After former President Donald Trump gave his victory speech early Wednesday, at the Palm Beach Convention Center, dozens of his supporters gathered in a lobby to sing “How Great Thou Art,” reciting from memory the words and harmonies of a classic hymn, popular among evangelical Christians.
It was a fitting coda to an election in which Trump once again won the support of about 8 in 10 white evangelical Christian voters, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters. That margin — among a group that represented about 20% of the total electorate — repeats similarly staggering margins of evangelical support that T rump received in 2020.
I grew up in a country with over 90% Christian population in the 80s and 90s. The way the average person in my country would have answered if asked what religions are there would be: Catholic and Orthodox. Any other Christian denomination was clumped under either “sectarians” or “heretics” (and of course non-Christians were just “pagans”). Nobody in my country considered these American churches to count as actual Christians.
And even though I personally grew up as an atheist and spent every single religion class (yeah, that was a mandatory subject in our schools) debating the existence of God with my teachers, I still cringe and resent seeing these people called “Christians”.