In the late 1800s and early 1900s, science was making tremendous inroads into how the world worked: the physics of weather, currents, winds; the chemistry of nearly everything; the biology of infections, diseases, and health. At the same time, scientific methods were employed to look at religion: new documents were uncovered, and new techniques for translation, interpretation, and dating traced the sources of the scriptures sacred to Christians.
This textual criticism, as it came to be known, brought much of the meaning of the Bible into question. Passages crucial to modern doctrine appeared to be added well after the originals, including the stories of the Resurrection of Jesus, which, as any Christian knows, is the most important single concept backing the uniqueness of Christian belief: God’s own Son came to earth, was killed to pay tribute for our sins, and then arose from the dead to provide a way for those who accept this to have eternal life.
As all this transpired, Biblical scholars and ministers struggled with its implications. Should they take a step back and soften the idea of the Bible as the literal words of God, inspired through the Holy Spirit to be written down by the holiest of men? What if the Bible were but a portion of divine wisdom and guidance, and not the definitive source, a flawed collection of the musings of what may have been a few zealots with faraway looks in their eyes and spittle on their beards? In the end, they decided, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, the Bible was inerrant, a flawless set of documents given by God to us, and all the doubts, contradictions, flaws, and nonsense it caused and contained should be ignored.
From this, the anti-science, anti-intellectual movement among evangelical Christians solidified. The line can be drawn straight through to the present: the predominance of anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and conspiracy theorists among modern evangelicals. Ironically, it is hard to define the scientific basis for this tendency. There is an underlying gullibility baked into these thought patterns, with a grid of fear and need for a sense of control underlying it all, but whether it is genetic, epigenetic (genes activated by the environment, especially life stressors), or entirely learned behavior has yet to be understood.
Into this arena, beyond the understanding of anyone of any common sense, entered the most dubious of catalysts: Donald J. Trump. A lifetime as a con man, rapacious in his lust for money and women but devoid of any actual skills other than relentless self promotion and the inability to feel shame, should have immediately disqualified him from the support of evangelical Christians. He had no redeeming qualities, and he held no religious beliefs at all (he held believers in contempt). But as he asserted himself, first with the flaming falsehoods about the birthplace of President Barack Obama, whom the evangelicals almost instinctively (wink, wink) despised (remember how Trump said he had people in Hawaii investigating things? A complete fabrication. He made it all up.), then taking out, nearly one by one, the motley and disgraceful batch of candidates aspiring to the nomination of the Republican party (Ted Cruz, truly one of the slimiest men of the last 30 years in politics, was the last bit of resistance), something remarkable happened: the evangelical Christians chose him overwhelmingly, and onto this sorry sack of humanity they projected all of their hopes and dreams to bring about the America they all wanted: caucasians in charge, with deference to believers and gun owners; the country becoming more righteous, unforgiving, judgmental, with policies predisposed to generate prosperity for those who felt the same. Perhaps most important of all, Trump now claimed, after nearly 70 years of not caring at all about abortion, to be stridently against it. Pundits occasionally talk of Trump’s “genius,” but there was nothing going on beyond Trump reaching out for more attention and applause lines and finding he could not possibly go too low. Coarse, jerk-like behavior was his stock in trade, and that is what these people seemed to want instead of the Christian virtues of piety, forgiveness, and humility. Trump replaced Jesus for them in their lives with the endorsement of their leaders, lives which were percolated through with despair despite their toeing the Christian line.
There are quite a few surveys and studies of professed evangelical Christians that reveal some startling trends: many barely know anything about the Bible and hardly ever read it; many rarely attend church and mostly go for the socializing when they do; many rely almost entirely on whomever they have currently installed as their leader to guide them. That leader became Trump. What did he offer them? It turns out the teachings of Jesus and Christianity are hard. They include poverty, humility, service, embracing suffering, sharing your blessings with others freely, and lots of time trying to make yourself a better person. Trump, with the blessings of in inordinate number of pastors who should know better, replaced that with permission to openly express racism and a love for inequality; his blessing to rough up and mistreat the weak, the marginalized, the foreign; waiving any sort of ethics in favor of taking whatever you could get by any means necessary; and the wholesale embrace of a cult of personality with Trump at the center.
What will it take to bring an end to this deviance? As long as they can grasp some sort of explanation, Trumpians will likely let his crimes, as they are enumerated in what will likely be a wave of indictments for what they will see as trivial matters like tax and financial fraud, money laundering, campaign finance violations, election fraud (was there anything more ridiculous than the biggest election cheat in history raising hundreds of millions of dollars to “stop the steal” all while trying to steal the election for himself?), slide. One characteristic of your average Trump supporter is an extreme reluctance to admit they are wrong, but if enough of the charges stick, and Trump shows little capability of mounting a defense, I would guess their fervor will at least wane. The temperature overall has definitely been lowered by his barring from social media, something that should have been done long ago. Now if the regular media would simply ignore him, it would take away nearly every means for him to satisfy his narcissism. He is elderly and unhealthy and should then fade into oblivion and disgrace, things he has earned. That is if the legal system can muster the charges and get him to testify under oath about anything. If they fail to pursue charges against him and the the other traitors who supported him over the Constitution, we are likely to be in the same situation soon enough, but perhaps the next time with someone who actually knows what he or she is doing as they sell the nation down the road to the highest bidder. Those people will know they can tap into the 40% of Americans who have authoritarian follower traits, a vast percentage of whom are Evangelicals desperate to find a strong leader.