White and non-white evangelicals: do their politics differ?

Evangelicals are usually spoken as a group that supports political and social conservatism. They are identified as a religious group that votes as a block and as it is close to 20-30% of the population, its views become very important during the US elections. However, while almost all evangelicals are socially conservative, research shows that, politically, evangelicals have diverse opinions and positions. Then, why it seems that evangelicals vote as a block for the Republican Party. There are three reasons:

• About two-thirds of the evangelicals are non-Hispanic white;
• White non-Hispanic Americans, including white non-Hispanic evangelicals, are more likely to vote than African-Americans or Hispanics;
• Many conservatives, who are not evangelicals according to most religious/doctrinal definitions, identify themselves as evangelicals.  

Add these three factors and it would be easier to see why more than 80% evangelicals regularly vote for the Republican Party even when the party leadership has regularly supported racist and anti-immigrant policies. President Trump's nomination, election, and continued popularity among evangelicals show that the political choices of evangelical voters (who are mostly white) are informed as much by race as they are by religion. 

A previous blog post discusses in detail the debate over how to define an evangelical and whether self-identification (which is the way most political polls identify evangelicals) is the right way to identify evangelicals, so we will not explore these issues here (for those who want to read about it: Who are evangelical Christians?). 

Here are two articles that explain the link of evangelism, race and voting behavior. 

The FiveThirtyEight article How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals? contends that race and President Trump are dividing evangelicals or exacerbating their differences:

 America’s community of self-described evangelicals, about a fourth of the population, is increasingly divided between a more conservative, Trump-aligned bloc deeply worried about losing the so-called culture wars; and a bloc that is more liberal on issues like immigration, conscious of the need to appeal to nonwhite Christians and wary of the president. The split in evangelical Christianity isn’t new, but it appears to be widening under Trump. 

Two factors appear to be driving this divide. First, the number of white evangelicals is in decline in America at the same time that the evangelical population is becoming more racially diverse. According to 2016 data from the Public Religion Research Institute, about 64 percent of evangelicals are non-Hispanic white, compared to about 68 percent in 2006... 

And these nonwhite evangelicals see politics differently than white evangelicals. While the largest plurality of white evangelicals identify as Republicans, most black evangelicals are Democrats. A plurality of evangelical Latinos, in contrast, identify as political independents — and they’re less supportive of the Democratic Party than Latinos overall — but they are still more likely to consider themselves Democrats than Republicans.

Source: How Trump And Race Are Splitting Evangelicals? 

The second factor driving this divide among evangelicals is Trump himself. His governing style is, in effect, forcing evangelical leaders to choose between embracing the white evangelicals who overwhelmingly support the president or distancing themselves from the president — and even politics generally — as part of an appeal to their diversifying congregations.

The Religion & Politics essay We Are All Evangelicals Now blames a "sense of “racial embattlement," the belief that one's group faces more discrimination than any other group in the US, for the voting pattern of evangelicals, who are mostly white. The author, Janelle Wong, argues that evangelicals are not outliers and their views are close to those of white Americans as white Americans also feel being discriminated against. The only difference is intensity, "Evangelicals embody U.S. racial attitudes on steroids." Wong concludes the essay by focusing on narratives of white persecution: 

The bottom line is that the racial divides and racial anxieties we see in evangelical America are not so different from the views of white Americans more generally. I speculate that these attitudes are more extreme than those of other white Americans because their fears of demographic change are even more exaggerated than other whites. A narrative of religious persecution runs deep in white evangelical theological circles. Believers expect to be attacked for their religious commitments. Hence, their defenses may be easily raised by “the War on Christmas.” Narratives of persecution have primed them to expect a broad cultural assault, despite the fact that white Christians face the least religious persecution of any religious group in the United States. These fears of religious persecution, unfounded or not, interact in an especially potent way with fears of racial embattlement to produce the political conservatism detailed above. That being said, the racial patterns we observe among evangelicals are more intense, but consistent with the racial patterns that define the country as a whole. In this respect, we all share something very deep with evangelicals.