Trump Supporters

I suppose it's mostly accurate to say that a good number of the conservative Christians I know are Trump supporters. I say it's only mostly accurate though because in the particular community of people I know, supporting Donald Trump for president wasn't a popular position originally. The people I grew up around are thoroughly socially and economically conservative—socially because they believe that many of the moral codes recorded in the Bible ought to be followed fairly literally, and economically because they mistrust liberal economics as being emotionally driven and unsustainable in the long run (although the sources of this mistrust themselves seem complicated enough to merit a speculative post of their own). To people who are this conservative, Trump was clearly not a desirable candidate when he first joined the 2016 race since his past didn't prove him to be a true conservative. For some of my family members, Dr. Ben Carson was the obvious best choice: He had a history of being conservative, and he was a real Christian. Who could be better equipped to lead our country than someone who talked and listened to God?

But somewhere along the line, something changed. It was definitely after Carson was out of the race and the true conservatives had decided to vote for Trump because anything was better than a socialist or a Clinton. At some point after that, their feelings towards him began to shift, and eventually at least some of the people I knew started to willingly say they supported him. I heard people who were originally skeptical of his intentions remark that he seemed to be someone who really loved this country and wanted to do what was best for it. Some of them started to enjoy what they perceived as his mind games with the press and the political establishment. I don’t think I know anyone who has turned into the type to wear a “Make America Great Again” hat, but their original suspicion has been replaced with anything from acceptance to appreciation and approval.

According to some voices, Trump supporters are monsters, beings whose presence should not be tolerated. I know these voices are probably far fewer in number than the tendency to repeat whatever is simple and extreme would lead one to believe, but I have happened to have two separate conversations with two different people that make it impossible for me to ignore the view altogether. In both cases, the person I was talking to turned the subject to politics and mentioned without being asked, in one case that they would not even talk to anyone who was a Trump supporter, and in the other case that they had distanced themself from a good friend who was a Trump supporter. The fact that I happened to come across this attitude among people I know without looking for it makes me feel like I have to take the hearsay a bit more seriously than I otherwise would.

Why does it matter if one group of people is calling another monsters, villains, unworthy of contact? Because I know people who count as members of that group and they aren’t monsters at all. They are people who care about others and want to see the country run in the way that’s best for the greatest number of people possible, and for some reason they’ve come to think that supporting Donald Trump as president is the best way to accomplish that. I have to try to understand why. Why can some people so easily overlook faults in a political leader that seem monstrous to others? The explanation that they’re just bad people doesn’t cut it. I know that these individuals are capable of acting selflessly when they feel convinced that their actions are truly helpful to others. I also know that they aren’t afraid to support something they feel is right even when it’s unpopular (a characteristic we need in the world but that is just as likely to appear among groups whom hindsight shows to be crazy as among those it shows to be visionary). When it comes to explaining why some people who want to be good people get on board with things that other people who want to be good people find problematic and dangerous, I have to state as with most subjects that I’m no expert. I don’t have carefully collected data on the phenomenon of Trump supporting. I can only offer the anecdotal evidence of what I’ve observed about people around me, but I hope it can be good for something in its proper place.

So, why have most of the conservative Christians I know become Trump supporters? Several patterns of behavior stand out to me as likely being important to the transition. For instance, some of the people I’m thinking of are big fans of Rush Limbaugh and often agree with the opinions he expresses, calling things serious when he finds them serious and ridiculous when he finds them ridiculous, and the support he expressed for Trump seemed to encourage them towards a similarly supportive attitude: They began to share Limbaugh’s view that Trump’s less-than-diplomatic statements were satirical and subversive to the establishment instead of careless and that, rather than being a self-serving candidate who made conservatives look bad, he was just the sort of unconventional outsider the country needed to cut through all the red tape and overdone political correctness and run things in a practical way. Of course this is one of the areas where it would be fascinating and far more useful to have actual data of some sort. I don’t know whether most people who fit the particular conservative profile I’m familiar with would view Trump differently if it wasn’t for the words of people like Limbaugh, but my best guess is that they still would have ended up seeing him positively because that would follow from other behavioral patterns I’ve noticed—but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m claiming that these people are the types who want to do the right thing, and yet they’re fans of talk show hosts who tend to villainize opinions they disagree with? This might be removing them even further from the category of normal people whose pathway of decisions is understandable. Let me try to roll these various behavior patterns together into a generalized story of how the people I have in mind got to where they are.

