FitzGerald To Discuss Evangelicals

In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, candidate Donald J. Trump, a reality television star on his third marriage, was quoted saying that if Ivanka was not his daughter he’d like to date her, a tape was released of him bragging to a TV journalist about how women let him grab them “by the pussy,” and he claimed that the Bible was his favorite book but he was unable to quote a single verse from it.  

In 2016, 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump.   

Popular evangelist preacher Rick Warren quoted in Frances FitzGerald’s latest book, “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” said ”It’s a funny thing to me that every five years American journalism reintroduces evangelicals to America. It’s like starting with Carter — you know there’s a headline, ‘Who are the Evangelicals?’ Well, its not like they’re a fringe group.”  FitzGerald will discuss exactly this on Sunday, Jan. 13, at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon.

What is an evangelical, and what do they believe in?  Many answers to these questions are found in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald’s book. FitzGerald says that even the most well informed of us don’t exactly know what evangelicals are. In the book she says, “Many equate evangelicals with fundamentalists or the Christian right when only a minority belong to either group.” 

In an interview at her weekend home in Sharon, FitzGerald spoke to Compass about the book and her upcoming talk. She says that it was precisely this fuzzy understanding of the religious movement influencing U.S. politics since the 1980s that inspired her to write the book. 

To understand evangelicals today and why they matter in U.S. politics, FitzGerald says, one must understand the past. In her thorough, engaging and dispassionate history of the movement from the early 18th century until the 2016 election, the book explains what evangelicals are and why they have come to be such a powerful voice in American politics. One half of the Republican vote is evangelical.  

FitzGerald points out that evangelical is a religious, not a political, term. “The word evangelical comes from the Greek ‘evangel’ meaning the ‘good news’ or ‘the Gospel.’” The American evangelical movement began in the mid- 18th century as a populist reaction against the established churches (similar movements were simultaneously going on in Europe.) With the spread of revivalist movements across the not-yet-formed country, evangelical ministers became the first Colonial celebrities. After Independence and on into the 19th century what were known as the Great Awakenings dominated American religious life. 

But, as FitzGerald writes, religion did not significantly influence politics until the 1980s. Tired of the loose morals and radical poilitics that influenced the Long Sixties, televangelists Jerry Falwell and  Pat Robertson (The Moral Majority) led the formerly Democratic South into the Republican Party and became a force in electing Ronald Reagan. From that moment in American history evangelicals have had to be reckoned with in Washington.  George W. Bush, spoke of having been “born again,” and counted several evangelical ministers as his advisors. Megachurch preacher Rick Warren gave the invocation at Barack Obama’s Inauguration in 2009. 

It is hard to understand why people who proclaim to follow Christ can support a man who is quoted in FitzGerald’s book saying that he has “never asked God for forgiveness but that he ‘felt cleansed’ when ‘I drink my little wine … and have my little cracker’.” 

FitzGerald says that Trump’s appeal to evangelicals is largely because he is an anti-establishment outsider and he has promised to “clean up the swamp.” He is, she says, “The bully who will defend them.” 

We will learn much more on Sunday at her talk. She will discuss the influence of the evangelicals on the 2016 election, and she will also discuss the splinters within the evangelicals and how the movement is changing. 

“Trump and the Evangelicals,” a talk by Frances FitzGerald is on Sunday, January 13, at 4:00 pm. at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon, 10 Upper Main St, Sharon, Conn. www.hotchkisslibrary.org.