The United States is now within the throes of the politics of sophistication division, and American evangelicalism isn’t any exception.
College-educated evangelical Christians often is the least prepared for this recent class-based polarization, since it doesn’t break along old class fault lines. As recently as twenty years ago, social class within the US was primarily determined by income or wealth, “haves” pitted against “have-nots.”
But today’s most intractable class divide is about education, and educated evangelicals are having a tough time navigating this split. After all, the college-educated are a minority amongst white evangelicals, only 29 percent of whom have four-year college degrees.
I say this—as an evangelical with not only a four-year degree but a PhD—not to hunt pity for the brand new educational elite. We don’t need commiseration. But we do need unity within the body of Christ. So what should we do when our education divides us from our Christian brothers and sisters? What can we do when the values we’ve acquired from our education lead us down a political path that many non-college-educated evangelicals view as dangerously mistaken?
It’s only lately that education has grow to be such a very important political predictor. “Among white voters, particularly, individuals with a minimum of a school degree are actually a rather more Democratic constituency than individuals with less education,” The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, whites with out a college degree are moving rapidly into the Republican Party.
This is a reversal of traditional patterns, because, for a lot of a long time, the GOP was the party of the affluent and upper middle class, while Democrats relied heavily on the support of working-class voters. That began to shift as divisions over the Vietnam War within the late Nineteen Sixties and debates over affirmative motion within the Eighties put the Republican Party in conflict with many liberal Protestant clergy and college professors.
For a protracted time, this dissent amongst PhDs looked as if it would have little effect on the remainder of the college-educated population, evangelicals included. Ronald Reagan received strong support from white college graduates during his reelection campaign of 1984, and a majority of white college grads continued to support the Republican Party until the twenty first century.
This meant that the majority college-educated evangelicals who voted for Reagan within the Eighties or supported the Christian Right within the Nineties didn’t must worry about alienating their secular friends. Those friends may not have shared evangelicals’ views on abortion or sexuality, but they probably didn’t view voting Republican as immoral.
That began to vary on this century, starting with the defection of many college-educated Americans from the Republican coalition during George W. Bush’s presidency. Some left due to opposition to the Iraq War. Others were fed up with Bush’s stance on cultural issues including embryonic stem cell research and same-sex marriage. One way or one other, by the tip of Bush’s presidency, the Republican Party was moribund in educated areas of the Northeast and West Coast, places where it had been reasonably strong a decade prior.
But that didn’t hurt the GOP very much, since it offset those losses with a rising appeal to non-college-educated Americans. As the Republican Party became more rural, Southern, and working-class, the party’s policy positions began to shift to reflect the interests of this recent constituency. Its positions on immigration and gun control became more hard-line, and its commitment to free trade and entitlement reform began to soften.
At first, those differences received little attention, however the nation’s polarization over former president Donald Trump exacerbated this divide and brought it into the open, including within the evangelical church. Today, the core of Trump’s constituency is united by a powerful opposition to the establishment, whether in government, the media, or education—or perhaps even their very own denominations. As Trump Republicans have taken over their party, this anti-establishment ethos has grow to be a part of the entire GOP’s identity.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is increasingly a pro-establishment party supported by college-educated Americans. Its agenda includes things that “establishment” evangelicals (comparable to the National Associations of Evangelicals) have also historically cared about, like efforts to fight climate change or honor the human dignity of undocumented immigrants. Both of those causes, which the NAE has endorsed previously, incur strong opposition from anti-establishment Republicans, evangelicals included.
But the fashionable Democratic agenda also includes things that “establishment” evangelicals have historically opposed, especially abortion and an ever more progressive ethic on sex and gender.
Here’s where the position of college-educated evangelicals gets complicated. Most voters who share our academic class are bored with or actively hostile to biblical values on life and sexuality. It’s easy for them to wholly embrace the contemporary Democratic Party’s pro-establishment agenda, abortion and LGBTQ activism as much as immigration reform and environmental care.
On the opposite hand, most voters who share our faith are non-college-educated, anti-establishment Republicans. They find it similarly easy to reject that whole Democratic agenda, and maybe also to dismiss anyone with any sympathy for any a part of it as “woke,” “weak,” or “leftist.”
So what can we do? College-educated evangelicals could stay within the awkward middle eternally, remaining aligned with fellow evangelicals on abortion and sexual ethics while continuing to partner with fellow college grads on immigration and climate policy. But recent polling data I’ve reviewed suggests that isn’t what’s happening. Instead, many college-educated evangelicals are reacting to this dissonance by turning their backs on the GOP and, in some cases, on non-college-educated evangelicals.