Now, the fact that they have a story and I’m trying to make it clear and understandable doesn’t excuse any wrong things that Donald Trump has done or that they have done, but excusing people’s actions isn’t the point here. The point is to resist the easy and natural habit of dismissing factions of people as simply not like me, below me, crazy, stupid—bad in any way that removes my responsibility to learn from their mistakes or to communicate with them in ways that might eventually win them over to something better. They’re certainly not too insane or too unintelligent to be held accountable for their wrongdoings, and so they’re not too insane or too unintelligent for me to ask where I might end up being just like them if I’m not careful or for me to find that unique angle that might change their mind on something.

Picking up their story from the beginning, I’m obviously biased in this area, but it seems to me that religion is key. (It’s not that particular religious beliefs always lead directly to particular political opinions, but with the people I’m talking about here, a particular understanding of Christianity is what ties the other key points in the story together and makes them all make sense.) The story I know best is that of older people, born when “traditional family values” were ubiquitous, accepted and expected everywhere. They were raised in large families who didn’t have much, and some considered themselves Democrats until later in life. Importantly, they grew up with some sort of Christian background, whether they attended church or just absorbed a general sense of Christian ideas culturally. As young people, they weren’t particularly political; they were focused on their friends, their jobs, their interests. But at some point, they came across both a religious and a political message that made them stop and think.

The religious message came from evangelical preachers who built upon the foundation of Christian morals these people had always taken for granted. You know there’s a God out there, the preachers said, and these people agreed; they were already coming from that perspective. But how do we know the truth about who God is? the preachers would ask. And they had answers that seemed very well thought out and logical, in a time where you couldn’t just pull out your smartphone and fact-check everything right after the sermon. They talked about the astounding reliability of the Bible, making it out to be a text whose origins were as old as human history and therefore a very good candidate for a way in which a God who wanted people to know him would have revealed himself. They addressed and dismissed challenges they had heard brought against its historical accuracy and painted a detailed and convincing picture that the Bible was an unusually coherent, factual, and forward-thinking book. Not only that, but it contained clearly supernatural prophecies, most importantly prophecies about the life of Jesus. They could point to hundreds of details in the Gospels that seemed to refer back to information found in the Old Testament and state quite correctly that manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Old Testament books as we know them existed well before the time of Jesus, meaning that these “predictions” weren’t invented after the fact. They would then offer all sorts of reasons that sounded air-tight for why the Gospels show every mark of factual, historical, truthful texts and claim that therefore history demonstrated the miraculously prophetic nature of the Bible and showed that Jesus of Nazareth was executed and physically returned to life, proving his claims to be God.

For people who already accepted a generally Christian understanding of the world, messages like these were proof that the Bible was a special message to them from God, and the preachers were quick to explain that God wanted to teach them through the Bible and be a part of their life every day. This is a powerful thing to tell someone: The spiritual reality they’ve always had at the back of their mind is actually much more imminent and tangible than they ever realized. But it carries powerful negatives along with the positives. On one hand, people are drawn in by enticing claims that God is on their side and has a good plan for their life, that he wants everyone to go to heaven and will forgive anyone who asks. But on the other hand, there is the threat of hell awaiting anyone who doesn’t live for God and the claim that good and evil spiritual forces are at war for control of people’s minds. The preachers who convinced crowds that the Bible was a source of divine truth also pointed out that it describes the devil as a master of deception who disguises his attacks as things that seem good. The Bible makes God’s moral standards of behavior clear, they would say, so any opposing view on what is moral must be from the devil, and if it seems good—if it seems pluralist, tolerant, accepting, updated, open-minded, kind—these are all just disguises meant to hide something that will actually destroy people.

To anyone who has never taken religion very seriously, it’s probably difficult to understand how “good people” could hold such harsh, black-and-white views, so what I can’t stress enough on this point is that these people feel like they have no choice. In their minds, it’s been proven that the world, morality, and religion work a certain way. This is what’s true, and we don’t have the luxury of just rewriting truth. The way things are has good points, and it has bad points, but it’s the way things are, and that’s that. Just like I on some level wish I could tell people there was a cosmic purpose for their lives, but can’t tell them that because I have no defensible reason to think it’s true, the Trump supporters I know personally aren’t the types of religious people who like believing in hell or telling people that their views are wrong, but they feel that all they can do for the people around them is be honest about the spiritual danger they know exists rather than giving anyone a false sense of security.

