends to change his mind. When I have heard that maxim mentioned in other contexts, it means that someone has intellectual humility and readiness to accept evidence that proves their beliefs incorrect. It does not mean that they abandon their opinions for no reason, for reasons of popularity, or because they are bored.

In the context of Alicia Machado's accusation that Trump had insulted her, Sims notes that it wasn't "news that Donald Trump said something offensive about someone." He asks why cable news channels chose to cover behavior that wasn't news. I ask why he chose to work for a candidate who says offensive things as a matter of course.

He recalls an incident in which Trump was "basically compiling an enemies list — but these enemies were within his own administration." The president said: "Give me their names." Sims avers, "Only in retrospect did I see how remarkable this was." He does not explain why it is remarkable, so it is not a teaching about values, norms, and expectations about naming political enemies.

Sims rehashes the brouhaha about the MLK bust at the White House. A reporter erroneously claimed Trump had removed the bust; the same reporter later corrected himself, saying that the bust had been there all along and he simply hadn't seen it. Sims says: "In this instance, Trump was totally justified in his fury..." I would challenge this. I believe Trump would be justified in a brief flash of anger, perhaps prolonged annoyance, and a desire to correct the record (which the reporter did anyway). But "fury"? Why? Why is a minor reporting error still being litigated two years later? Sims figures that, in Trump's view, the incorrect claim about the MLK bust was part of a deliberate effort "to humiliate him and perhaps even delegitimize his electoral victory." That may well be Trump's perception, but that doesn't mean he was totally justified in taking that view. Sims recalls that Trump directed his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to attack the press for its reporting about the MLK bust and about the inauguration crowd sizes; Spicer was told to respond to the latter with new lies. Trump's friend, the billionaire Tom Barrack, brought in some supposed statistics and facts that made a counternarrative about crowd size. Sims personally typed up the list. "Nobody stopped to make certain it was true. Nobody had time. Spicer, in all his manic glory, had worked us all into a frenzy," he says. "We had no idea that nearly everything we were being told was wrong." Groups do tend to fall into a collective panic mode, so this may be true, but in saying this, he is not taking personal responsibility. After finishing the list as dictated by Tom Barrack, Sims' computer promptly crashed and he lost the entire document. "Between Spicer, Cairncross, and myself, we pieced the prepared remarks back together as fast as we could," he recalls. They were piecing together factually incorrect information from memory, and it was not becoming any more correct. "In retrospect, of course, we were engaging in a senseless, unrecoverable act of self-sabotage....as he prepared to throw away whatever credibility he’d built over decades in Washington, Spicer was quiet as a church mouse, almost like he was walking to his own execution." He frames this as a regret:

"Quietly, without the glare of the lights, I was embarrassed, too. I would go on to write countless presidential statements and remarks, numerous @realDonaldTrump and @PressSec tweets, thousands of talking points, and dozens of op-eds in major publications. Nothing I wrote was a bigger disaster — and more damaging to the credibility of the White House — than the first piece of work I put my hands to. Partly, I hoped, this could be attributed to typical first-day chaos. But the chaos never really went away."

But saying that one is "embarrassed" about a workplace failure is not the same as recognizing the damage it caused and having ideas about what one will do differently in the future and about general principles that others can follow.

"In Harry Hurt III’s Trump biography, Lost Tycoon, he wrote that Trump’s father, Fred, used to tell his sons, 'You are a killer ... You are a king ... You are a killer ... You are a king.'...if you’re trying to make sense of almost any action he took as President, this is the prism through which everything should be viewed."

During the campaign, Trump paid attention to crowd sizes as if "they were a running tabulation of his wealth." He inflated these numbers according to the principle of "truthful hyperbole," as he termed it in his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal (1987), because: exaggeration gets sales results; lies attract fact-checkers, and any media attention is good, and he likes to provoke reactions ("Trump is history’s greatest troll").

Some of his memories are apocryphal: He argues about whether Spicer stole a mini fridge from fellow White House staffers as he departed his position. (No, says Spicer; yes, says Sims.) He remembers Anthony Gilberthorpe, who claimed to have a “photographic memory" of the interaction between Trump and Ms. Leeds on a flight over two decades earlier. (Ms. Leeds had accused Trump of molesting her on that flight.) Other members of Sims' team made a snap decision to fly Gilberthorpe from Britain to New York, where he creeped out Sims by "look[ing] like the kind of guy who’d pull up to playgrounds with a basket full of candy" and eating all the staff pizza, and ultimately the man was given a brief appearance at the end of a Fox News segment to defend Trump's character. Sims gives a literary sigh of resignation: "as Donald Rumsfeld once put it, you went to war with the army you had." Well, no. That episode could have been done differently.

Some of his perceptions don't quite gel together. On the one hand: "The way we saw it, they [the Clinton campaign insiders] were the spoiled rich kids whose mommies and daddies bought them BMWs for their sixteenth birthday. We [the Trump campaign insiders] were still riding the bus to school and wearing last year’s fashions." On the other hand: Keith Schiller, who had led Trump's security staff for over a decade and who became Director of Oval Office Operations, "was one of the only nonbillionaires that Trump viewed as a peer." So, Trump generally surrounds himself with billionaires, yet all his staffers think of themselves as poor upstarts? If this is true, it's a strange juxtaposition that should have been fleshed out more in the book.

