Brandon Ambrosino is a writer and visiting assistant teaching professor in the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program at Villanova University, from which he holds a PhD in theology and ethics.
Weird’s the word. In fact, it’s the word of the 2024 United States presidential election. Beginning in July, vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz started to throw around the term in reference to Republicans. “These guys are weird,” he said several times. “Weird” quickly took off. Columnists, journalists, even historians weighed in on the term’s popularity. In an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside Jen Psaki, Mr. Walz was asked how he “settled on that particular description.” Characterizing the leading MAGA players as Bond villains and members of the He-Man Woman Haters Club, Mr. Walz said he just didn’t know how else to describe them.
Plenty of Americans seem to agree with Mr. Walz and hope to banish the weirdness away on election day. Others, however, seem not only to accept the MAGA weirdness, but to embrace it. A sizable part of this latter group are American evangelicals – which is, as many critics have pointed out, weird.
Donald Trump is a darling of a certain kind of evangelical. In 2020, 81 per cent of white evangelicals voted for him, per a Pew poll. This number saw a slight uptick from the previous election, when, according to the same pollster, 77 per cent cast their votes for Mr. Trump. And expect a similar result on Tuesday: An April poll found that 81 per cent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Mr. Trump if the election were held the day they answered.
The question is, why?
The explanations about the current state of evangelicalism run the gamut from Evangelicals Have Lost Their Way to Evangelicals Have Always Been Christian Nationalists. Each extreme gets something right; neither tells a complete story. And it’s probably not possible to do that. There’s a lot of disagreement, both on the outside and on the inside, about what evangelicalism is, whether Mr. Trump and his loyalists are evangelicals, and what the future of American evangelicalism will look like.
I don’t think any one story can answer all these questions, even though some of them might be helpful in providing us with various frames for constructing and telling smaller stories. But there is one story that I want to tell about evangelicals, one that I think has been neglected. This story has less to do with politics and more to do with aesthetics. The story that interests me is a story about weirdness.
In March, 2010, Jerry Falwell Jr. stood next to his brother Jonathan in DeMoss Learning Center on the campus of Liberty University, the conservative Christian school their late father Jerry Sr. founded in 1971. The brothers were joined by David DeWitt, then-director of the school’s Center for Creation Studies, to unveil the school’s brand-new Creation Hall Museum, which would, according to a writeup from the Office of Communication, give students the chance to “view fossils and artifacts up close while learning how to defend their belief system.” For Mr. Falwell, the museum represented “Liberty University’s core values,” and as his brother, a pastor, promised, his father’s school “will always hold to the truth accounted in Genesis.”
That truth? That the world was created a few thousand years ago according to the account found in the opening chapters of the Bible, and that – crucially – humans have always existed in our current form, and did not descend from other life forms. Not only did I learn all of this from Dr. DeWitt when I enrolled in his Creation Studies class in 2005 – at the time, you could not graduate from Liberty unless you took the course – I also learned how to defend this truth against attacks from academic elites, modern science and the mainstream media.
Fossil record, you say? Evidence of transitional hominins? Archeological and geological evidence confirming that the Earth is extremely old? Those were nothing to worry about. They were lies from the Devil.
Dinosaur fossils like this Apatosaurus are evidence of life's development over millions of years. Creationists reject this, claiming God created the Earth a few thousand years ago.Noemie Olive/Reuters
We knew no other college science students were doing what we were doing; we knew we were out of step with the mainstream; we knew that we sounded silly talking about 6,000-year-old dinosaur bones. That was all sort of somehow the point.
Education is formation. Our content in CRST 290 was ourselves. We weren’t learning science; we were learning how to be us, how to not be them, and how to embrace, to delight, even, in that difference. We weren’t passive agents of an othering process initiated by modern, intelligent America; we were actively othering ourselves. We wanted to be weird.
