Immigrants and Evangelicals: What Does the Bible Say?
- Immigrants and Evangelicals: What Does the Bible Say?
Despite its frequent use in American news media, the term “evangelical” is an umbrella term used to describe diverse groups of Protestants ranging from Southern Baptists to Pentecostals to non‐denominational churches. In the past, according to Frances FitzGerald in her recent book, The Evangelicals, “almost all Protestants would have called themselves evangelicals in the sense that they believed that they had been born again in Christ and had a duty to evangelize…” (, 2). Today, the most widely accepted definition of “evangelical” was advanced by historian David Bebbington () with these four components: devotion to the Bible, an emphasis on Jesus's crucifixion, conversion through turning away from sin toward Christ, and a life of action in service of the gospel. Although numbers are imprecise, FitzGerald suggests that evangelicals make up nearly a quarter of the population in the United States; although they are not uniform in their views, they are still a powerful force in American politics.
A watershed moment: the 2016 election
In the 2016 presidential election, 81% of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump. This was remarkable considering the fact that Trump's 65‐percentage‐point margin of victory, according to a Pew study, “matched or exceeded the victory margins of George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012” (Smith and Martínez ). The question that pundits and journalists have been asking ever since is: “How could so many conservative Christians have voted for a thrice‐married casino mogul who has bragged so much about assaulting women and rarely goes to church?” (Worthen ).
What brought white evangelicals to the polls to vote for Trump and what keeps them so loyal? Trump did not win based on his character. According to the Barna Group, 49 percent of white evangelicals “felt that Trump lacked a strong moral character” and “only 15 percent see him as ‘authentically Christian’” (Renaud ). An obvious place to start, then, would be the hardline positions that Trump as a candidate and now as president has taken against abortion, same‐sex marriage, and LGBTQ rights. The problem with this explanation is that these issues are important not only to a majority of white evangelicals but also to many evangelicals of color in the United States (and many Catholics as well). Trump, however, received less than 35 percent of the non‐white evangelical vote (compared to 59 percent who voted for Clinton).
As it turns out, while issues such as abortion and same‐sex marriage were important to white evangelicals in their selection of candidates, other issues took precedence. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals ranked issues such as terrorism, the economy, and immigration much higher (Smith and Martínez ). In her 2017 article, “Myths Debunked: Why Did White Evangelical Christians Vote for Trump?” Myriam Renaud argues that white evangelicals voted for Trump because he successfully tapped into economic anxiety. Many voters of this demographic perceive themselves as struggling to regain their pre‐recession footing and permanently losing their solid middle‐class standing. In a nutshell, she says, Trump won over this group because…
…[h]e promised seemingly quick fixes like eliminating trade agreements that appeared to favor foreign companies over American ones, forcing U.S.‐based companies to keep jobs stateside instead of shipping them overseas, and reducing competition for jobs with a tough stance toward illegal immigrants. (Renaud )
Mehdi Hasan, in a 2017 article in the New Statesmen, sums up white evangelical support for Trump by citing Jim Wallis, the progressive evangelical head of Sojourners, who said that “black evangelicals, Hispanic evangelicals… did not vote for Donald Trump. White evangelicals did…because they were more white than evangelical” (Hasan ).
Economy over values
These statistics are less interesting for what they say about white evangelical concerns regarding their economic standing or their perception of how illegal immigrants and a more liberal immigration policy could impact them adversely; rather, they are numbers important because these concerns about the economy and immigration have moved to the fore, playing an outsized role in the voting choices of many white evangelicals. Perhaps more significantly, especially for the purpose of this article, what seems...
