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An evangelical explains what people get wrong about her faith

A new book from writer Bonnie Kristian argues that evangelicalism has been “monstered.” What aren’t we getting right?

When the Donald Trump era is over — however that ends — I feel comfortable saying that at least one thing will be certain: He’ll still have the overwhelming support of evangelical Christians in the United States.

Even today, with the president’s popularity at near-record lows, you’d be hard-pressed to find a religious denomination or ethnic group more supportive of Trump and his MAGA movement than American evangelicals, something that’s been true in polling and election results over the last decade. And that’s all lent itself to the perception in popular media, elite spaces, and the greater non-evangelical world of Christians that this movement is full of bigoted, Trump-worshipping hypocrites.

Yet Bonnie Kristian, a deputy editor at Christianity Today and a fellow at the foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities, says that perspective gets it all wrong. It’s a caricature those outside the evangelical movement have made the mistake of accepting as truth, and in the process, they conflate the loud, Trump-supporting, white evangelical voting bloc with the entire evangelical faith tradition.

The result is a “monstering” of normal people who hold deep and earnest beliefs about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the importance of the Bible, and spreading the gospel. They may vote for Trump, and they typically favor Republicans, but Kristian argues the reason they vote that way is often more complex than supporting every policy, or even most policies, associated with those candidates. She also points to fascinating research that shows that when Southern evangelicals leave the church, they become more cynical and individualistic, not less — which itself poses concerns for democracy’s future.

“This is a movement of tens of millions of people. You can’t have any collection of people that size and not have some unsavory stuff in there,” Kristian told me recently. “But I do really want to emphasize that [what gets caricatured in media coverage] is not typical evangelicalism.”

She expands on all this in a new book out this week — In Defense of Evangelicalism — in which she rebuts five popular attacks levied against the evangelical movement in the US: that it is insincere, advances evil, is hypocritical, imposes itself on others, and seeks political control. It’s an impressive intellectual undertaking, and an informative education for those of us who grew up outside of the evangelical tradition. (As a Catholic from Los Angeles, I hadn’t had much exposure to the theological roots and spiritual convictions of the prototypical evangelical.) Kristian helped me better understand all this, and evangelicalism’s place in 2026.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m sure our Vox audience thinks of the guys with “big beards and big podcasts,” or Trump-supporting white voters when they think about “evangelicals.” Who were you thinking about when writing this defense? Who are the evangelicals you are trying to defend?

The best way to put it is I’m thinking about a normal, typical evangelical church.

One of the interesting things that I found as I was researching the book is you’ll see the same characters recur in coverage of evangelicals doing crazy stuff. There’s one pastor in Tennessee, Greg Locke, who shows up in story after story and book after book. I listed something like two dozen media outlets in which he’s been featured. He does sound pretty extreme, but there’s a reason reporters go back to a guy like that, and it’s because most evangelicals are not like that.

If you just walked into a normal evangelical church on any given Sunday, you won’t find anything of that nature. This isn’t just my impression — though certainly being at Christianity Today, I do have a bird’s-eye view of this movement, and I did do in-person reporting and talk to ordinary evangelicals for this book.

But this is also something that you can see in survey data. Pew especially has done good research on this, asking both pastors and congregants: “Do you want politics in your churches?” Overwhelmingly, people are saying, “No, that’s not what we’re here for.”

People might also have misguided ideas about themselves when they speak to pollsters. And so the other fascinating thing is many churches put sermons online now, and we’re able to do large-scale assessments of........

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