Case Study 2 — White Evangelicals and Republican Politics, 1976–2025

The starting point: Carter's evangelical coalition (1976)

The 1976 presidential election produced one of the most surprising voting patterns of the modern era: white evangelical Protestants voted in significant numbers for Jimmy Carter, the Democratic governor of Georgia who described himself as a "born-again" Southern Baptist. Carter spoke openly about his faith, taught Sunday school, and used evangelical idiom comfortably. Per the analysis of the 1976 election by political scientists including James Reichley (Religion in American Public Life, 1985), Carter received approximately 50–55% of the white evangelical vote — competitive with Republican nominee Gerald Ford in this demographic.

The Carter alignment was unstable. Carter's presidency disappointed white evangelical leaders on several issues. The 1978 IRS attempt to revoke tax-exempt status from segregated Christian schools (in which Bob Jones University was a central case) galvanized opposition. Conservative evangelical leaders perceived the Carter administration as insufficiently committed to opposition to abortion (after Roe v. Wade in 1973) and as out of step with their views on family policy. The Equal Rights Amendment, the Iran hostage crisis, and inflation all damaged Carter's standing.

The 1976 cycle is worth remembering because it demonstrates that white evangelical political alignment is not a constant of nature; it was constructed in specific political and institutional circumstances over the period that followed.

The Religious Right (1979–1988)

The institutional formation of the Religious Right dates to 1979 and the founding of the Moral Majority by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. in Lynchburg, Virginia. Other organizations — Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign (1972), Tim LaHaye's network, the Christian Voice (1978) — provided antecedents. The Moral Majority was the first to operate at national scale with explicit electoral mobilization as its purpose.

Falwell's founding mission was, in his own framing, to mobilize evangelical Christians as a voting bloc on issues including abortion, school prayer, the family, and pornography. The strategic insight was that evangelical Protestants — historically religiously fragmented across hundreds of denominations and independent churches, often theologically opposed to political engagement — could be organized into a coordinated political force if the right institutional infrastructure was built.

The 1980 election demonstrated the strategy's potential. Ronald Reagan received approximately 63% of the white evangelical vote, a significant jump from 1976. Reagan's campaign — including a major appearance at the 1980 Religious Roundtable in Dallas, where he addressed an evangelical audience — explicitly courted evangelical voters. His support for school prayer, opposition to abortion, and rhetorical alignment with traditional family values provided a coalition framework that has held, with variations, for forty-five years.

The 1980s consolidated the Religious Right's institutional infrastructure. The Christian Coalition was founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson and led by Ralph Reed, building a more sophisticated state and local political organization than the Moral Majority had achieved. Focus on the Family (James Dobson, founded 1977) provided the cultural and family-policy commentary that surrounded political organizing. The Family Research Council (founded 1981, separated from Focus on the Family in 1992) and the American Family Association (founded 1977) provided additional advocacy capacity. Concerned Women for America (Beverly LaHaye, founded 1979) organized evangelical women specifically.

By 1988, the institutional infrastructure was substantial. White evangelicals voted approximately 81% Republican in the 1988 presidential election — within rounding distance of where the demographic would vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

The 1990s and early 2000s: consolidation

The Clinton presidency (1993–2001) provided unifying opposition for evangelical political organizing. The 1998–1999 impeachment proceedings, while divisive across the country, were broadly supported within the evangelical political coalition. The 2000 election of George W. Bush — an evangelical Methodist who had spoken openly of his faith and his transformation — solidified the evangelical-Republican alignment. Bush received approximately 78% of the white evangelical vote in 2000 and 78% in 2004.

Bush's faith-based initiatives (the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, established 2001), opposition to same-sex marriage (the Federal Marriage Amendment, 2004 election cycle), and judicial nominations of Catholics and Protestants understood to share originalist constitutional commitments deepened the alignment.

This was also the period in which the evangelical-Republican coalition extended internationally. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), launched in 2003, was supported by an evangelical / Bush-administration coalition focused on global AIDS in Africa. Evangelical engagement with religious-liberty issues abroad, with Sudan and other conflicts, with sex-trafficking abolition, broadened the coalition's substantive concerns.

The Trump era (2015–2024): alignment under stress

The 2016 Republican primary was an unusual moment for evangelical political alignment. The candidate field included multiple figures with longer-standing evangelical credentials: Ted Cruz (Southern Baptist son of an evangelical pastor), Marco Rubio (with significant evangelical outreach), Mike Huckabee (a Southern Baptist minister), Ben Carson (a Seventh-day Adventist with significant evangelical-aligned support), and Scott Walker (a Reformed evangelical). Donald Trump, by contrast, was a thrice-married Manhattanite with a non-evangelical religious profile.

White evangelicals broadly supported Trump in the general election. He received approximately 81% of the white evangelical vote in 2016, despite — and in some accounts because of — pre-election controversies including the 2005 Access Hollywood tape. Multiple evangelical leaders publicly endorsed Trump; others endorsed reluctantly; a smaller group did not.

