How Trump Became the Savior and Caused a Generation of Christians to Sell Their Soul

CONFESSION: I voted for Donald Trump in 2016. 😬

I know, I know. Trust me, I know.

But it’s important to admit, because there is temptation for somewhat progressive people like me to quietly airbrush that part out of our story. It is all too easy to pretend that we were always eyes-wide-open to the problems and pitfalls of Christianity, but many of us are recovering addicts of the evil effects of Evangelicalism.

… Some of us voted for him.

…... Some of us didn’t vote for him but sat silently in pews every week next to people who did and said absolutely nothing.

……... Some of us never voted for him but forwarded FoxNews talking points over email and called it “just asking questions.”

………… Some of us watched the whole thing happen in slow motion from a safe, educated, comfortable distance and congratulated ourselves on our moral clarity while the fire burned down God’s house and the nation with it.

I’m writing this for all of us.

Because whether you cast the ballot, filled the pew, or just looked the other way: We all own a piece of this sh!t.

This is our collective mess. We all own it.

And it only continues to get worse, as tonight, Donald Trump will address the nation in primetime to assert, once again, with the full theatrical weight of a failed presidency behind him, that the 2020 election was stolen, that voting machines were compromised, that outside forces effected the outcome.

The problem: The intelligence community (his intelligence community, the one he appointed) has always confirmed what he always knew.

He is lying.
Still.

Yet millions of Christians are nodding along in agreement with him, continuing to support his every lie… and it is sin.

But Christians sold their soul long before Trump.

To understand how we got here, we have to go back far further than 2016. Much further.

We have to revisit the very thing that made Trump possible, not just politically, but spiritually: Evangelicals are to blame, of course, but not just Evangelicals.

The American church has spent half a century building a Book-of-Revelation-worthy monster, starting in the late 1970s with the Moral Majority. It was then that Jerry Falwell Sr. looked at the cultural shifts of that decade—abortion rights, second-wave feminism (focused on workplace discrimination and equal education opportunity), the sexual revolution—and decided that the church could not afford to stay out of the political arena. Falwell and his henchmen began tearing down the walls of separation between the church world and the political one, and much of American Christianity walked straight into the Republican Party and never walked back out.

For more than forty years, the arrangement has held.

Republicans promised the courts.
Winning the courts promised the overturning of Roe.
And the church promised the votes to Republicans, if they could deliver.

Then came Clinton and two democrat appointed Supreme Court justices, then Obama with two more. Four elections lost, to a Democrat… but maybe worse in the eyes of many, two of them to a black man. The demographics were shifting, and with it, the restrictive white supremacy, patriarchy, and fundamentalism of the past. The culture was moving in a direction that felt, to large portions of white evangelical America, like an existential threat to its existence.

Gay marriage was legalized in 2015.
Religious liberty cases were stacking up.
The white, rural, culturally Christian America that had been the backbone of evangelical political power was watching its cultural dominance erode in real time.

They were afraid.

👆 and THAT is an understatement, but I can’t say it any more plainly than that.

White Christianity was afraid.
There was very real, palpable fear.

And into the middle of that fear, in June of 2015, rode a savior on a golden escalator.

Here is the thing about Donald Trump that the church should have found immediately disqualifying: He didn’t pretend to be anything other than evil.

Trump didn’t speak in the careful, coded, dog-whistle language of the Romneys and the Bushes who had used evangelical voters without ever fully respecting them. Trump just said the quiet part out loud. He named the fear, embraced the bigotry, embodied the petty grievances, and pointed directly at the people the base had been told to blame, and blamed them… calling them names, using slurs, and treated everyone in his way like scum.

He had zero theological or spiritual credibility. He could not name a favorite Bible verse without mangling it (”Two Corinthians”). He had been married three times, paid off a porn star, and regularly used lewd language to refer to women. His brazen personal, moral profile was so far outside anything the church had ever endorsed as to be almost satirical. Yet the church embraced him, the very same church that condemned Bill Clinton to hell and the political abyss for a single affair. The Christian Right said that they could never support any politician without integrity, morals, or decent character.

But with Trump, none of it mattered.

