Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump
By John Fea
Eerdmans Pp. 238 $24.99.
Review by Benjamin Guyer
John Fea opens the conclusion of Believe Me by relating a conversation that occurred at an unnamed college where he gave a guest lecture about Donald Trump and American evangelicals. After the talk, a student asked him, “How should Christians respond to the election of Donald Trump? What do you think we are supposed to do?” By his own admission, the question was “fair,” but “also a question that my training as a historian and my research for previous books had not prepared me to answer” (p. 179). This episode encapsulates Believe Me as a whole. The book is an exercise in criticism, but although long on critique, it offers evangelicals no plan of action. In the end, Believe Me is, at best, self-defeating.
The book contains five chapters. The first three belong together. Chapter one argues that even before Trump became the frontrunner, the 2016 Republican primary was awash in what the chapter’s title calls “The Evangelical Politics of Fear.” The second chapter, entitled “The Playbook,” explains this by looking at the development of modern conservatism. Fea argues that the religious right has created an ideological framework in which particular political moves attract conservative political support, even at the cost of undermining evangelical witness. The third chapter then offers an even larger historical canvas, upon which Fea purports to trace the history of evangelical fear as a continuous line throughout all of American history.
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The fourth and fifth chapters move in different directions. Chapter four takes aim at those whom Fea terms “court evangelicals,” religious leaders who use political channels to achieve their religious ends. He identifies four goals as being especially important: “overturning Roe v. Wade, defending religious liberty, supporting Israel, and appointing conservative federal judges” (p. 122). The fifth chapter argues against the romanticism inherent in the phrase “Make America Great Again.” Central to his argument is that Trump is a racist and that his supporters are thus guilty by association; evangelicals unwittingly romanticize racism when they romanticize the past. After five chapters, evangelical support for Trump appears a profound betrayal of evangelical convictions.
Fea’s main argument against Trump is one unique to evangelicals. The President is guilty of “decidedly un-Christian behavior” and is “a profane man” (p. 4). “His entire career,” Fea later writes, “was built on vices incompatible with the moral teachings of Christianity” (p. 66). This is not an argument about competence, constitutionality, or anything else. Rather, it’s an argument about sex. Trump has divorced and remarried twice, had an affair with a porn star, and made unacceptable comments about grabbing women by their genitalia. Fea apparently belongs to the generation of evangelicals who recoiled with horror at the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton (discussed on pp. 62-64). In the late 1990s, evangelical leaders like James Dobson urged Clinton’s impeachment with the argument that moral character is paramount for political leaders, but now he and other evangelicals support a president whose sexual habits have flouted the same code. It is this hypocrisy that Fea cannot abide.
The practical payout of Fea’s moral high ground is unclear. For example, in his second chapter, he notes that when Trump’s comments about grabbing women’s genitalia were made public, Dobson and other evangelical leaders condemned Trump’s words — but without removing their respective endorsements. Dobson’s reasoning, which Fea notes, was simple. Trump told evangelicals that he would support “religious liberty and the dignity of the unborn” (p. 68). Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, made no such promises. Thus Dobson maintained his support for the Republican candidate. Regrettably, Fea tries to psychologize his subject and claims that by voting for Trump, evangelicals operated under the impetus of fear. This, however, is called the intentional fallacy; because we never know another’s internal motivations, it is invalid to explain their behavior on the basis of presumed intentions. By ignoring Dobson’s stated justification (which is all that we can know), Fea cannot allow that Dobson’s decision was an exercise in moral reasoning. Consequently, Fea does not consider that the alleged evangelical “playbook” has developed rather than changed, with some evangelicals now preferring broad policy goals over their own particular moral scruples.
Genuinely irksome, however, is Fea’s use of the term “white.” Early on, he writes, “For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place” (p. 7). Yet, he then goes on to discuss multiple conservatives, including 2016 Republican hopefuls, who belong to various racial minorities. Among others, we have Dinesh D’Souza, an Indian American (p. 19); Ben Carson, an African American (pp. 30-32); Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both Cuban Americans (pp. 32-38); and, much later in the book, Rousas John Rushdoony, an Armenian American (p. 58). Yes, Trump became the Republican presidential candidate, but the beliefs he courted (and possibly embraced) were cut from the same ideological cloth as that of his opponents. “White” is an insufficient explanatory framework for contemporary American conservatism, whether political or religious.
While some evangelicals are genuinely enthusiastic about Trump, and while some even consider him a typological fulfillment of Biblical prophecy (discussed in ch. 4), Fea never shows that most evangelicals personally identify with the President’s life and doctrine. A more quotidian explanation of the 2016 election would therefore be more valuable. Allow me to propose that, in a partisan democracy, when people cannot vote their full range of interests, they will vote for the candidate that they consider least bad. Longtime political alliances do not disappear over the course of a single election cycle or even presidential term. Evangelical concerns have an important place in the Republican party, even if Republican politicians sometimes grant them only lip service. (No doubt Democrats do the same with their own constituencies.) Consequently, the concerns and complaints of Believe Me are ultimately unbelievable.