Another example of something that doesn't gel: As a journalist, Sims is alarmed by Trump's use of the phrase "enemy of the people." Sims recognizes that phrase from Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao. "I doubt Trump was aware of the history of the phrase," he says. "Then again, maybe he was fully aware and used it anyway, knowing it would spark outrage. Regardless, it made me squirm. But I never told Trump that, or tried to explain this, which was a failing on my part. So if the choice was between calling reporters enemies of the United States or mocking their errors — and it was — I was all in for the Fake News Awards." I disagree that the only choice is between labeling journalists "enemies" or "fake" (because no other U.S. politicians use this language); I also disagree that the label "fake" is nothing more than a jest or a mocking insult (because disinformation and misinformation are real phenomena, and to accuse all journalists of peddling disinformation can have a chilling effect on the press and it certainly misrepresents the role of a free press in a democratic society, and in the public's perception there may little difference between someone who is "fake" and someone who is an "enemy"). Sims did not mention Trump's July 2017 tweet showing him punching a representation of a CNN reporter, nor the mass shooting in the Capital Gazette newsroom in June 2018, nor — as Sims' book was going to press in October 2018 — Trump's response to the murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, Trump's praise of the assault of Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs by a Republican congressman, or the pipe bombs sent to CNN.

I wrote this piece about 7th anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi's murder. On the costs of speaking the truth in today's world. And how Jamal's memory still stalks Saudi Arabia--- and the Washington Post. open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

[image or embed]

— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) October 2, 2025 at 1:35 PM

"Have you lying, unprofessional jerks at ABC, considered that the teens were annoying? That a lot of people didn’t even like those teens very much? That those teens had bad vibes and probably would have grown up to have even worse vibes?"

[image or embed]

— McSweeney's (@mcsweeneys.net) November 22, 2025 at 10:01 AM

Recalling one occasion when the Trump camp received positive news coverage, he called it "jarring. We had never experienced anything quite like this before. This must be what it feels like to be a Democrat." No, no, no. Anyone who watches or reads news coverage of the United States knows that Democrats have their share of negative coverage. In recent years, with his false rumors about President Obama's birth certificate, Trump has been a major source of negative media attention on Democrats. Sims, working for a campaign that mounted a successful effort to seat four accusers of Bill Clinton in a debate audience, knows this better than anyone. The line that Democrats always have positive media coverage is utter nonsense. It is not supported by any argument within this book. It's some kind of leftover Trump insider snipe that is not reality-based. It does not demonstrate that serious reflection has taken place.

He expresses some regret: "But as is so often the case, when I point my accusatory finger at someone else, I have three more pointing back at me. My greatest regret from my time in the White House is that I wasn’t a better picture of my faith to the President and my colleagues." I find this insufficient. He should also regret hurting people. He spent 2018 writing this book. During that time, he reflected on his own memories but did not interview ordinary people who have been injured by this administration's policies, both in the United States and in the ripple effects in other countries. Nor does he explain in this book exactly what his faith is (beyond the implication that he is Christian evangelical), what its specific values are, and what it would have advised him to do differently. Thus when he says he wants to be "a better picture of my faith to the President and my colleagues," I don't see him saying he wishes he'd helped the downtrodden instead of treading down upon them, but rather only that he he wishes he personally looked better, in some undefined way, in front of powerful people.

After Sims resigned, Trump stopped taking his calls.

"This wasn’t personal to him. And in a way I didn’t take it personally, either. He hadn’t lifted a finger for countless loyal aides before me, and I’m sure he wouldn’t for countless loyal aides to come. It was well known that in Trump World, loyalty was mostly a one-way street. But it’s one thing to know that, another thing entirely to experience it firsthand—to be unceremoniously abandoned by the President of the United States. I had let my personal relationship with the President blind me to the one unfailing truth that applied to anyone with whom he didn’t share a last name: we were all disposable."

These are Sims' concluding words, and they make sense if the book is a reflection on how he was hurt and not on how he hurt other people. But it isn't. Regular USAmericans know that bigoted behavior has escalated during Trump's presidency. If the author isn't reckoning with this reality, there's no real reckoning.

Areas that were not given much weight:
Syria is mentioned 12 times, North Korea 7, Iran 2.
Russia is mentioned 10 times. Putin, 1. Mueller, 1.
Climate, 2, in the context of the pullout from the Paris agreement.
Abortion, 8.
Gay, transgender, LGBT: 0.

In his epilogue, he says, "I’m proud that the president I served was Donald Trump." We must consider that his pride concerns a man he called "history’s greatest troll" within this very book, a liar who surrounds himself with villains and befriends only billionaires. The book is titled Team of Vipers. If that's a point of pride for him, I don't think he's really internalized his regret. I think this two-month manuscript is another example — just like the script given to Sean Spicer about the inauguration crowds — of something that was rushed to press.

Update

This is him, August 14, 2022 on Twitter:

Evangelicals disappointed in Trump's character

President Trump is perhaps the least demonstrably Christian U.S. president ever. When he and First Lady Melania Trump attended the funeral service for George H. W. Bush on Dec. 5, 2018, they did not recite the Apostle's Creed that was printed in the program. Seated next to them, Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton recited the prayer.

But how do contemporary Christians perceive him?

It can be tricky to pin down what evangelicals think of Trump, in part because it's an impermanent demographic based on self-identification.

It is well known that 81% of self-identified white evangelicals told exit pollsters they voted for Trump in 2016. However, as Napp Nazworth points out, this self-identified group may not correlate to the people who actually attend church or the people who don't vote. There may be many churchgoing Americans who aren't active voters but nevertheless don't like Trump.

The most often cited number when it comes to evangelical support for Trump is "81%," which is likely what Falwell had in mind. But that number comes with many caveats: 1) it only includes white evangelicals, 2) it only includes self-identified evangelicals, which means non-churchgoers and people who don't hold evangelical beliefs could be included, 3) non-voters were not polled and so their numbers are not included in the denominator, and 4) it was based upon exit polls, which are among the least reliable polls.

It's important to note the decline in Christian influence in the United States. Many commentators have suggested that Christians are making a kind of "deal" with the man who happens to have gained power, someone who — just perhaps — they otherwise would not have admired.