The emerging "evangelicals against Trump" wing was small but vocal. Russell Moore, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, was an early and persistent critic. David French, then a National Review writer, was another. Beth Moore, a Bible teacher with one of the largest women's-ministry followings in evangelicalism, became a critic over the course of 2016–2020. Tim Keller, the influential Manhattan pastor, expressed concern in measured terms before his death in 2023.

By the 2020 cycle, the alignment was firm. Trump received approximately 84% of the white evangelical vote, the highest evangelical Republican share of any presidential candidate in the modern era. The 2024 cycle held similar: approximately 81% per Pew Validated Voter, 82% per Catalist.

The intra-evangelical debate

The "evangelicals against Trump" position is small in vote share but substantively important. The arguments, in their strongest form:

Russell Moore, in his 2023 Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, argued that the evangelical alignment with Trump was producing a crisis of integrity for evangelical witness. His argument was theological: the New Testament's standards for political engagement and personal character did not, in his reading, support unqualified support for Trump as a representative figure. Moore left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021 over related issues and has since been editor-in-chief of Christianity Today.

David French, now writing for The New York Times and The Dispatch, has argued similarly that evangelical political alignment with Trump trades long-term moral authority for short-term political wins, and that constitutional and rule-of-law concerns about Trump should outweigh policy alignments.

Beth Moore, in her 2023 memoir All My Knotted-Up Life, described her break with the Southern Baptist Convention and her concerns about the way the SBC's institutional culture had handled both the 2016 election and abuse-related scandals.

Tim Keller, before his death, articulated a more measured concern. His 2018 New York Times essay "How Do Christians Fit Into the Two-Party System? They Don't" laid out a position of partial-affiliation: Christians could legitimately vote for either party while maintaining critical distance from both.

These voices have not significantly moved the aggregate evangelical vote. But they represent a substantial intellectual position within evangelicalism and have produced ongoing debate about evangelical political identity, Christian witness, and the theology of political engagement.

The defenders within

The other side of the intra-evangelical debate has been similarly serious. Wayne Grudem, the systematic theologian, has argued that the policy outcomes (judicial nominations, religious-liberty protections, abortion policy) of evangelical-Republican alignment justify the coalition. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, has been a sustained Trump supporter and articulator of evangelical-coalition theology. Eric Metaxas, the writer and commentator, has been a persistent voice for the alignment.

The defenders' arguments take several forms. Pragmatic: the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, was the result of judicial appointments enabled by the Trump-evangelical coalition, and represents the most significant policy outcome of the past 50 years from an evangelical-conservative perspective. Theological: God uses imperfect leaders for righteous ends (the Cyrus framing some evangelical leaders applied to Trump in 2016). Civic: the alternative coalition (the post-2020 progressive coalition) has positions on abortion, religious liberty, gender, and education that, in the defenders' framing, present greater threats to evangelical institutions and beliefs than Trump's personal characteristics do.

The intra-evangelical debate is real, ongoing, and substantive. The chapter on identity politics does not adjudicate it; it documents that the debate exists and that thoughtful evangelicals are on multiple sides.

What this case shows about identity-coalition politics

The white evangelical / Republican alignment is structurally analogous to the Black church / Democratic alignment (Case Study 1). Both involve:

• Dense institutional infrastructure (denominations, congregations, parachurch organizations, media networks).
• Trusted messengers (clergy, religious commentators, organizational leaders) carrying political messages with credibility.
• Identity-grounded mobilization (theological framing, in-group narrative, group-specific media).
• Long-term coalitional stability with periodic intra-coalitional debate (the Russell Moore wing among evangelicals; the Black church / progressive-coalition tensions on cultural questions).
• Evolving relationships with the broader political coalitions they participate in.

What is different: substantive content, theological commitments, the specific issues that animate each coalition, the demographic and historical contexts. The structural framework is similar; the content is not interchangeable.

The two case studies together illustrate the chapter's central analytical move. Identity-coalitional politics is not the property of any one side. White evangelicals and Black Protestants are both organized through religious institutions for political purposes. Both are subject to internal debates about the wisdom of specific coalitions. Both face structural challenges (declining religious affiliation, generational succession). Both have been formative for one of the major political parties for two generations.

The political scientist who treats white evangelical mobilization as "religious-conservative coalition politics" while treating Black church mobilization as "identity politics" is not doing political science; the political scientist who reverses the labels is also not doing political science. The honest analyst applies the same analytical framework to both — and to the suburban-college-educated coalition, to the rural non-college coalition, to the LGBTQ+ political organization, to every demographic group whose institutional infrastructure has been mobilized for political purposes.

Identity-coalitional politics is what most American political mobilization actually is. The case studies are different windows into the same underlying phenomenon.