Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

it energizes the most extreme partisans today, from red-zoners who warn of a “Flight 93 election” (“charge the cockpit or you die”) to blue-zoners whose headlines declare that “Trump’s next coup has already begun” or “America is now in fascism’s legal phase.”

The White religious right rest their theology on an ideal of moral “cleanliness” that is, if challenged, to be defended violently. There is nothing new about ugliness in a very dressed-up place. It is endemic in some ways. That is something you must understand. Perhaps you remember from lessons of the civil rights movement that the White citizens’