An Interview with an Evangelical Trump Voter

Don't Try This at Home!

Like everybody I know, I’m gravely concerned about the coming presidential election and completely baffled by Trump voters. I vaguely get that the wealthy tend to vote Republican in the interest of preserving their wealth, no matter what. But the wealthy account for a small percentage of the 62,984,828 who voted for Trump in 2016. Seeing countless TV images of Trump’s “base” at his rallies, I concluded that they must be a huge, unknown demographic of ignorant, pathetic losers looking for an alpha-male to “save” them from major socioeconomic changes they’re too stupid to understand and accommodate. Dumber than dirt and dangerous. However,unlike everybody I know, I’m surrounded by Trump voters. They’re right here in my not-carefully-chosen “independent senior living” place, and I can talk to them. A golden research opportunity!

Well, I can talk to one of them, a particularly interesting evangelical one because the link between Trump supporters and evangelicals is documented and significant. Exit polls in the 2016 election documented that 81% of self-identified White evangelicals voted for Trump. Recent Pew research indicates that 80% of them will vote for him again in November. That’s well over 6 million votes, and 6 million votes matter in a close election. Trump is the antithesis of every Christian principle, indeed of every social construct put in place over centuries to ensure ordered, rational human society. Why would over 6 million law-abiding Christian religious fundamentalists vote for him? I decided to interview Gloria, a White evangelical resident here, and get the answer. Now I wish I hadn’t.

Gloria has been friendly, inviting me to watch movies in her apartment since I don’t get Netflix. We’re the only two educated people here and enjoy talking, agreeing on things like the idiocy of what’s happening in universities. She’s quite attractive at 92, tall and fashionable, intelligent and articulate. I know she’s a religious fanatic; she knows I’m agnostic and gay, but we sort of get along. She was happy to be interviewed for my Substack posts, asking only that I make clear that there are countless differences among evangelicals. I here make that point. White evangelicals are not all alike despite 80% of them being alike in supporting Trump. Why?

So I asked her why she continually supports Trump, and she said that while he’s immoral, a “womanizer” and basically disgusting, she likes his policies and votes for policy, not person. “What policy?” I had to ask. “He doesn’t have any policies except destroying what’s left of democracy and making himself dictator!” “The wall,” she replied. “His immigration policy.” Yet Trump just instructed his lackeys in Congress to defeat Biden’s National Security Agreement. It would have done more to secure the border than a pointless wall the only purpose of which is symbolic. But Gloria wants the hopelessly ineffective, token wall and will still vote for Trump. Clearly, it’s not really the immigration thing, so what’s going on?

Gloria loathes Biden despite their shared Christianity, seeing him as merely a representative of the “deep state” cabal of left-wing figures out to destroy traditional American values with “socialism.” So is her vote more anti-Biden than pro-Trump? She recited some right-wing cant about Biden’s “dementia” and I asked where she’d learned that. No surprise. She watches Fox News, but why? Gloria isn’t stupid, is perfectly aware that Fox offers nothing but right-wing propaganda, much of it laughable. “It’s all propaganda,” she says. That’s true, and I know my fave MSNBC must be watched critically, its biases constantly noted. But what draws Gloria and several million others to choose and internalize gross-to-the-point-of-ridiculous, outright lies over, say, PBS? An article in Christianity Today suggests that Fox personalities and guests all use coded religious language with which religious people are familiar and comfortable. Except I know many deeply religious people who find everything about Fox abhorrent. So it’s not Fox, not anti-Biden.

Gloria has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, yet believes every word in the Bible is absolutely true, factual. She actually believes that the Adam and Eve origin story, rather than an allegory is historical fact; they were real people. She can even give the location of the Garden of Eden. She is happily confident that she’ll go to heaven and I’ll go to hell, this told to me with a strangely sweet cheer I found eerie, chilling. Gloria and I agree that another Trump presidency is likely to result in the ruin of our country, democracy, everything we’ve known and valued. The difference is that to her, it’s already happening with Biden anyway and will go on no matter what. It’s the biblical Armageddon of Revelation, the cataclysmic battle between god and evil at, according to fundamentalists, the end of time. It’s in the Bible and that’s that. If so, I wonder why they bother to vote at all.

I’ve never known a fundamentalist personally before, never really tried to talk to one. The experience is weird, utterly absent the usual exchange of ideas and perspectives, like talking into a sort of bland abyss. Gloria lives with total certainty inside a metaphor, which is to some extent enviable. I love folklore, poetry, symbolism - metaphors all. Revelation? Sure, let’s talk about various possible meanings of the four horsemen, and how about 666? But there’s NO exchange of ideas with anyone who for some reason chooses never to think. An intelligent person who chooses never to think, instead merely to recite obviously allegorical tales written, rewritten, translated and altered a thousand times by a thousand authors with as many agendas over 40 centuries. Tales now distorted and squashed into yet another agenda defining who’s good and who’s evil, defining who’s gonna win. But for Gloria, there is no allegory. I gave up, sadly, on the possibility of any real exchange with her, and went back to Trump.

“So what, in your opinion, is the single issue driving over 6 million White evangelicals to vote for Trump in November,” I asked her. “You’ve said that some Evangelicals are less adamant about aspects of belief than you are, and some go to extremes you find pointless. What’s the one thing you’d say that you and those 6 million agree on?”

“Abortion,” she told me. ”Life begins at conception. Most evangelicals oppose all abortion at any stage for any reason, including life begun in rape or incest. I do.”

Dear god, there it was! The core,screaming misogyny that refuses to value female life. It’s our old primate wiring that intelligence exists to override, but only if we do the hard work. Apparently, not thinking is much easier even for those who can. So the evangelical Trump vote is about abortion even though Trump himself actually couldn’t care less. He was pro-choice until he shrewdly decided to parrot his base. So let the raped child be pregnant and give birth even if it kills her!  Who cares? Nothing matters but obeisance to men. Those who oppose every woman’s right to choose abortion are about nothing but control of women, ownership of women, erasure of women. And so, apparently, are evangelicals.

I didn’t point out to Gloria, who bases every thought on something in the Bible, that the word, “abortion” or anything that can be translated as anything like abortion appears nowhere in any version of the Bible. It just isn’t there, and so the whole biblical basis for everything falls apart, revealing what lies beneath – sickening misogyny. I thanked Gloria for the interview and left, but then I couldn’t sleep. I finally decided that if this is possible, that if even an intelligent and educated woman representing millions of others, voluntarily chooses the most base, cruel and mindless path wired into us as primates before we could think, then I guess our coming obliteration by AI may not be a bad thing.