Evangelicals & Politics

In the evangelical worldview, everything in the world is divided into two sides — God’s side and the Devil’s side. These two sides are at war unceasingly. Demons are everywhere. Spiritual warfare is inescapable.

This became very clear to me in my research on Brazilian and Nigerian Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, and I soon came to see it playing out in American politics with the rise of Donald Trump. People kept asking, how can evangelicals possibly support him? But the answer wasn’t complicated: he was on God’s side, a flawed hero to be sure, but a hero nonetheless.

I wrote about this for The Boston Review in January 2016, during presidential primary season, when I was living in New Hampshire and went to a local diner to speak to Ted Cruz, who was then Trump’s main challenger for the presidential nomination.

The evangelical belief in the ominpresence of spiritual warfare is also very much a part of politics in Nigeria and Brazil. That’s why it was so surprising that in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election, Muslims and Christians formed an alliance. I published an essay about this as well.

I continue to find it exceedingly frustrating that legacy media fails to grasp the centrality of spiritual warfare in understanding evangelicals and politics. It’s so easy to overlook what one finds absurd, but what is ridiculous to one person is another person’s fundamental logic for the workings of the world.