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      Donald Trump Is Connecting With a Different Type of Evangelical Voter

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      They are not just the churchgoing, conservative activists who once dominated the G.O.P.Karen Johnson went to her Lutheran church so regularly as a child that she won a perfect attendance award. As an adult, she taught Sunday school. But these days, Ms. Johnson, a 67-year-old counter attendant at a slot-machine parlor, no longer goes to church.She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. “I have my own little thing with the Lord,” she says.Ms. Johnson’s thing includes frequent prayer, she said, as well as podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics and “what’s going on in the world” from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview. No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.“Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Ms. Johnson said recently as she waited outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear the former president speak.Karen Johnson went to church regularly as a child and taught Sunday school as an adult, but, despite identifying as an evangelical Christian, she does not attend church anymore.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWhite evangelical Christian voters have lined up behind Republican candidates for decades, driving conservative cultural issues into the heart of the party’s politics and making nominees and presidents of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

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      I just finished reading Tim Alberta’s masterly new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s a powerful and emotionally resonant account of the transformation in evangelical politics that has brought us to the current moment: A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.One of the troubling aspects of the Trump era for me, as a churchgoing evangelical, has been watching the evolution of his support among white evangelicals. During the 2016 primaries, I took some solace in the fact that Trump’s support seemed to decline the more a voter went to church. According to the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study, he received majority support from white evangelicals who seldom or never attended church, but he received barely over a third of the votes of white evangelicals who attended weekly.As we headed into the general election, a self-justifying narrative emerged. Countless churchgoing evangelicals told friends and neighbors that Trump had been their last choice among Republicans but that they had to vote for him against Hillary Clinton as the only pro-life option remaining.Soon enough, however, the churchgoing dynamic flipped. I noticed the change among people I knew before I saw it in the data. After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.Then the data started to confirm my observations. In 2018, Paul Djupe, a Denison University professor, and Ryan Burge, a statistician and associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, reported that Republican approval for Trump was positively correlated with church attendance: The more often people went to church, the more likely they were to strongly approve of Trump. By 2020, white evangelicals who attended church monthly or more were more likely to support Trump than evangelical voters who attended rarely or not at all.I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”Alberta captures this rage well in his book. He tells a gut-wrenching anecdote about receiving a nasty note in 2019 at the funeral of his father, a pastor. After Alberta spoke at the service, he was handed the note from a member of the congregation condemning him as part of an “evil plot” to “undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States” and demanding that he seek absolution by investigating the “deep state.” This would be a strange message to direct at a journalist under any circumstance. But to do so at his father’s funeral is grotesque.Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity. It’s the sense of shared purpose and community that makes any form of fundamentalism truly potent. There is an undeniable allure to the idea that you’re joining a community that has achieved an understanding of life’s mysteries or discovered a path to resolving injustice. As angry as fundamentalists may feel, at the same time, there is true joy among comrades in the foxhole — at least as long as they remain comrades.I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.When you recognize the psychology of fundamentalism, fundamentalist Christian enthusiasm for Trump makes considerably more sense. His fundamentalist supporters are certain that he is fulfilling a divine purpose. They are ferocious in their response to opponents, especially those Christians they believe to be weak or squishes. And they experience great joy in their motivated, activist solidarity.But the keys to fundamentalist success are also the source of its ultimate failure. Certainty, ferocity and solidarity can combine to create powerful social and political movements. They can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity.We’ve seen this phenomenon in both secular and religious spaces across the political spectrum. A small number of extremely confident and aggressive people can turn an organization upside down. Political activists who possess fundamentalist intensity can push through resistance — at least until their inherent intolerance creates sufficient backlash to trigger real opposition.That’s how fundamentalism fails. Certainty, which gives so much purpose, ultimately struggles in the face of complex realities. Ferocity, which allows fundamentalists to bully and intimidate opponents, also limits the ability to win converts. And solidarity, which creates community, can become stifling, as it encourages conformity and punishes those who raise good-faith questions.Why do so many fundamentalists love Trump? Because in his certainty, ferocity and demands of loyalty, he’s a far more culturally familiar figure than a person of restraint and rectitude such as the departing senator Mitt Romney, who has the piety of a true believer but does not possess the ferocity of the fundamentalist. Thus Romney was culturally out of step with the millions of Christians who wanted, in the words of Jeffress, “the meanest, toughest son of a gun” they could find.That’s why Trumpism, too, is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s engineered to destroy, not to build. The very characteristics that give it life also plant the seeds of its destruction. And so as we watch the continued marriage between Trumpism and fundamentalism dominate the right, the proper question isn’t whether fundamentalism will permanently remake American culture in its own image. Rather, it’s how much damage it will do before it collapses under the weight of its own rage and sin. More

