Evangelical protestants on the right have for ages wanted to cut down the forest of secularism that they believe blights the American landscape. Secularism gets in the way of Christian politics and breeds vice, or so the story goes. There’s some truth in that; secularism has its vices, and Donald Trump, the most secular Republican president since Lincoln—and perhaps the most secular ever—has shown little interest in supporting traditional evangelical-supported restrictions on abortion, gambling, marijuana, abortifacient contraception, and a host of other reforms historically coded as “Christian right.”
Trump’s brand of transactional politics and his political presence unquestionably feeds the newfound interest—especially among low-church evangelicals—in political theology. But this new founded interest in the topic has not come with other needed political virtues, such as patience or the wisdom to judge what is possible or sustainable in a given moment.
Sustainability isn’t something evangelicals do well. A movement based on—if David Bebbington is to be believed—conversionism, activism, a specific soteriology, and biblicist hermeneutics is not really prepared to create institutions, much less sustainable ones. Even the more highbrow evangelical or evangelical-adjacent communions—the ACNA, the PCA, and OPC—are ecclesiastically and intellectually led almost entirely by converts. Multi-generational anything is rare in 2025; multi-generational churchmanship outside of Catholic, Eastern, or Lutheran churches is nigh unheard of. Evangelicals, it seems, can’t sustain anything. How then could they be expected to sustain Christian politics? Why this matters especially today is evangelicals are interested in destroying the forest of secularism, they have reason to think that they can, and yet they still have not learned how to build for generations or to make decisions today in view of what is prudentially possible and sustainable long-term.
Kentucky agrarian writer Wendell Berry made sustainability a calling card of his own approach to a distinctively Christian moral economy, and his passion for a sustainable ecology, economy, and social structure is a useful mirror for Christian political theology. In a speech given in 1994, Berry explained how the conservation of forest communities reflected America’s own profound callousness towards forests. If American secularism is like a forest, then Berry’s own remarks on the role of forests within an ecosystem can offer us a great deal of wisdom and guidance.
Certainly, forests present occasional obstacles to farming, and they need to be managed. A healthy farm could not be maintained in an overgrown and untamed wilderness. But neither, Berry warned, was it ever wise to clear-cut a forest. Farmers, especially poor farmers, often turned to clear-cutting the forests surrounding their farms for a one-time payday. That payday, significant as it might be, actually robbed the farmers of a sustainable income that might have been theirs by more careful management of the forest community. “More than likely,” Berry lamented, “only the prime log of each tree is taken,” which meant that other usable branches and potential board feet of tree and smaller logs for firewood were all left on the ground to rot. “The tree thus carelessly harvested will most likely leave the local community and the state as sawlogs, or, at best, rough lumber. The only local benefit may well be the single check paid by the timber company to the landowner.”
That alone is a lesson for what can happen when forests are carelessly culled. But it actually got worse for the farmers Berry had in mind when he gave his address. Not only was a great deal of usable lumber wasted, but even the price paid for the lumber that was harvested turned out to be less than expected. Why? Because it was not just one farmer clearcutting his forest. Rather, the “prevailing assumptions and economic conditions encourage(d) or require(d) them to sell all their marketable trees at the same time.” In other words, prevailing cultural and economic pressures encouraged all the farmers in the area to sell their forests, which created an oversupply of timber and drove the price down for everyone. So even the actual benefit they got from clearing the forest didn’t bring much benefit at all. The farmers were left with little to show for the decimation of their forests.
Over the past decade, evangelical protestants have undoubtedly done their best to cull the forest of secularism in America’s public life. They’ve done this with no small amount of encouragement from others. Many thinkers outside of evangelicalism have recognized a similar need for such pruning and even pruning by Christians. Tom Holland, Ross Douthat, Glen Scrivener, and Paul Kingsnorth have all made some version of this argument as have, arguably, Rod Dreher, Rusty Reno, and Archbishop Charles Chaput. One could even argue that the endorsement of “cultural Christianity” by figures as disparate as Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins is a tacit acknowledgement of this point. There is nothing wrong with Christians pruning secular society. Yet pruning requires skill to be done well, it requires knowledge of trees and biological ecosystems. Done badly, culling a forest can actually make a forest worse off, rather than healthier.
Not only that, but if we shift the analogy slightly and think of the evangelicals as the farmers in this analogy, then there is a pressing question of what evangelicals have gotten for their efforts, and who they have sold their socio-cultural cut lumber to, and for what price? At present, the chief buyer for the wares of Christian labor have been the electoral machinations of the Republican Party, and particularly Donald Trump. Trump’s price—near-absolute loyalty and a refusal to prioritize historic evangelical regulation of vice—has been steep.
It is unclear what evangelicals have gotten in return. The magnificence of the Dobbs decision has been marred by the Trump administration’s insistence on increased federal access to abortion drugs like the abortion pill mifepristone. Additionally, in December of 2025 the Trump administration ordered the rescheduling of marijuana, in what the BBC called “the most significant shift in US drug policy in decades.” That shift, it should be noted, is entirely away from the position taken historically by Evangelicals. Trump’s commitment to traditional sexuality—tenuous at best—has likewise been shown to be negotiable.
One of the reasons given for evangelical support for Trump is that there is a new crop of young right wing men that need to be witnessed to. That’s true, in that there is a specific demographic of right wing men who are not traditionally churched. It is not true, however, that Trump has in any way helped the church reach these men or that the church’s endorsement of Trumpism has better equipped them for that task.
One response—and it’s a fair one—would be that Trump isn’t doing church; he’s doing politics. That response only works, however, if churchmen doing political theology are careful to distinguish conservative politics from Trump’s politics. Those pastor-scholars are out there, but they are few and far between. The fact of the matter is that most evangelical protestants, especially outside of Reformed and Angelical traditions—doing political theology have made little to no effort to distinguish themselves from Trumpism. That these figures—First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffries, and others—do a ham-fisted populist version of political theology does not make them any less effective in influencing their flocks.
For nearly a half-century, evangelical protestants maintained the forest of their influence assiduously. They sold their influence sparingly—if suspiciously—while also dealing with buyers—Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, John McCain, Mitt Romney—who to their credit were charitable enough to buy at fair prices. Forests need to be pruned; sellers need to find buyers.
But in the past decade, evangelicals have seemingly sold the whole forest to Donald Trump, in a way that has left the land sicker and at a price that seems to have been better for the 47th president than for evangelicals. There is no guarantee that Trumpist politics will endure. When they fade, what will be left for evangelicals? In all likelihood, they face a future much like the farmers Berry wrote of, who had fewer goods to sell and had to do so in markets where they had no power to speak of.