The rise of Donald Trump among some evangelicals is an understandable, even if unsettling phenomenon. The alienation and despair that he has both fostered and exploited is a pervasive feature of some corners of American life. But no one is more susceptible to such hopelessness about our political class than working-class, rural, white evangelicals, who have been tutored more by the grievance and resentment theater of both conservative and evangelical talk radio than by the good news of the Gospel. As Ben Domenech has astutely explained, having lost every culture war such evangelicals are now fighting on the only terrain they have left: political correctness. And Donald Trump is their gift to the world.
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Matthew Lee Anderson
Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.