Evangelicals won’t dump Trump over his racist Obama video

Have white evangelicals finally been embarrassed enough by Donald Trump? There were some glimmers of hope that many in the community hit their limit when the president posted a video to Truth Social that included a clip portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times argued that no one should be surprised, as Trump’s entire career has been centered around “his bitter, deep-seated racism.” But even after a decade of pretending not to see it, even some stalwart Trump supporters couldn’t deny the video was the visual equivalent of saying the N-word in public.

Along with a handful of congressional Republicans, a number of prominent Christian conservatives condemned the video. Sandi Patty, a legend in gospel and contemporary Christian music, posted a video on Instagram, noting she’s a “registered Republican” but found the video “inexcusable.” The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention issued a statement calling the clip “intentionally derogatory and dehumanizing.” Dr. Russell Moore of Christianity Today, Kay Warren of Saddleback Church and Desiring God founder John Piper also denounced the video.

With notable names like these, it’s easy to understand how some members of the mainstream media, including MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, enthusiastically declared that “evangelical leaders” had been “forced or shocked” to “speak out against it.” But one should not be fooled by the outliers. Most white evangelical leaders copied Rev. Franklin Graham, who ignored the racist post while praising Trump for “turning to God.” Others, like televangelist Lance Wallnau, reminded their followers that they love the president because “he says the quiet parts out loud.”

Plenty of other prominent preachers and pundits from the evangelical right chose to defend Trump outright. Minister Sean Feucht retweeted a post claiming Trump did it by accident. (While the White House initially deflected on the video before deleting it and blaming the incident on a staffer, the president has refused to apologize.) Turning Point USA executive Benny Johnson called the widespread outrage a “hoax.” Christian podcaster Matt Walsh denied the video was racist, claiming it was merely “edgy.” Instead they all spent far more energy freaking out over Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, revealing they share Trump’s hostility to non-white people in positions of prominence and esteem.

While the mainstream press often gives evangelical Christians a reflective glow by conflating religiosity with morality, none of this is surprising to those who have researched the culture of American white evangelicals. The video clip’s content was “immediately familiar” to Robert P. Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), who also studies racism and white evangelicalism. In his newsletter, Jones wrote that the “dehumanizing imagery” evoked a long history of “cartoons, jokes, and serious arguments about the superiority of white people.” As he told Salon last year, a large part of the reason why white evangelicals have long been Trump’s strongest base of support is that they support “the preservation of white supremacy.”

On Monday, the Pew Research Center published extensive polling data showing that white evangelicals remain Trump’s strongest base of support, with 69% saying they approve of the president. This admittedly is down from his 78% approval rating with this group in April, but there’s no reason to think his racism is a factor in the decline. Even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement alienates most Americans with violence and indiscriminate abuse of people based on perceived race or ethnicity, PRRI found 62% of white evangelicals express confidence in the agency’s now-overtly racist agenda. Instead, the small decline in support for Trump appears to be a response to fears that he’s not “ethical,” which I suspect has a lot to do with the administration’s reluctance to release the Epstein files.

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White evangelical leaders have been among the most enthusiastic in its support of Trump’s mass deportation policies. William Wolfe, the founder of the Center for Baptist Leadership, tweeted last week that Jesus “would support ICE and mass deportations,” adding, “If we want to save Western Civilization, we must become immune to the tears of liberal women,” who supposedly have too much empathy for immigrants. Popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey has been scolding her followers not to be “duped by the anti-ICE propaganda” while noting that she also thinks the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were “nonsense.” Right-wing Christian influencer Riley Gaines also insisted that people should “not let compassion” get in the way of supporting ICE — even as they were seizing five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and taking him to a detention center 1,300 miles away from his home. 

As Peter Wehner recently wrote in the Atlantic, “Much of today’s evangelical world sees Trump’s viciousness not as a vice but as a virtue, so long as it is employed against those they perceive as their enemies.” It is increasingly obvious, I would add, that anyone who threatens white supremacy is among those enemies. White evangelical leaders like Graham and Feucht went all-in on promoting TPUSA’s “alternative” to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime concert. The TPUSA show was billed as a celebration of “faith, family, and freedom.” But they could not explain why headliner Kid Rock — who has frequently joked about sex with underage girls — is more wholesome than Bad Bunny, who included a genuine wedding in his show. The answer is obvious: Kid Rock is white and Bad Bunny is Latino.

The mild rebukes of Trump from a smattering of evangelical leaders were not followed by a larger reckoning with his dehumanizing policies to terrorize non-white people. Nor did any of these people defend the right of Bad Bunny to rap in Spanish, a language that the Bible is translated into just as surely as English.

Animus toward racial diversity has been an unspoken but just as powerful motivator for the white evangelical movement as opposition to feminism and LGBTQ rights. They don’t like to admit it these days, and so some of their followers will occasionally get embarrassed when Trump says the quiet parts out loud. But no one should mistake the Christian right’s wish that the president would be more subtle about his racism for a larger moral shift against him. He is the same bigot he was when they first fell in love with him.