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      Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim Alberta

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      In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security.” Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.”Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism | More

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      In Iowa, DeSantis Talks Abortion to Win Over Evangelical Voters

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      The Florida governor is courting white evangelicals by using Donald J. Trump’s criticisms of hard-line abortion restrictions against him.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida paused, looked down and then told a banquet hall filled with conservative Iowa Christians something that he had never before said in public: His wife, Casey DeSantis, experienced a miscarriage several years ago during her first pregnancy.The couple, Mr. DeSantis explained on Friday at a forum for Republican presidential candidates hosted by an influential evangelical group, had been trying to conceive before taking a trip to Israel.“We went to Ruth’s tomb in Hebron — Ruth, Chapter 4, Verse 13 — and we prayed,” Mr. DeSantis, citing Scripture, said at the event in Des Moines. “We prayed a lot to have a family, and then, lo and behold, we go back to the United States and a little time later we got pregnant. But unfortunately we lost that first baby.”The deeply personal revelation — in response to a question about the importance of the nuclear family — was an unexpected moment for Mr. DeSantis, who is usually tight-lipped about both his faith and his family life. On the campaign trail, he rotates through a limited set of anecdotes about Ms. DeSantis and their three young children, as well as his religious beliefs. Still, at the Iowa event, he lingered only briefly on his wife’s miscarriage, calling it simply a “tough thing” and a test of faith.Mr. DeSantis, a Roman Catholic, is heavily courting Iowa’s religious right, which has helped deliver the state’s last three competitive Republican presidential caucuses to candidates who wore their faith on their sleeves. White evangelical voters are likely to play a decisive role in the state’s Jan. 15 caucuses, the first contest in the 2024 G.O.P. primary, and they often turn to politicians who speak the language of the church.“You have to talk authentically from the heart,” said Terry Amann, a conservative pastor from Des Moines. “Anybody can cite Bible verses.”A majority of evangelical voters in Iowa favor former President Donald J. Trump over Mr. DeSantis. But some say they fear Mr. Trump is backing off on abortion.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIf Mr. DeSantis has any hope of beating former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner, who leads him by roughly 30 points in Iowa polls, it lies in winning over conservative Christian voters while fending off the challenge of Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who is seen as more moderate.A DeSantis victory in Iowa remains a long shot, but Mr. Trump’s criticisms of the hard-line abortion restrictions favored by many evangelical voters in Iowa may have created a lane for the Florida governor to bolster his standing. The former president has described a six-week abortion ban signed by Mr. DeSantis in Florida as “a terrible mistake.” Mr. Trump has blamed extreme positions on abortion for recent Republican losses at the polls and, looking to win over moderates in the general election, has avoided supporting a federal abortion ban. That has deeply disappointed some evangelical leaders and voters who cheered him after his appointments to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe v. Wade.“Trump has backed off his pro-life position,” said Mike Demastus, who leads an evangelical church in Des Moines. “And that’s caused voters like myself to pause and be willing to listen to other candidates.”Mr. DeSantis is trying to take advantage of concerns like Mr. Demastus’s. As he opened his new Iowa campaign headquarters outside Des Moines on Saturday, the governor told reporters that Mr. Trump’s comments on abortion had been the real “mistake.” He had previously said of Mr. Trump, during an interview with an Iowa radio station, that “all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out.”Still, Mr. Trump remains immensely popular with conservative Christians, and not only because of his role in Roe’s demise. Mr. Trump moved the United States Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an issue of deep importance to many evangelicals. He is also credited for his anti-immigration policies and for a strong economy during his presidency, reflecting the fact that many religious voters have political concerns beyond their faith.Even many of the evangelical voters who support Mr. DeSantis are deeply grateful to the former president.“The reversal of Roe v. Wade — I didn’t ever think that would happen in my lifetime, and he did that,” Jerry Buseman, 54, a retired school administrator from Hampton, Iowa, said of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have battled for months to win over influential evangelical leaders and top Republicans in Iowa, a state some say is still Mr. Trump’s to lose.Doug Mills/The New York TimesNow, the DeSantis and Trump campaigns are engaged in a back-and-forth to win over faith leaders and voters. Evangelicals are the single largest religious group among Iowa Republicans, accounting for more than a third of their ranks, according to Pew Research Center. So far, polls suggest Mr. Trump is winning the race for their votes. The former president had the support of 51 percent of white evangelical voters, compared with 30 percent for Mr. DeSantis, according to a September poll by CBS News and YouGov. It’s a major shift from 2016, when evangelicals flocked to Ted Cruz rather than to Mr. Trump, helping the Republican senator from Texas win the caucuses that year.