Donald Trump made a promise to white evangelical Christians, whose support can seem mystifying to the outside observer. In January 2016, Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech at a small Christian college in Sioux Center, Iowa. Standing in front of a three-story pipe organ, he said, “I have the most loyal people.” -“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”. But he said something else that day. And his intended audience heard him.
SIOUX
CENTER, Iowa — They walked to the sanctuary in the frozen silence before dawn,
footsteps crunching over the snow. Soon, hundreds joined in line. It was
January 2016, and the unlikely Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, had
come to town.
He was
the boastful, thrice-married, foul-mouthed star of “The Apprentice.” They were
one of the most conservative Christian communities in the nation, with 19
churches in a town of about 7,500 people.
Many
were skeptical, and came to witness the spectacle for themselves. A handful
stood in silent protest. But when the doors opened and the pews filled, Mr.
Trump’s fans welcomed him by chanting his name. A man waved a “Silent Majority
Stands With Trump” sign. A woman pointed a lone pink fingernail up to the sky.
In his
dark suit and red tie, Mr. Trump stood in front of a three-story-tall pipe
organ and waved his arms in time with their shouts: Trump, Trump, Trump.
The
67-minute speech Mr. Trump gave that day at Dordt University, a Christian
college in Sioux Center, would become infamous, instantly covered on cable news
and to this day still invoked by his critics. But the line that gained
notoriety — the promise that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and
shoot somebody” and “wouldn’t lose any voters” — overshadowed another message
that morning.
“I will
tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about
it or we don’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Trump said.
Christians
make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed
slightly to stress each next word: “And yet we don’t exert the power that we
should have.”
If he
were elected president, he promised, that would change. He raised a finger.
“Christianity
will have power,” he said. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power,
you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you
very, very well. Remember that.”
Nine
days later, the Iowa caucuses kicked off the most polarizing road to the White
House in memory. Mr. Trump largely lost the evangelicals of Sioux County that
day: Only 11 percent of Republicans caucused for him. But when November came,
they stood by him en masse: 81 percent of the county voted for him. And so did
81 percent of white evangelical voters nationwide.
Now,
this group could be Mr. Trump’s best chance at re-election. The president’s
response to the coronavirus pandemic has battered his political standing: He
has trailed Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, by nearly
double digits for a month in national polls. Even among white evangelicals, his
approval rating has dipped slightly. But 82 percent say they intend to vote for
him, according to the Pew Research Center.
To the
outside observer, the relationship between white evangelical Christians and
Donald Trump can seem mystifying.
From the
start it appeared an impossible contradiction. Evangelicals for years have
defined themselves as the values voters, people who prized the Bible and sexual
morality — and loving your neighbor as yourself — above all.
Donald
Trump was the opposite. He bragged about assaulting women. He got divorced,
twice. He built a career off gambling. He cozied up to bigots. He rarely went
to church. He refused to ask for forgiveness.
It is a
contradiction that has held for four years. They stood by him when he shut out
Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border.
When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as
if they were true. When he was impeached.
Theories,
and rationalizations, abound:
That
evangelical support was purely transactional.
That
they saw him as their best chance in decades to end legalized abortion.
That the
opportunity to nominate conservative justices to the Supreme Court was
paramount.
That
they hated Hillary Clinton, or felt torn to pick the lesser of two evils.
That
they held their noses and voted, hoping he would advance their policy
priorities and accomplish their goals.
But
beneath all this, there is another explanation. One that is more raw and
fundamental.
Evangelicals
did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of
who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is
on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country
as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly.
White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no
longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their
values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to
restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.
“You are
always only one generation away from losing Christianity,” said Micah Schouten,
who was born and raised in Sioux Center, recalling something a former pastor
used to say. “If you don’t teach it to your children it ends. It stops right
there.”
Ultimately
Mr. Trump recognized something, said Lisa Burg, a longtime resident of nearby
Orange City. It is a reason she thinks people will still support him in
November.
“The one
group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had
become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms.
Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down
and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that
we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally
have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice
too.’”
Explained
Jason Mulder, who runs a small design company in Sioux Center: “I feel like on
the coasts, in some of the cities and stuff, they look down on us in rural
America. You know, we are a bunch of hicks, and don’t know anything. They don’t
understand us the same way we don’t understand them. So we don’t want them
telling us how to live our lives.”
He
added: “You joke that we don’t get it, well, you don’t get it either. We are
not speaking the same language.”