We’ve seen this at the person level, after all. More than just a few who made this selection have ended up leaving evangelicalism altogether and/or spending a big period of time battling evangelical Republicans online. But we are able to see it on the national scale too.
As late as 2016, there was no statistical difference between the voting selections of college-educated and non-college-educated evangelicals. That 12 months, 81 percent of college-educated white evangelical voters solid their ballots for Trump, as did 80 percent of white evangelical voters with out a college degree.
This modified by 2020. Then, 84 percent of non-college-educated white evangelical voters voted for Trump. But amongst college-educated white evangelicals, support for Trump markedly decreased to simply 63 percent. That means a remarkable 21-point educational gap developed amongst white evangelicals over the course of a single presidential election cycle.
This class-based division in evangelical opinion continued after the 2020 election. An American Enterprise Institute study from March 2022 showed that only 51 percent of white evangelicals with a bachelor’s degree had a positive view of Trump, in comparison with 77 percent of white evangelicals who had not attended college. The evangelical groups that historically have been probably the most suspicious of ecclesiastical and political establishments and the least prone to be college-educated—comparable to Pentecostals, as an illustration—have also been Trump’s strongest supporters.
And there’s every indication that divide will widen this 12 months. A poll in early June 2024 showed that President Joe Biden’s support amongst voters (of all faiths) with out a college degree had dropped by 10 percentage points since 2020, while his support during that very same period had slipped by only one percentage point amongst college-educated voters. I expect we’ll see similar—even perhaps accelerated—dynamics with Vice President Kamala Harris because the Democratic presidential nominee.
Consequently, this November, college-educated evangelicals will face a selection. Like lots of our academic peers, we could vote for the establishment, a selection that may perhaps alienate us from fellow church members and the broader evangelical movement. Or we could vote for the anti-establishment party, burning bridges with our college-educated friends and colleagues.
Neither one in all those selections strikes me as a very good one, and I need to suggest an alternate.
To begin, college-educated evangelicals must recognize that we’re a minority in our faith tradition. Most fellow evangelicals will make political selections that don’t line up with ours. This reality could be easy to miss if all our friends are college-educated and the one Christian books we’re reading are those written for us.
By the time of pastor Timothy Keller’s death last 12 months, for instance, all of his books combined had sold just over 2 million copies. That’s lots, but Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series sold 80 million copies. Far more American Christians have encountered the apocalyptic good-versus-evil scenarios presented in those books than have ever read Keller’s apologetics.
Similarly, if we’re a part of a congregation or denomination that disproportionately attracts college-educated members, we may greatly exaggerate the importance of trends amongst people in our own circles—like a move toward more liturgical worship or a rediscovery of the Reformed heritage or the early church fathers. Denominations well-represented among the many evangelical elite, just like the Presbyterian Church in America (where Keller pastored), the Christian Reformed Church (home of James K. A. Smith and Nicholas Wolterstorff), and the Anglican Church in North America (which incorporates Esau McCaulley, Tish Harrison Warren, and now Beth Moore) are smaller than many realize.
Those churches have national memberships of just 400,000, 200,000, and 125,000, respectively. Even put together, they’re far outnumbered by the Assemblies of God’s 3 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention’s 13 million members, or the 16 million who attend nondenominational churches. The educated evangelical bubble may be very small.
If we exist in that bubble, we may come to search out it incomprehensible that other evangelicals do things like flying Trump 2024 flags on their trucks. We must learn to grasp it. We must acknowledge that our circles are politically unusual, and that’s okay. And after we see reports this November (as we surely will) that the majority evangelicals voted for Trump, we shouldn’t be shocked. In our current political climate, that’s exactly what we’d expect from such anti-establishment voters.
As for the way we vote, this election—and each after it—could also be a moment of reckoning for college-educated evangelicals like me. We’ll feel forced to decide on one major party or the opposite. But what if we’re convinced neither side sufficiently represents the values of Christ’s kingdom?
That should mean we won’t fully align ourselves with either, which may even mean continuing dissonance amongst our educated friends and fellow evangelicals alike. That might never feel comfortable, but discomfort doesn’t excuse us from maintaining a charitable disposition toward Christians who disagree with us, knowing that we’re all fallible. This recent class difference may prove durable, but it surely needn’t divide the body of Christ.
If our education becomes a path to understanding moderately than a component of our tribal identity, it might probably be a beneficial gift in the dominion of God as an alternative of a marker of political division.
Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the writer of The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.