Before I go on, I’d like to point out that I also know a lot of people who hold religious views like what I’ve just described and are not Trump supporters or political conservatives. I met them through church communities that were comparatively younger, more ethnically diverse (including their leadership, not just their congregations), and more heavily made up of people who were already committed Christians when they joined rather than being recent converts.

But getting back to the overview of the Evangelical Christian Trump supporter, besides feeling that their life was changed by a realization of the daily importance of an ongoing spiritual battle between good and evil, these people have in their story a point at which it was changed by a shift in their political and economic views. I don’t know if this usually happened before or after the religious turning point, but at some point they became convinced by a piece of conservative ideology that held a foundational importance for them. Some of them simply felt that the Democrat party had become too socially liberal and no longer represented those traditional values they had always accepted, and so they started to look to conservative Republican voices for a political platform they could support more comfortably. Some ended up listening to one of the various controversial conservative talk show hosts, whether by coincidence or because a friend recommended them with promises that they weren’t so bad, and discovered that they weren’t as crazy as people said or that it was actually difficult to put together a good argument against some of their claims. Although the Trump-supporters-to-be came across their first convincing conservative political message in a variety of ways and the specific claims that originally got their attention differ, the upshot is that these people had a moment in their life that they look back on as a realization that conservatism was logical. It was the viewpoint that actually aligned with their values but that they had overlooked in the past because it wasn’t part of their upbringing. It was a system that wasn’t trendy or instantly likeable, but when they thought about the types of solutions it included, they seemed like things that would work in the long run. I would guess that part of what went into making the Trump supporters I know was the fact that they were won over by conservative views. Since they feel like they found, vetted, and accepted this political stance for themselves, choosing it over what they originally went along with unthinkingly, it could be that they have an even stronger loyalty to conservative views and the figures who promote them than the average person who was raised in a conservative environment.

I don’t know nearly as much about the political side of things as I do about the religious one, so I can’t go through all the common ideas that draw people to conservative views and explain why they seem so convincing under certain circumstances, but the important thing is that the type of Trump supporter I’m describing feels that their political and economic views are based on logic and represent what is actually best for everyone, while views they reject are based on emotion and only appear to be helpful on the surface. Some of this probably has to do with the fact that it’s difficult to prove cause-and-effect connections between implementations of political policies and shifts in the economy and changes in the lives of individuals, and so there’s enough ambiguous information out there on any given issue that you can form a convincing argument either for conservative policies or for liberal ones. Because of this, it could be that people’s choice of which side to support has to do mainly with who got to them with a polished argument first, or with the assumption that public figures whose opinion they already trusted about some issue must have been trustworthy when it came to economics as well. For the ones who already had their religious views firmly in place, the thought process may have been something like, I already know conservatives are on the right track with social policies because they agree with biblical principles, and when they move on to economics they are able to provide statistics that support their claims and explain their reasoning in ways that seem sensible, so their economic policies are probably dependable too.

If we fast-forward the composite story to the point where all our subjects have decided to get serious about their religion and have also come to think that conservatism is the logical approach to politics, we come to a characteristic I observed them all sharing in common: They mix their religious and political views closely. I want to say that it’s mainly individual churches that are to blame for encouraging this mixing, by way of their particular interpretation of the Bible. The churches that the Trump supporters I’m describing attend preach that the Old Testament’s account of the history of the nation of Israel provides models and warnings that all countries should follow. The story that spans most of the books of the Old Testament tells how God makes Israel into an organized country and promises to give them prosperity if they follow his laws, but Israel instead ends up with leaders who disobey God’s laws, which eventually leads to the country being destroyed by violent invaders. These churches claim that the United States began as a Christian country and has been successful because of its biblically-based laws. They say that many of the problems Americans face today ultimately trace back to the fact that we elect leaders who make decisions to please people instead of to please God and that if we keep failing to run the country in a God-honoring way, God will remove his favor and protection from us, leading to catastrophes like what the Old Testament describes happening to ancient Israel. What this message results in is a conviction that in order to protect our country from disaster we need to elect leaders who are socially conservative and preferably who pray for God’s guidance in their decision-making while in office.

Remember that this view is the product of people’s certainty that the Bible is true, accurate, and meant to guide their daily lives. As someone who grew up in a community that worried about our country being destroyed unless we could somehow convince more people to use the Bible as a voter’s guide, I can tell you that it’s not a pleasant thing to believe. It leaves you feeling like you’re constantly fighting a losing battle, that you and your church are pleading with people to stop building their homes on a tsunami-prone beach but all they care about is how pretty that waterfront property is. I can only assume that if the people I know hadn’t been convinced by impressive-sounding arguments that the Bible was fact, they would believe something less stress-inducing. Unfortunately though, this is another area where they think that this is simply how things are and feel a responsibility to help everyone avoid danger.