The
speech in Sioux Center symbolized why there has been so much confusion about
evangelical support for Mr. Trump. From the beginning, the outside world
focused on the comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Those in the
town, though, ultimately heard something else entirely. What mattered was not
just what Mr. Trump said. It was where he said it. And to whom.
And so
to understand the relationship, one has to go back to Jan. 23, 2016. One has to
hear the speech at Dordt the way the evangelical community heard it.
‘We
started out as a Christian nation’
The day
Mr. Trump spoke at Dordt, Rob Driesen sat in the very front. He supported Ted
Cruz at the time. But now, four years later, his eyes light up when he talks
about Mr. Trump.
He
brought out two photographs, framed, one of him and Mr. Trump, and one of him
with Mike Pence before he became vice president.
“I guess
the biggest concern for me is trying to keep our country the way it was.
Conservative. The values. For us, I mean, this is as good as it gets. We can do
whatever we want,” said Mr. Driesen, 56, sitting at his kitchen table this
spring with his wife, Cheryl, 52. Next to them, a family motto was painted on
the wall in gold and black lettering: “Home, Where Your Story Begins.”
He
gestured to his front door. “You don’t lock the doors,” he said. “I never take
the keys out of the car.”
He
thought back to Mr. Trump’s speech. “There was one gaffe he kind of got in
trouble for. What was it? Because there were a bunch of things he said.” He
paused a while. “I can’t distinctly remember, but I just remember there was one
thing, and that was the news for 10 days after that. Something about — I wish I
could remember. I can’t.”
“You
know how things can sound bad,” he said. “He can get away with it. People
seemed to like it.”
Mr.
Driesen works for the utility company, and his wife is a nurse. They have
raised their five children in the area, where they grew up. Mr. Driesen’s
grandmother’s grandparents were among the first Protestant immigrants to come
to Iowa from the Netherlands in the late 1800s. They were among hundreds of
families looking for economic opportunity, and a place to worship without
interference from the Dutch government. The immigrants called their first
colony Pella, after the place where first-century Christians fled to avoid
persecution. Their second colony, which would include Sioux Center, settled on
land that had been home to the Yankton Sioux, before the U.S. government had
forced them west.
Church
is still what really holds the community together. A day earlier, on Sunday,
the Driesens had gone to services in the morning and at night. They unplugged
the router and turned off their cellphones. They read the Bible. Sioux Center
was quiet on Sundays, when it is easier to name what is open — the Pizza Hut, the
Culver’s, the Walmart — than what is not.
Mr.
Driesen spoke of the policies that were important to him, all the usual
conservative issues. Small government. Ending abortion. Judges who share his
political views. “Traditional families,” he said.
“Unfortunately,
there’s just more divorce than there used to be,” he said. “There’s more
cohabitating. I think it is detrimental to the family. I just think kids do
better in a two-parent home, with a mom and a dad.”
His wife
had been quiet, letting him do the talking. She did not go to Mr. Trump’s
speech, and politics were not her thing; often the men around here were more
vocal than their wives about supporting the president. Now she spoke up.
“The
religious part is huge for us, as we see religious freedoms being taken away,”
Ms. Driesen said. “If you don’t believe in homosexuality or something, you lose
your business because of it. And that’s a core part of your faith. Whereas I
see Trump as defending that. He’s actually made that executive order to put the
Bibles back in the public schools. That is something very worrisome and dear to
us, our religious freedom.”
She
remembered how when her mother was a child about 20 miles north, the public
school still started the day with prayer. But when she was growing up, it
stopped. Her church, Netherlands Reformed, started a private Christian school
in Rock Valley, and so she went there instead.
They
send their children to that same school, which still has some of the same
teachers.
“We
don’t know any different,” Mr. Driesen said. “For a lot of people around here,
that’s just what you do. You have the same classmates all the way through. And
it holds the community together.” His siblings left the area for a while, but
then they came back.
They
want the Christian education for their children “so we don’t have to have them
indoctrinated with all these different things,” he said. “We are free to teach
them our values.”
“So
far,” Ms. Driesen clarified. “That’s where we see Trump as a key figure to keep
that freedom.”
She
paused. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance. If you have somebody
that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But
it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”
She
worried that the school might be forced to let in students who were not
Christian, or hire teachers who were gay.
“Silly
things. Just let the boys go in the boys’ bathroom and the girls go in the
girls’,” he said. “It’s just something you’d think is never going to happen,
and nowadays it could. And it probably will.”
“Just
hope nobody turns it upside down,” he said.
