House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and his evangelical compatriots have for years tried to galvanize voters with a narrative of conservative Christians facing constant attack, but that strategy may not be working the way they hoped, argued Ruth Braunstein for Religion News Service on Tuesday.
In her analysis, Braunstein looks at Johnson's work with the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom and challenges the group's narrative that religious liberty must be protected from a hostile liberal elite, as the New York Times reported in October.
"There is not an open effort to silence and censor the viewpoints of other religions," Braunstein writes. "This ties into a worldview evangelicals have espoused for decades, where they have 'cultivated a myth that Christians are under siege by a hostile secular culture.'"
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The analyst then argues this message isn't landing with U.S. voters who are growing frustrated with winner-takes-all tactics they're seeing from top conservative leaders, one in particular.
"And in fact not only isn't it landing with voters, it's not even galvanizing the evangelical community itself, which is increasingly fractured over support for former President Donald Trump," she writes.
What all of this means, Braunstein concluded, is that the evangelical movement is being torn apart and stripped of its Christian values from within, not by some shadowy external secular forces.
"Those who have dissented from Trump’s political agenda have either exited or were forced out of white evangelical communities, leaving them smaller and more uniformly aligned with the political right," wrote Braunstein.
"White evangelicals are no longer embattled and thriving. They have crossed over the embattlement tipping point and have begun a process of subcultural decline that has left them smaller, more politically radical and more desperate to hold onto their power at any cost."
Read the full analysis here.
