Why Write A Book Defending White Evangelicalism?

 

Sep 8, 2026

Jennifer Welch called white evangelical Christianity a cancer. Bonnie Kristian answered in The Washington Post and in her new book In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers. She wants civic friendship. She grants a persecution complex. She says she’s been a frequent critic of Donald Trump. Fair enough on the overbroad insult. But prophetic speech does not require a census of every person in the category. Jesus rebuked “the Pharisees” and “this generation” without meaning Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, or every scribe in Israel. Category critique of a religious-political pattern is biblical. Person-as-cancer contempt is not. Those are different speech acts. Before white evangelicals police tone, the Fruit Test (Matthew 7:16) still applies. A movement that keeps producing strongman loyalty, cruelty toward the vulnerable, character hypocrisy, and truth decay does not mainly need a defense brief for its “cultured despisers.” It needs repentance. On immigration alone, the pattern is measurable: white evangelicals entered 2024 among the religious groups most supportive of Trump’s harsh immigration agenda, backed him at landslide levels, and remain the most supportive major faith constituency after the election—even as support softened elsewhere. Private kindness in the church basement does not cancel public political fruit. So the real question is not only whether Welch’s worst sentences failed the image-of-God test. They did. The question is why In Defense of Evangelicalism is the book this moment keeps demanding—while MAGA theology still runs so much of the witness.