Many of us in that classroom had spent our teenage years wearing What Would Jesus Do? bracelets, putting on Christian “haunted houses” in our churches, and praying loudly around flag poles at our public schools. We were taught that Jesus commanded us (via Scripture) to “come out of the world and be ye separate.” Most of our lives had been spent showing everyone around us, everyone who wasn’t one of us, how separate we could be. But this wasn’t just any kind of separateness, not your standard difference. We fetishized our differences. We leaned hard into what marked us out and celebrated that. We were Jesus Freaks.
What will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus Freak? What will people do when they find that it’s true? I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus Freak, There ain’t no disguising the truth.
This is the chorus of the song Jesus Freak, released in August, 1995, by a Christian musical group named DC Talk. This group was quite famous around our college because the three artists actually met at Liberty University in the late 1980s. Jesus Freak was a commercial success, and within its first month sold more than 50,000 records. It reached number 16 on the Billboard 200 and the album of the same name won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Rock Gospel Album. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide, an achievement that most Christian artists could only dream of. If you were a Christian teenager/preteenager in the late 1990s/early 2000s, the song was inescapable. It played in our homes, in our churches, in our summer camps, in our skating rinks … but only on the nights our youth groups held private events there. We weren’t allowed to skate to secular music.
The first word of the first verse is “separated” and the song’s theme is all about becoming “separate” from the world, or countercultural. One lyric references a New Testament passage: “I’ve been marked by my Maker a peculiar display.” That phrase – peculiar display – is a common mistranslation of I Peter 2:9, in which the letter recipients are told that God has set them apart from everyone else in the world to be his special “possession.” The mistranslation fit the theological agenda of countercultural Christians so the word “peculiar” not only stuck but became popularized, summing up for many of us our vocation. Christians were called by God to be separated from the mainstream, from the normal, from the typical. We were called to be peculiar. Being weirder than those outside of our folds wasn’t an insult to us.
So when, as a college sophomore, I was pulling all-nighters cramming for Creation Studies exams, I was very happily and consciously confirming a stereotype that modern Americans held about us evangelicals.
The process of willingly becoming peculiar, of separating the Bible-believing wheat from the evolutionary chaff, predated us by about 80 years.
In 1925, an 11-day trial in Dayton, Tenn., captured the country’s attention. The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, or the Scopes Monkey Trial, as it came to be known, was ostensibly about whether a science teacher had violated the Butler Act by teaching evolution. (The court found that he did.) In actual fact, as anthropologist Susan Harding points out, the trial was about so much more: It was about the power of narration, about the construction of both a modern point of view and the fundamentalist “others” on whom its very existence depends.
These new others were, as H.L. Mencken memorably described them, “peasants,” “hillbillies” and “morons.” They believed the Bible was literally – literally! – true, which meant they were wildly out of step with a progressive world proudly pursuing scientific and technological advancements.
Although the defence, represented by Clarence Darrow, lost the case, Mencken thought the lawyer “performed a great public service” by letting the anti-evolution, born-again perspective reveal itself. The entire ordeal, he said, “serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.”
In addition to the legal verdict rendered upon Scopes, Dr. Harding argues that there was a “cultural verdict” handed down upon the fundamentalists, a verdict that had “exiled them from public life.” Not that the “fundamentalists” objected to their own othering.
As Dr. Harding has argued, they not only assented to, but, in some ways, embraced the rhetorical productions that created them. “At once victims and critics of modern insinuations,” Dr. Harding writes in The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, they were complicit in their own naming, their own narrating. “They collaborated in their own cultural and political exile.” After the trial, they withdrew to the “backwaters of the land,” as Mencken scornfully described their homes.