Nina Burleigh wrote for Newsweek on April 16, 2018 that white evangelicals have experienced a sharp demographic decline over the last decade. Burleigh attributes this to their children "leaving the faith in droves over its anti-LGBT and anti-science positions"; today, 92 percent of white evangelicals are over age 30. "During the 2016 primary season, white evangelicals were largely divided in their opinion of Trump...But once Republicans nominated him, his favorability among white evangelicals jumped to 61 percent in September 2016...Now, according to a poll conducted in late March [2018], after the Stormy Daniels story was widely discussed, support has risen to a record 75 percent." This suggests that this demographic is substantially unconcerned "by his lawyer’s hush money to Stormy Daniels," "revelations that the married President had a year-long affair with an adult film actress after First Lady Melania gave birth to their son Barron," and "shady business deals". After all, as Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels wrote in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, "A great many of his supporters were thrilled to hear white Christian America forcefully defended against its perceived enemies. Those were their identities. He was their hero. Whether he got the facts right did not matter."

MUST WATCH: In this video, from April 5, 2018, Trump categorically denies knowing anything about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels

Trump claimed he doesn't know why Cohen made the payment or where he got the money

Everything he says here is a liehttps://t.co/HeGy7d31XG

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 18, 2023

THERE ARE AUDIO TAPES "In a conversation captured in an audio recording in approximately September
2016 concerning Woman 1’s account, the Defendant [Trump] and Lawyer A [Cohen] discussed how to obtain the
rights to Woman 1’s account from AMI and how to reimburse AMI."

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) April 4, 2023

An update on the hush money payments, regarding a lawyer handling the appeal of that case:

Jared Yates Sexton: "We're very lucky, for the record, that this overt corruption is happening. No one thought to put in the law that you can't name your personal lawyer [James M. McDonald] who's in a suit against the Southern District of New York to make them the head of the Southern District of New York. You know why? 'Cause most people's brains don't work that way. You know? You're just like, Well, what are you talking about, I never thought that could happen."
Nick Hauselman: "Well, hang on — The lawyer himself can't accept that position. That's really part of it, right? That's what you would go to law school for, to learn."
Jared: "Well, you'd think — It depends on the law school."
Nick: "I guess so."
Jared: "It depends on where you're going and what they're teaching you, and also whether you carry those ethics into your regular life."
(We're Talking About Revolutionary Shit, Here, Muckrake Podcast, June 19, 2026, 30:23–31:05)

Angie Maxwell wrote in the Washington Post in July 2019 that the Republican Party's late 20th-century "Southern strategy" has "finally come to fruition, and it is still working today. The GOP’s partisan conversion of Southern white evangelicals is so complete that no longer must a Republican candidate hold authentic religious beliefs to secure their support. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Indeed, only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent of them still voted for him."

Though "Democrats like to pretend [the realignment that sorted the two parties along lines of civil rights] was over and done with in the 1960s," the sorting continued until 2007 when Barack Obama ran. (Vikram Bath, The Democratic Party Was Not Always This Way, 2018, and see also The Republican Party Was Not Always This Way)

Inspired by an exchange here yesterday, I wrote up a short piece at CAMPAIGN TRAILS about an infamous Lee Atwater quotation that just about everyone gets wrong.

[image or embed]

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 5:07 PM

White evangelicals "went from being the least likely to the most likely to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality had nothing to do with public service," an article in the New York Times said in June 2018, referencing a September 2017 article in the paper.

As an example of how Trump merges his lifelong interpersonal habits with his policy: On December 13, 2019, reporter Bob Woodward interviewed Trump, who said he instantly had a good feeling about North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Un. Trump said, as Woodward quoted him in his book Rage: "You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it's all going to happen. It doesn't take you 10 minutes, and it doesn't take you six weeks. It's like, whoa. Okay. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."

John Pavlovitz wrote a searing indictment of the inconsistency of Trump's evangelical supporters. In January 2018, he wrote an open letter addressed to "White Evangelicals," berating them:

For eight years [during the Obama administration] they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.

* * *

you never once suggested that God placed him where he was,
you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family,
you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities,
you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance,
you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy,
your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership,
your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him,
you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

* * *

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth — that the mind boggles.

* * *

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities.
They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus.
They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it.
They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus — not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

Ross Douthat wrote for the New York Times in September 2018 that a new survey by the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins for the Voter Study Group found that whether a Trump voter attends church predicted their views on race. Among Trump voters who never go to church, only half had positive feelings about Black people, and a quarter said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. Among Trump voters who frequently go to church, 71 percent had positive feelings about Black people, and only 9 percent said their own whiteness was "very important" to their identity. While the religious and secular groups in the survey had similar incomes, the secular people were "less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general." (Emily Ekins wrote a separate article about it, concluding that "encouraging conservatives to disengage from religion...may in fact make it even harder for left and right to meet in a more compassionate middle.") But why did the churchgoing people vote for Trump, if they disagree with him about race? It seems they made "a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery." Early Christianity made such a bet with the Roman emperor Constantine. However, with Trump, it's "the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism....it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it."

Others have a different interpretation. Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, notes the study's conclusion that "religious participation may serve a moderating function in our politics" [emphasis mine] and he clarifies that he believes that "white evangelicals are no moderating force. They are the core of our extremist president’s support." [emphasis mine] Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, an Episcopalian, and an openly gay man running as a Democratic candidate for President in 2020, said in an April 2019 television interview that evangelicals' "hypocrisy is unbelievable" when it comes to their support for Trump.

