Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. During the 2016 Republican primary, it was easy enough to argue that Trump was exploiting these divisions, winning Fox News-watching cultural evangelicals and prosperity-gospel types while losing churchgoers who cared about character and orthodoxy. If this is right, then the alienation of younger evangelical writers from Trumpism’s court pastors could indeed be a signifier of a coming evangelical crackup. But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success. If so, then this would imply that white Christian tribalism and a very American sort of heresy, not a commitment to scripture and tradition, has kept evangelical churches thriving all these years.

Source: New York Times November 25, 2017 19:30 UTC