An Anti-Trumper Evangelical Weighs in on Trump's True Believers

Much has been made of how eight in 10 white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Now, John Fea, author of The Bible Cause (Oxford, 2016) and a self-described conservative who teaches history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pa, has written Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, (Eerdmans, June), which he calls “the first book written by an evangelical Christian who is an anti-Trumper.”

Your book is dedicated “to the 19%.” Why?

Most polls show that 81% of white evangelicals voted for [Trump], so I am a proud member of the 19% of white evangelicals who didn’t. Many evangelicals have moral and spiritual problems with Trump. I would argue that the 19% were more consistently Christian in their engagement with politics. It could be to vote for Hillary or not—but definitely not Trump.

Are you ashamed to be described as an evangelical at this political moment?

The word “evangelical” means good news—and evangelicals believe in the good news of the gospel. But when 81% of the people who believe in the gospel associate themselves with a man with no prior experience identifying with it, whose policies seem to undermine that gospel, and who lacks the character that exemplifies a follower of that gospel—it does bother me that the word has become associated with people who throw their support behind this president. As an evangelical myself, I have one of two choices: I can abandon the word to describe myself or I can fight to reclaim it. ...