Dr. Benjamin Guyer is a lecturer in the department of history and philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Martin.
Hi Ben:
Thanks for this. I find this a curious review.
Could you explain? You say that Fea’s criticism of white evangelical Trump supporters — that they are rooted in fear, nostalgia, and pursue of worldly goals — does not apply because his book also discusses Republicans of various ethnic backgrounds. It doesn’t seem that one precludes the other. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding. We also know that the demographic makeup of the contemporary Republican party is overwhelmingly white (87%). Is he wrong to focus his attention there?
Your final paragraph seems to undermine your criticism of Fea’s discussion of Dobson. If, as you say, Trump voters supported him out of concern that Hillary Clinton was worse, how can you claim that Dobson’s support was not based on fear? What negative impacts was he expecting without assurances about religious liberty and abortion? And are you not in your final paragraph committing some version of the intentional fallacy: purporting to know the internal motivations of voters? That your explanation is exculpatory does not necessarily make it more accurate, unless of course you can claim to know something Fea does not.
Finally, you claim in your opening paragraph that the book is self-defeating. Why is that? Did it promise to provide a series of actions for evangelicals to take? If so, it would be good for a review to indicate that.
I did not receive a notification about the above comment, hence my delay in responding.
Let me try to answer the various questions.
1. My point is that the religious dynamics that Fea draws attention to are shared by many persons of color (hence my enumerating these). Ergo, focusing on just evangelicals who are “white” imposes an artificial division and attempts to render discreet to white evangelicals what is not discreet to them at all.
The original version of this review was just over 2,000 words, which was too long for the magazine. So, it was trimmed down. The following, from the original draft, may be helpful here:
“One of the more curious facets of this book is Fea’s tendency to oversimplify complex phenomena. For example, he dedicates his book to “the 19 percent,” a reference to the widely-reported statistic that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 (a helpful analysis is available at Pew Research [NB: link posted below]). White evangelicals were Trump’s most supportive demographic. According to Fea, “A higher percentage of evangelicals voted for Trump than did for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012” (p. 6). The same Pew analysis records that the numbers for Bush are not available for 2000, but that in 2004 he received 78% of the white evangelical vote, as did Romney in 2012; with 74%, McCain came in with slightly less in 2008. If taken at face value, Fea’s point seems fair.
But two caveats are in order. First, in a lengthy end note (pp. 193-4) to the above quote, Fea cites a pointed short essay by Tobin Grant [NB: link posted below], who argued in 2016 that, due to the method of data collection, reports on evangelical politics often exaggerate their support for Republican candidates (read Grant’s essay for details). Fea counters that his own concern is with white evangelicals, but he does not explain why pro-Trump minority evangelicals should be excluded from his criticism. After all, many evangelical churches are quite racially diverse (and far more than any Episcopal church I have attended); my own evangelical upbringing had pastors and fellow church members who were white, black, and Hispanic. By whitewashing evangelicals of color, Fea studies and critiques an artificially discreet religious demographic.”
Pew link: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/
Grant link: https://religionnews.com/2016/08/03/how-the-polls-inflate-trumps-evangelical-vote/
2. I didn’t say that Dobson’s decisions weren’t based on fear. Rather, I said that Fea does not consider that Dobson may have had a coherent form of moral reasoning behind his support for Trump. Yes, fear might have been part of this. I don’t know. I do know that alleging fear, without considering anything else, is self-serving editorializing. However, what is wrong with voting out of fear? What demographic isn’t afraid? If Fea wishes to criticize evangelical fear, why not criticize feminist fear, etc.?
In terms of my final paragraph, I don’t think I’ve committed the intentional fallacy. The Dobson example certainly points to someone voting for the candidate they considered less bad. I’ve known lots of evangelicals who say they vote for the person they think is less bad. Maybe it’s true. Maybe not.
However, if I could have added something to the last paragraph of the review, it would have been an emphasis on habit. Partisan voting is as much about habit as it is about anything else.
I hope that this helps.
If you are interested, the original version of the review follows below. It was completed shortly after COVID-19 (hence the reference to the state of emergency):
Review of John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018). X + 238pp. $24.99. Hardcover. isbn: 9780802876416.
John Fea opens the conclusion of Believe Me by relating a conversation that occurred at an unnamed college where he gave a guest lecture about Donald Trump and American evangelicals. After the talk, a student asked him, “How should Christians respond to the election of Donald Trump? What do you think we are supposed to do?” By his own admission, the question was “fair,” but “also a question that my training as a historian and my research for previous books had not prepared me to answer” (p. 179). This episode encapsulates Believe Me as a whole. The book is an exercise in criticism, but not of the constructive sort; although it is long on critique and warning, it offers evangelicals no plan of action. In the end, Believe Me is self-defeating.
