Donald Trump’s victory in Iowa shows how much he owns the evangelical movement

Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses was hardly surprising. He was up by 30 points in the last poll before the vote. The vote actually said less about Trump – who is essentially running as an incumbent – than it does about the core GOP base, evangelicals.

Iowa has long been the place where conservative evangelicals have had an outsized say in the party’s nomination process. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) squeaked by in 2016 because he assiduously courted the state’s evangelicals. At the time, Trump was an unknown quantity, a thrice-married casino magnate from New York who was hardly a study in piety.

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Cruz was building on the same base that gave former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) a victory in 2012 and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee the win in 2008. The standard religious right issues of attacking LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and the lack of faith in the public square propelled all three to wins in Iowa before their campaigns fell apart.

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Cruz, Santorum, and Huckabee were courting church-going conservatives. But that group has been shrinking in size. In fact, the number of Americans who identify as having no religion is greater than those who identify as evangelical.

But it’s not just a matter of people no longer going to church. People are identifying as evangelical even if they aren’t regularly attending services. What makes them evangelical in their eyes is believing in Trump.

“Politics has become the master identity,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, told The New York Times. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”

Indeed, more white Americans self-identified as evangelicals during the Trump presidency, especially if they were Trump supporters. They may not go to church regularly, but they profess to adhere to evangelicalism.

If they do go to church, they may just as easily hear a political lecture as a sermon. Tim Alberta, a writer for The Atlantic and himself an evangelical, writes in his recent book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, that people he had known all his life attacked him at his father’s wake in the church where his father was the pastor. Alberta’s crime: he had been critical of Trump. Defending Trump was far more important than comforting a grieving son.

DeSantis’s big mistake was thinking that piety was still the common language of evangelicals. The Florida governor would show up at Iowa events and fling Scripture like it was hash in a dinner. He tried in that both-shoelaces-tied-together way of his to insinuate that he was a real believer compared to Trump. He even suggested he was endorsed by God in an ad for his re-election for governor in 2022.

That might have worked in 2016, but those days are gone. The evangelical that DeSantis was courting is fast disappearing. Religion is, at best, secondary to the ideological issues driving the new evangelicals. They just want pure MAGA. Why should they get it from someone just because he quotes the Bible when they can get it from the source itself?

If you need any more proof that religion and politics have merged, you need only look at a HarrisX poll last fall asking about voters’ perceptions of candidates’ faith. More than half of Republican voters said that Trump was a man of faith, putting him in a statistical tie with ostentatiously pious former Vice President Mike Pence.

Belief in Trump is an article of faith. The results in Iowa prove it.