“Trump has already proven himself to have a backbone,” said Brad Sherman, a pastor and state legislator who has endorsed Mr. Trump, even though he said he wished the former president would take a “stronger stand” against abortion. “He’s shown that he will do what he says.”Like Mr. Sherman, many Iowans backing Mr. Trump seem willing to forgive his more recent comments on abortion. Only 40 percent of Trump supporters agreed that he was right to criticize six-week abortion bans, according to an October poll by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom.Alex Latcham, the Trump campaign’s early-states director, said the former president had gotten results on issues that had been “the top priorities” for evangelical voters for decades. In his Des Moines office, Mr. Latcham said, he keeps a map of Iowa showing the locations of more than 100 religious leaders who have endorsed Mr. Trump.“There’s plenty of time, but right now it’s Trump’s to lose,” said Steve Scheffler, the president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, who is staying neutral through the caucuses.To counter Mr. Trump’s popularity, Mr. DeSantis held his first official campaign rally in May at a church outside Des Moines, where a group of pastors prayed over him. He has rolled out his own endorsements from more than 100 religious leaders around the state. Before each Republican presidential debate, he has invited a pastor to pray for him and his wife in the green room backstage. His campaign holds a monthly video call for pastors. And unlike Mr. Trump, he has attended several church services in Iowa, including alongside the Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, who hosted Mr. DeSantis at the forum where he discussed his wife’s miscarriage.Never Back Down, a super PAC supporting the DeSantis campaign, has produced advertisements that accuse Mr. Trump of a “betrayal of the pro-life movement,” call into question his support for Israel and criticize his attacks on Kim Reynolds, the popular Iowa governor who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and has also signed a six-week abortion ban.”DeSantis has done an outstanding job networking with evangelicals,” said David Kochel, a veteran Iowa political strategist. “He’s running the campaign the right way. The problem is he’s doing it against someone who has already delivered for evangelical voters.”Ms. Haley, the other top runner-up in the race, who is now tied with Mr. DeSantis in many Iowa polls, does not appear to be pursuing the state’s faith leaders as aggressively, and her more measured way of talking about abortion has turned off many evangelicals.In Iowa, Mr. DeSantis must also fend off Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who has become a formidable challenger for second place.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesOlivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Haley campaign, highlighted Ms. Haley’s “steadfast support for Israel” as a reason for evangelical voters to get behind her. And she pointed to Ms. Haley’s recent endorsement by Marlys Popma, a prominent anti-abortion activist in Iowa. For Mr. DeSantis, a lack of folksy charm may still be an issue in Iowa, despite his efforts to be more personal with evangelical voters.Evangelical voters “want to see the heart,” said Sam Brownback, a conservative Christian and former Republican senator from Kansas whose own presidential campaign failed to take off in 2008. “They want to see what you really are inside.”The last three Republicans to win contested caucuses — former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mr. Cruz — all talked easily about their faith. (None of them captured the nomination.)Mr. DeSantis, who has been criticized as stilted on the campaign trail, is not built in that mold. Instead, he is relying on his record as Florida governor, which includes, in addition to the six-week abortion ban, laws to restrict the rights of transgender people and to limit discussions of sexuality in schools.When a reporter asked why he was a better fit for Iowa’s evangelicals than Mr. Trump — a thrice-married former Democrat — Mr. DeSantis replied that he was “better representative of their values.”“I have a better record of actually delivering on my promises and fighting important fights on behalf of children, on behalf of families and on behalf of religious liberty,” he said on Saturday at a coffee shop in Ottumwa, Iowa.Heidi Sokol, 51, a Republican voter who teaches at a Christian school in Clear Lake, Iowa, said she wasn’t bothered that Mr. DeSantis spoke far more about policy than about his personal faith when she saw him speak at a Des Moines church this fall.“We’re not hiring the president to be our pastor,” Ms. Sokol said.Ruth Igielnik More

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      Christian Nationalism ‘Is No Longer Operating Beneath the Surface’

