Racism Fuels White Evangelical Backing Of Trump: Salon Columnist

It's not exactly breaking news that white evangelical Christians were the core of Donald Trump's support, both in the election he actually sort of won in 2016 and the one his supporters refuse to admit he lost (by a healthy margin) in 2020, Crash Course reported.

Photo Insert: It all boils down to racism.

But as Amanda Marcotte discusses in her column in Salon on the same day, the Trumpian Big Lie about 2020 is not usually framed as a near-apocalyptic religious belief, when it probably should be: In the mainstream media and the eyes of much of the public, there's a secular cast to the false claims that Biden "stole" the 2020 election, which is being used to justify a national GOP campaign to actually steal the election for Trump in 2024.

From Rudy Giuliani sweating through his hair dye to Steve Bannon's self-aggrandizing to the hard-drinking Proud Boys, the face of the Big Lie is that of the all-American dirtbag, someone who is more likely to be out on Saturday harassing women in bars than up early on Sunday for church.

But while those figures certainly get attention, the larger threat to democracy likely comes from the well-organized, well-funded white evangelical movement, which has managed to reorganize itself around Trump's Big Lie out of the glare of much mainstream media attention.

From the beginning, the religious right was the backbone of Trump's Big Lie. As Kathryn Joyce reported for Salon on the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, in the run-up to the riot, "allegations about the 'stolen' election became nearly inseparable from messages of apocalyptic faith."

The crowd that turned out that day was largely driven by religious fervor. Since then, the Christian nationalist devotion to the Big Lie has only grown stronger. Six out of 10 white evangelicals claim Biden stole the 2020 election, compared to 37% of white Christians from mainline churches.

But why are the big-time Bible-crunchers so down with Trump's manifestly implausible and easily disproven conspiracy theories? Amanda argues it can be summed up in one word: Racism.

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