A crisis of faith: the political discourse of evangelicalism after Trump

From the moment Donald Trump announced his intention to run as president of the United States, there were some who thought it would inevitably lead to the end of the alliance between white evangelicals and the Republican Party. We now know that this would not happen, and that more evangelicals would vote for Trump than for any Republican candidate previously. The following thesis seeks to examine the reasons for this and the extent to which it might be subject to political intervention and realignment in the future. Previous analyses and explanations for the rise of the religious right tend to replicate an essentialist paradigm with regards to evangelicalism that inadequately accounts for its historical discontinuities and contingencies and can lead to a position of political intractability. Instead, I propose to use a critical approach that derives from the post-Marxist framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the value of which I will proceed to demonstrate by interrogating two key moments in the articulation of evangelical discourse: the formation of the religious right in the 1970s and the response to the crisis that followed Trump’s election.