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      Mike Johnson is the first person to become speaker of the House who can be fairly described as a Christian nationalist, a major development in American history in and of itself. Equally important, however, his ascension reflects the strength of white evangelical voters’ influence in the House Republican caucus, voters who are determined to use the power of government to roll back the civil rights, women’s rights and sexual revolutions.“Johnson is a clear rebuttal to the overall liberal societal drift that’s happening in the United States,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote by email in response to my query. “His views are far out of step with the average American and even with a significant number of Republicans.”“Yet, he was chosen as speaker,” continued Burge, who is also a pastor in the American Baptist Church. “If anything, it shows us that white evangelicals still have a very strong hold on the modern Republican Party. They are losing overall market share in the larger culture, but they are certainly taking on an outsized role in Republican politics.”Burge provided The Times with data on the changing religious composition of the Republican electorate. In the 1970s, mainline Protestants dominated at 46 percent, compared with evangelical Protestants at 24 percent and Catholics at 19 percent. By the decade of the 2010s, evangelical Protestants were a commanding 38 percent of Republicans, mainline Protestants had fallen to 17 percent, and Catholics had grown to 25 percent.Robert Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, described Johnson in an email as “the embodiment of white Christian nationalism in a tailored suit.”What is Christian nationalism? Christianity Today described it as the “belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a ‘Christian nation’ — not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future.”Johnson’s election as speaker, Jones went on to say, “is one more confirmation that the Republican Party — a party that is 68 percent white and Christian in a country that is 42 percent white and Christian — has embraced its role as the party of white Christian nationalism.”Jones argued that “while Johnson is more polished than other right-wing leaders of the G.O.P. who support this worldview, his record and previous public statements indicate that he’s a near textbook example of white Christian nationalism — the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”In a long and data-filled analysis posted on Substack on Oct. 29, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., argued that the election of Johnson reflects the success of the Christian right in a long-term struggle to wrest control from traditional Republican elites, in battles fought out in Republican primary elections.Over the past two decades, Podhorzer wrote, “the political might of organized right-wing Christianity was successfully redeployed against establishment Republicans.”The decimation of moderate and centrist members of the House was most striking over the election cycles from 2010 to the present, according to Podhorzer: “From 2010 through 2022, a historically high number of House Republicans were defeated in primaries, with the vast majority of successful challenges happening in the most evangelical districts.”The result: When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats. The bottom three quintiles are represented by 188 Democrats and 73 Republicans.Not only do Republicans overwhelmingly represent the districts with the most white evangelicals, but those Republicans are deeply entrenched, with little or no danger of losing the general election to a Democrat:“Republicans represent 98 percent of the most evangelical safe districts and 82 percent of the remaining above-median evangelical safe districts,” Podhorzer wrote. “These two categories elected just shy of three-quarters of the Republican Caucus in safe districts.”The MAGA movement, in Podhorzer’s view, was unleashed with the Tea Party movement in 2010, well before Donald Trump emerged as a dominant political figure, and the elevation of Johnson marks the most recent high point in the movement’s acquisition of power: “Mike Johnson becoming speaker is better understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA,” he writes.White Christian nationalists, Podhorzer contended, “were once reliable votes and loyal foot soldiers for almost any Republican candidate since the 1970s,” but they “rebelled when John McCain and other establishment Republicans treated Obama’s win as legitimate.”From 2010 forward, Podhorzer wrote, “the political muscle provided by white Christian nationalism’s extensive church-based infrastructure in congressional districts, and its national reach through Christian broadcasting and national organizations, has turned MAGA into a ruthlessly successful RINO-hunting machine.”It should not be surprising, Podhorzer said, “to see an election-denying evangelical Christian who favors a national abortion ban, Bible courses in public schools, and ‘covenant marriage,’ and who believes that L.G.B.T.Q. people are living an ‘inherently unnatural’ and ‘dangerous lifestyle’ elevated to the speakership.”There is a strong correlation between election from a district with a high share of white evangelical voters, Podhorzer found, and election denial: “More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.”The most recent P.R.R.I. American Values Survey, conducted in late August, “Threats to American Democracy Ahead of an Unprecedented Presidential Election,” further illuminated the priorities of the contemporary Republican electorate.The survey asked respondents whether they would “prefer a presidential candidate who can best manage the economy” or a candidate who will “protect and preserve American culture and the American way of life.”Democrats chose a candidate who can manage the economy 57 to 40, a view shared by independents by a smaller margin, 53 to 45. Republican voters, in contrast, preferred a candidate who will preserve American culture, by 58 to 40 percent.A different P.R.R.I. survey, released on Feb. 8, “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” measured support for Christian nationalism based on responses to five statements:The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.On the basis of the responses, P.R.R.I. created four categories:Christian nationalism adherents: the 10 percent of Americans who overwhelmingly either agree or completely agree with the five statements above.Christian nationalism sympathizers: the 19 percent of Americans who agree with these statements but are less likely to say they “completely agree.”Christian nationalism skeptics: the 39 percent of Americans who disagree with the statements but are less likely to completely disagree.Christian nationalism rejecters: the 29 percent of Americans who completely disagree with all five statements in the scale.Among Democrats, the survey found that 15 percent were either adherents (5 percent) or sympathizers (10 percent). Among independents, 23 percent were adherents (6 percent) or sympathizers (17 