Paula White, the "spiritual adviser" to Trump, who said a prayer at his inauguration and who formed a White House evangelical advisory council, "has ratcheted up support among evangelicals for the president’s hard-line immigration policies and used her Facebook following of more than 3 million to champion the idea that God has blessed Trump’s plans," according to the Washington Post. When challenged with the proposition that Jesus was a refugee, she once answered, that Jesus had done nothing illegal. "If he had broke the law, then he would have been sinful and he would not have been our Messiah." (Other Christians have challenged this interpretation, as Jesus was, famously, executed.) When she spoke at the rally in June 2019 at which he announced his reelection campaign, she told the crowd, "let every demonic network who has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus!” she prayed. She added: "I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy — every strategy — and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny."

"Today, I submitted another FOIA request to the Department of Justice after the Department used Trump’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission mailing list to promote a White Christian Nationalist event scheduled to take place on the National Mall.

They’re calling it “Rededicate 250,” and the list of speakers reads like a Who’s Who of Christian extremism, including multiple members of Trump’s Cabinet, the Chancellor of Liberty University, the president of Hillsdale College, Paula White, Franklin Graham, and many more." (Geoffrey T. Blackwell, Legal Director of American Atheists, May 12, 2026)

Christian Author Catches Holy Hell Online After Ball-sy 'Joke' About Trump Falls Flat Eric Metaxas insisted that critics simply didn't get his "sarcastic humor." Ed Mazza, HuffPost, May 18, 2026

Whether or not conservatism today is stripping Christianity of its religious content, it is giving it power, and this does reverse the decline of the influence of Christian institutions. Katherine Stewart, author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children wrote in a May 2018 op-ed for the New York Times:

"There is a story going around, on both the left and the right, that America’s 'true believers' are a declining force and are now conducting desperate, defensive maneuvers in a secularizing society. But that is not how the leaders of the Christian Nationalist movement see it — because it is not true. They played a key role in putting President Trump in power. They are protecting him now, as they giddily collect their winnings in legislatures and in the courts. Why should they doubt that they can pull off the same trick again?

What Christian nationalists know — and many of us have yet to learn — is that you don’t need a majority to hijack a modern democracy. You just need a sizable minority, marinating in its grievances, willing to act as a bloc, and impervious to correction by fact or argument. Make this group feel good about itself by making other people feel bad about themselves, and dominion may well be in reach."

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Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, planned ten "campaign-style rallies" throughout California in late May and early June 2018 in advance of that state's primary election. The goal is to turn out the evangelical vote. Other kinds of Christians are not receiving the same outreach to attend these rallies, "a tactic that plays directly into the growing separatist sentiment among many white evangelicals," according to Neil J. Young, author of We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics. Of this attempt to stoke "white evangelical resentment and outrage," Young wrote: "Such a dark and alarmist vision might seem to contradict the hopeful joy evangelicals claim their faith provides, but it aligns perfectly with the cynical and conspiratorial worldview Trump has brought to the center of American politics. As such, white evangelicals’ support for Trump doesn’t expose their hypocrisy, as plenty have contended, so much as it plainly reveals their heart." On 13 June, even Graham told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump's policy of separating would-be immigrant families at the border is "disgraceful, it’s terrible to see families ripped apart and I don’t support that one bit." He stopped short, however, of holding Trump accountable: "I blame the politicians for the last 20, 30 years that have allowed this to escalate to where it is today."

(Franklin Graham later complained about the ten Republican congresspeople who voted to impeach Trump for incitement to insurrection in 2021. He said they must have betrayed him for "thirty pieces of silver" — i.e., he couldn't imagine they had cast their votes on principle — though he said one must "wonder" what the material reward was.)

Whether Christian power is seen to be declining or rising, many see the new administration as an opportunity to advance a theocratic-leaning political agenda.

This was how it worked on an institutional level. Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, in conversation with Andrew Keen, published May 18, 2020 on the "Keen On" on LitHub (recording: 5:30–6:30)

I think that the relationship between the leadership of the Council for National Policy and Donald Trump is as purely transactional as you’re going to get in politics. There was a deal cut in fairly stark terms in 2016, in June, where the conservatives from the fundamentalists and these business interests came to Trump and said, 'You don’t have any campaign organization. You don’t have a war chest. You don’t have people on the ground. We’ve got all of those. We’ve got campaign in a box. What we want from you is the right to nominate your federal judges. We want our guy, Mike Pence, as your running mate. We want to write the social platforms for the Republican National Convention.' And the deal was struck, and both sides have honored them. So I think it’s the ultimate quid pro quo.

The deal has also been internalized on an individual, personal level by many people. The theologian Roger E. Olson wrote for Patheos in August 2018 in "Is Trump “Our Cyrus?"

Here I’m not talking about those evangelical Christians who, among others, voted for Trump in order to vote against Hilary Clinton as the “lesser of two evils.” I’m talking about the many evangelical Christians who are now lionize Trump as a kind of new national messiah—not on a par with Jesus Christ but...on a par with whom?

A growing common answer is "He’s our Cyrus.'

* * *

During his approximately thirty year reign he [Cyrus] released the Hebrew people in exile to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple that was destroyed earlier by the Babylonians....the Hebrew people did not consider Cyrus one of them, of course, but a powerful ally — and one raised up by God to deliver them from exile and bondage."

Olson issues a warning: "I strongly suspect that he [Trump] is manipulating his conservative Christian 'base' and would turn on them in a moment if it suited his agenda to be powerful."

Is it hypocritical? Well, yes. Kathleen Parker on Aug. 31, 2018 in the Washington Post decried "the utter hypocrisy of allowing such a foul-mouthed, race-baiting misogynist to occupy the Oval Office after many of these same paragons of virtue impeached Bill Clinton for lying about his irresponsible affair with an intern." But it can be politically expedient to ignore the personal failings of one's own candidate. James Traub wrote in the Atlantic on July 18, 2018:

Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party. Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes. Thus Christian conservatives hold their tongue rather than jeopardize their chances of getting a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The party of personal morality thus becomes the party of indifference to personal morality.

