The treason of the evangelicals?

Every few months, it seems, Michael Gerson publishes a column bemoaning what he perceives as increasingly uncritical support for President Trump among evangelical Christians. This time, at least, Gerson performs a sort of public service by reminding us that Ralph Reed is alive. The columnist takes Reed's recent remark that no President has "defended us" or "fought for us" more than Trump as proof that evangelicals have become "primarily concerned with the respect accorded to their own religious community" at the expense of a historic commitment to "the oppressed and vulnerable." Their embrace of Trump as their defender threatens to stigmatize them as "old, white Christians who want to restore lost social status through political power," but at the expense of Christianity itself, as Gerson understands it. As a reminder, Gerson is a Republican, and something of a neocon, who sees Donald Trump as a depraved bigot. Neither Trump nor his supporters match Gerson's ideal for Republicanism. But in appealing to an idealized past for both Republicans and evangelical activists, Gerson engages in selective history, or else he exposes his own blind spot. If he's trying to say that evangelicals never indulged in bigotry or chauvinism before Trump, he can't be taken seriously. At the same time that evangelicals cited admiringly by Gerson agitated against slavery, other evangelicals -- and in some cases, almost certainly, the very same evangelicals -- took a very Trumpian position on immigration. Who were the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, after all, but evangelical Protestants fearful of a suspected Catholic takeover of the United States through unlimited immigration from Europe? If anything, evangelical Trumpism is consistent with a historic evangelical tendency to see themselves as the authentic American people. The major difference between then and now is that many Catholics today take the same side as these evangelicals, now that both see ethnicity rather than sectarianism as a threat to American identity. This is all very un-Christian and historically inconsistent to Gerson, but it may not seem so to those with a clearer view of American history. Gerson warns that by embracing Trump evangelicals risk alienating themselves from a younger generation that is growing less religious according to the measure of church attendance. Perhaps Gerson risks alienating himself from that younger generation by insisting that some sort of Christian renaissance is the solution to Trumpism.