White evangelical Republican partisanship is recent, born of a mid-century realignment

Evidence

BILLY GRAHAM WAS A LIFELONG REGISTERED Democrat. This may come as a surprise, given the close alliance between white evangelicals and the Republican Party that has come to define the American political landscape in recent decades, but in the middle of the twentieth century it would have been hard to find a Southern Baptist from North Carolina who didn’t identify as a Democrat. Contemporary evangelical partisanship can only be understood in terms of a broader realignment that transformed partisan politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, a realignment that evangelicals themselves helped bring about. At the heart of this realignment were attitudes toward civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and “family values.” For conservatives, a defense of white patriarchy emerged as a unifying thread across this range of issues; for conservative evangelicals, a defense of white patriarchy would move to the center of their coalescing cultural and political identity. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s key contest: this frames the realignment thesis the book’s central claim depends on — that Trump support is continuity, not betrayal, within a strand that coalesced around white patriarchy in the 1950s-80s. — connects to: The great white switch made white religiosity a reliable Republican vote predictor. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 45