Posted by Jay Livingston
Evangelicals support Trump so strongly not because he promotes Christian values or beliefs and certainly not because he embodies or practices those values. They support him because he symbolizes the position of dominance that White Protestants enjoy in the US. That was the gist of the previous post.
Just to make sure that this was about group identity and not Evangelical religious principles, I checked the Internet for information on Trump support among Black Evangelicals. If Trump’s appeal is tied to religious values, then Blacks should support Trump as strongly as do Whites. Sure enough, I found this headline in an article the appeared last March in the Washington Examiner. The article is reporting the results of a Pew survey.
It certainly sounds as though Trump is popular among Black Protestants. But the Examiner leans heavily to the right, so it’s best to look at the graphs of the Pew data.
Only 12% of Blacks approved of Trump, and that percent was unchanged from a year earlier. So the Black Protestant support for Trump was “steady.” You could even say it was “firm.” It’s not a lie; it’s just misleading.
The headline could just as accurately been, “Decline in White Evangelical Support for Trump.”
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