“What profit is it for a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?”
It is one of the most haunting questions posed by Jesus in the New Testament. Why, he asks his followers, should a person chase riches or power if it means losing their most precious possession when the day of reckoning comes?
As the midterm elections approach and a post-Trump America looms, some evangelicals and religious scholars are now considering a similar question: What will White evangelicals’ allegiance to President Trump cost them now that their day of reckoning is at hand?
Trump’s rise to power was the culmination of a religious movement that began in the early 1970s. White evangelical Christians have since become his most steadfast supporters. The vast majority of them voted three times for a man one White evangelical commentator recently called “arguably the most vulgar, most corrupt president in American history.”
What they received in return is now clear: unprecedented access to political power, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices who are dismantling the separation of church and state.
But what’s less clear is what kind of price they may pay for their allegiance once Trump is gone. As the President nears lame duck territory, that question becomes more urgent. Young Americans are already saying they’re less inclined to attend church because of Christian leaders’ support for Trump.
Other unintended consequences may soon follow. Moral reform movements often boomerang on their followers. Prohibition triggered an explosion of organized crime and a public health crisis. The sexual revolution of the 1960s fed the rise of the Religious Right. Black Lives Matter protests led to the War on Wokeness.
Reform movements trigger furious counterattacks because America is a deeply divided nation, says James A. Morone, a professor at Brown University and author of “Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History.”
“If one side wins, it’s never permanent. If history is a guide, it’s very likely you’ll see some backlash to this,” Morone tells CNN, referring to the “religious right” movement that helped put Trump in the White House. “There are some indications that we are already seeing it.”
Morone is one of a handful of evangelicals and scholars who recently spoke to CNN about White evangelicals’ support of Trump. They identified four challenges that evangelicals will likely face in the final years of the Trump era and beyond.
It’s an image that distills the unbreakable bond between Trump and many White evangelicals. The president is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, eyes closed and head bowed, as a prayer circle of evangelical leaders surround him, beseeching God to watch over their holy warrior.
The photo illustrates the political power White evangelicals amassed under Trump. For over 40 years, evangelical pastors like Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell sought to reshape the culture and the courts to sway public opinion and change the legal system. Their goal: persuading Americans to “turn back to God.”
But some critics would say the image captures something else: hypocrisy. White evangelicals who support Trump have been accused of setting aside their faith to support a president whose rhetoric and personal conduct often contradict the teachings of Jesus.
To be clear, millions of White evangelicals lead lives of faith and service, and do not support Trump. But those who have stood by Trump won’t have the moral credibility to persuade people or shape public opinion, says John Fea, an evangelical and author of “In God We Trust: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”
“Evangelicals are going to see post-Trump that they’re not going to have any prophetic voice — they’re not going to be able to speak morally to the culture,” says Fea, a historian at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.
“How do you critique the next president if something goes wrong ethically when you’ve been in bed with Trump for 12 years?” he adds. “The evangelical movement … is now going to be associated with Trump’s politics. It’s going to take a generation or more to shake that stigma.”
But some White evangelicals reject the notion that their alliance with Trump has undermined their moral credibility.
The Rev. Lucas Miles, senior director of Turning Point USA Faith, has been one of the most vocal evangelical supporters of Trump.
“We elected presidents, not a savior,” he said in a statement shared with CNN. “Every man is fallen by nature, but that reality does not suspend our duty to seek the welfare of the country in which God has placed us.”
Miles said Trump has “advanced religious liberty protections, appointed the most pro-life Supreme Court majority in 50 years, and resisted efforts to impose gender ideology on children and institutions.” He also cited a recent dramatic rise in Bible sales as well as increasing church attendance by young people (a revival that has been disputed by some scholars).
“Looking ahead, the future of the evangelical community does not rest on any single political figure,” he said.
They may be displaced by a competing brand of Christianity
White evangelicals’ alliance with Trump could damage them in another way: They could be displaced by a competing brand of Christianity.
This may already be happening. It’s evident in the candidacy of one of the most talked-about Democrats in the midterms: James Talarico, the Texan running for the US Senate.