While ominous religious messages super-charge the social conservatism of our select group of Trump-supporters-to-be, a similar process happens with their economic conservatism, this time involving either religious or secular voices, usually both. These voices may be the same preachers who warn of God’s judgment on disobedient nations, but they can also be conservative spokespeople (such as the infamous set of talk-show hosts), authors, professors, and others. What they share in common is a penchant for promoting a cluster of messages with some level of alarmism, or at least urgency. Personally, I’m not sure which label is more fitting; these messages could be completely accurate or very exaggerated, and I would need to know much, much more about how the actions of individuals add up on a national scale before I could hold a confident opinion either way. The basic idea behind these messages seems reasonable: that keeping a democratic nation safe, healthy, and truly democratic takes a lot of hard work on the part of average citizens and may require making counterintuitive choices because the solutions to a problem that instinctively seem right aren’t always best, actions that feel helpful can actually be hurtful, and sometimes a plan that doesn’t sound great on the surface is actually the plan that helps people the most. This background of reasonable ideas however is used to give credibility to a narrative that seems alarmist to me. The story goes that unspecified forces around you want to take away your freedom. They will try to lull you into a stupor, entertain you, distract you, offer things that make your life easier in exchange for giving them a little more control, all so that they can rule you in the end. This is why the Roman Empire fell, they say. People got too distracted chasing after pleasure and stopped caring about politics, and that’s when invaders took over. For the conservatives who talk this way, everything liberals do fits into the narrative. Platforms involving welfare and financial aid are seen as bribery schemes used to buy voters. Policies intended to lessen financial burdens are labeled as short-sighted knee-jerk reactions to throw money at a problem without asking where the money comes from. Spending on environmental concerns is seen the same way, particularly because many of these people are convinced for a variety of religious reasons that climate change is not a threat or not influenced by human actions.

The way I’ve worded things here might make the view sound silly, but it feels totally realistic when it is encountered in the way the people I’m describing encountered it. Most of them already disliked or mistrusted something about liberal politics before they thought over all the financial details. They already agreed with the religious idea that evil spiritual forces were trying to influence people through laws and cultural movements, so it was easy to see any political view they disliked as being part of something bigger and more sinister. Many of them had probably witnessed situations that liberals truly did handle badly, and on top of the real faults, it’s easy to find statistics that make any ideology look like a disaster. Once they had begun to like something about conservatives or dislike something about liberals it was easy for the sources who agreed with their sentiment to introduce them to a network of ideas that all backed each other up and over time taught them to see politics as an extension of the spiritual battle of good against evil and the intellectual struggle of responsibility against laziness. Everything was connected in a grand scheme that ultimately boiled down to the devil using people’s good intentions to ruin their lives—and that doesn’t sound crazy when you’re already in the daily habit of looking out for how your own emotions and natural inclinations might actually be temptations from the devil intended to ruin your life.

Once this mindset was in place, the preachers, the talk show hosts, and the top-of-the-head chatter of peers kept adding fears to it, making it more powerful all the time. Whether these voices intended to inspire fear I don’t know, but it looks to me like that was the result. For example, when it came to controversial social issues, the debate would be discussed in terms of whether a conservative policy would triumph and maintain safety and security for your children or whether a liberal one would succeed in changing everything, upsetting their lives, ruining their chances for a happy future. Whether by suggesting that children were threatened or by claiming that liberal laws were intended to protect corrupt bureaucrats or by some other means of sensationalizing the importance of the latest political battle, conservative figures taught their audiences not to just disagree with the other side when good reasons for disagreement came up, but to fear and mistrust them, to assume that some of them had malicious intentions and that those who had good intentions were unwittingly playing into the plans of the others.

Here, I’ll speculate: Based on the way people talked about religion and politics in the community I grew up in and the way I’ve heard the older generations among them, the people I’m describing here, talk about the candidates they support, I think that the us-versus-them atmosphere produced by all this talk of spiritual battles and liberal plots is so strong that once a candidate becomes the only conservative choice or starts to be promoted by influential conservative figures, people like the originally reluctant Trump supporters start to find reasons why that candidate is good and worth fighting for.