On another front, where Christians are trying to consolidate political power, it isn't exclusively white Christians who are doing so.

Katherine Stewart profiled Jim Domen for the New York Times on June 20, 2018. Domen (who considers himself a "former homosexual") founded Church United and has led it since 2014. It is "a multiethnic group of pastors from a variety of traditions — including Pentecostal and Catholic clergy members" with a mission of “helping pastors transform California at the government and church level.” Domen supports Trump, saying that he has “done more for the Church than many Christian presidents have.” Church United's work to "politicize pastors," as Stewart put it, "started with six affiliated pastors in 2014. The group now counts approximately 500 member pastors."

Some people feel torn.

An example of a middle-of-the-road position is given by Rev. Samuel Rodríguez, who serves at a church in Sacramento, Calif. and who has had private conversations with Trump in the White House. He publicly condemned Trump for his misogynistic, crude comments on the Access Hollywood tape and is also fighting Trump's immigration agenda, but he is willing to work with Trump overall. In May 2018, Rodríguez told BBC World:

"Trump ha hecho más por el movimiento evangélico que cualquier otro presidente desde la época de Ronald Reagan. Se puede medir. Hay 20 puntos que uno puede decir claramente: aquí firmó una orden ejecutiva, aquí firmó una ley, aquí avanzó..."

* * *

"El movimiento latino evangélico no está casado con Donald Trump. Tampoco estaba casado con Obama. Estamos casados con una agenda que va mucho más allá de la personalidad."

Independently of whatever "deal" may be struck here, what do evangelicals feel about Trump's character?Many are disappointed. Molly Wicker wrote for the New York Times on May 19, 2017:

"Evangelical voters have long demanded that politicians exemplify Christian character and morality in the public sector. In Donald Trump, however, evangelicals were confronted with a candidate who pledged allegiance to conservative ideals, but embodied none of them.
* * *
Claire Waugh, a senior from Woodbridge, Va., told me that she refused in November to have a Trump vote on her conscience, and that she hates to see the country being "led by a man who spews vitriol against anyone who is unlike him, a man who tries to invoke God’s name when he is acting utterly ungodly.""

Some Christians think that theology, not secular politics, is the way forward.

David Kuo, who worked for the George W. Bush administration, wrote in his 2006 memoir Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction when he was facing a terminal illness (pp. 262-263):

"We Christians need a short fast from politics.

We need to eschew politics to focus more on practicing compassion. We need to spend more time studying Jesus and less time trying to get people elected. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year in support of conservative Christian advocacy groups such as the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, and the panoply of similar groups, let's give that money to charities and groups that are arguably closer to Jesus' heart. And we Christians should spend less time arguing with those on the other side and more time communing with them."

More recently, Daniel Burke wrote for CNN on 13 June 2018 about the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Dallas that "a small but significant slice" of the 10,000 participants objected to the planned address by Vice President Mike Pence. Younger people seemed more concerned with evangelizing the message of Jesus (what they call "The Great Commission") than with aligning themselves with the Republican Party. Garrett Kell, a pastor, said alignment with the Republican Party was also strategically fraught as it could affect the Southern Baptists' interracial and international relations. (The Southern Baptists formed as a pro-slavery splinter group in 1845, and Pew's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study found that the Southern Baptists remain 85 percent white.) Pence did address the Convention that day, and Burke followed up, saying that "much of Pence's speech was dedicated to praising the accomplishments of his boss, President Donald Trump." He added: "The denomination's executive committee will consider a motion to cease inviting elected officials to speak at national conventions."

Jonathan Merritt, writing for The Atlantic on 16 June, said that the crowd at the annual meeting was significantly younger than he remembered from his childhood. He quoted Baylor University history professor Barry Hankins as saying that this demographic change "has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis". They elected 45-year-old J.D. Greear as the president of the Southern Baptists who has promised to make an effort to proportionately represent women and people of color in leadership roles. The denomination addresses public policy through its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which opposes President Trump, and Greear said that inviting Pence to speak "sent a terribly mixed signal" about whether the Southern Baptists stood for religion or politics. At least some Southern Baptists, Merritt said, "appear to recognize that tethering themselves to Donald Trump...places the moral credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention at risk." Furthermore, although "Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines," they, too, are experiencing the same decline; they have lost 1 million members in the past 15 years. Tying themselves to conservative politics is therefore, many conclude, not the answer to reversing this trend.

Michael Gerson, a white evangelical conservative, noted the demographic decline in an August 2019 op-ed for the Washington Post, pointing out that a quarter of Americans over age 65 are white evangelical Protestants, but only 8 percent of Americans ages 18-29 have that identity. Gerson said it is a "scandal" that white evangelicals are not in a state of "panic" about this decline." Gerson said that evangelical support of "religious liberty" legislation reflects "a larger anxiety about lost social standing." He argues that evangelicals should reemphasize their "religious calling," as they did "in late-18th-century and early-19th-century Britain, or mid-19th-century America," rather than continuing to behave "like another political interest group."

In her article "The Religious Right Has It All Wrong. Trump is a 'Test,' Not Their Savior," Cynthia Dagnal-Myron said she believes that Jesus is "asking Christians, through Trump, to follow His lead repeatedly," — note that the capitalized "His" refers to Jesus, not Trump — by having Trump break every law in The Book to see if we're paying attention."

Carol Kuruvilla wrote for Huffington Post in April 2019:

"In a 2011 poll from PRRI and the Religion News Service, 60% of white evangelicals surveyed said that a public official who 'commits an immoral act in their personal life” cannot still “behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.' But in October 2016, right after The Washington Post published an 'Access Hollywood' recording of Trump making lewd comments about sexual assault, the number of white evangelicals who weren’t willing to give politicians a pass for immoral behavior dropped to 20%. ...white evangelicals were even less likely in late 2018 to connect politicians’ private and public lives in this way. Only 16.5% said they believed privately immoral behavior translates to unethical professional conduct."