“But we
feel like we are in a little area where we are protected yet,” she said. “We
are afraid of losing that, I guess.”
Every
day, Mr. Driesen said, they pray. He wakes up and prays for his family, and for
safety at his job at Rural Electric Cooperative. Often he would pray that when
he hooked up a transformer it would not blow up.
They
want America to be a Christian nation for their children. “We started out as a
Christian nation,” she said.
“You
can’t make people do these things,” he said. “But you can try to protect what
you’ve got, you might say.”
He
thought about November, and felt confident Mr. Trump would win. He sees Trump
flags all over as he drives. Something has shifted in the country, he said, and
he is looking ahead to who might even come after Mr. Trump.
“I feel
like we are safe for four more years,” he said. “You know. So that’s a good
feeling.”
‘He will
vanquish all our foes’
Micah
Schouten cannot remember exactly why he did not go to hear Mr. Trump that
morning. Probably it was just too cold, or maybe he was working.
As a
child he dreamed of being a farmer like his father, but land was too expensive.
Now he worked at a cattle reproduction company — or, as he explained with a
smile, “I.V.F. for cows.”
At the
time, he supported Ben Carson. But Mr. Trump was a celebrity, and Dordt
University, 10 minutes down the road, was Mr. Schouten’s alma mater. The school
was named for a major church assembly in 1618 and 1619 that declared salvation
was only for God’s chosen ones, and expelled from Dutch territory anyone who
disagreed. Its students are “Dordt Defenders,” represented by a knight in gray
armor, wielding a sword like a cross.
So that
night, after his three children went to bed, Mr. Schouten pulled up YouTube to
hear it for himself.
Soon Mr.
Trump made him laugh. The candidate bashed the media. He said the thing about
shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. But the thing Mr. Schouten remembered most
was that he defended Christianity.
Mr.
Schouten, 36, is proud of his town and during a tour pointed out a community
hospital and water park for children. Asked about the growing Latino population
in Sioux Center, he drove to an area he did not know well and pointed out a
trailer park where he said new arrivals, many of them Latino workers, live.
When he
was a child, he said, the public school students were almost entirely white,
and now about half of the kindergartners are Hispanic. He noticed that many of
the Latinos in town were Catholic, and that they worked or shopped on Sunday,
which was traditionally a time of rest in Sioux Center.
“You
can’t find a single white person to milk cows or do any of that stuff,” he
said. “They know how to work hard. They don’t mind working those 12-hour
shifts.”
On a
Sunday in March, Mr. Schouten worshiped at United Reformed Church with
neighbors he has known for years. They all knew the harmonies by heart. They
were one choir, in sync on yellow quilted pews.
They
sang: “I will praise my dear Redeemer, his triumphant power I’ll tell, how the
victory he giveth over sin and death and hell.”
They
prayed: “With our God we shall be valiant, he will vanquish all our foes.”
The
pastor spoke to a sea of white parishioners: “God’s standard requires absolute,
total, perfect, obedience.”
The
Schoutens’ oldest daughter, who was 11, took careful notes in her journal.
When the
service ended, the church served cookies. Mr. Schouten caught up with some
friends, all fathers in their 30s wearing blue collared shirts and khaki pants.
“Trump’s
an outsider, like the rest of us,” he said. “We might not respect Trump, but we
still love the guy for who he is.”
“Is he a
man of integrity? Absolutely not,” he went on. “Does he stand up for some of
our moral Christian values? Yes.”
The guys
agreed. “I’m not going to say he’s a Christian, but he just doesn’t attack us,”
his friend Jason Mulder said.
Mr.
Schouten’s wife, Caryn, had walked over with the other wives. After the
election of President Barack Obama, the country seemed to undergo a cultural
shift, she said. “It was dangerous to voice your Christianity,” she said.
“Because we were viewed as bigots, as racists — we were labeled as the haters
and the ones who are causing all the derision and all of the problems in
America. Blame it on the white believers.”
None of
them said they had wanted to vote for Mr. Trump, but they did — “When he was
the last option,” Heather Hoogendoorn said. The group laughed.
But they
agreed it would be easier to vote for him this time. Before, it was hard to
know what he would be like as president. Now they knew, and they liked the
results: Supreme Court justices, conservative judges, including a Dordt
graduate now on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and growing
clout for the anti-abortion movement.
“Obama
wanted to take my assault rifle, he wanted to take out all the high-capacity
magazines,” Mr. Schouten said. “It just —”
“— felt
like your freedoms kept getting taken from you,” said Heather’s husband, Paul,
finishing the sentence for him.
