Why Ex-Churchgoers Flocked to Trump

The best way to describe Trump’s support in the Republican primaries—when he was running against the likes of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich—would be: white evangelicals who do not go to church.

Geoffrey Layman, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, noticed this during the primaries, writing: “Trump does best among evangelicals with one key trait: They don’t really go to church.”

While writing my forthcoming book, Alienated America, my research assistant Nick Saffran and I crunched some numbers provided by Emily Ekins of the Voter Study Group. We broke down Republican primary voters by church attendance. Among the most frequent attenders—those going more than once a week—Trump got about 32 percent of the vote.

Trump also got a minority of those who simply go once a week. Among those who reported going “a few times a year,” Trump got about half. He got an easy majority (55 percent) of those Republicans who “seldom” attend, and a full 62 percent of those who never attend. That is, every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa. The most frequent attenders were half as likely to support Trump as were the least frequent attenders.

This confirmed what others had noticed. Liberal Peter Beinart wrote for The Atlantic that the GOP electorate has secularized, and that this secularization “helped Trump win the GOP nomination.”

In March, as the GOP field was narrowing down to Trump and Cruz, one Pew Research Center survey found Trump trailing by 16 points among white evangelical voters who attended church weekly, but leading by 19 points among those who do not.

The nuances of this picture shouldn’t be blurred over. It would be wrong to say that Trump’s base was less religious. Ekins, the pollster, divided the GOP electorate into clusters, defined by various traits. There were “Free-Marketeers” and “Staunch Conservatives,” for instance. There was one cluster defined by being non-ideological and being pessimistic about the future. Ekins labeled them the “Preservationists.” This was Trump’s strongest cluster in the GOP primaries, by far.

The Preservationists, Ekins found, were the most likely to say religion was very important to them. They were also the least likely to attend religious services.

This gave an easy and satisfying explanation during the primaries to Christian conservatives put off by Trump and his base: Oh, these are hypocrites, not real Christians.

That dismissive explanation misses the point. We shouldn’t see this as a story of working-class whites slacking off and turning away from God, as much as one of working-class whites finding themselves in places where institutions of civil society—most importantly the church—are drying up.

Buchanan County is in Virginia, but it borders on West Virginia and Kentucky. It’s Appalachia. In April 2016, Buchanan County earned the distinction of “The Place that Wants Donald Trump Most,” as a Wall Street Journal headline put it. After 32 states had held their Republican primaries, Buchanan stood out as Trump’s best county, with 69.7 percent of the vote there.

Among the 3,143 counties in the U.S., Buchanan ranks 3,028th in religious adherence, according to ARDA. Only 25 percent of the county declares any religion, compared to 50 percent in the median U.S. county. Even more striking, in the counties that make up Appalachia, is the low attendance.

“These people,” said J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, “despite being very religious and having their Christian faith as something important to them, aren’t attending church that much. They don’t have that much of a connection to a traditional religious institution.”

Buchanan County, Virginia, like Fremont County, Iowa, has suffered economically, and so it’s easy to chalk up the pessimism and the Trump support to those economic hard times. But it’s an inadequate explanation when you put the economic struggles in perspective.

Fremont’s unemployment was below 4 percent when it went for Trump—lower than the national rate today. Buchanan County’s 11.8 percent in 2016 is much higher, but go back a few years, and you’ll find hundreds of counties around the country doing far worse.

Economic collapse goes hand in hand with the desiccation of religious institutions. When factories or coal mines close, some portion of the population flees. Still others stop going to church—white Americans are less likely to attend religious services when they are unemployed, sociologist Brad Wilcox reported in a study titled “No Money, No Honey, No Church.” A church built for a few hundred families has trouble maintaining itself when a third of them leave.

Absent strong job prospects, fewer adults form families. When people have fewer weddings and christenings, and fewer kids to educate on right and wrong, they go to church less. Of course then, this becomes a vicious circle: in communities less anchored in church, there’s less family formation. A place with fewer families is a place less attractive to employers—thus this social and moral collapse is both a consequence and a cause of economic collapse.

The “economic anxiety” is inextricably tied with the collapse of church and family. The latter is the more dangerous problem.

If you are enmeshed in strong institutions—if you live in a close-knit neighborhood, are rooted in a small town like Orange City, belong to a strong congregation—you may notice how much higher the trust is. Kids leave their bikes on the front lawn. You don’t fret if you show up without a ride home arranged, as someone there will take care of you. You don’t keep a ledger of favors you do, because reciprocity is the norm, and you’re confident you’ll receive back about as much as you gave out.

Social trust is an immensely valuable asset. Increasingly, it’s a luxury good that is abundant only in elite neighborhoods and strong religious institutions. Low trust is a condition of the white working class. Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, reported that white-collar Americans were twice as likely as blue-collar Americans to say “people can generally be trusted.”

Sure enough, low trust helped to predict Trump support in the early primaries. The core group of Trump voters in the GOP primary—the “Preservationists” identified by pollster Ekins—when asked whether “most of the time people try to be helpful, or… they are mostly just looking out for themselves,” were by far the mostly likely to say people mostly just look out for themselves.

In elite family-filled suburbs where most people have college degrees, trust actually tends to be high, regardless of stereotypes about gated driveways. Where do we find trusting middle-class or working-class communities? Where most people go to church.

And when the churches start emptying, the trust starts shrinking. Researchers Margaret Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett looked into what happened where Catholic schools shut down for reasons that didn’t appear to be low attendance. Maybe the pastor was transferred and not replaced. Maybe the building had to be demolished. These neighborhoods, shortly after the school shut down, saw increases in public drinking, drug dealing, and drug use. Graffiti, litter, and abandoned buildings became more prevalent.