percent).Among Republican voters, 54 percent were either adherents (21 percent) or sympathizers (33 percent).In a series of questions on racial issues and immigration, Christian nationalist adherents were well to the right of Americans as a whole.Asked whether “discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities,” 85 percent of Christian nationalist adherents agreed, compared with 41 percent of all those surveyed.Asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” 81 percent of Christian nationalist adherents agreed.Philip Gorski, a sociologist at Yale who has written extensively about Christian nationalism, replied by email to my inquiry about Johnson’s election:He says out loud what most others just feel: that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the founders were “evangelical” Christians, that the founding documents were based on “biblical principles,” that God has entrusted America with a divine mission, that he has blessed America with unique power and prosperity and that those blessings will be withdrawn if America strays off the straight and narrow path of Christian morality. And that it is every good Christian’s duty to make America Christian again.Christian nationalism, in Gorski’s view,is no longer operating beneath the surface or in the background. It’s now front and center at commanding heights of power. It will now be much harder for right-wing Christian activists to claim that Christian nationalism is a fringe phenomenon or a left-wing smear job. In 2021, it was still hard to find an avowed Christian nationalist in the top ranks of the G.O.P. Not anymore.Gorski wrote that Johnsonlikes to say that the United States is a “republic” and not a “democracy.” By this, he means that the majority does not and should not get its way. That would be democracy. A republic means rule by the virtuous, not the majority. And the virtuous are of course conservative Christians like him.Eric Schickler, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed in an email his view that Johnson’s election as speaker demonstrated once again the weakness of the centrist wing of the House Republican caucus, writing that the elevation of the Louisiana Republicanreinforces the message that the most conservative voices in the Republican Party have decisive influence on the party in the House of Representatives. Less conservative members from swing districts have repeatedly made noises, suggesting that they were willing to wield power to ensure that leaders would reflect their needs — but once again, when push came to shove, they gave in despite having the numbers to hold the balance of power in the House.In addition, the “entire episode” — from the ousting of Kevin McCarthy on Oct. 3 to the election of Johnson on Oct. 25 — reflects the collapse of the unwritten rule that “majority party members would stick together on the floor in speakership contests.” There is no way, Schickler added, that “the Freedom Caucus would have voted for a member seen as distant from them on key issues.”Does Johnson’s election as speaker improve Democrats’ chances to retake the House in 2024? I asked.Schickler: “It is hard to know. Johnson starts with such a low profile, it is not clear whether Democrats will be able to make him a target.”Johnson’s relative anonymity in the House served him well in his bid for the speakership, insulating him from acrimony. More recently, however, some of Johnson’s out-of-the-mainstream views and alliances have begun to surface.In a July 20, 2005, opinion essay for The Shreveport Times, Johnson argued:All of us should acknowledge the real emotion and strife of the homosexual lifestyle and should certainly treat all people with dignity, love and respect. But our government can never provide its stamp of approval or special legal sanction for behavior patterns that are proven to be destructive to individuals, to families and to society at large. Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do.“We must always remember,” Johnson concluded, “that it is not bigotry to make moral distinctions.”A year earlier, Johnson wrote, in another opinion essay:The state and its citizens have a compelling interest in preserving the integrity of the marital union by making opposite sex marriage the exclusive form of family relationship endorsed by government. Loss of this status will de-emphasize the importance of traditional marriage to society, weaken it, and place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation.It would be difficult to overestimate the dangers Johnson foresaw. “Society,” he wrote,cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet. If everyone does what is right in his own eyes, chaos and sexual anarchy will result. And make no mistake, the extremists who seek to redefine marriage also want to deny you the right to object to immoral behavior. Our precious religious freedom hangs in the balance.In an Oct. 26 interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News after he was elected to the leadership post, Johnson described his faith in the Bible as his exclusive guide in life:What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun? Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.On Oct. 27, my Times colleagues Annie Karni, Ruth Graham and Steve Eder reported on a 2006 essay that Johnson posted on Townhall, a right-wing website.In it, they wrote, “Johnson railed against ‘the earnest advocates of atheism and sexual perversion’. He also decried ‘This sprawling alliance of anti-God enthusiasts’ that ‘has proven frighteningly efficient at remaking America in their own brutal, dehumanizing image.’”