And it probably should not have surprised us,

Most of the white evangelical/Christian Trump support was never about Trump at all. In the beginning, it wasn’t a vote for Trump but a vote against something else. A study out of the University of New Hampshire found that evangelical Trump support is primarily driven by “negative partisanship,” meaning, his support was about the conviction that the other side is so dangerous, so evil, so threatening to everything you hold sacred, that you will support literally anyone who promises to stop that “evil”… even Satan himself, were Satan to run for office.

When the enemy is demonic, the person carrying the torch doesn’t have to be holy.

That’s the 2016 deal.
That’s the original sin that led to where we are today.

It isn’t that Christians were fooled by a con man, so much as…

Christians consciously, willfully, knowingly chose a con man and then built a theology around the choice in order to avoid their shame and guilt for having chosen a con man over their values.

But this isn’t just an Evangelical problem, which is where I place the co-equal blame on many of my progressive friends: the ones who didn’t vote for him but said nothing bear responsibility too.

Every pastor who kept politics out of the pulpit out of fear of losing donors and members is guilty of validating Trump. Every minister who remained quiet about their concerns essentially gave their pastoral pulpit mic to FoxNews, which allowed them to disciple their congregation into fascism. Every “Never Trumper” who refused to make the case loudly enough within their own communities because it was socially costly are as equally responsible as those who voted for him.

Silence is not neutrality.
In a burning building, silence is consent.

Trump’s first term was the crucible in which the now-dominant “Trump Is Right No Matter What” GOP Theology was forged. Resistance was futile.

Trump gave evangelicals what they wanted most:
Neil Gorsuch.
Brett Kavanaugh.
Amy Coney Barrett.

He gave the Church-turned-political-regime what they most desired: Three Supreme Court justices who would eventually deliver Dobbs v. Jackson, and with it, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the promised land that the evangelical church had been marching toward for fifty years.

But something even more dangerous was happening at the same time.

The transaction wasn’t just political anymore.

The theological machinery of the charismatic and prophetic stream of evangelicalism was being deployed in service of the unholy alliance between the church and power. High-profile prophets were declaring Trump to be more than a President, but a divine appointment. God-ordained. A Savior, of sorts.

The language of “Cyrus the Great” (the Persian king who God used as an instrument of restoration despite being a pagan) spread like wildfire through evangelical networks, providing theological cover for the moral contradiction and extensive corruption.

“God uses imperfect vessels,” Trump-supporting Christians would loudly proclaim, defending their support of all manner of evil and sin.

Researchers at USC Dornsife documented this framework extensively, pointing out how the “Imperfect Vessel” Theology functions not just as a nuanced theological insight but as a truth-immunity mechanism: i.e., If Trump is Cyrus, then his integrity and personal character is irrelevant. His honesty is irrelevant. His cruelty is irrelevant. God has ordained him, and that ordination renders factual evidence about his behavior theologically null.

Read that again.

The church formed a “truth-proof” theology for Trump that made his character, cruelty, honesty, and integrity irrelevant.

And that isn’t Christianity, at all. It is a cult.

Then came 2020.

Biden won. Trump lost.

But how could God’s man lose?! … to the church, it was unthinkable, so it must not be true that he really lost.

He must have won; the election must have been stolen. God’s man cannot lose.

Except, every recount confirmed the loss. Every court, even those stacked with Trump appointees, rejected the challenges and confirmed his loss. Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, said there was no widespread fraud and that Trump indeed lost. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called it “the most secure election in American history.”

Trump lost, bigly.

And yet, dozens of the most prominent voices in American Christianity had publicly, emphatically, on the record, declared that God had told them Trump would win…. God had told them that Trump must win.

This was the moment of reckoning for the church.

This was the moment that should have been a catastrophic, humbling, institution-shaking moment of evangelical accountability. It should have woken the church up to its sin and sent it to repentance.

But the church, as you might know, doesn’t easily repent of its sin… especially the political kind that requires the loss of power.

Instead of repenting, many in the church doubled down on Trump, defending him… protecting him… even elevating him.

The pastors, priests, and prophets who got it wrong didn’t recant, instead, they reframed the loss: Trump had won, they said, but the victory was stolen! God’s plan, they said, was being thwarted by demonic forces.

