Young Evangelicals, we are told, leave the faith because Evangelicals have changed political and social behaviors. There is little evidence for that. What evidence that is offered—Trump’s supposed popularity—is more evidence of Evangelicals not changing their political habits than of them changing. Since the middle of the 1980s, roughly eighty percent of Evangelicals voted for Republican candidates. Trump’s election was a confirmation of a historical pattern, not a radical break. The better explanation for the disappointment of the Evangelical millennialists and the breakup of so-called Evangelicalism lies less with Trump’s presidency or a supposed change in Evangelical political morality than with socio-cultural disappointment that a peaceful post-political Evangelical millennium never came. History didn’t end, and Christian political engagement must return to a sometimes adversarial posture with society at large. The key is that for the first time in nearly a century conservative Protestant political thought is not hemmed in by the cartoonish biblicism inherited from the Fundamentalists, but has a robust intellectual ecosystem based in Protestant ressourcement and the reclamation of Protestant natural law theory. Read more»
Miles Smith | “Apocalyptic Politics: Millennial Fervor Vs. Protestant Statecraft” (July 11, 2022)
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