In such neighborhoods, after the shut down, people were less likely to agree that “people around here are willing to help their neighbors,” or “this is a close-knit neighborhood,” or “people in this neighborhood can be trusted.”

“[R]eligious Americans are, in fact, more generous neighbors and more conscientious citizens than their secular counterparts,” wrote Robert Putnam and his coauthor David Campbell in American Grace, a church-centered follow-up to Bowling Alone.

Most importantly, trust is simply higher in places where more people go to church. “[T]he average American has more trust in ‘people who are deeply religious,’” Putnam and Campbell reported. Also, “religious people themselves are most trusting of just about everybody than are secular people.”

The main determinant in all of religion’s benefits, the authors found, was not depth of belief, but frequency of attendance.

The secularization of America is eroding trust. The elites’ replacements for church are strong public schools, country clubs, travel sports teams, and so on. The working class and middle class, it seems, lack those secular institutions of civil society, particularly after the core institution, church, dries up.

It’s got to be a bitter irony for the secular Left. They cheered as they saw Americans turning away from church. But when Middle America turned away from church, they were missing something. And they sought it in Trump.

Timothy P. Carney is commentary editor of the Washington Examiner and author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.

Interesting article. Secularists, who have rejected Christianity, often try to find meaning and purpose in their lives through getting involved in politics. Perhaps many Trump supporters who say that they are religious, but have seemingly given up on it, find more hope for "the American dream" in Trump. If so, they were correct. Trump is the only guy who was willing to stand up against the militant secular elitists who want to "fundamentally transform" America into something that the Founding Fathers never intended. Btw, I teach Sunday School to college students and young adults at my church and I am a "yuge" Trump supporter. The alternative (Hillary) was just totally unacceptable to us Christian deplorables.

Dewey-my first reaction also. Interesting article. Makes me think Trump should quit halfway through his 2nd term-always leave them wanting more. The bone he could throw them? 1) America is great AGAIN. 2) Condition it on a GOP majority in both Senate/House. 3) OFFER Obamas last SCOTUS pick AFTER they give Trump something BIG. Won’t matter.

An offer we all can’t refuse.

“Secularists, who have rejected Christianity, often try to find meaning and purpose in their lives through getting involved in politics.”

Verus God’s lost children who grasp on to identity politics and the pagan religion of Climate Change.

Its been 2 years and they still try to hide why Trump won my god my 1st grade granddaughter even hated Hillary Clinton I would love to poll all the climate changers and see exactly what there Religion is

I read the article and the 5 comments that followed, while biting my tongue.

The author seems to believe that people must belong to an organized religion and regularly attend the ritualized services they demand while brainwashing their congregations.

If a person has read books, including the Bible, and was raised from an early age to believe in a higher order, God, that person can live as a Christian without being a regular church-goer.

Many of DJ Trump’s voters were from the group I described in the previous paragraph above and will be again. JMO

I agree. My father, however, has always had his mind made up as to insist somebody who doesn’t go to church is not showing themselves a true Christian, even going so far as to insinuate they probably aren’t “saved.” He was of course, passive aggresively speaking about me. Now has dementia so there’s no changing his mind, as if there ever was. It is what it is but he and I butted heads a few times over the years there was no getting through to him. He’s “old school” I guess.

“Where do we find trusting middle-class or working-class communities? Where most people go to church.”

We find that to be true, having moved from CA to TN. Hardly anyone we knew, or knew of, went to church and you lived your life you couldn’t trust anyone.

Here in eastern TN, almost everyone attends church. When you meet people for the first time the most popular question they ask is, “Where do you go to church?”. It’s not, “ DO you go to church?”. They assume you do; it’s the default here. Most people are sincerely kind and helpful, where in CA that only happened if they thought you could do something for them.

So this guy’s study makes us an anomaly, as here, most people go to church at least three times a week, and Trump won BIGLY here.

I’m not sure I accept the premise being used but those who abstain from church are more likely to find their belief system in big government - the sort of people who freak out about government shutdowns.

Trump’s message resonated with those who distrust big government. Those who cling to the silly notion that government is “fair” and “helps everyone” are either on the government dole or depend on government, rather than faith in God, to solve their problems.

Barna’s research in his book “Revolution” showed that in fact many Christians left church because the spiritual experience wasn’t deep enough. There “wasn’t ENOUGH God,” he concluded. The services were getting too shallow.

If his research is true, it would throw a totally different light on the so-called “secular Christians,” who aren’t all that secular. For some time we didn’t go to church. I still did a regular Bible study and prayed sometimes an hour a day. It didn’t change my faith-—if anything, what I had been hearing at certain churches was eroding my faith.

My son, then six years old, predicted Hillary’s loss because “she has a bad voice and no one will want to hear it all the time”

You are correct, even young kids know.

They don’t have that much of a connection to a traditional religious institution.

Quite possibly the interesting point here is that they are alienated from the leftist pop cultural dynamic that has taken over so much America...Hollywood, academia, government, and yes - religious denominations. Too many churches have/had decided to transform religious services into pop culture entertainment. It no longer seems to be about refreshing ones faith and coming before God but about rock bands, light shows and social messages about race, gender, sex, Yada, Yada.

I think the point is missed that large denominations in this country have openly embraced Satan. The people who have left, ARE the Christians.

If they can “think outside the box” enough to escape the “Crystal Cathedral”, their support of Trump doesn’t surprise me.

Crap in - crap out....not going to church and rejecting Christianity are two different things....I went non-denominational because I heard a lot more about Jesus in those churches than in “regular” religions....millions just like me out there.

Ekins found, were the most likely to say religion was very important to them. They were also the least likely to attend religious services.

We have enough liberal ideology shoved down our throats all week and use the break to have our own services at home or with a group.

This is how Christians are reacting to the liberal and mega churches.

We don't want any part of them.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.