Why do so many evangelical Christians support former President Donald Trump despite his decades of documented ungodly behavior?
An in-depth report from The Economist shows that it has a simple explanation: They believe that God personally appointed him to rule the United States.
In fact, the report cites a survey conducted by Denison University political scientist Paul Djupe that around 30 percent of Americans believe Trump “was anointed by God to become president.”
This smells of bullshit. You can’t get any of the numbers or methodology without paying. (Generally academic abstracts at least include their methodology if not their conclusion)
Which is because this is a book. This isn’t a study it’s a fucking advertisement.
Just looking at the publicly available numbers from respected groups like Gallup, 47% of Americans are religious. This would mean that 63% of religious people in the US believe God anointed a president.
Furthermore, 31% of Americans believed Trump had won the election as of 2023. (Gallup again) This would assign a mere 1% of those people to non religious, or at least, not believing he was anointed by God.
These numbers are highly suspect. However I’ll stop short of saying the book itself is wrong. The free pages available on Google books talk about taking a comprehensive approach to Christian Nationalism in the US. Not this headline. It would not be the first time reporters read something an academic wrote and went off with a take away that was nowhere in the book or study.
What’s far more likely, (without having paid for a subscription because fuck that and OP’s free links don’t work) is he said something along the lines of 30% of Christians believe he was anointed by God to bring Christian governance back to the the US. (Their ideology not mine, according to PEW, 24% of US adults identify as Evangelists) Not that he is anointed now. Of course there’s serious overlap between evangelists and people who believe Trump won, but it is not 1 to 1.
Overall these are things we’ve known for a while. But finding out 30% of Americans believe in Divine Right Monarchy would be a big deal. And burying it in a book on a tangential subject would be completely irresponsible. It would be the watershed of a whole series of studies to support or refute. I highly doubt Rawstory has the right takeaway on this.
Edit -as always, it takes far more effort to track down what was actually done and said than to print a spurious story. So the Rawstory article simply points to the Economist article as it’s citation. The Economist article has this to say -
And
It also says they see Trump like the Persian Emperor who, while not Jewish himself, secured their freedom. So this was before the election, with no polling after the election. Only the observations of Christian Nationalists and Apostolic Militants combining to form the January 6th insurrection. Simply put we don’t know how many still believe he’s anointed to be elected. And how many people thought God would intervene after the election or still believe he will intervene.
Replying to myself because it’s a bit late for this edit. But here’s the money quote from the poll author.
21 percent of about 30 percent of American Adults believed this before the 2020 election. Somebody better than me with math can correct me but I’m pretty sure that’s 6 percent of Americans?
Link
Sigh.
Its not a book.
It is a comprehensive study that is 68 pages long not counting the pages of references.
I was able to download it and read it as a 5.2mb pdf file from the first sub link from annas-archive link I posted, maybe learn how to use the internet.
Anyway, the specific claim that Trump was annointed President by God is held by 30% of Americans is backed up by research done by the authors that shows a dramatically increased likelihood to believe this when someone scores high on a measure of a set of beliefs/views the authors define as Christian Persecution, which is also shown to be very highly correlated with another measure of Christian Nationalism, which itself is another indexed measure of beliefs, studied by the authors in this paper.
Given that various polls and studies, many referenced in the paper, but also there exist many others, show that around 40% of Americans believe the US should be a Christian Nation, openly identify as Christian Nationalists, that the idea that Trump being appointed President by God is hugely popular amongnst this group, the claim that 30% of Americans currently believe Trump was/is appointed President by God is well evidenced.
I have absolutely no idea how or why you think this is shocking. You apparently are very out of touch with current events.
Further, this /is/ big news, hence it being a major story in ‘The Economist’, a popular and extremely influential publication read by basically an audience of millions of Western corporate businesspeople.
Basically, Trump and his follower’s derangement is so extreme that it is threatening to the stability of the global western capitalist system as Trump and his followers believe in so many ludicrous things so fervently that the kinds of corporate decisions that rely on being able to predict market conditions and general economic and social stability are now needing to be reevaluated wholesale.
Again, I have no idea how any of this is surprising to you unless you live under a rock.
It’s literally on Google books. With chapters. It’s completely narrative up to the purchase point. Furthermore the operative study for this article wasn’t the point of the book. It was part of a larger body of research to talk about Christian Nationalism.
I’m glad your link worked for you. It 501’d for me and I’m guessing quite a few other people.
But that’s okay because we found an interview with the author. Both articles have mangled this study. Which really isn’t that unusual in media. The actual number is 21 percent of Protestants that attend church weekly. 30 percent in certain demographics, and 54 percent in one specific demographic.
And you’re going to need citations to sell me on the entirety of religious America thinking we should be a religious country. (There’s whole churches that reject this idea and embrace the separation of church and state. So good luck!)
Yes it is well documented that there are Christian Nationalists who want Trump to destroy our democracy. But blowing it out of proportion by defending sensationalist stuff like this does not help defeat them. If you were at all involved in statistics you’d know this is absolutely par for the course in journalism about statistics.