In the case of Donald Trump, my best guess at how this was possible in spite of him not having a good conservative record is that his talk of being good for business combined with his promises to “drain the swamp” of government corruption and his disregard for political correctness won over the not-so-religious segment of conservative opinion-drivers, and that their liking for him encouraged the people I’ve been describing to warm up to him. Both the anti-corruption promises he made and the “Make America great again” message helped with this group of older Evangelicals too. This group knows that, just like using money carefully, fighting corruption has to be prioritized because it provides the foundation that makes it possible to take other positive actions. Almost everyone would agree on that, but what those of us who don’t favor Trump disagree with is the idea that he was actually going to cut out corruption. I guess the religious Trump supporters believed the claim because people like the talk show hosts believed it and sold it so well—although what made the talk show hosts believe it I can’t explain. The more controversial “Make America great again” slogan struck non-Trump-supporters wrong from the beginning with its suggestion that there is some ideal time in the past we can return to to fix our problems, but for the group I’m talking about, it played right into the familiar claim that liberals are driven by guilt over the past to the point where they want the United States to fail at everything. People like Rush Limbaugh spent the entire Obama presidency repeating that Barack Obama wanted America to fail, and when it comes to topics like racial tensions and immigration, they focus exclusively on people who are carried away with trying to look politically correct to the point where it becomes ridiculous. After eight years of hearing their favorite radio personalities tell them that their president was trying to ruin their way of life to ease his bleeding-heart liberal guilt, the idea of having a president who said, “We’re not bad people, we’re going to do great things, and our success isn’t something to be ashamed of,” sounded extremely enticing.

To summarize, Trump was saying the things these people wanted to hear, and while they had good reason to maintain their suspicion of his actual motivations, trusted figures praised him and got them to let their guard down. Like I said, I don’t feel like I understand the reasons why those figures took to Trump so well, and they aren’t the main subject of this post, but I can’t help mentioning one thought that has crossed my mind about their decision to support and promote him: I wonder if it was as simple as the rush they got from hearing someone make fun of the same people they make fun of. I’ll keep focusing on Rush Limbaugh because he’s the one I know most about—I’ve heard a lot of his show while around certain family members and once or twice been handed his magazine with something marked out for me to read. Anyway, one notable characteristic of the radio show is that he refers to politicians and news figures he dislikes by unflattering nicknames and uses terms like “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos” for groups of people he disagrees with. A good part of what he talks about has to do with fitting the actions of these groups and individuals into categories of absurd liberal behavior (kowtowing to communists, defending terrorists, white guilt, pinning victim badges on complainers, nature worship, funding scientific studies of the most useless things ever, etc.). He clearly enjoys picking out and highlighting real stupidity and oversimplifying everything else to the point where he can make it sound stupid too, and I wonder if part of what drew him to Trump was the sight of crowds of people cheering on someone who poked fun at a similar targets and the thought that this guy might actually win on a platform of calling liberals stupid and acting like conservatism offers simple, age-old solutions to every problem.

But returning to the people I’m focusing on, Trump was running for the party they associated with those vitally important family values; he was promising to fight corruption; he was reinforcing the idea that good, hardworking people shouldn’t ever have to feel bad about hazy things like discrimination and climate change that they didn’t see happening in front of their faces every day and weren’t trying to contribute to; and he had the endorsement of voices they trusted.

Still, there’s one hugely important question you’re probably asking: What about Trump’s sexism and racism? How could these people support him in spite of that? Well, this is actually one of the most important points to understand, and one of the most surreal. According to their understanding of things and the sources they get information from, Donald Trump is not sexist or racist at all. Everything he’s said that sounds sexist or racist was meant to get the libs angry because they’re so obsessed with keeping things politically correct all the time. If it was before he started calling himself a Republican, then it was just some meaningless comment made in a situation where bravado was expected and has nothing to do with how he actually sees people—he’s a businessman, and discrimination gets in the way of business, so there’s no way he could be sexist or racist. But didn’t the border wall thing seem like an extreme and ineffectual proposition aimed more at whipping up people’s fear of outsiders than at actually addressing any problems realistically? No, not under the circumstances, this side would say. There are laws regulating immigration, people are breaking them, and for years the discussion about how to respond has been bogged down by red tape and fear of offending anyone; Trump is just the first one to come along and propose a straightforward solution without caring what anyone thinks.