In the most recent study, people did not seem to be responding based on principle as much as they seemed to be responding to a particular politician. When white evangelicals had Bill Clinton in mind, they were four-and-a-half times more likely to say that privately immoral behavior was relevant to public life than when they had Donald Trump in mind.

In May 2019, the Jim Bakker show offered viewers the chance to buy a coin with the faces of Cyrus and Trump for a $45 donation. On the show, Lance Wallnau described Trump as "a Cyrus to navigate through the storm" of American politics. He described the coin as "a point of contact" to use in prayer.

There is also faith-based activism on the left, and, of this, Laura E. Alexander wrote in August 2019:

"...there’s always been progressive Christian activism in the United States.

I have studied religious thought and action around migrants and refugees for some time – including analyzing the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches that offers refuge to undocumented immigrants and advocates for immigration reform.

* * *

Talk of an emerging “religious left” is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation.

But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump’s immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America."

A Fox News poll conducted October 6-8, 2019 found that, among white evangelicals, 71% of approved of the job Trump is doing. Only 44% had confidence in Congress and only 26% approved of the job Congress is doing. These white evangelicals had favorable opinions of Trump (70%), Pence (64%), the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani (46%), the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (21%), Adam Schiff (17%), Bill Barr (34%), Mitch McConnell (37%), Hillary Clinton (24%), the Democratic Party (24%), the Republican Party (63%). And 57% of them were at least somewhat troubled by the situation surrounding Trump's scandal with the Ukrainian president. 73% were concerned about Trump's allegations against Joe Biden in that scandal. While 28% of white evangelicals said that Trump should be impeached and then removed from office, 64% said that he should not be impeached at all. 38% of them said it is, in general, appropriate for a president to ask foreign countries to investigate their political rivals. 34% said they believe Trump feels it is more important to do what is best for him as an individual rather than what is best for the country.

That 71% approval rating among white evangelicals represents a decline from "the 81 percent that backed him over Hillary Clinton in 2016," Eugene Scott wrote in the Washington Post, and it is possible that Trump's military decision that enabled violence against Christians in Syria will cause him to lose more Christian support among American voters.

In October 2019, the Public Religion Research Institute found that, as reported by Relevant Magazine, "75 percent of white evangelicals say they approve of him and, what’s more, 31 percent of that group say there’s 'almost nothing' Trump could do to lose their support." By contrast, "86 percent of black Protestants disapprove of Trump, 67 percent of which say there’s almost nothing Trump could do at this point to change their minds," and a majority of black Protestants, Hispanic Protestants, and Catholics believe that he encourages white supremacists.

A majority of white evangelicals (60%) think that Trump is morally upstanding, a Pew survey found in early 2020. "The evangelical assessment," an NPR article explained, "does come with some reservations. Only about 15% of white evangelicals, for example, say 'morally upstanding' describes Trump 'very well,' while another 45% say the term applies to Trump 'fairly well.'" (Here, they differ from the American population as a whole, two-thirds of which say that "morally upstanding" does not describe Trump.) Furthermore, in the NPR summary: "Almost two-thirds of white evangelicals see Trump as at least 'somewhat religious,' despite his profanity, his sporadic church attendance, and his evident unfamiliarity with the Bible."

Between April and June 2020, white evangelicals' approval of Trump's performance dropped from 78% to 72% in a Pew survey, and yet 82% of them still said they would vote for Trump over Biden. (Pew found that 77% of white evangelicals voted for Trump over Clinton in 2016.)

Other polls had more drastic results. Over two months (March-May 2020), white evangelicals' support for Trump dropped from 77% to 62%. (PRRI survey) "Militant white masculinity has always been at the center of family-values evangelicalism," Kristin Kobes du Mez wrote. "They denigrated feminism, pacifism, and political correctness, and championed war, law enforcement, the military, and the Second Amendment in order to promote a culture where men could exercise their God-given, testosterone-driven authority." That is why, Kobes du Mez argues, one of his biggest problems for his image in the summer of 2020 has been "his West Point commencement address was derailed by his halting descent down a ramp and apparent difficulty in lifting a glass of water to his lips." Any hint of weakness, physical or otherwise, damages his standing with the "family values" crowd.

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On the other hand, though, people who approve of Trump may be more likely to declare themselves evangelical essentially on his behalf. From 2016–2020, Ryan Burge wrote in the New York Times, "there was no significant decline in the share of white Americans who identify as evangelical Christians. Instead, the report found the opposite: During Donald Trump’s presidency, the number of white Americans who started identifying as evangelical actually grew." This is based on a 2021 report from the Pew Center. However, Burge writes: "The number of self-identified evangelicals has likely not increased over the last few years because evangelicals have been effective at spreading the Gospel and bringing new converts to the church." Instead: "millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P." In recent years, the share of evangelicals who say they rarely attend church has grown, and the non-churchgoing evangelicals are simultaneously becoming more likely to say they are politically conservative. It also appears that non-Christians — for example, Muslims — are adopting the label "evangelical" because they think it means "very religiously engaged and very politically conservative." So the label "evangelical," as a self-descriptor, is changing to mean politically conservative and also some kind of religious, whether that is cultural Christianity or another religion. The result is that "more and more Americans are conflating evangelicalism with Republicanism — and melding two forces to create a movement that is not entirely about politics or religion but power."

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Many white evangelical Christian voters, says Jennifer Rubin in November 2021,

essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government [in their view] is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity. ... The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation.

