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Donald Trump, Televangelist in Chief

As the president seeks to mend fences with his evangelical base, it’s crucial to understand how he enlisted its support in the first place.

A group of pastors praying over 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump at the Midwest Vision and Values Pastors and Leadership Conference at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

This week, President Donald Trump will be reading aloud from 2 Chronicles, as part of a week-long nationwide streaming event called “America Reads the Bible.” Trump’s participation is widely seen as an effort to shore up his standing among his evangelical base after a rocky few weeks of controversy. In recent weeks, Trump’s Christian right supporters have had to reckon anew with the fact that their purported values and those of their president are deeply misaligned. Whether Trump is chastising the pope, mocking Allah, or posting memes of himself as Jesus, he is a man who believes he is above faith and superior to those who profess it.

Yet, as we can see from Trump’s tour in the virtual pulpit for an event intended to showcase the scriptural unity of the evangelical right, he’s not a figure that the movement can readily disown. Indeed, this latest bout of cognitive dissonance on the evangelical right serves chiefly to remind us how far American evangelicals have already gone toward elevating the unlikely figure of Trump as the vessel for their mission to revive Christian nationalism, and to place it at the forefront of the American right’s governing agenda. That’s the clear reason that one of the most worldly and gleefully depraved figures in American political life has managed to draw the support of and then maintained his hold on religious people—especially white evangelicals. Pundits and religious observers have been asking themselves since the dawn of the MAGA movement more than a decade ago just how a thrice-married casino owner who mocks opponents, savors vengeance, and revels in cruelty could become the hero of millions of devout Christians.

The short answer is that he seized on a central truth about evangelism in the postmodern age: It is a style, not a theology. Trump did not convert evangelicals. He mastered their techniques of revivalism—emotional intensity, apocalyptic urgency, charismatic authority, and a stark division between the faithful and the damned—and translated them into politics. His appeal was never about substance or theology but spectacle and performance. In short, Trump is the ultimate American televangelist.

In 2016 the former real estate baron and reality-TV star earned 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, a higher percentage than previous GOP front-runners George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. In 2020, Trump secured the votes of 85 percent of Americans who both self-identified as evangelicals and attended church regularly. In 2024, he again secured over 80 percent of the evangelical vote.

What evangelicals have mostly received in exchange for their unyielding support is a Trumpian variation on the same wrenching dilemma that’s dogged them throughout the past half century of spiritually minded political activism: the inherent contradictions between faith and policy. The teachings of Jesus seem unmistakable. Care for the poor and the downtrodden—Trump cuts social services. Welcome the stranger and the outsider—Trump drives them out of the country. Offer mercy and grace—Trump spews contempt and vows revenge. Bless the peacemakers—Trump thrives on discord and promises annihilation. In his searing criticism of the unprovoked US/Israeli war on Iran, Pope Leo, like Francis before him, made clear how far out of line Trump’s policies are with traditional Christian values.

But Trump’s theological aberrations don’t matter—it’s his personalist message of cultural domination that attracts his evangelical base, even when his actions and pronouncements defy the basic precepts of gospel belief.

Still, Trump’s repudiation of theological substance in mimicking an evangelical style isn’t just another feature of his own omnivorous attention-seeking ego: It’s actually deeply rooted in the traditions of American public religion. The unique role of religion in American history has made Trump’s seamless merger of religion and politics possible. We too often imagine the First Amendment’s strictures against a religious establishment as the product of high ideals blended with deep Enlightenment philosophy and careful, rational thought. It actually grew out of crass pragmatism—the need to secure claimants to religious truth on a roughly equal standing lest they revert to the violent premodern European habits of using the state to promote religious warfare—or vice versa, in many cases.

The founders recognized they needed a unified nation—meaning they could not afford to have Congregationalists killing Baptists killing Anglicans killing Presbyterians killing Catholics. They could not choose a single establishment religion and instead pledged to support its free exercise. Thomas Jefferson wrote more than a decade later that the amendment had separated church from state, but it often failed to realize that ideal in practice.

America’s bewildering new spiritual marketplace meant that religious leaders had to find a way to compel audiences to come to church. They had no pope or bishop or king to legitimize them; their spiritual authority had to come from the people.

The First Amendment forced religious leaders to become entrepreneurs of faith. To survive, they had to be on the cutting edge of both popular entertainment and communications technology.

Christianity forged many new modes of mass appeal in the United States, but its most popular and effective form was the revival. American revivals were first and foremost pietist spectacles; they thrived on intense public expression of religious sentiment. No creeds, no deep theological reflection, no careful catechisms.

Revivalism touched spirit, emotion, and feelings. It promised secret knowledge—the revelation of fact found only in one’s heart. Truth came through feeling, not thinking.........

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