“In the space of a few decades,” Johnson added, “they have managed to entrench abortion and homosexual behavior, objectify children into sexual objects, criminalize Christianity in the popular culture, and promote guilt and self-doubt as the foremost qualities of our national character.”In lectures, Karni, Graham and Eder wrote, “Johnson has lamented that ‘There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.’”David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, reported in an Oct. 28 article that in a series of seminars Johnson and his wife, Kelly, a Christian counselor, conducted — “Answers for Our Times” — the couple addressed such questions as:What is happening in America and how do we fix it? Can our heritage as a Christian Nation be preserved? How should Christians respond to the changing culture? What does the Bible say about today’s problems and issues?In May 2019, Johnson described the goal of the seminars to the Louisiana Baptist Message: “Our nation is entering one of the most challenging seasons in its history, and there is an urgent need for God’s people to be armed and ready with the truth.”For Johnson, the obligation “to be armed and ready with the truth” led him to become a leader of the election denial movement. In December 2020 he recruited 125 fellow House Republicans to sign on to his lawsuit seeking to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn the election results.He told his colleagues that “the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and that the former president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would defend him,” The Times reported.In the Supreme Court brief that Johnson filed on Dec. 10, 2020, he argued that the election hadbeen riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities. National polls indicate a large percentage of Americans now have serious doubts about not just the outcome of the presidential contest, but also the future reliability of our election system itself. Amici respectfully aver it is the solemn duty of this Court to provide an objective review of these anomalies and to determine for the people if indeed the Constitution has been followed and the rule of law maintained.On Dec. 11, in a brief unsigned order, the Supreme Court dismissed the suit, but Johnson won recognition from his fellow Republicans in the House for his fealty to Trump.Asked shortly after he was elected speaker whether he continued to believe that the 2020 election was stolen, Johnson told a Washington Post reporter: “We’re not talking about any issues today,” adding only, “My position is very well known.”In theory, at least, it is difficult to understand how Johnson can justify his support for Trump, whom Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum and a contributing writer for Times Opinion, described this way in The Atlantic in 2020:A man whose lifestyle is more closely aligned with hedonism than with Christianity, Trump clearly sees white evangelicals as a means to an end, people to be used, suckers to be played. He had absolutely no interest in evangelicals before his entry into politics and he will have absolutely no interest in them after his exit. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a person who has less affinity for authentic Christianity — for the teachings of Jesus, from the Sermon on the Mount to the parable of the good Samaritan — than Donald Trump.Johnson’s ascent to the top job in the House also raises a larger, more encompassing question: Will voters care in 2024 (and beyond) that one of America’s two major political parties has been taken over by an alliance of MAGA forces and their white evangelical allies, who have clearly indicated their willingness to abandon democratic norms — that is, democracy itself — in the pursuit of power?Polling suggests that this is a far from settled question.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Where Mike Johnson Stands on Key Issues: Ukraine, LGBTQ Rights and More

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      The new House speaker, an evangelical Christian, has a staunchly conservative record on gay rights, abortion, gun safety and more.Speaker Mike Johnson, the little-known congressman from Louisiana who won the gavel on Wednesday, is deeply conservative on both fiscal and social issues, reflecting the G.O.P.’s sharp lurch to the right.Mr. Johnson, a lawyer, also played a leading role in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, helping to push a lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states he lost and then offering members of Congress a legal argument upon which to justify their votes to invalidate the results.He has a career rating of 92 percent from the American Conservative Union and 90 percent from Heritage Action for America.Here’s where he stands on six key issues.Government fundingMr. Johnson is a fiscal conservative who believes Congress has a “moral and constitutional duty” to balance the budget, lower spending and “pursue continued pro-growth tax reforms and permanent tax reductions,” according to his website.He voted in favor of the deal in May to suspend the debt ceiling negotiated between former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Biden administration. But alongside 89 other Republicans, Mr. Johnson voted against the stopgap funding bill Mr. McCarthy put forth last month to stave off a government shutdown just hours before it was to commence. That bill ultimately passed with more Democratic than Republican support and cost Mr. McCarthy the gavel.In a letter this week, before he was elected speaker, Mr. Johnson proposed a short-term funding bill to avoid a shutdown and an aggressive calendar for passing yearlong spending bills in the interim. But he did not specify what spending levels he would support in the temporary bill, and many Republicans have refused to back such measures without substantial cuts that cannot pass the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed by President Biden.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off