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Katherine Stewart said in May 2022 that some Christian nationalism "overlaps with the Great Replacement theory and demographic paranoia in general," although among Latino Christian nationslists, "the argument is not that a preferred racial group is being replaced but that a preferred religious and cultural value system (with supposed economic implications) is under threat.” Stewart prefers to call it "religious nationalism": "a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the 'right' religion in recovering that lost greatness."

---

Kathleen Belew writes:

White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise.

Although, a distinction is added in this January 2021 academic article by Ruth Braunstein "identifies two ideal-typical versions of this [Christian nationalist] narrative: the white Christian nation and the colorblind Judeo-Christian nation."

---

From a New York Times story by Ben Smith:

Though Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "wrote in 2016 that Mr. Trump was 'the Great Evangelical Embarrassment,'" nevertheless in 2020 he supported Trump "because Democrats are 'antagonistic to biblical Christianity' on issues like abortion and transgender rights."

By contrast, Marvin Olasky, the editor of the Christian magazine World since 1994, has continued to oppose Trump. He wrote that he "deplored the 'Flight 93' approach — a reference to the hijacked flight on 9/11 where passengers banded together to storm the cockpit — that he sees among many conservatives, who, he says, believe they must use any means necessary to keep America from being destroyed by liberals." He submitted his resignation in November 2021 because he disagrees with the magazine's direction toward American political conservatism. He plans to produce the annual Roe v. Wade issue in early 2022 and then leave.

As Thomas Zimmer explained ("Do Americans Value Democracy?", Substack, Democracy Americana, November 19, 2023):

"Trump’s appealed to the Right in 2016 precisely because he made it clear he wouldn’t be bound by the rules. That’s exactly what reactionary intellectual/pundit Michael Anton captured so precisely in his infamous “Flight 93” essay, published shortly before the 2016 election, in which he made the case for Donald Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11: Anton called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive,” who would keep playing by the rules of the game, and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t constrained by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” – to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93 on 9/11. What the American Values Survey is picking up here is how the “Flight 93” mentality is taking over not just the rightwing intellectual sphere, where it’s been hegemonic for a while, but ever larger parts of the Republican Party and its voters as well. It is now “Flight 93” politics, all the time."

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A Trump speech in October 2023:

"'On Day One, I will immediately restore and expand the 'Trump travel ban,'' he pledged to the cheering crowd.

* * *

Then Trump again expanded his rhetoric.

“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” he said, reading from the teleprompter. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel,” he continued, apparently ad-libbing, “if you don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t — if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right?”

The crowd cheered enthusiastically. Trump vamped: “We don’t want you! Get out of here! You’re fired!”

* * *

This is all Trump is getting at. “Our religion” — the religion of those in the room at his event — is right-wing, often evangelical Christianity. In 2020, the density of White Christians in a county was a very good indicator of whom voters in the county supported.

* * *

Parsing Trump's comments is excessive, of course; as stipulated, we know what he means. He means that certain categories of people are inherently dangerous and unacceptable ... He is saying, once again, that he will defend American Christians against perceived threats — threats that might be framed in vague religious terms but which are not fundamentally religious...

He is telling those Americans — White Christian conservatives — that he will make them the focus of America’s protective power."

— Trump pledges to turn away those who don’t like ‘our religion’ (gift link), Philip Bump, Washington Post, October 24, 2023

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In 2009, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life asked Americans whether it was ever justifiable to torture suspected terrorists during interrogation, and respondents were 50% more likely to say yes if they were white evangelicals than if they were "religiously unaffiliated."

Still unconvinced that God exists: Holes in the argument from objective moral values

Within the "Conversations with Matt DeLockery" Christian podcast available free on iTunes, four episodes titled “Looking for a God” (Parts 1-4) deserve a little attention, although, as I show below, they fail to present a convincing argument for the existence of God. Together, the episodes total one hour, and they were released on four different dates in October and November 2017.

'1 - Intro to the Moral Argument'

The first episode is a solid introduction. DeLockery's stated intent is to examine whether human behavior implies God's existence. He believes that God’s existence is “probably the most foundational question there could possibly be on any subject, because it touches on everything else,” especially the question of whether human purpose is given to us or whether we invent it for ourselves and the question of the afterlife. He explains the importance of critical thinking and gives a brief overview of common arguments about God’s existence. He says that, in discussions about whether morality is objective or subjective, "we’re looking for an answer to the question: Are there any basic foundational principles that say how humans should operate in relation to ourselves, other people, the world around us, and so forth?"

'2 - Objective vs. Subjective Moral Values'

The second episode has some flaws.

He defines "objective" as "hard fact": something that is true for people regardless of what culture they belong to and regardless of who recognizes it as an objective truth or who may believe it to be a subjective truth or falsehood.

He defines "subjective" as preference or opinion. Throughout the episode, apparently unwittingly, he goes back and forth about whether such preference is personal or social, and unfortunately this detail leads to the failure of his argument.

In this passage, he says the subjectivity can be either personal or social.

“Subjective moral values are things that we feel or are socially right or wrong. [emphasis mine] These vary from group to group and can and do change. Think about the phrase ‘everything’s relative.’ If a particular moral value is relative, then it is subjective. Moral values being ‘relative’ and moral values being ‘subjective’ are really two ways of saying the same thing. However, if a particular value is not relative, then it is ‘objective’.”

But then he asks listeners to ask themselves what they personally feel, their "immediate gut reaction," about the question of sex trafficking. Specifically, when they examine the source of ther moral opinion that sex trafficking is wrong, he asks listeners to decide: is their belief due to “social pressure,” a “social ‘no-no’,” or is sex trafficking “actually wrong”? Here, DeLockery implies that you can determine that something is objectively right or wrong based on what you subjectively feel. This is confusing at best. An "immediate gut reaction" is practically the very definition of subjectivity and is not a good way to demonstrate hard facts about the world.

