Evil, Identity, and White Evangelical Support for Trump.

The initial motivation for this paper was the puzzle of evangelical support for Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Why would "values voters" - who for the last four decades have promoted biblical morality and traditional marriage - support a thricemarried casino-owner who cannot quote a Bible verse and has previously supported Planned Parenthood and LGBT-friendly policies? To investigate this question, I lived and worked in Pleasant Fields - a small, historically conservative Christian town in the Midwest - between April 2016 and January 2017. I conducted fifty in-depth interviews; worked part-time as a diner waitress; and participated in churches, volunteer organizations, McDonald's coffee groups, and a range of social spaces and community events. I returned for a shorter stint of fieldwork and follow-up interviews in December 2017. In this paper, I use these data to explore how white evangelicals draw upon their cultural toolkit (particularly conceptions of evil, narratives of America's Christian founding, and End Times imagery) to make sense of the challenges facing America and justify their political choices. The two most frequently and extensively discussed concerns articulated to me by Pleasant Fields evangelicals are Islamic terrorism and the advancement of the "LGBT agenda." Both are conceptualized as threats to the freedom of Christians, the status of truth, and the moral direction of America. The language used to talk about Islam and the LGBT agenda is imbued with notions of "evil," assigning theological weight to the "lesser of two evils" justification of Trump. These twin enemies are placed within an underlying narrative of spiritual warfare and the approach of the End Times, in which violence, sexual immorality, and persecution place Christians in a highly precarious position. Against the backdrop of significant demographic and cultural shifts that have led to declining numbers and influence of white evangelicals in America, insecurities about group position are highly salient. Within the theologically-framed narrative of spiritual peril and global uncertainty, the New Testament injunction to be "shrewd as serpents" functions to legitimate pragmatic political choices that may appear to be at odds with evangelicals' espoused ethical commitments. At this historical moment in American politics, Donald Trump is (still) perceived by his white evangelical supporters as a strong figure with the capacity to stem the progress of societal evils and protect the freedoms of evangelicals living in Pleasant Fields, despite his complete non-alignment with Christian ethics at the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]