Opponents dismissed Trump-supporting evangelicals as not true evangelicals

Evidence

EVANGELICALS OPPOSED TO TRUMP tried in vain to redirect their coreligionists. Even before Trump secured the nomination, Russell Moore likened Trump’s attitude toward women to “that of a Bronze Age warlord.” Moore had a hard time believing that fellow evangelicals could support this man. When polls said otherwise, he cried foul. Just after Trump handily won the South Carolina primary, besting Ted Cruz by six percentage points among white evangelicals and Marco Rubio by nearly twice that much, Moore offered his own spin: Many people telling pollsters they were evangelical “may well be drunk right now, and haven’t been into a church since someone invited them to Vacation Bible School sometime back when Seinfeld was in first-run episodes.” The word “evangelical” had been “co-opted by heretics and lunatics” and diluted by evangelicals-in-name-only, and none of this should be confused with true evangelicalism. When the dust settled after the election, the time would come “to make ‘evangelical’ great again.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 585

Categorization

• DEFINE: Moore’s ‘evangelicals-in-name-only’ dismissal is exactly the definitional contest the reader wants: who counts as a real evangelical vs. a diluted one.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s central evaluative question — whether the Trump strand IS white evangelicalism or a dominant strand within it.