Two nations under God – Evangelicals are divided over the movement’s support for

SET IN THE bucolic countryside on the edge of Nashville, Christ Presbyterian Church is a stately building where, in normal times, hundreds of evangelical Christians gather to worship. On a recent Sunday a smaller, socially distanced congregation assembled to hear the preacher speak on the eighth chapter of the gospel of Mark, in which Jesus asks his disciples: “Who do people say I am?” Such questions of identity are troubling many in the congregation, too. Chatting after the service, Samantha Fisher, a mother of two who works in public relations, sums up the current moment: “I don’t know any more what it means to be a Christian and an American.”

White evangelicals like Ms Fisher are undergoing an identity crisis that has been a long time in the making, but has crystallised during four years of Donald Trump’s presidency and, especially, with the violent uprising at the Capitol on January 6th. Images of activists waving flags with Christian messages, praying in the name of Jesus inside the Senate chamber and claiming to defend America as “a Christian nation”, have left many evangelicals angry and confused. About 80% of white evangelicals supported Mr Trump in 2016 and at least 75% did so in 2020. The Pew Research Centre found last year that 59% of evangelicals felt the Trump administration had helped not hurt their interests. But conversations with a wide range of believers suggest that many churches are divided, and that support is not as overwhelming as the 80-20 split might suggest.

“For every evangelical I meet who supports what happened on January 6th, I meet 5,000 who do not,” says Scott Sauls, senior pastor at Christ Presbyterian. Leaders like him are trying to shift the focus of their churches, warning that putting too much faith in politics is not only spiritually misguided, but also self-defeating. “The culture wars are the greatest distraction from the mission of the church,” he says.

Evangelicalism is traditionally defined by four theological beliefs: the need for a spiritual rebirth (being “born again”); the centrality of Christ’s death on the cross to bring about that rebirth; the spiritual authority of the Bible; and an outworking of faith in missionary and social-reform efforts. The current reckoning centres on how to carry out that fourth belief and how much to stress political activism. “I think to some degree, there is an understanding in popular culture of ‘evangelical’ as referring to a personal relationship with Donald Trump rather than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” says Russell Moore, head of the public-policy arm of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), who opposed Mr Trump.

A growing number of people are differentiating between the two. Ten days after January 6th Hunter Baker, the dean of arts and sciences at Union University, a Southern Baptist college in the town of Jackson, 130 miles west of Nashville, published an apology in which he declared that, though he had voted for him twice, he had “severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency.” In an interview, he added: “I have been pouring myself into politics most of my adult life. I think now we need to focus back on the church and less on politics.” He says he will not vote for Mr Trump again. “I am not prepared to put the whole American order up for grabs. It is time to walk away.”

Some evangelical institutions, though remaining conservative, are also readjusting. Before the November election, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), one of the largest umbrella groups for the movement, representing millions of people in 45,000 churches from 40 denominations, released a statement resolving to “seek racial justice and reconciliation” and to “resist being co-opted by political agendas”. Many within the NAE are trying to represent a new type of evangelical, more intellectual, less white and less confrontational. Its new head, Walter Kim, holds a Harvard doctorate and is its first non-white leader. The chairman of its board, John Jenkins, is African-American.

Demography is having an impact, too. Robert P. Jones of PRRI, a think-tank, and author of “The End of White Christian America”, says that 22% of American pensioners are white evangelicals but only 8% of millennials are. Between a quarter and a third of evangelicals are not white, and many vote Democrat. Some of these shifts could start to influence politics.

And on the sixth day

The current moment is in some ways a replay of an earlier crisis. In the baking summer of 1925, outside a courthouse in Dayton, 150 miles east of Nashville, a teacher called John Scopes was charged with illegally teaching evolution in school. Scopes was found guilty by the court, though he was acquitted on a technicality…