Talarico often cites Jesus to argue that health care is a human right and that the wealthy and corporations should pay more taxes. But he is also part of a Christian backlash that is poised to take advantage of labeling White evangelicals as hypocrites.
Democrats are having a “come to Jesus” moment. At least a dozen pastors, seminarians and former clergy are running as Democrats for federal and state offices, including Rob Sands, a Democrat running for governor of Iowa, and the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor running for a US Senate seat in Kansas.
The brand of Christianity that Talarico and other Democrats are invoking is called the “Social Gospel,” and it has clashed with evangelical Christianity for more than a century.
The Social Gospel is a Christian movement that emerged in late 19th-century America. It was a response to the obscene levels of inequality in the Gilded Age. It turned Christianity into a weapon for economic and political reform. Its message: saving people from poverty was just as important as saving them from hell.
The Social Gospel shaped public policy during the Great Depression. It drove the dramatic expansion of the welfare state under the New Deal. It saturated the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons. It’s become more popular in recent years. When Talarico says, “the real fight in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom,” he’s singing from the Social Gospel hymnbook.
Many White evangelicals, though, sing a different tune. Evangelicals are loosely defined as Christians who often share a “born again” personal conversion, take the Bible literally or seriously, and believe they’re supposed to spread their faith to others.
Some of them care about social justice. White evangelical Christians fought for the abolition of slavery as well as women’s rights. But when it comes to fighting poverty, many have traditionally preached a trickle-down Christianity. People who are saved, they argue, will help the poor and transform society.
Both Christian perspectives — one shaped by the Social Gospel, and another by a focus on individual sin and salvation — have competed for public dominance throughout American history.
The Social Gospel’s message of economic justice resonated with many Americans when the Great Depression hammered the country in the 1930s. By that time, it had displaced the more fundamentalist strain of White evangelism and later served as the “implicit assumption in American policy making” of the 1970s, Morone wrote in “Hellfire.”
That displacement may happen again. The erosion of moral credibility among some White evangelical leaders has created a theological vacuum. Democratic politicians like Talarico are stepping into that public void. White evangelical Christian leaders haven’t traditionally offered any sustained critique of concentrations of wealth and corporate power. But the Social Gospel’s message of “top vs. bottom” resonates with many Americans.
“We’re in a period now where lot of the population is very upset about the economic inequality, and the most powerful answer to that is the Social Gospel movement,” Morone says. “It’s been a long dry spell for the Social Gospel, but the conditions are in place for its revival, and we’re really seeing it.
“If Talarico wins, everybody is going to be talking about it.”
It was one of the greatest victories of any moral reform movement in American history. Cheers erupted across the country. People staged rallies and praised God during church services.
“The reign of tears is over,” the Rev. Billy Sunday, a popular evangelist, told a crowd of 10,000 in Norfolk, Virginia. “The slums will soon be only a memory.”
Americans were celebrating a political victory that day in 1920 that once seemed unattainable. They amended the Constitution with the passage of the 18th Amendment, which banned the making, selling, and moving of alcohol and created Prohibition.
Evangelical Christians were some of the temperance movement’s most active supporters. They thought their crusade was inspired by God and predicted it would lead to a moral revival.
And then they discovered something that happens to many moral reform movements:
Once reformers achieve their goal, they never recover. They often lose intensity and followers.
Like some White evangelicals today, proponents of Prohibition were also accused of being hypocrites. Many of the same politicians who voted for Prohibition were known to be persistent drinkers. Even President Warren G. Harding was rumored to keep bootleg liquor in the White House.
The moral revival they promised never arrived. Prohibition eventually collapsed in 1933 during the Great Depression, when the federal government needed the tax revenue that alcohol sales provided.
But the temperance movement fell apart for reasons apart from money and hypocrisy. Many of its supporters lost their fervor, while their opponents mobilized.
The same dynamic could afflict White evangelicals in the post-Trump era, Morone tells CNN.
“The moralists always promise that there will be a new era of love and justice in this world that never happens,” Morone says. “When they win their prize, it’s never as good as they promised it was going to be. You finally overturn Roe v. Wade, and abortions don’t even go down. People who want abortions are still getting them.”
