Why do so many Evangelicals like Trump?

(This is something I wrote down as a reply to a Facebook comment in February 2017, and had it saved in a Word document. I decided to upload it now because it really hasn't stopped being relevant.)

Since the Trump administration began, and President Trump has begun to work aggressively at the goal of fulfilling all our worst fears about him, I’ve heard people express amazement that anyone can still believe anything Trump says, or support anything he does. I don’t exactly think of myself as an anti-theist, but I do think that my atheistic perspective has given me a viewpoint on this question that the average person may not have. From this viewpoint, I’ve developed a hypothesis as to why people continue to support Donald Trump despite all he’s done to prove himself utterly dishonest and unqualified.

In simplest terms, my idea is that a certain type of religious person is primed by their religious upbringing to think about things dogmatically. Before I go any further, let me say that I do fully understand that there are religious people who analyze their beliefs critically and make some effort to only believe true things (though I think many of them have a flawed starting point or epistemology, but that's a different discussion). However, there are far too many Christians who just believe because that's what they've been told all their lives. Think about it; practically any Christian home teaches their kids that God is real and the Bible is true from a young age. They don't wait till the child reaches the age of reason, and then say, “read some Aquinas on one side and some Ingersoll on the other, and then use the critical-thinking skills we taught you to decide for yourself if you agree with our beliefs.” (I tend to think that if Christianity were true, Christian parents should have no fear of doing that, but that’s also a different discussion.)

So, for those children being taught that Christianity is true from a young age (which seems to be practically all children raised in Christian homes), the first, initial reason that they believe the truth-claims of Christianity is, “I believe it’s true because my parents believe it’s true.” Later on, that might turn into, “I believe it’s true because the Bible says it’s true,” or “I believe it's true because my pastor/friends/spouse believe it’s true.” Until they actually look at the reasons behind their beliefs for themselves, then they are only believing dogmatically. My theory is that, the longer a person believes in religion dogmatically, the easier it is to believe in other things dogmatically. If you just blindly accept what your parents/pastor/spouse/etc. says about religion, then why wouldn't you also blindly accept what they say about politics, economics, current events, and so forth?

But the more you blindly accept things and believe things dogmatically, the more you build up a foundation of unwarranted presuppositions that inform your future conclusions. If you think Evangelical Christianity is the right and true flavor of Christianity (because someone said it and you accepted it dogmatically), then you’ll think conservative values are the right and true values for Christians to hold. If conservative values are the right and true values for Christians to hold, then the Republican Party is obviously more honorable and Christian than the Democratic Party. If the Republican Party is obviously more honorable and Christian than the Democratic Party, then the news sources which bolster the Republicans and bash the Democrats (such as Fox News) must be the most accurate and honest news sources. If Fox News says that Trump is actually pretty good and Hillary is completely terrible, then Trump must actually be pretty good. If Trump is actually pretty good, then when he signs an order banning immigrants, there must be a pretty good reason for doing that.

That's an over-simplification for the sake of illustration, but the point is that you can reach conclusions through sound deduction and critical thinking, but the conclusions are completely false, because the premises of those deductions were the result of believing in false claims dogmatically. A person can be completely rational in believing Trump's nonsense (but working from deeply-flawed starting points), or it could just be that they’re believing him dogmatically too. Either way, my theory is that it's the result of being conditioned by religion to accept things dogmatically and uncritically.

The late anti-theist Christopher Hitchens, in his defense of his book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” argued that even the worst inhumanities of an atheist dictator like Stalin still had religion to blame, because Stalin rode on the coattails of the religious mindset that the masses were steeped in before he took over. He used the language and symbolism of religion, tapped into the parts of their minds that had been made more credulous and uncritical by religion, and then simply replaced church with state.

Christopher Hitchens is a great icon to many atheists, but I personally thought this particular argument was a bit of a reach... until November 8^th, 2016. I think we're seeing an eerie echo of everything he described coming to pass. It's not an exact copy; Trump is using church power to get state power, instead of outright replacing church with state. But he's still using the way that a certain type of religious mind (which apparently accounts for 80% of white Evangelicals) is conditioned to accept things dogmatically, instead of analyzing them critically. Someone with such a mindset would have no reason to not continue believing in and trusting Trump, even after all the insanity and un-Christ-like behavior of his administration so far. That’s the power of dogma, and I still say that religion is the most powerful purveyor of dogma out there.