Anthea Butler, NBC News, September 27, 2019

{snip} White evangelical support for Donald Trump is still at 73 percent, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016.

But focusing on the disconnect between Trump’s personal actions and the moral aspects of their faith misses the issue that keeps their support firm: racism. Modern evangelicals’ support for this president cannot be separated from the history of evangelicals’ participation in and support for racist structures in America.

{snip} After the schism among the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians in the 1850s over slavery, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptists — who defended slavery through their readings of scripture — came into being. And because the primary schisms between northern and southern denominations was over the issues of slavery, in the pre- and post-Civil War years, African American Protestants formed their own denominations.

Evangelical denominations formed from these splits in the South were usually comprised of people who had made money from slavery or supported it. After the Civil War many were more likely to have supported the Ku Klux Klan and approved of (or participated in) lynching. {snip}

During the civil rights movement, many white evangelicals either outright opposed Martin Luther King Jr. or, like Billy Graham, believed that racial harmony would only come about when the nation turned to God. In the 1970s, evangelicalism became synonymous with being “born again” and also against abortion and, with the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s, they began to seek not only moral, but political power.

Ronald Reagan, who also counted evangelicals among his most vociferous supporters, started his presidential campaign on the platform of states’ rights from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered by several Klansmen with the participation of local law enforcement in 1964, while attempting to register African Americans to vote. Decades later, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical leader, opposed sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime and insulted Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize Peace winner, as a “phony.”

After 9/11, many evangelicals vilified Islam and created cottage industries and ministries promoting Islamophobia. And when Barack Obama was elected president, they regrouped, bought guns and became Tea Partiers who promoted fiscal responsibility and indulged in birtherism, promoted by no less than the son of Billy Graham, Franklin.

Still, evangelicals have worked to make a good show of repenting for racism. {snip}

But statements are not enough. Proving how disconnected they are from their statements about atoning for the sin of racism, the 2019 Annual Convention of the Southern Baptists was opened with a gavel owned by John A. Broadus, a slaveholder, white supremacist and the founder of their seminary. {snip}

So it’s not surprising that white evangelicals supported the Muslim ban, are the least likely to accept refugees into the country (according to the Pew Foundation) and, though a slim majority oppose it, are the denomination most likely to support Trump’s child separation policy. White evangelicals certainly are not concerned with white supremacy, because they are often white supremacists.

And Trump appeals to these evangelicals because of his focus on declension, decline and destruction, which fits into evangelical beliefs about the end times. {snip} Rhetoric, not morality, drives their voting habits.

All of this has made a mockery of white evangelical protestations about morality and the family. {snip} Trump promised justices and a return to a time when they felt less fear, and he delivered, at least on the former. White evangelical fealty to him is firm. {snip}

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