Robert P. Jones on Exorbitant Price White Evangelicals Will Pay for Grand Bargain They've Made with Trump

Robert P. Jones, "Trump Can't Reverse the Decline of White Christian America":

White evangelicals have entered a grand bargain with the self-described master dealmaker, with high hopes that this alliance will turn back the clock. And Donald Trump's installation as the 45th president of the United States may in fact temporarily prop up, by pure exertions of political and legal power, what white Christian Americans perceive they have lost. But these short-term victories will come at an exorbitant price. Like Esau, who exchanged his inheritance for a pot of stew, white evangelicals have traded their distinctive values for fleeting political power. Twenty years from now, there is little chance that 2016 will be celebrated as the revival of White Christian America, no matter how many Christian right leaders are installed in positions of power over the next four years. Rather, this election will mostly likely be remembered as the one in which white evangelicals traded away their integrity and influence in a gambit to resurrect their past. 

Meanwhile, the major trends transforming the country continue. If anything, evangelicals' deal with Trump may accelerate the very changes it was designed to arrest, as a growing number of non-white and non-Christian Americans are repulsed by the increasingly nativist, tribal tenor of both conservative white Christianity and conservative white politics. At the end of the day, white evangelicals' grand bargain with Trump will be unable to hold back the sheer weight of cultural change, and their descendants will be left with the only real move possible: acceptance.

The only thing I'd change in Jones' masterful analysis here is the comment that "a growing number of non-white and non-Christian Americans are repulsed by the increasingly nativist, tribal tenor of both conservative white Christianity and conservative white politics." A growing number of Christian Americans are also repulsed by what white evangelicals and their allies in the white Catholic and Mormon community are doing to the Christian brand in the U.S. today. 

I want nothing to do with the Christian brand now, given its ownership by the kind of folks who inform me that queers make them sick and they own Jesus and the bible — while their "liberal" and "tolerant" fellow Christians stand by in total silence as this hateful betrayal of Jesus and the gospels rolls forth. I'm totally with Frederick Douglass: "For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those divines!"

The graphic "Take This Hammer" is by Mr. Fish at Truthdig.