Believe Me

Whether promising that Americans would say “Merry Christmas” again, that he would protect America’s “Christian heritage,” or that he alone could fix the country’s problems, Donald Trump relied on a consistent refrain: “believe me.” But why should white evangelicals believe in Donald Trump, a religiously awkward man who has skirted most of the moral norms for politicians that they once viewed as non-negotiable? John Fea makes the case that Trump masterfully executed a plan out of the political playbook of the Christian Right to appeal to evangelicals’ sense of fear that the country’s moral core has been threatened and must be made great again. He did so by enlisting rhetoric of fear, power, and nostalgia, offering authority in desperate times, promising long-lasting change through the Supreme Court, and mobilizing new wings of the broad evangelical family – supporters of the prosperity gospel, independent charismatics, and other “entrepreneurial Christians” (p. 34). Fea argues that this appeal, often overlooked by non-evangelicals, is what ordained Trump to be the Republican nominee and eventual president of the United States.

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