Some of that reaction is already evident. The overturning of Roe in 2022 didn’t settle the abortion issue. Abortions increased in the US during the first two years after the Supreme Court reversed Roe and made abortion a state issue (although they decreased in 2025). In recent years, anti-abortion groups have lost most state ballot measures. Most Americans continue to say that abortion should be legal in most cases.
“It’s like the dog finally caught the bus — evangelicals don’t know what to do,” says Fea, the evangelical historian. “Coming out of the Trump administration, they’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that overturning Roe v. Wade was not the answer. Maybe they’re going to realize that if you really want to reduce the number of abortions in the United States, you may have to support candidates that have social programs that help the poor, who are having the significant number of abortions.”
Robert P. Jones isn’t easily surprised when it comes to White evangelicals.
He grew up in the Deep South attending White churches. He joined evangelical youth groups, Bible studies and prayer services. He graduated from an evangelical seminary before becoming the founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), an organization that studies religion and politics.
For years, he’s parsed White evangelical attitudes through PRRI’s widely distributed polls. But Jones says he was puzzled by responses to recent surveys that found most White evangelicals favored militarized encampments for undocumented immigrants and agreed with Trump’s charge that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“It was stunning, especially for me — I still have plenty of friends in that world,” says Jones, author of “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”
He sighs before adding, “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is nearly impossible for me to … (cite) a policy that was too cruel for White evangelicals to support.”
A PRRI survey this month found that White evangelicals are the only major religious group in America that rejects the belief that empathy “is a foundational moral value for a healthy society.”
Jones compares many White evangelicals who support Trump to the Christians in Germany who rationalized their support for the Nazi Party. In his new book, Jones writes that most German Christians “redrew their moral bearings to align more comfortable with Nazi ideology.”
“Today we are seeing a similar degradation of our moral faculties,” Jones writes. “Like the Germans, Trump’s white Christian supporters have relieved themselves of moral discomfort not by demanding a more ethical politics but by continually tailoring their theological convictions to fit Trump’s demands.”
Jones believes many evangelicals who support Trump are now facing their own “moment of reckoning.” He describes this dynamic as a form of spiritual debasement — adding that White evangelicals’ moral faculties are “essentially broken.”
“That’s going to be the ultimate cost of white evangelicals who followed Trump to the end of this authoritarian road,” Jones tells CNN. “They will not be able to tell the truth, even if they wanted to, after embracing the lies for so many years.”
There are signs that some White evangelicals are having second thoughts about Trump. Although evangelicals remain his strongest supporters, a Pew Research Center poll in January found they view Trump less favorably than in previous years.
But one evangelical leader says he doesn’t believe a large number of White evangelicals will regret their support of Trump.
“It’s not about personality, it’s about policies,” says the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, citing Trump’s pro-life stance and his support of evangelicals’ religious liberty.
Most evangelicals know that the Bible employs morally flawed leaders like King David for a higher purpose, Rodriguez says.
White evangelicals, and their Latino counterparts, will continue to ask the same question in the future when considering supporting a political leader, says Rodriguez, author of “Goliath Never Wins: 5 Rock-Solid Strategies for Slaying Your Giants.”
“Who do we support that will undergird our Judeo-Christian system?” he asks. “For evangelicals, it’s simple. The world is divided between your Christian value system and everything else: chaos, anarchy, socialism, Marxism — whatever it may be. Whatever policy will undergird a Judeo-Christian worldview, that’s the one you’re going to support. Whatever president, or whatever candidate.”
Jones also doesn’t envision widespread remorse from White evangelicals who supported Trump, but for a different reason.
“That kind of repentance often comes from a kind of brokenness,” he says. “Would White Christians had ever repented of slavery if the Confederates had won the Civil War? I doubt it.”
In the months and years ahead, White evangelical leaders will continue to speak out on the big issues of the day. They may continue to urge America to turn back to God. They may even cite scripture in demanding a politician resign over some sexual impropriety.
But many people will accuse them of being hypocrites and tune them out. Their greatest victories may be undone because political power is temporary, while moral credibility is more durable.
If they face that religious reckoning, those who went all in on Trump would have to decide if it was worth it. They may discover the hard wisdom of the New Testament scripture:
“You reap what you sow.”
