2024 election: Evangelical critic of Trump expects him to be GOP nominee

One of former President Donald Trump’s most steadfast evangelical critics said he expects Trump to be the Republican nominee in 2024, and that the years since Trump’s election in 2016 have been an “apocalypse.”

“The argument that we had in 2016 ... was always, ‘Well, this is a binary choice. We’re choosing between Trump and Hillary Clinton, and so we’re just doing the best that we can,’” Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today magazine, said in an interview with Yahoo News.

“Well, we’re in a place right now where there’s no binary choice that’s happening. There’s a wide-open choice, and still you have a majority in the Republican primary behind Trump,” Moore said. “I would be shocked if he’s not the Republican nominee.”

Once the field of nearly a dozen Republican candidates is winnowed down to one nominee during the primary process, and a Republican faces off against incumbent President Biden, “then that means that anything could happen.”

“And so I would not forestall the possibility that [Trump] is in office again,” Moore said. In his upcoming book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, due out July 25, he argues that the American Christian church has become “morally compromised” but says that evangelicals can remain hopeful and focus on building a new Christian culture.

The first Republican presidential primary debate will take place in just over a month, on Aug. 23, in Milwaukee and will be hosted by Fox News. Trump currently sits at 50% in the FiveThirtyEight polling average, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis his closest challenger, at 21%.

Moore says democracy vs. authoritarianism on the ballot in 2024

Moore, 51, also said that “the stakes are much higher” in the 2024 election than they were in 2016, because “the future of democracy” is at stake amid “the rise of authoritarian nationalist movements around the world.”

Moore was not unique when he first criticized Trump in the summer of 2015. Most evangelical leaders did that. But while most others in the evangelical and Republican establishments accommodated themselves to Trump’s rise, Moore did not. He continued to repudiate Trump’s personal character and his disregard for constitutional order, and became a target of intense blowback from Trump and other figures in the evangelical world.

At the time, Moore was president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. The SBC is the second-largest Protestant group in the United States, after nondenominational churches, according to the U.S. Religion Census.

But two years ago, Moore resigned his post and left the SBC, the denomination in which he was raised and had spent his entire adult life. He is now a pastor in residence at a nondenominational church in Nashville.

The cautionary tale of Southern Baptist conservatives

In his new book, Moore recounts how his own personal history in the SBC trained him to rationalize support for leaders whose personal character was less than sterling. He refers to Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, two Southern Baptist leaders who led a conservative takeover of the SBC in the late 1970s.

Patterson and Pressler were “mythological figures” to fellow conservative evangelicals in the SBC and were revered because they “stood up for biblical orthodoxy and fought for the authority of scripture.”

But, Moore noted, “a lot of people would say, ‘These are really nasty figures in terms of the way that they relate to people and in terms of the Machiavellian nature of the way that they went about things. But they’re on our side, and so we need to just bear with those things until the battle is over.’”

Pressler, 93, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge, has been accused by three different men of rape or sexual abuse in civil suits. Patterson, 78, has been accused of helping Pressler cover up his behavior and of intimidating other victims of sexual abuse into silence. Both deny the accusations.

Moore said that during the years that he was ascending into a leadership role himself in the SBC, “there would always be these moments where I would say, ‘This seems crazy to me, but I seem to be the only one who sees it, and so it must just be me.’”

“So I would make all of these rationalizations,” he said.

Moore believes the Trump era has been an ‘apocalypse’

Often, Moore writes in Losing Our Religion, the chief rationalizations were that liberals are dangerous and evil and so “immorality is necessary to combat even worse immorality.”

But he came to believe, he writes, that too often these evangelical conservatives were just “conserving ... their own chauffeured cars and offering-funded expense accounts.”

And so, in the Trump era, Moore said, he did not want to rationalize anymore.

“I had seen all of those same rationalizations done by me previously, not with political figures, but with evangelical figures in which I would say, ‘This is somebody who seems to lack character, seems to lack stability, but the stakes are too high,’” he said. “I saw where all that had led.”

In his book, Moore refers to the “post-2016 era” as an “apocalypse.” That word is used commonly to describe an end-of-the-world kind of scenario, but that is not the original meaning, nor is it how he uses it.

“‘Apocalypse’ literally means unveiling and revelation,” he said. “And I think that’s what happened in the post-2015 era is that a lot of things were revealed in which we could see patterns of behavior that were preexisting but weren’t really all that clear.”

As for the future, Moore — who still considers himself an evangelical — writes that “Evangelical Christianity, at its best, is all about small solutions.” And so his book, written for fellow evangelicals who have been disillusioned with Trump support and the suppression of sexual abuse allegations, is full of advice for “little choices you can make.”

“Let’s create some new alliances and some new structures and some new ways that aren’t just trying to repeat the last thing,” he told Yahoo News.