In the review that follows, I do three things. First, I offer a basic overview of the book’s chapters and contents. Then, I circle back and critique Fea’s work on two fronts: methodologically and politically. I write all of this as one who left evangelicalism as an undergraduate; I have never been a Republican and I did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Frankly, I don’t care how evangelicals vote. I am, however, baffled by Fea’s uncomprehending upset at evangelical support for Republicans broadly, and Trump specifically.
I. Overview
Believe Me contains five chapters. The first three belong together. Chapter one argues that even before Trump became the frontrunner, the 2016 Republican primary was awash in “The Evangelical Politics of Fear” (the chapter title). The second chapter, entitled “The Playbook,” explains this by looking at the development of modern conservatism. Fea argues that the Religious Right has created an ideological framework in which particular political moves attract conservative political support, even at the cost of undermining evangelical witness. The third chapter then offers an even larger historical canvas, upon which Fea purports to trace the history of evangelical fear as a continuous line throughout all of American history.
The fourth and fifth chapters move in different directions. Chapter four takes aim at those whom Fea terms “court evangelicals,” religious leaders who use political channels to achieve their religious ends. He identifies four as being especially important: “overturning Roe v. Wade, defending religious liberty, supporting Israel, and appointing conservative federal judges” (p. 122). The fifth chapter argues against the romanticism inherent in the phrase “Make America Great Again.” Central to his argument is that Trump is a racist and that his supporters are thus guilty by association; evangelicals unwittingly romanticize racism when they romanticize the past. After five chapters, evangelical support for Trump appears a profound betrayal of evangelical convictions.
II. Methodological Problems
One of the more curious facets of this book is Fea’s tendency to oversimplify complex phenomena. For example, he dedicates his book to “the 19 percent,” a reference to the widely-reported statistic that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 (a helpful analysis is available at Pew Research). White evangelicals were Trump’s most supportive demographic. According to Fea, “A higher percentage of evangelicals voted for Trump than did for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012” (p. 6). The same Pew analysis records that the numbers for Bush are not available for 2000, but that in 2004 he received 78% of the white evangelical vote, as did Romney in 2012; with 74%, McCain came in with slightly less in 2008. If taken at face value, Fea’s point seems fair.
But two caveats are in order. First, in a lengthy end note (pp. 193-4) to the above quote, Fea cites a pointed short essay by Tobin Grant, who argued in 2016 that, due to the method of data collection, reports on evangelical politics often exaggerate their support for Republican candidates (read Grant’s essay for details). Fea counters that his own concern is with white evangelicals, but he does not explain why pro-Trump minority evangelicals should be excluded from his criticism. After all, many evangelical churches are quite racially diverse (and far more than any Episcopal church I have attended); my own evangelical upbringing had pastors and fellow church members who were white, black, and Hispanic. By whitewashing evangelicals of color, Fea studies and critiques an artificially discreet religious demographic.
Second, every survey has a margin of error. An uptick of merely 3% may be more apparent than real. Notably, Pew was more subtle in its discussion of the data, concluding that the evangelical vote for Trump “matched or exceeded” earlier support for Bush, McCain, and Romney. In other words, it isn’t fully clear that white evangelicals are more supportive of Trump. However, the simple bifurcation of 19 vs. 81 percent enables an equally simple bifurcation between the narrow path and the broad, the chosen few and the damned majority. Believe Me thus begins as an academically-tinged jeremiad.
Fea also homogenizes his key terms “white” and “evangelical.” The term “evangelical” acquired its current American meaning only in the postwar period, when fundamentalists and other Protestants looked to create coalitions for both political and religious ends. The discussion of “court evangelicals” in chapter four reveals the baffling disparity of the term “evangelical” in contemporary American discourse. I, for one, would happily see the word “evangelical” disappear. Because it cannot point to a coherent set of religious convictions, it is of no descriptive value. But in his third chapter, Fea finds “evangelical” Christians everywhere and judges them guilty of multiple evils from the Salem witch trials onward. Regrettably, this is simply bad history.
Worse is Fea’s analysis of “white.” Early on, he writes, “For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place” (p. 7). And then Fea goes on to discuss multiple conservative figures, including 2016 Republican hopefuls, who belong to various racial minorities. We have Dinesh D’Souza, an Indian American (p. 19); Ben Carson, an African American (pp. 30-32); Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both Cuban Americans (pp. 32-38); and, much later in the book, Rousas John Rushdoony, an Armenian American (p. 58). Yes, Trump became the Republican candidate, but the beliefs he courted (and possibly embraced) are cut from the same ideological cloth as those of his competitors.
