Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts was a victory for the rule of law. But it won’t shake his core base support among white evangelicals. That’s because the quasi-mystical bond they share is based on something more than facts; it’s rooted in “evangelical anxiety.”
Understanding why this dynamic exists — and what drives it — requires penetrating the emotional connections between American evangelicals, conspiracy theories and anxiety. The future of American democracy will hinge on healing the root spiritual dysfunctions that drive evangelical anxiety. Only then can we begin to build anew.
Conservative white evangelicals comprise one-fifth of the American electorate; 75 percent of them voted for Trump. This religious community constitutes the former president’s most devoted base of support and was instrumental in delivering him to victory in 2016. Evangelical leaders are among Trump’s staunchest defenders, and they’ve proved critical in “normalizing” him as acceptable within their flocks.
So why, then, have Trump’s many criminal cases actually increased his support among this community, which historically has concerned itself with moral uprightness?
The answer lies in the vulnerability of evangelicals to conspiracy theories. A stunning 74 percent of white evangelical Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Even before this, 62 percent of white evangelicals said they believe that a cabal of unelected government officials was plotting against Trump.
Far from dislodging it, the recent string of legal cases against Trump only confirmed the evangelical belief that the “system” is out to get him — his conviction is sure to have the same effect.
The attachment of evangelicals to the conspiracy mindset is difficult to overstate. As a former pastor and a divinity school faculty, I encountered this firsthand in my efforts to persuade evangelicals to get vaccinated against COVID-19. About half of my target audience embraced the idea that the vaccine contained a tracking chip built by Bill Gates; a PRRI survey found in 2021 that only 56 percent of white evangelical Protestants had been vaccinated.
You might roll your eyes at the irrationality of it all. And you’d be right: Conspiracy theories are irrational. They don’t operate on the level of cold, calculated logic, nor are they meant to. Instead, they are emotionally driven. And the key emotion in play is anxiety.
Human life is filled with uncertainty and loss, so the emotion of anxiety is inevitable for everyone. We first need to distinguish anxiety (the natural human feeling) from an anxiety disorder (the dysfunctional ways we respond to anxiety). Studies consistently show that the common feature woven into all anxiety disorders is the insistent need to avoid uncertainty and loss. A conspiracy theory is a political anxiety disorder. Conspiracy theories don’t create anxiety, they exploit pre-existing anxieties by proffering a dysfunctional response, which promises to make that anxiety go away.
Think of a conspiracy theory as a highly toxic drug that targets the evangelical nervous receptors for uncertainty and loss and provides a momentary release from those feelings. The bizarre appeal of QAnon — which 50 percent of white evangelicals say they believe — becomes more comprehensible in this light. Evangelicals have historically worried (not without cause) that dominant secular institutions may take valued things from them, and a great deal of uncertainty surrounds this generalized fear. When the pandemic temporarily shuttered some houses of worship, this fear was confirmed in many evangelical minds.
When and how will the loss of status, rights and freedoms occur? Who do they need to watch out for? QAnon and other Trumpist conspiracy theories remove all this uncertainty by naming names and providing specifics: Elites in Hollywood and the Democratic Party are engaged in a secretive pedophilia cult. The government wants to close down your church. The vaccine is a lie. All of these are comfortable salves that promise the avoidance of feared loss, playing on one of the basest of human emotions.
A recently released study confirms that the inability to tolerate negative emotions around uncertainty and loss — what psychologists call “emotion dysregulation” — is the key factor driving belief in conspiracy theories. In fact, researchers have demonstrated that this intolerance also intensifies the impulse to share these theories with others on social media. If you cannot tolerate anxiety, you will be tempted to keep shooting up the conspiracy drug, no matter how fleeting the relief provided and the toxicity inflicted. And you will feel compelled to share the needle.
Conservative evangelicals are highly vulnerable to conspiracy theories because they are poorly equipped to tolerate anxiety. A brew of sociological and theological distortions have created this intolerance. They range from the cult of personality that prizes bold certitude in megachurch preachers to the “prosperity gospel” that falsely depicts God as a cosmic insurance broker in the sky guaranteeing avoidance of all loss. These are comfortable, difficult-to-resist fictions.
But the most toxic theological dysfunction is the widespread evangelical teaching that anxiety itself is a sin — a sign of a lack of faith.
Numerous televangelists and popular preachers enjoin Christians to “pray anxiety away,” fostering the expectation that God will magically protect them from all uncertainty and loss. Evangelicals are being quite literally taught that they should not tolerate anxiety. Consider the political impact of this widespread belief: If you are not supposed to experience anxiety, it means you must avoid the possibility of loss. Therefore, you will naturally turn to any object — whether that be a conspiracy theory or a political leader — that promises loss avoidance.
Enter Trump, who not only identifies the hated outgroup but promises deliverance from it in one fell swoop.
A healthy American democracy requires that all groups must be able to tolerate loss. Uncertainty and the possibility of loss is baked into the very logic of elections, where one party wins and the other necessarily loses. Loss tolerance is critical in a pluralistic society where conflicting interests co-exist among the electorate. When one in five voters are formed spiritually to insist on loss avoidance — and this is precisely what the dominant Evangelical teaching on anxiety does — the very foundations of democracy are severely threatened. A dysfunctional response to evangelical anxiety is why we saw crosses and “Jesus Saves” signs wielded by a mob storming the Capitol to overturn an electoral loss.
The work of preserving our democracy must therefore have a spiritual component. While measures like publicly correcting election lies and advocating a positive, fact-based policy agenda have their place, these rational steps, taken primarily by secular authorities, will not touch the fundamental emotional and theological dysfunction.
That is why it is incumbent on evangelical thought leaders to step to the fore to address the underlying dysfunction in how our community understands and experiences uncertainty, loss and anxiety. The prevailing teaching is simply not true to the Bible, especially to the story of Jesus. We don’t necessarily need to do this corrective work by starting with politics — in fact, much of this work should exist outside of politics, in the pulpit and within our own communities. As pastors, theologians, counselors and lay leaders, we should begin by teaching our community how to endure everyday anxieties around financial, relational and health losses without turning to conspiracy theories or extremist political tribalism.
It is true that evangelicals suffer from a particularly toxic relationship to anxiety. But we are not alone. The left’s rationale for cancel culture is that even hearing opposing views will create a loss of psychic safety — in other words, it will make them feel anxious. Cancel culture shares the same emotional dysfunction as conspiracy theory: the inability to tolerate the uncertainty and loss intrinsically found in pluralistic society, and in life itself.
Across the political spectrum, we all need to reform our relationship to anxiety. That means developing healthier, more prosocial responses to the anxieties that each of us will necessarily encounter in day-to-day life. It doesn’t require that evangelicals renounce their sincerely held faith, nor that we stop preaching the gospel of Jesus. But it does require that we stop employing the avoidance and vilification tactics that have brought us to this extreme moment in our politics.
And it requires that we stop placing our faith in false idols who offer false deliverance from our earthly problems. The One who can do that appears on no ballot, and we would all do well to remember it.
Curtis Chang is consulting professor at Duke Divinity School and the host of the popular podcast “Good Faith.” He is the author of “The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry is the Doorway to Your Best Self” and “The After Party: Towards Better Christian Politics” (with Nancy French).