Televangelist Jerry Falwell spent his life urging conservative Christians to organize in politics through the so-called Moral Majority movement and Liberty University, which he founded in Lynchburg, Va.Steve Helber/The Associated Press
Until (and in the interests of time, I’m skipping a few decades) Rev. Jerry Falwell led them back out into public life. Sure, there were some political efforts made by born-agains in the intervening years between Scopes and Mr. Falwell’s ascendancy: the founding of the John Birch Society, opposition to school curriculums and the Equal Rights Amendment. But in Dr. Harding’s reading, these were “smaller contests” emerging locally throughout the country. The born-agains – Mencken’s backwater morons – were still marginalized, quarantined from public life. What Mr. Falwell and the movement that put him forward were up to was “suturing up the two things kept apart” since the Scopes trial: “routine political activism and aggressive, Bible-based supernaturalism.”
To put it another way: What Mr. Falwell did was to encourage Christians to re-enter public life and to bring their weirdness, their peculiarity with them, right out into the open. Don’t confine your Christian convictions to your churches, he preached. This is, after all, your country. “This idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix,’ ” he said in 1976, “was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.” Many point to this quote as evidence of Christian nationalism, but there’s more going on in this kind of rhetoric. Mr. Falwell is not merely inviting Christians to take over the country; he’s calling them back into the public square. But he doesn’t want them to assimilate to mainstream America; he wants them to reshape it according to their peculiar beliefs.
As Mr. Falwell’s rhetoric heated up, Dr. Harding argues, he accomplished an almost alchemical transformation: He converted “his people from ‘fundamentalists,’ whose only mission in American society was evangelism, into ‘conservative Christians,’ who would fight worldly battles and who sought worldly power and influence in the name of Christian values.”
Not that the battle over the term “fundamentalist” was Mr. Falwell’s creation. In the early 1940s, a coalition of born-again Christians, concerned about what they saw as the excesses of both progressive and “backwater” Protestant Christianity, founded the National Association of Evangelicals as something of a middle way. To settle into a middle position, as the NAE has done, is to double down on the rhetoric of peculiarity. In other words, evangelicals formed their identity by being like fundamentalists in some ways, but very much unlike them in other ways.
Evangelicals, by their own self-definition, are peculiar but not too peculiar.
Depending on whom you ask, there’s not much difference between an evangelical and a fundamentalist. At least not when it comes to what are called “the fundamentals” – those beliefs that many born-again Christians believe to be non-negotiable tenets of their faith (biblical inerrancy, the Virgin Birth, Jesus’s bodily resurrection etc.). In fact, Russell Moore, a prominent evangelical and the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, published an editorial last year titled “Why I’m a ‘Bible Thumping Fundamentalist’.” Back in the day, he said, all born-again Christians believed the fundamentals. But at some point, “fundamentalism” stopped referring to belief and “became a vibe – an attitude in which ‘contending for the faith’ came to mean ‘If you’re not in a fight, you’re a liberal.’ ” On this reading, evangelicals are fundamentalists without the fundamentalist vibe. Like Amy Poehler’s Mean Girls character, they aren’t like other born-agains; they’re cool ones! But not too cool – Mr. Moore still encourages his evangelical fans to stand strong on God’s “design” for heterosexual marriage.
Mr. Moore is one of the most prominent evangelicals to criticize Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. He has condemned the racism and nationalism of white evangelical conservatives. He’s also expressed concern that “almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized.” In an effort to address these issues, he and his friend David French, previously a columnist for the conservative National Review, have put together an online workshop teaching Christians how to “engage in politics in a way that reflects Jesus.”
At an event in March, 2023, hosted by the non-profit Trinity Forum, Mr. Moore was asked to comment on a study claiming that up to 40 per cent of Christian pastors are leaving their jobs. He gave a long, thoughtful response, but it was a reference to “flat-Earthers” that caught my attention.
“I knew a pastor who had a couple of flat-Earthers in his congregation one time. They showed up with a flat-Earth conspiracy. They’re sweet people but confused.”
There was some knowing laughter both on and offstage. Between Mr. Moore’s body language and facial expressions, as well as his comment about these born-agains being “confused,” his point was incredibly well communicated: We evangelicals, the kind that attend public lectures hosted by think tanks, you know, like this one, we know better than to fall for any anti-science conspiracy theories like, you know, the ones believed by those sweet backwater folks.