They cast a political battle as a spiritual one, in order to save themselves from facing their abysmal spiritual condition.

The lie that “Trump is God’s man” didn’t have to be corrected; it just had to be escalated. And the congregation—the same congregation that had invested its identity so completely in the theological project of Trump’s divine mandate—followed them right into the delusion.

The church was now lost, following a false savior like the Pied Piper.

But this really wasn’t a casual or accidental mistake, this is a documented pattern in the psychology of committed belief systems: When a falsifiable prediction fails, true believers don’t abandon the belief, they deepen it. In cults, true believers find a way to make the failure confirm the narrative rather than abandon the false belief. Psychologists call this belief perseverance and motivated reasoning.

The church community has a different name for it: spiritual warfare.

Rather than accept that they had followed a pagan charlatan for reasons of power and bigotry, rather than their crucified Christ, much of the American church simply pivoted and said they were in an epic fight for the heart of a nation.

But reality is a funny thing when truth is not on your side and when you decide to live in an echo chamber of your own lies.

The church has become an embarrassing consumer of lies, conspiracies, and anti-Christ doctrine. A study confirmed what most of us already knew in our guts: 62% of white evangelicals reported watching FoxNews daily, and over 1/3 cite it as their most trusted news source. Among the general U.S. population, only 15% named FoxNews as their most trusted news source. Among white evangelicals? 36%. Nearly double any other religious group in America.

Let that gap settle for a moment.

A news network that was found liable in court for knowingly broadcasting false claims about the 2020 election (whose own hosts sent private texts saying they didn’t believe what they were saying on air, that it was “crazy,” “insane,” and “mind-blowing”) is the most trusted news source for the most reliably church-attending demographic in America.

White evangelicals watch Fox News at nearly 4x the rate of the general population and trust it at more than double the rate of any other religious group.

Much of the church in America is being formed by the liars at FoxNews, not God.

James K.A. Smith, in You Are What You Love, makes the case that human beings are not primarily rational animals. We are liturgical animals. We become what we repeatedly practice. We are shaped by the rhythms of our days and the habits of our communities far more than we are shaped by our stated beliefs or our intellectual conclusions.

If your nightly liturgy is Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld followed by a quick devotional, and your Sunday liturgy is a politically homogeneous congregation with a pastor who has made peace with the unholy alliance of Trump and FoxNews talking points, and your social media liturgy is a closed loop of sources that all confirm the same story, then your loves are being formed toward that narrative, regardless of its relationship to reality.

The church has long been being formed by FoxNews.

And it didn’t just believe the lies. The church practiced them. Daily. Repeatedly. Communally.

This was willful.

I am not talking about people who were innocently deceived. I am talking about adults with smartphones and broadband internet access who made deliberate choices about which pastors to listen to (the ones who agreed with them), which news sources to trust (the ones that confirmed their opinions), and which questions to never ask (the ones whose answers might require them to change). I am talking about a church community that chose its echo chamber and then refused to exit it, not out of ignorance, but out of the one thing that the Gospel is supposedly designed to defeat:

Fear.

The fear of having been wrong. The fear of what it would mean for your identity if the story fell apart. The fear of the shame that would come with admitting that you handed your theological credibility to a man who has never once, in his public life, demonstrated even a passing familiarity with the teachings of Jesus or any care (at all) for anything remotely resembling the Christian faith.

Guilt. Shame. The fear of being seen.

These are powerful forces. I know them personally. And I want to have compassion for the people in their grip.

But compassion does not require me to pretend that the grip isn’t self-inflicted.

Because I want to end with something other than despair (because despair is too easy and too passive and too much of what the moment does not need), I want to point out that:

Trump’s approval among white evangelicals has declined notably in 2026. A Christian Post poll from May documented it. The Axios reporting on “quiet quitting” in evangelical churches (which means pastors are consciously stepping back from political sermons and their members are slowly disengaging from the MAGA identity) suggests that the fever may, finally, be breaking.

But it is not nearly enough, not yet.

It does matter though, because:

Christians are, at this point, probably the only people who can move the needle away from Trump and save the Union… and more importantly, save the Church.