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      Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”For now, Mr. DeSantis’s top advisers say they are planning a steady diet of the grind-it-out approach that worked for the Republican victors in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses — none of whom, notably, went on to capture the party’s nomination.“Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult,” David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said in an interview this month. “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”A campaign stand for former President Donald J. Trump was set up at a tailgate event this month in Nevada, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMuch of the DeSantis strategy mirrors the approach taken by the last three Republicans to win contested caucuses in Iowa: former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, all social conservatives who trekked to practically every corner of the state. Mr. Cruz — not exactly a ball of white-hot magnetism himself — beat Mr. Trump here in 2016, an effort in which Mr. Polyansky played a key role.“Governor DeSantis is doing the 99-county tour,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who appeared with Mr. DeSantis on Saturday at a meet-and-greet at a county historical society in her hometown, Red Oak. “He’s meeting with those Iowa voters. That makes a difference.”And Mr. Trump may be giving Mr. DeSantis openings to press his case in the state.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida a “terrible thing.” Iowa passed a similar law that is widely popular with social conservatives. Mr. DeSantis struck back on Monday in an interview with Radio Iowa, saying, “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow pro-life if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”The former president has also spent few days campaigning in Iowa so far, and he was booed when he appeared this month at the Iowa-Iowa State football game.“They’re jittery, they’re nervous, and they absolutely should be,” Mr. Polyansky said of the Trump campaign. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a very tight race in Iowa. And the former president losing there seriously damages the sheen of invincibility that they are trying to project.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump would “put the pedal to the metal” in Iowa, even though he has a commanding lead.“We don’t play prevent defense,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time.”One of Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenges may be showing voters that he is not as painfully awkward as his critics suggest.Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, has seen Mr. DeSantis appear at roughly 10 events so far this cycle. She said that his small-town approach made sense in Iowa but that he himself might not be the right candidate to execute it. She has been particularly struck, she said, by how he interacts with voters.“He always looks miserable until he’s directly in front of a camera about to take a selfie,” said Dr. Paine Caufield, who has written a book about the Iowa caucuses.On Twitter, a cottage industry has sprung up turning Mr. DeSantis’s most awkward moments into viral memes. There was the time he told a young girl at a county fair in Iowa that her Icee probably had a lot of sugar. The painful way his face contorted when he was reminded that Mr. Trump led him in the polls. And, of course, the bizarre, almost body-racking laughs — his head thrown violently back, eyes screwed shut, mouth agape — he uses to herald jokes from voters.New York magazine and Vanity Fair have packaged those interactions into clickbait listicles. They have become fodder for late-night comedians. The Onion, a satirical news site, has turned Mr. DeSantis into a regular punching bag (“DeSantis Has Surprisingly Smooth Verbal Exchange With Iowa State Fair Corn Dog,” one headline read).Even his super PAC, Never Back Down, reminded Mr. DeSantis that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children, in an unexpectedly public memo about last month’s debate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has been integral to his campaign in Iowa, and it has reserved $13 million in television ads there through Thanksgiving.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut on the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by his wife, Casey, a former local television anchor, and their three small children, Mr. DeSantis has seemed plenty likable, voters say. Even some Trump supporters don’t find him to be a stiff. They just like Mr. Trump better and wish the Florida governor had waited to run until 2028.“I saw a very confident spokesman for what he believes in,” said Madeline Meyer, 85, a retiree who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a fund-raiser in Iowa last month but said she planned to stick with the former president. “He’s got a good voice and a nice, young family.”In a Fox News interview last weekend, Mr. DeSantis called criticisms of his demeanor a “bogus narrative.”Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer, said the group’s messaging in Iowa would zero in on Mr. DeSantis’s plans for immigration and the economy, which polling shows are top issues for Republicans.“We’re focusing on amplifying what the governor has said he will do for voters,” Ms. Davison said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis has also tried to tailor his appeal more specifically to Iowa voters in recent trips, after heavily focusing his initial pitch on his record in Florida. He has noticeably adjusted his stump speech to talk less about Florida and more about what his priorities would be as president.But the governor clearly finds it hard to leave his home state behind.As he walked through an Iowa cattle ranch over the weekend, a gust of wind blew his blazer open, revealing that its lining had been stitched with images of Florida’s state flag.Maggie Haberman More

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      Republicans Agree on Foreign Policy — When It Comes to China

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      At first glance, last week’s Republican presidential debate revealed a party fractured over America’s role in the world. Ron DeSantis said he wouldn’t support additional aid to Ukraine unless Europe does more. Vivek Ramaswamy said he wouldn’t arm Ukraine no matter what. Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, all staunch defenders of Kyiv, pounced. Within minutes, the altercations were so intense that the moderators struggled to regain control.But amid the discord, one note of agreement kept rising to the surface: that the true threat to America comes from Beijing. In justifying his reluctance to send more aid to Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis said he’d ensure that the United States does “what we need to do with China.” Mr. Ramaswamy denounced aiding Ukraine because the “real threat we face is communist China.” Ms. Haley defended such aid because “a win for Russia is a win for China.” Mr. Pence said Mr. Ramaswamy’s weakness on Ukraine would tempt Beijing to attack Taiwan.Regardless of their views on Ukraine, Republicans are united in focusing on China. They are returning to the principle that many championed at the beginning of the last Cold War. It’s neither internationalism nor isolationism. It’s Asia First.When Americans remember the early Cold War years, they often think of Europe: NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, which justified aiding Greece and Turkey. But for many leading Republicans at the time, those commitments were a distraction: The real menace lay on the other side of the globe.Senator Robert Taft, nicknamed “Mr. Republican” because of his stature in the party, opposed America’s entrance into NATO and declared in 1948 that “the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace and safety than is Europe.” The following year, Senator H. Alexander Smith, a Republican on the Foreign Policy and Armed Services Committee, warned that while the Truman administration was “preoccupied with Europe the real threat of World War III may be approaching us from the Asiatic side.” William Knowland, the Senate Republican leader from 1953 to 1958, was so devoted to supporting the Nationalist exiles who left the mainland after losing China’s civil war that he was called the “senator from Formosa,” as Taiwan was known at the time.Understanding why Republicans prioritized China then helps explain why they’re prioritizing it now. In her book “Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism,” the historian Joyce Mao argues that Cold War era Republicans’ focus on China stemmed in part from a “spiritual paternalism that arguably carried over from the previous century.” In the late 19th century, when the United States was carving out a sphere of influence in the Pacific, China, with its vast population, held special allure for Americans interested in winning souls for Christ. The nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, who were Christians themselves, used this religious connection to drum up American support — first for their war against Communist rivals on the Chinese mainland and then, after they fled to the island of Taiwan, for their regime there.Many of America’s most influential Asia Firsters — like the Time magazine publisher Henry Luce — were either the children of American missionaries in China or had served as missionaries there themselves. The John Birch Society, whose fervent and conspiratorial brand of anti-Communism foreshadowed the right-wing populism of today, took its name from an Army captain and former missionary killed by Chinese communists at the end of World War II.Today, of course, Americans don’t need religious reasons to put Asia first. It boasts much of the world’s economic, political and military power, which is why the Biden administration focuses on the region, too. In Washington, getting tough on China is now a bipartisan affair. Still, the conservative tradition that Ms. Mao describes — which views China as a civilizational pupil turned civilizational threat — is critical to grasping why rank-and-file Republicans, far more than Democrats, fixate on the danger from Beijing.In March, a Gallup poll found that while Democrats were 23 points more likely to consider Russia a greater enemy than China, Republicans were a whopping 64 points more likely to say the reverse. There is evidence that this discrepancy stems in part from the fact that while President Vladimir Putin of Russia casts himself as a defender of conservative Christian values, President Xi Jinping leads a nonwhite superpower whose regime has spurned the Christian destiny many Americans once envisioned for it.In a 2021 study, the University of Delaware political scientists David Ebner and Vladimir Medenica found that white Americans who expressed higher degrees of racial resentment were more likely to perceive China as a military threat. And it is white evangelicals today — like the conservative Christians who anchored support for Chiang in the late 1940s and 1950s — who express the greatest animosity toward China’s government. At my request, the Pew Research Center crunched data gathered this spring comparing American views of China by religion and race. It found that white non-Hispanic evangelicals were 25 points more likely to hold a “very unfavorable” view of China than Americans who were religiously unaffiliated, 26 points more likely than Black Protestants and 33 points more likely than Hispanic Catholics.This is the Republican base. And its antipathy to China helps explain why many of the right-wing pundits and politicians often described as isolationists aren’t isolationists at all. They’re Asia Firsters. Tucker Carlson, who said last week that American policymakers hate Russia because it’s a “Christian country,” insisted in 2019 that America’s “main enemy, of course, is China, and the United States ought to be in a relationship with Russia aligned against China.” Mr. Ramaswamy, who is challenging Mr. DeSantis for second place in national polls, wants the United States to team up with Moscow against Beijing, too.And of course, the Republican front-runner for 2024, former President Donald Trump — deeply in tune with conservative voters — has obsessed over China since he exploded onto the national political stage eight years ago. Mr. Trump is often derided as an isolationist because of his hostility to NATO and his disdain for international treaties. But on China his rhetoric has been fierce. In 2016, he even said Beijing had been allowed to “rape our country.”Republicans may disagree on the best way forward in Ukraine. But overwhelmingly, they agree that China is the ultimate danger. And whether it’s Mr. Trump’s reference earlier this year to his former secretary of transportation as “Coco Chow” or House Republicans implying that Asian Americans in the Biden administration and Congress aren’t loyal to the United States, there’s mounting evidence that prominent figures on the American right see that danger in racial terms.That’s the problem with Republicans’ return to Asia First. Many in the party don’t only see China’s rise as a threat to American power. They see it as a threat to white Christian power, too.Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More