Dominant pundit explanations treated evangelical Trump support as pragmatic or fraudulent.

Evidence

Pundits scrambled to explain. Evangelicals were holding their noses, choosing the lesser of two evils—and Hillary Clinton was the greatest evil. Evangelicals were thinking in purely transactional terms, as Trump himself is often said to do, voting for Trump because he promised to deliver Supreme Court appointments that would protect the unborn and secure their own “religious liberty.” Or maybe the polls were misleading. By confusing “evangelicals-in-name-only” with good, church-attending, Bible-believing Christians, sloppy pollsters were giving evangelicalism a bad rap. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 7

Categorization

• DEFINE: Charts the three standard alternative explanations (transactional voting, lesser-of-two-evils, pollster error) that the book’s thesis is framed against.