For some Evangelicals, accepting the Genesis story of Adam and Eve is not negotiable, regardless of what evolutionary biology says about human origins.Olivier Matthys/The Associated Press
What’s remarkable about this brief comment is that, by the same standards of modern science, Mr. Moore himself would be considered backward. Over the years, he has been very public about his opposition to evolutionary “theory.” Like many evangelicals who try to distance themselves from fundamentalist vibes, Mr. Moore expresses openness to certain aspects of evolution but draws clear lines that he won’t cross. In a 2017 conversation with the late Tim Keller, another rock-star evangelical, Mr. Moore and Mr. Keller discussed the “essentials” of what Christians must believe about how the world came to be. One non-negotiable was the historical existence of a real Adam and Eve, an original pair of humans from which all other humans descended. (Contemporary scientific consensus holds that humans have evolved from other life forms.)
Imagine attending an academic science panel on conspiracy theories and one of the scientists mentions conservative Christians, such as Mr. Moore, who have doubts about some aspects of evolution. You can almost hear the scientist calling them “sweet but confused” as her fellow panellists knowingly chuckle.
To be an American evangelical is to constantly practise the aesthetics of what I’m calling “peculiar but not too peculiar.” This is perfectly illustrated by Mr. Moore’s gentle ribbing of flat-Earth theory (which science has disproved), yet his wholehearted embrace of creation theory (which science has also disproved). This aesthetic project is supremely important because, as Mr. Moore himself pointed out, what really matters are vibes. “We may have reservations about natural selection, but at least we’re not as ‘confused’ as the flat-Earthers! Aren’t they precious?!”
For the past century, American born-again Christians have been engaged quite publicly in both of these practices. At first, the negotiation was between the modern world and fundamentalists. Then it was between fundamentalists and evangelicals. Currently it’s between evangelicals and The Right Kind of Evangelicals.
To some, evangelicalism is on the decline. Actually, white evangelical Christians are declining. In 2006, “white evangelicals” made up about 23 per cent of the U.S. population, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll. By 2023, the number was down to just 13 per cent.
To others, the current crisis among evangelicals is simply showing who the real believers are. Still others question the polling methodology, noting, for instance, that the category “white evangelical” is itself misleading. Anecdotally, I’ve got many friends who formerly identified as evangelical but who no longer use the word because of its political connotations. They have pretty much the same beliefs as evangelicals, but they’re embarrassed to say so out loud. I also have some former evangelical friends who have left organized religion altogether, after coming to believe that MAGA simply brought to the surface the inherent nationalist and racist tendencies that were always a defining mark of evangelicalism.
I think there are several interesting stories to tell about evangelicalism’s decline – but to me, a theologian, the most interesting story to tell has to do with its increase.
At least by one person.
Mr. Trump, who calls himself a 'non-demominational Christian,' has courted Evangelical leaders since early in his race for the presidency.Brian Snyder/Reuters
What is it about American evangelical Christianity that made it and continues to make it easy for Mr. Trump, without any hint of irony, to count himself among its ranks? What is it about evangelicalism that provides a home for folks who embrace conspiracy theories and hope to “drain the swamp”? When Mr. Trump announced his candidacy, he didn’t hop in bed with the Anglicans or Catholics or Methodists. He cozied up to the evangelicals – and that seemed to make sense to many of them. When he invited 1,000 prominent evangelical leaders to Trump Tower in June, 2016, many evangelicals took this as a sign that he was one of them. To be sure, Mr. Trump has been careful not to identify as a particular kind of evangelical – he’s called himself a “non-denominational Christian” – but to plenty of evangelicals, he checks the right boxes.
Granted, it’s sometimes difficult to say exactly what constitutes those boxes, but it’s probably a good idea to start with theological beliefs, as historian David Bebbington does. Evangelicals believe every word of the Bible, organize their lives around their interpretation of Jesus’s cross, have a born-again experience and share their faith publicly.
