The Trump appeal did not come from nowhere. White evangelical politics is now predominantly the politics of older, conservative voters for whom “owning the libs” and pushing back hard against cultural and demographic change has become a sacred obligation. The particularities of Iowa make that possible.īut the evangelical political landscape is quite different than it was when Cruz made his appeal in Keosauqua and around the state. In 2024, Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination - none more so than former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump put on his ticket to appeal to evangelicals - hope for a repeat of Iowa exceptionalism that would strike an early blow to Trump’s comeback effort. “No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” Trump told the Faith & Freedom Coalition gala crowd in Washington in late June. Holding his support among white evangelicals remains central to Trump’s strategy. Wade and issued other rulings altering or abandoning post-1960 precedents on church-state issues. He repaid their faithfulness with a Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. White evangelicals have remained one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies. Cruz prevailed over Trump in Iowa because the state’s powerful evangelical machinery and its loyal troops continued to be motivated, as Cruz hoped, by the issues of traditional religious conservatism, among them abortion and same sex marriage, and by solidarity with a candidate who could comfortably invoke scripture and evangelical language.īut over the long run, it was Trump who seized control of the white evangelical constituency on the basis of a shared anger and shared resentments rather than a shared faith. The first skirmish turned out not to be prophetic. The final days in the battle for Iowa - but also all the days to come in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination - would be marked by a struggle (political Armageddon, perhaps?), for the political souls of white evangelical Christians. He made clear that he understood the stakes in his battle against Donald Trump. Ted Cruz’s prayerful closing plea to a crowd of about 150 people in Keosauqua, Iowa in late January 2016, less than a week before the state’s presidential caucuses.
“Awaken the body of Christ that we might pull back from this abyss.”
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