The Holy Vote

Anyone perplexed by the growing polarization in the United States and the evangelical participation in this divide ought to read Sarah Diefendorf’s The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety among White Evangelicals. Diefendorf’s ethnographic research and writing bring refreshing depth and complexity to the White evangelical demographic bloc that aids in understanding the nuanced support that continues to bolster the Trump movement. The Holy Vote seeks to demonstrate how evangelicals are feeling vulnerable, anxious, and confused, and “how the debates around the imagined secular allow White evangelicals to re-create themselves as good and godly and to avoid being marked as ugly” (21-22).

A distinctive perspective of Diefendorf’s research comes from the context and time of her fieldwork. Her sixteen months of fieldwork began in late 2015 and continued through the 2016 election of Donald Trump and into his presidency in 2017 at an evangelical megachurch in a suburban city in the Pacific Northwest. (Diefendort uses the pseudonym “Lakewood Church” in her book to protect the privacy of the congregation.) The time and location of this church are significant as “Trump backers in places like the Pacific Northwest had been largely and wrongfully ignored by many” (71).

Deifendorf’s research shows that while many of her subjects voted for Trump, this was not a bastion of Trump’s vocal base. Lakeview Church congregants are fraught with an “internal chaos” caused by their perceptions of shifting social standards, whereby they fear they are no longer the standard. These are people who have heretofore been provided the “comfort and confidence that come with the assumption that they are the standard against which all others are judged and that all others must strive to become” (176). As evangelicals perceive shifting attitudes and changing times as possibly unseating their role as standard bearers, it is causing an “internal chaos that our previous theories do not account for” (50).

Diefendorf introduces a theory of the imagined secular to help explain how evangelicals are reconciling “a need to grow and retain members in a rapidly changing social environment in which their beliefs, and by extension their own sense of self, might be understood or labeled as ‘ugly’” (4). The language of “ugly” was typically used as “a stand-in for being marked as racist, sexist, or homophobic” (3). Thus, the four elements of the imagined secular that Diefendorf unpacks through chapters 3-6 are the feminist, the Black activist and racial justice, and the dual threats of uncontained heterosexuality and homosexuality. The book draws upon ethnographic research to draw out this conception of the imagined secular—or what the White evangelical worldview supposed certain liberal projects to be about and what their responses to these perceived projects ought to be. For example, chapter 3 considers how Lakeview’s pastor could repeatedly identify himself as a feminist while simultaneously preaching about the role of submission in a good and godly marriage.

In these ways, evangelicals typically sought to avoid being ugly by engaging in “bounded welcoming” of these components of the imagined secular in ways that “entertain conversations about feminism, Black Lives Matter, and same-sex marriage” while still being “an organization governed by hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality” (5). How has this applied to their ability to support Trump? “They may not be thrilled about him, but he made sense to them as a foil to the imagined secular” (174); even more, they could seek to be good and godly and “vote for someone else to do the ugly work for them” (177).

This book is a crucial contribution to scholarship seeking to understand the intersections between Whiteness, evangelicalism, and Trumpism. Diefendorf places her research within the context of other sociological and anthropological studies to strengthen her generalizing claims about White evangelicals more broadly. However, this emphasis on the generalization of her findings occasionally distracts from the reader’s ability to immerse themselves fully in the particulars and distinctiveness of Lakeview.

The distinctive story from this church is crucially important to understanding the lasting poll strength that Donald Trump has found through three election cycles and, as Diefendorf wisely reminds in her conclusion, “those who identify as more liberal would do well to continue to treat conservative politics as quite real” (177).

Marie Olson Purcell is an adjunct professor of religion at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.

Marie Olson Purcell

Date Of Review:

March 13, 2024