The Christian left, unfortunately, is no longer able to help the broader American church. They are not going to reach the white evangelical voter. The progressive and level-headed evangelical voices have been dismissed as apostate, so they are of little help. The Republican establishment has been fully absorbed into the MAGA identity. And the mainstream media is trusted by virtually no one in these communities.

None of these are going to reach those who still see Trump as Messiah and Savior.

BUT, there are pastors who still have credibility in these spaces. There are deacons and Sunday school teachers and small group leaders who still speak into the lives of people who are quietly starting to feel the cognitive dissonance. There are former Trump supporters who have already made the journey (people like me) who carry a credibility that no outside critic can manufacture.

And tonight’s speech is another opening, another hole in the wall.

When a sitting president uses a primetime national address to assert—on the basis of “declassified intelligence” that his own former officials contradict—that voting machines were compromised in an election that has been re-examined exhaustively by courts, state officials, and election security experts from both parties, he is not just making a political claim.

He is asking you to believe something that is not true.

He is lying.

And for Christians—a people who build their entire lives on the claim that Truth with a capital T is not just a concept but a Person—that should be a breaking point.

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

Not: you will know the narrative that makes you feel safe.
Not: you will know the story that confirms your tribe.
Not: you will know the version of events that FoxNews has settled on.

The truth. The actual, verifiable, evidenced, audited, recounted, court- and expert-reviewed truth.

This is not an abstract theological debate. It is happening tonight, in real time, on national television. Here is what faithfulness looks like in this moment:

You know the person in your life who is still inside the narrative. You have been keeping the peace because the cost of the conversation feels too high. It is time to decide if you love them enough to pay it. Ask them: “What would it take to convince you this was wrong? What evidence would you need to see? And if no evidence could ever change your mind, is that still called faith… or is it called something else?”

Don’t tell someone their news source is lying. Ask them to cross-reference one story. Just one story. One. “Can you find three sources outside FoxNews that confirm this?” The goal is not a debate; the goal is to crack open the sealed room.

“You shall not bear false witness.” Most people in the pew have never heard this applied to political speech. They have heard it applied to gossip and personal slander. Apply it here. Apply it to the President. Apply it to the media ecosystem that profits from manufactured outrage and lies. The commandment does not have a partisan exception.

If your church has been largely silent about the most sustained campaign of public disinformation in modern American history, your pastor owes you and the congregation a sermon on truth-telling. Not a political sermon, a biblical one. There are ninety-three verses in the Bible about false witness and lying. Pick one. Any.

The biggest barrier to people leaving the lie is not intellectual: it is emotional. There is a dread in admitting to ourselves, our family, our community, our pastor, that we were wrong, and that what we were wrong about carried real consequences. Name that. Say: “I know it is hard to look at this. I know what it costs. I have paid it. It is worth it. You will not lose yourself. You will find yourself.”

The midterms are not a spectator sport, not this year. The 2026 elections will be shaped, in large part, by whether a meaningful portion of the Christian community decides that its loyalty is to Truth rather than to the man who has made himself its living symbol. That decision doesn’t happen in the voting booth, it happens in living rooms, small groups, and Sunday school classes between now and November.

Jeremiah was thrown in a cistern for telling the truth about Babylon. Amos was told to go back where he came from. Micah asked a thriving, self-satisfied religious community to take a hard look at who was being crushed under the weight of its comfort.

The word is the same today.

We were captured by an identity, but it wasn’t a Christian one. And it was fueled by false fear… fear of a changing culture, fear of losing power, fear of the shame of having been wrong about all of it.

But there is an older, deeper story, one about a God who is not impressed by empires, who does not share an altar with golden calves wrapped in flags, and who has a long, documented track record of showing up on the side of truth when the powerful have decided that truth is negotiable.

That story is still available to us.

The question is whether we want it badly enough to let go of the other one.

I think some of us do.
I think that number is growing.

And I think that is the only genuinely good news in this whole rotten mess.

Kevin Young writes at the intersection of culture and faith from a progressive perspective. Would you help support this kind of content by subscribe to【Culture ✚ Faith】or by considering becoming a paid subscriber?

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