The confusion is repeated:

“Are there things that are really good or bad, and are not merely based on social preferences? In my opinion, I think that there are many more values that are subjective or relative. However, not all are. I think sex trafficking is morally wrong. I think taking advantage of poor people is morally wrong. I think loving and caring for others is morally good. And I don’t think these things are merely preferences. They are not relative; they are not ‘to each his own.’ I think there really are at least some moral values that are objective because I think that’s how the world is. It’s not because I want to believe that there is something right or wrong with certain things. It’s because when I look at the world, I see [my emphasis] that there really is[my emphasis] something right or wrong with certain things. That is how I perceive the world when I look around me.”

By starting with the individual or social definition of subjectivity and, by some conscious or unconscious sleight of hand, dropping off the individual so that only the social remains as the hallmark of subjectivity, DeLockery allows the individual to be the arbiter of the objective. Even had he started with a purely social definition of subjectivity, this schema would not endure long, because the question would arise how a number of infallibly objective individuals suddenly become fallible and subjective when they organize into a society or culture.

Another problem is revealed by his choice of "sex trafficking" as an example. He assumes that his audience is sufficiently educated to recognize the phrase "sex trafficking" (defined as kidnapping and selling or exploiting people, often minors and often across international borders, for sexual purposes); that they recognize it is illegal in most countries; and that they are aware that everyone around them shares values that place them in opposition to it (likely, since he speaks to an audience interested in modern Christian apologetics). His example works reasonably well and makes its point rapidly precisely because everyone in the room already knows everyone else's general orientation on this topic. There are, however, people who practice sex trafficking; there are places where it is considered culturally acceptable to give girls to older men for marriage or as a form of collective punishment, and people from those cultures might have different definitions of "sex trafficking"; there are scenarios, such as war, in which kidnapping and rape become commonplace when they were not so before; and there are sociopaths or rebels among us who might know the socially appropriate thing to say when asked for their moral opinions but do not actually hold these feelings. So, asking the room to examine their personal feelings on a given moral question does not prove that the answer to that question is universally held. It matters how you ask the question, who is in the room, and how they choose to respond. It is not at all like placing a rock and asking someone to kick it to prove that it is a "hard fact." Anyone, regardless of their belief, culture, situation, or capacity, will trip over a rock or walk into a wall placed in front of them, but they will not all agree on values, which makes it difficult to prove that any given value is indeed objective. My own "immediate gut reaction" to value statements can always be contradicted by someone else's gut reaction and it will be difficult to arbitrate between us. It seems better to say that our moral intuitions matter and yet are fallible.

It is also confusing why the objective value is said to be true regardless of what anyone believes about it, yet apparently the only way to investigate the value is to ask "What do you believe about it?"

'3 - Evolution and Morality'

Believing that he successfully demonstrated in the previous episode that objective values exist, he now inquires where those values come from. According to him, God is one option:

“Now, there really isn’t much of an argument that a god could create moral values, or objective moral values. It’s pretty simple: If there is a god who can create everything, then creating a specific way that he wants his creatures to function is pretty straightforward. God makes man. God can provide a set of operating instructions to explain how man best functions. Pretty simple.”

In my estimation, this is not, to the contrary, at all simple because there is little to compare it to. As a human, I can engineer nonliving objects and, through selective breeding or environmental control, tinker with or influence living beings. In so doing, I control how they do operate, but I do not control how they should operate. The only way I can change values and rules about how any object or being should operate is by changing the values and rules of the society in which we participate — which is, by definition, in the realm of the subjective. If I were "God," it is not obvious how that status would enable me to create values and rules that are objective, nor how a value or rule could possibly be a hard fact about the world rather than just my opinion (albeit a divine opinion) about what I want my creations to do. Thus the question of whether God can create objective moral values cannot be dispensed with so easily. But it is dispensed with, so onward we go.

Could values have evolved? In examining the possibility that objective values resulted from "biological evolution," DeLockery doesn’t start with any pre-human or non-human type of animal. He only asks about how social learning might have occurred to promote human survival. He believes it’s clear that evolution — assuming that evolution is a real process, a position to which he does not commit — can produce subjective values (those that can “vary from place to place, from group to group”) but cannot produce objective values. At best, evolution could somehow aid us to "discover” objective values.

Now he changes his definition of “objective.” An objective fact, he says here, is one that “cannot change.” This contradicts a nuance of an example he gave in Episode 2. There, he said that the statement “gas-powered cars need oil to function properly” is an objective fact because of “the way gas-powered cars are currently made [my emphasis]...This does not change, and will not change, until the ways cars are manufactured changes [my emphasis].” The objective fact indeed can change to reflect the underlying conditions that support its validity. But here in Episode 3 he declares that an objective moral fact cannot change.

He says that, while evolution may help humans discover objective moral values, it can only produce subjective moral values. The type of values generated through evolution meet “the definition of subjective because it’s everything about how it affects the other person, how it is perceived by the other person, not whether it’s inherently the way that the human machine was made to function.” Note the assumption that the human machine was made at all (by a creator) which was assumed indirectly in Episode 2 when objective moral values were discovered by immediate gut reaction.

He concludes that, since objective values exist (as asserted in Episode 2) but could not have evolved (as asserted in Episode 3), they must have been created by God. He does not consider any alternative origins of values — say, for example, the result of a careful reasoning process.

'4 - God, Morality, and Euthyphro'

He presents Plato's Euthyphro dilemma: Can God arbitrarily choose values or is God held to a standard above himself? Neither is attractive, so DeLockery solves it with a third option: God is identical with those values. The values reflect God's character. The objective values with which we concern ourselves reflect the values of our Creator just as a painting reflects something of its painter. This is all merely asserted, not properly argued, and this is the shortest of all four episodes.