Holding to these four beliefs might seem like a high bar for enrolment, but it’s really not. To count yourself among evangelicals, you simply need to say that you believe the right things. There are no other qualifications. In fact, evangelical theology is premised upon the conviction that no one but God alone is capable of meeting any qualifications for “salvation” (the theological term for the state of being born again). To be an evangelical, you have to check the theological boxes – a test that, by the way, will not be checked in this life because no human can see into your heart: “I believe the Bible when it says that Jesus died and came back to life for me.” Welcome to the evangelical church, your gift bag is in the mail. Perhaps this is why people – or, more pointedly, politicians – whose behaviour seems so at odds with Jesus’s instructions for moral living can believably pass for evangelicals. Belief, not behaviour, is what matters in the end. An evangelical could literally, say, stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and their membership wouldn’t be revoked.
Unlike Catholics, whose unity is publicly symbolized by the Pope, evangelicals are a populist bunch. Evangelical churches are of the people, by the people and for the people. They are free to interpret and apply Scripture as they see fit. They are free to open churches in their basements. It’s not surprising, then, that many in the MAGA movement, which has always embraced the rhetoric of populism, find a religious home in a faith movement that eschews hierarchical restraint.
Mr. Trump's 'God Bless the USA Bible' includes the Bill of Rights, which prohibits the creation of a state religion and guarantees freedom of worship.Ben Curtis/The Associated Press
Nor should it surprise us that many MAGA evangelicals talk so much about the Constitution and other historical texts by prominent historical American figures. The MAGA movement, like evangelicalism in general, is a textualist one. The sacred texts of both are binding. We are no freer to reinterpret the Second Amendment than we are to reinterpret, say, the opening chapters of Genesis. When Mr. Trump started to promote the “God Bless the USA Bible” – which, in addition to the King James Version translation of Scripture, also contains the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights – many people were confused. But the promotion makes a lot more sense when you acknowledge that the broader evangelical movement of which he is part has always believed its proper relationship to texts ought to be one of uncritical submission.
I’m not saying that evangelicals found their way to MAGA because their theology led them there, or that MAGA folks found a warm reception in some evangelical circles because of their overlapping reading strategies. What I am suggesting is that the aesthetics of both movements – an uncritical fetishization of peculiarity – resonated with each other so much that it seemed to the adherents that, whether they were at a contemporary worship service in Georgia or a Trump rally in North Carolina, they were home.
They were home because they were not home. That’s what makes them peculiar. Their allegiance is to another place, Heaven, and another time, the past – the “again” to which they so badly want to return.
Is MAGA the logical outcome of 20th-century American evangelicalism? I’m inclined to say no mostly because of the many lovely and kind evangelicals I’m friends with. They’re horrified by the MAGA movement, by its bald nationalism and its flagrant indecency. But indecency can only be judged by respected norms of decency, and as I’ve tried to suggest, evangelicalism has always had a contentious relationship with those norms.
Why, for the past century, have evangelicals been willing participants in their becoming peculiar? Is the MAGA aesthetic just the next logical step?
In many ways, weird-making is a practice that many religious people all over the world engage in: Wearing the hijab, keeping Shabbat, repeating mantras etc., all set one apart from those not performing these behaviours. But there are ways of performing these behaviours democratically, so to speak, ways that respect that other people might find your behaviour weird. That is not, it seems to me, how a large portion of the MAGAngelicals go about performing their peculiarity. They seem to delight in saying what they know they’re not supposed to say. The point, it seems, is to call attention to the difference, to exaggerate it, to overperform it, to become, as the lyrics from the song Jesus Freak put it, a “peculiar display.”
Just how peculiar, though – that’s the question that a sizable group of evangelicals is thinking through. Peculiar enough that they will continue to oppose gay marriage and stand firm on a historical Adam and Eve, but not so peculiar that they will blitz on the Capitol if their guy loses.
The question for the future of evangelicalism is whether peculiarity can be negotiated in just this way.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images