The death of “America’s pastor” Billy Graham at age 99 has brought reflection on the politics of American evangelicalism. Richard Flory, CRCC’s senior director of research and evaluation, spoke with FiveThirtyEight and Congressional Quarterly (forthcoming) about evangelical politics.
As he explained on Facebook the day of his death, many evangelical leaders today do not follow Graham’s vision of faith and politics:
https://www.facebook.com/usccrcc/posts/10155319913717361
FiveThirtyEight picked up on this thread, writing about the growing political divide, as well as the demographic shift, within evangelicalism, a trend CRCC has studied. It quotes Flory about Trump’s relationship with conservative evangelicals:
“Conservative evangelicals will acknowledge that Trump has problems, but he’s moving forward policy on the issues they care about, and in a sense that’s all that matters for them,” said Richard Flory, a University of Southern California sociologist focusing on religion. “Trump is helping with conservative evangelicals’ broader goal of keeping America an essentially Christian nation, with the moral values that white Christians support.”
Click here to read the whole piece.
Flory also spoke with Marketplace Radio about the business side of evangelicalism. Click here to read excerpts from this interview.
Photo: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
