White evangelicals diverged from other religious groups in backing the Iraq war

Evidence

IN THE EARLY 2000S, white evangelicals were enthusiastic supporters of a military response to the September 11 attacks, but they weren’t alone. In October 2001, eight in ten Americans supported a ground war in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq, however, was a harder sell. Connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and America’s national security remained sketchy, and many religious groups in the country resisted the administration’s efforts to drum up support for another war. The National Council of Churches urged the president to refrain from a preemptive strike; the Vatican warned that preemptive war would be “a crime against peace.” Conservative evangelicals begged to differ. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 420

Categorization

• XREF: Supplies the baseline causal fact the reader needs: evangelicals were the war’s outlier religious constituency, setting up the claim that militant masculinity explains the divergence.