The desire to treat race as the primary motivator too often results in strained interpretations. In his fifth chapter, Fea argues that Trump’s usage of the phrase “law and order” harkens back to the presidency of Richard Nixon, who used the same phraseology amidst mounting racial tensions nearly 50 years ago. Yes, it is possible that Trump wishes to invoke Nixon (although it is extremely difficult to think that Trump would be so historically informed!), but in arguing thus, Fea risks committing the elementary logical fallacy of post hoc propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Consider that one of the most popular shows of the last 30 years was Law and Order, which ran for 20 seasons. Was Law and Order attempting to invoke Nixon as well? My question is rhetorical. Fea, like many of Trump’s critics, is so convinced of his subject’s malice that he fails to examine the full range of possible meanings behind key words and phrases. Most historians call this range “context.” After all, habits often remain long after their point of origins have been forgotten. But Fea’s “evangelicals” are always “white” — and always wrong. “White” is an insufficient explanatory framework.
III. A Self-Defeating Politics
Fea’s main argument against Trump is one unique to evangelicals. The President is guilty of “decidedly un-Christian behavior,” and is “a profane man” (p. 4). “His entire career,” Fea later writes, “was built on vices incompatible with the moral teachings of Christianity” (p. 66). This is not an argument about competence, constitutionality, or anything else. Rather, it’s an argument about sex. Trump has divorced and remarried twice, had an affair with a porn star, and made grotesque comments about grabbing women by their genitalia. Fea apparently belongs to the generation of evangelicals who recoiled with horror at the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton (discussed on pp. 62-64). In the late 1990s, evangelical leaders like James Dobson urged Clinton’s impeachment with the argument that moral character is paramount, but now Dobson (among others) supports a President whose own sexual habits have gleefully disdained the same code. It is this hypocrisy that Fea cannot abide.
Believe Me therefore occupies a very unusual spot on the American political spectrum. Fea’s own sexual ethics are apparently quite conservative. Many Americans, including but not limited to Trump’s progressive opponents, could never embrace the standard that Fea evidently endorses. In other words, Fea’s evangelical upset with Trump points to evangelicals’ own frustrated theocratic ambitions. Fea wants a president whose life and doctrine embody his own evangelical values. This is hardly a progressive critique of Trump, even if it occasionally sounds like one.
The practical payout of Fea’s moral high ground is far from clear. For example, in his second chapter (“The Playbook”), he notes that when Trump’s comments about grabbing women’s genitalia were made public, Dobson and other evangelical leaders condemned Trump’s words — but without removing their respective endorsements. Dobson’s reasoning, which Fea discusses, was simple. Trump told evangelicals that he would support “religious liberty and the dignity of the unborn” (p. 68). Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, made no such promises, and thus Dobson maintained his support for the Republican candidate. Curiously, Fea concludes that, operating under the impetus of fear, evangelicals continued following the “playbook” of the Religious Right (p. 73). And yet, indifference to presidential moral character is a remarkable break from evangelical precedent. Perhaps the playbook has indeed changed, but in ways that Fea dislikes.
Readers may therefore find themselves perplexed by Fea’s call for evangelicals to embrace “pluralism” (pp. 72, 164-165). After all, his own argument ultimately demands that evangelicals adhere to a single way of voting — that of the 19 percent. However, genuine pluralism embraces the belief that evangelicals, like all other Americans, have the right to vote however they see fit. This includes, but is not limited to, voting for candidates that one finds disappointing (or even appalling), but who pledge to maintain and defend values that a holds dear. Otherwise, frustrated theocratic ambition becomes political quietism. Some Americans would happily see evangelicals engage in such self-effacing behaviors, but a democratic society cannot function well if a portion of its population believes that it has no right to vote its conscience.
Conclusion
It is simply baffling that anyone is perplexed by white evangelicals voting for Donald Trump. In a democracy, when people cannot vote their full range of interests, they will vote for the candidate that they consider least bad. So it is in many if not most elections, and so it was in 2016. Evangelical concerns have a place in the Republican party, even if Republican legislators often grant them only lip service. However, evangelicals have been a staple of the Republican party for decades, and there is no reason to assume that this will change any time soon. Longtime political alliances do not disappear over the course of a single election cycle or even presidential term. What is truly fascinating is the bizarre but small number of very vocal evangelicals who believe that God has appointed Trump, and that all criticism of the president is part of some vast conspiracy. But I suspect that most evangelicals occupy far more diverse intellectual spaces.
Regardless, the President has now declared a National Emergency. Sadly but predictably, the Coronavirus has already been weaponized, in self-servingly partisan fashion. The last four years have been politically exhausting, but this is by no means due to Trump alone. The future of our country needs something far more expansive and charitable than our very broken political culture has yet made possible. On this I trust that John Fea and I both agree.