The Monstering of Evangelicalism

The following is an excerpt from Bonnie Kristian’s new book, In Defense of Evangelicalism. 

---

I ‘d been working in journalism for about two years when Donald Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. I was in seminary, getting a theological master’s degree at an evangelical school and building a journalism career at the same time. These days I work at Christianity Today, but back then I’d recently taken a gig as a news writer for an outlet called The Week. Editors there had realized that while their opinion team was ideologically diverse, the news team was populated with twentysomething Democrats with the cultural and religious habits that description suggests. They asked around for a young writer who could mix things up, and they found me. 

The Week hired me for my politics, but my faith soon came in handy too. I was the only visibly practicing evangelical on the writing staff, and story assignments about evangelicalism began to flow my way. I pitched these stories too, because I felt I could cover them with confidence and offer insights our other writers might not reach. 

Then came Trump. Like many educated evangelicals, especially in the media, I was immediately put off by him at every level: morally, theologically, politically, aesthetically. I never considered voting for Hillary Clinton (or, later, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris), but I was dismayed at Trump’s clumsy pandering to evangelical voters and even more dismayed when it worked. That year and in the years to come, I wrote often about Trump and evangelicals, thinking through how it could be that we were so linked to him in the public mind. 

I’m still dismayed, to be honest. Though I’ve come to hold that dismay in tension with the reality that many evangelicals have defensible, understandable reasons for their Trump votes, this isn’t a story about how I learned to stop worrying and love the Donald. 

It’s about this larger problem with evangelicalism’s place in the American public square—this long practice of uncharitable and inaccurate critique, now escalated to a point of frenzy by false conflation of the whole evangelical tradition with white evangelical representation in the Trump voting bloc.

It’s not that we should be exempt from frank, even tough critique. Rather, many in the mainstream commentariat—and particularly “exvangelicals” writing for secular audiences—wildly miss the mark. Their accusations are contradictory and ungenerous, in some cases outright ignorant, manipulative, or unjust. Much of what they take as evidence of evangelical malevolence or threat is truly pretty mundane stuff—and often not unique to evangelicals but common to Christians across centuries and cultures, to Americans across political proclivities, or to fallen, finite humanity as a whole. 

Worse, much of what these critics present as benevolent calls for reform functionally treat evangelicalism as a failed movement, irredeemable and embarrassing and without moral or spiritual credibility. They introduce themselves as the remodel team, then announce it’s a teardown. 

This kind of criticism isn’t new, of course. We felt “neglected, slighted, misrepresented” in the 1950s, an era remembered with only some exaggeration as a time of record Christian religiosity in America. As far back as 1925, journalist H. L. Mencken could casually assert that “evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate.” And that line came in the course of describing a prominent evangelical as “a peasant come home to the dung-pile,” a man possessed of “a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things.” 

But criticism of evangelicals has undeniably intensified since around 2015, during a decade when the rise of Trump coincided with the exvangelical phenomenon, including widespread public renunciations of evangelicalism; with rapid changes in American norms and laws around sex and gender; with a string of high-profile evangelical scandals; and with rising ignorance of religion in general. 

Evangelicals were long since weird, outré, too into all that Jesus stuff. Still, in these recent years, the conversation really took a turn. It’s unremarkable, now, to see sweeping, merciless, uncurious declarations from fellow Christians about white evangelicals’ supposedly total corruption and our individual responsibility for every evil Trump commits. 

Looking back, I’m not sure when I began to notice that something was off in the way evangelicals were being widely discussed. Journalists always want to be the first to a story, but I can’t claim to be first to this one—not least because the Trump-evangelicals relationship for a long time struck me as the more novel and pressing problem. 

By 2018, though, I was pairing critique of evangelical alliances to Trump with swipes at progressive exvangelical double standards. In an article at The Week, I went after an exvangelical “suggestion that abortion and same-sex relationships are inappropriate topics for politics, and [that] evangelicals should keep publicly silent on these points lest they create ‘an American theocracy.’” 

But the first time I remember consciously objecting to this entire genre of criticism came in 2022, when I read Jesus and John Wayne, the extraordinarily successful 2020 volume from historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. The argument of the book, as the subtitle puts it, is that “white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation,” but most of the word count is given over to history. 

I finished Jesus and John Wayne with two impressions that I wasn’t sure how to reconcile. On the one hand, so far as I knew personally and could gather from various reviews of the book, the historical work was detailed and competent, the writing compelling, and many of the stories Du Mez recounted exactly as disturbing as she said. 

On the other hand, I couldn’t recognize the debased movement Du Mez described. Her evidence seemed sound, so far as it went, but did the conclusion follow? The evangelicals I knew weren’t corrupting our faith or fracturing our nation—at least, not any more than other Americans participating in our no-win politics. And that was true even of the white evangelicals, the Trump-voting evangelicals, the evangelicals with whom I had serious theological and political differences. 

If you’re in the pew at a good evangelical church every week, you probably feel this same dissonance. As Protestants, we want to be open to calls to reform. As Christians, we want to respond to invitations for repentance. But the widespread monstering of evangelicalism just does not comport with the ordinary faithfulness we see each Sunday. 

I can certainly think of plenty of counterexamples. Like any movement on this scale, evangelicalism has its freaks and fringes. There are any number of prominent figures, people with big churches (or at least big beards and big podcasts) with downright abhorrent beliefs and behavior. It’s not hard to find these folks, nor is it wrong to want to avoid any association with them. 

I’m not talking about them, though. I’m talking about the millions of people who make up ordinary American evangelicalism, people who are overwhelmingly kind and faithful, with normal (which is to say: low) levels of political engagement and expertise. They don’t want their church or their identity to be focused on politics; they want both to be focused on Christ. 

They’re sincerely trying to bring their faith to bear in a fast-moving, polarized, two-party system with no good options. It doesn’t always go so well. But they are trying to follow Jesus, and they are trying to do the right thing. They do not merit contempt.

---

IN DEFENSE OF EVANGELICALISM: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers by Bonnie Kristian. Copyright © 2026 by Bonnie Kristian. Published by Forum Books, an imprint of the Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.