When the
Schoutens got home, Caryn, 36, scooped a chip into sour cream dip and plopped
into a chair in her living room.
She
spoke of her concern about sex trafficking. She had seen posts on Facebook
about mothers being followed to their cars if they went shopping at Target in
Sioux City, almost an hour away.
“I’m
safe when I’m here. I’m not afraid when I’m here,” she said.
They
thought about the lives they want for their children, and why they send them to
a Christian elementary school. “We hope our kids eventually find a Christian
spouse, and that exposes them to other kids of like-mindedness,” her husband
said. The two of them met through their rival Christian high schools.
People
seem to get married younger around here than they do in corporate America, Mr.
Schouten said. “It’s fairly common for women to go to Dordt to get their M.R.S.
degree, their Mrs. degree,” he said.
When she
was younger, his wife said, she used to say she would leave Sioux County. She
remembered the shock of traveling to Europe in high school and seeing “men in
full drag” for the first time.
“We have
life very easy, it is laid back, it is like-minded people. And it’s just, I
like the bubble,” she said. “I like not worrying about sending them outside to
play, or whose house they are going to if they are going to the neighbors a few
houses down, they might not go to the same church, they might not hold all the
same beliefs, but I trust them. I don’t know, maybe that is naïve.”
The
years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her. She said she heard talk of
giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it
felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the
minority.
“I do not
love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is
going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with
our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to
all,” she said. “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”
She
explained what she meant. “If you are a hard-working Caucasian-American, your
rights are being limited because you are seen as against all the races or
against women,” she said. “Or there are people who think that because we have
conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my
husband, I must be against women’s rights.”
Her
voice grew strong. “I would say it takes a stronger woman to submit to a man
than to want to rule over him. And I would argue that point to the death,” she
said.
She felt
freer as she spoke. “Mike Pence is a wonderful gentleman,” she said. “This is
probably a very bad analogy, but I’d say he is like the very supportive,
submissive wife to Trump. He does the hard work, and the husband gets the
glory.”
She
turned to her husband. “Let’s be real, Micah, do you have any clue what goes on
in our children’s lives on a daily basis? No.” They laughed.
“Pence
you can picture as your father, as your dad,” he said.
But Mr.
Biden as president really worried her: “Biden is a few fries short of a Happy
Meal.”
‘They’re
not Hispanic’
Jesús
Alvarado first came to the area a few months after Mr. Trump did, and he was
busy, preparing to start a church. It would be the first Hispanic church in
nearby Orange City — one of just a few emerging in the region.
He was
commuting from an hour away, and had heard about the speech like most people
did, when the sound bite hit the headlines. All he really remembered was
thinking that Mr. Trump sounded like Hugo Chávez, the former Venezuelan
strongman.
Twenty
years ago, less than 3 percent of Sioux County was Hispanic. Now, that figure
has nearly quadrupled, largely as the pork and dairy industries have relied on
Hispanic workers.
Most
Hispanic migrants who come to the area are Catholic, but many convert to
evangelicalism, as he did, Mr. Alvarado said in his office at Nueva Esperanza
Iglesia, or New Hope Church. They kept a low profile, especially the ones
without the right papers. At first even he had trouble finding them. Mostly
they seemed to stick to work, home and the grocery store.
“There’s
fear in the people,” he said. “The fear, the fear of losing everything —” His
unfinished sentence hung in the air. The lights in the main fellowship hall were
off.
Mr.
Alvarado, 64, remembered how he ran away from home in Mexico when he was 13.
His mother had died when he was an infant, he said, and his aunt and uncle
could not pay for him to get an education. He found agricultural work wherever
he could, in New Mexico, California, Texas, Colorado. At the time, he was
undocumented. He met his wife when they were both being detained on a bus. She
was dressed for a dance, he remembered, and three days later, on Valentine’s
Day, they got married.
When he
was detained another time, he said, a Hispanic pastor spoke to the judge on his
behalf, reducing his sentence. He prayed on the side of the road and devoted
his life to God, and eventually got U.S. citizenship. He began to start
churches — this one was his sixth.
He and
his wife were renting a farmhouse and taking care of four of their 13
grandchildren. He thought of how wonderful it was to raise them here. The whole
community — the schools, the businesses — is evangelical-minded, he said, and
the attitude toward immigrants has grown more welcoming. One of his church
members had called it “a piece of heaven for us.”