You might see weaknesses all through these claims. You might see heaps of contradictory information that has to be ignored in order to maintain them, but these people have answers for all of it, and they mean what they say. They would never dream of supporting a candidate who said, “I want white people to get ahead by holding back other races.” They work with and go to church with people of various races. Some of them can look back fondly on the good wishes they held for Martin Luther King Jr. when they were teenagers. None of them want things to be unfair for minorities. But all of them seem to share the idea that their goodwill towards people who aren’t like them is enough. They’ve grown sick of the groups who say that inequality still needs to be fought because this has always sounded to them like an attack, like someone calling them racist when to them racists are the villains from their youth who opposed the Civil Rights movement. All of that is why it’s so hard for them to see things that Trump does as racist. The things he doesn’t care about are the same things that seem unimportant to them. When he says that actions he takes have nothing to do with race, they believe him because in their minds that should be enough. They don’t see the need to be proactive in avoiding prejudice, and they know what it’s like to have people call them racist for being conservative. To some extent, the word has lost meaning to them. It’s a signal overly-sensitive people use to start witch hunts and nothing more.

Everything in the preceding paragraph applies to sexism in exactly the same ways. Any supposedly sexist thing Trump has done or said wasn’t really sexist and is just being talked up by people who already hate conservatives. The people I’m describing think they know what real sexism is, that the systemic problem was solved years ago, and so on, so when Trump says his words were misconstrued, they believe him, and when Rush Limbaugh says that liberals are just making up unfounded accusations of sexism they believe that too.

And here I think I’ve finally come to the end of all the factors that seem necessary in explaining the Trump supporters I know. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not excusing them or the people or causes they favor. They certainly are not models of how anyone should act. I’m only trying to find comprehensible reasons for how they can say they’re good people, think they’re good people, sincerely mean to be good people, and still make the choices they make, all the while believing they’re doing what’s ultimately best for everyone. I think that’s important because too many criticisms of Trump supporters come out sounding like, “You must be a really bad person if you’d vote for him,” and those criticisms go completely unnoticed or only serve to harden the resolve never to listen to a liberal, whereas more limited, specific criticisms informed by understanding of where Trump supporters are coming from and how the world looks to them actually stand some chance of being heard.

If your automatic response to that is to say, “Fat chance” and stew over how stupid and stubborn Trump supporters actually are, I still challenge you to be a little more creative. Of course there must be some people out there who are unreachable, but you never really know which ones they are for sure, and their existence doesn’t make the chance to change someone’s view for the better any less valuable. For this issue or any, if I choose to rant instead of to criticize diplomatically, I’m prioritizing my own feelings of vindication above the future that those people who could be won over might have. The key is to find those diplomatic ties, subjects that the people you care about will listen to. In the circle of people I know, the creative approach that has shown some promise is to turn political discussions into religious ones—everything is about religion for us. When my Evangelical family members express political views that I find concerning, the way to get them to consider other angles is to turn the discussion to what the Bible says on a similar issue. From there it’s possible to discuss the subject using language that isn’t politically loaded, which means it’s far easier to actually engage with ideas and concepts instead of flinging out buzzwords and triggering the responses people are conditioned to give to them. And for you too there is probably some approach that can make a difference to people you’d like to reach: some way of wording things, some relation to a set of ideas that is considered safe or neutral, or a different tactic unique to your situation.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I haven’t made use of this approach to conversations nearly as much as I should be doing based on the promise it’s shown to get people to rethink things. There was a religious subject and a couple political subjects that I was making progress on before the chain of events that led to me realizing I no longer believed in God happened, but since then, I’ve mostly avoided these types of discussions. I have told most people I know about my change in beliefs now, but the conversation with the ones I’m closest to was minimal and awkward and I’ve been afraid to go back to it so far. From the way they talk to me, I can’t tell if maybe they don’t really believe everything I said about having changed my mind. I think that going back to similar conversations will be possible eventually though. They’ll accept that the Bible doesn’t mean the same thing to me it does to them, but they won’t stop listening to and considering propositions about how its teachings fit together.

Another note worth making is that, like most things I write, I’ve been working on this post slowly for a long time. When I started, the novel coronavirus pandemic was just beginning to seem problematic here, and now as I’m finishing President Trump has committed enough vital errors in his response that even the type of people I’ve been talking about can’t overlook all of them. The issue of how to communicate with Trump supporters might become nonexistent after this year’s election given the amount of people who now have reason to be angry with him. I thought this was still worth sharing though because the overview story I put together for the composite of the older Evangelical Trump supporters I’ve encountered applies to the formation of their conservative views in general, so it could be helpful in understanding the ideological framework behind their decisions to support or reject all sorts of causes. Even under tension, let’s make an effort to know the culture and speak the language of our audience when we have an important point to make.