He
appreciated that Mr. Trump defended Christians. But he had another conviction:
“We should welcome foreigners, immigrants.”
“Doing
things like dividing the family, I don’t think that is very Christian,” he
said. “And building walls, instead of helping people with medicine, food,
especially old people getting sick for not having enough income.”
.He does
not talk about Mr. Trump with the white Christians around him. His church has
now joined an existing Anglo church, he said, under the leadership of its
pastor. Mr. Alvarado leads a Spanish service on Sunday afternoons for about 70
people, after the Anglo congregation finishes its two morning services.
“Maybe
they know, that they realize that he is kind of persecuting Hispanics, so they
won’t talk very much about that in front of me. I won’t, the same thing, I
won’t tell them my opinion,” he said.
He grew
quiet when he thought of why he believed that the white evangelical community
around him supported Mr. Trump. Then he spoke as if it were obvious.
“They’re
not Hispanic,” he said. “They have not been living what we have been going
through.”
“They
have to make their own decisions. I understand their point of view,” he went
on. “For them, the benefit is that he is pro-Christian. Which is one of the
things I like about him.”
He
shared their worry about the disappearance of Christian values in America, he
said, and he was especially concerned about the future of religious freedom.
“Our
freedom has been under attack, that’s the way I see it,” he said. “This country
was based and built on God-fearful leaders, and changing that is going to
change one of the reasons why this country started, and the thing that everybody
loves about this country. A lot of people are coming here because of the
freedom.”
He will
not tell his congregation which candidate he will vote for. Politics, he said,
is just not something they talk openly about.
The line
to Lafayette
It is
deep into summer now. The pandemic has killed 160,000 people nationwide.
Thousands have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of Black
people. In Sioux Center, where the Black population is less than 1 percent,
feelings about Mr. Trump remain largely unchanged.
Only
three people in the county are reported to have died of the coronavirus. There
was an outbreak of cases at the pork processing plant. Churches have mostly
reopened. The closest thing to a protest was a walk for justice in Orange City.
“People
in my circles, you don’t really hear about racism, so I guess I don’t know too
much about it,” Mr. Driesen said of the protests. “When I see the pictures, I
thought they all should be at work, being productive citizens.”
“I still
think he is going to blow Biden away,” he said of Mr. Trump.
Ms.
Schouten remembered a song she taught her children, called “Jesus Loves the
Little Children.” She quoted the lyrics, which have been sung in churches for
generations but would be considered racially insensitive today: “Red and
yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.”
“We are
making this huge issue of white versus Black, Black Lives Matter. All lives
matter,” she said. “There are more deaths from abortion than there are from
corona, but we are not fighting that battle.”
“We are
picking and choosing who matters and who doesn’t,” she said. “They say they are
being picked on, when we are all being picked on in one shape or form.”
The
Trump era has revealed the complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and
conservative politics, even as white evangelical Christianity continues to
decline as a share of the national population. There are some signs of fraying
at the edges of the coalition, among some women and young people. If even a
small fraction turns away from Mr. Trump, it could make the difference to his
re-election.
But even
if he loses in November, mainstream evangelical Christianity has made plain its
deepest impulses and exposed where the majority of its believers pledge
allegiance.
There is
a straight line from that day at Dordt four years ago to a recent scene at a
chapel in Washington, where armed officers tear-gassed peaceful protesters in
Lafayette Square and shot them with rubber pellets. They were clearing the way
for Mr. Trump to march from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church and
hold up a Bible, a declaration of Christian power.
“We have
the greatest country in the world,” he said. “We’re going to keep it nice and
safe.”
It was
another instantly infamous moment, covered by cable news and decried by
Democrats as an unseemly photo op. But in Sioux Center, many evangelicals once
again received a different message, one that echoed the words uttered by a
long-shot presidential candidate in a sanctuary on a cold winter morning.
“To me
it was like, that’s great. Trump is recognizing the Bible, we are one nation
under God,” Mr. Schouten said. “He is willing to stand out there and take a
picture of it for the country to see.”
He
added: “Trump was standing up for Christianity.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes
Correction:
Aug. 10, 2020
An
earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the
location of Micah and Caryn Schouten's home. It is in Sioux Center, not Sioux
City.
****Elizabeth
Dias covers faith and politics from Washington. Elizabeth Dias covers religion
for The New York Times.She previously covered a similar beat for Time magazine.
@elizabethjdias
A
version of this article appears in print on
Aug. 9,
2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
‘Christianity Will Have Power’.