2016 Election: The Machine Delivers

The 2016 presidential election was the Religious Right's most consequential political act and its most clarifying one. Donald Trump — a twice-divorced casino owner with no credible religious history — received 81% of the white evangelical vote, surpassing Ronald Reagan's 1980 margin and every candidate since. The result was not explained by Trump's personal piety. It was explained by the machine. The machine had been built for exactly this moment: to deliver a unified evangelical bloc to whichever candidate would appoint the right judges, protect religious liberty in the courts, and reverse Roe v. Wade. Trump offered all three explicitly, and the evangelical leadership — Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Paula White, and the Trump Evangelical Advisory Board — offered a religious case that recast a political transaction as a moral duty. The Flight 93 Election framing, articulated by the Claremont Institute and amplified across the evangelical media ecosystem, told believers that voting for Trump was not a moral compromise but a spiritual obligation: the alternative was civilizational death. What 2016 revealed was that fifty years of institution-building — the moral vocabulary, the media infrastructure, the political apparatus, the theological frameworks — had produced a bloc that leaders could rally for a candidate who credibly promised those outcomes.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic

Connections from 2016 Election: The Machine Delivers

• influenced → Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) (2022) — The 2016 election was the decisive mechanism in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Trump's three Supreme Court appointments — Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018), and Amy Coney Barrett (2020) — created the six-justice conservative supermajority that issued the Dobbs decision in 2022. Many evangelical leaders described their support for Trump as a trade — tolerating his character for judges — and Dobbs was the result they had sought.
• influenced → Project 2025 (2023) — The 2016 election and the subsequent Trump administration demonstrated that a Republican president could rapidly reshape the federal judiciary, dismantle regulatory agencies, and implement Christian nationalist policy priorities at a scale not previously achieved. Project 2025 was the movement's attempt to institutionalize those lessons — to ensure that a second Trump administration would begin with a pre-built personnel apparatus, a pre-written policy blueprint, and no repetition of the perceived failures of improvisation in the first term. The 2016 election was the proof of concept; Project 2025 was the professionalized sequel.

Connections to 2016 Election: The Machine Delivers

• Birther Movement influenced (2016) — Donald Trump's five-year birther campaign (2011–2016) was not a distraction from his political rise — it was the foundation of it. By demanding Barack Obama's birth certificate, questioning its authenticity after it was produced, and sustaining the conspiracy through two election cycles, Trump established himself as willing to say what other Republicans would only imply. Robert P. Jones and others argue it helped establish Trump with parts of the Republican base, including white evangelicals. The birther campaign communicated racial delegitimization in constitutional language — the same code-switching the Southern Strategy had used for decades. When Trump announced his 2016 campaign and began assembling his Evangelical Advisory Board, the religious leaders who joined (Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Paula White) did not publicly challenge it. Trump's formal disavowal of birtherism in September 2016 — delivered in a sixty-second statement — did not undo five years of relationship building with the white evangelical base. It came after five years of the campaign.
• Jerry Falwell Jr. influenced (2016) — On January 26, 2016, Falwell Jr. endorsed Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. He deployed Liberty University's platform, prestige, and symbolic weight as son of the Moral Majority's founder to signal to white evangelical voters that Trump was an acceptable vehicle for Christian nationalist political goals. Du Mez treats the endorsement as an important early signal to evangelical voters.
• 'Flight 93 Election' Essay (2016) influenced (2016) — The 'Flight 93 Election' essay, published pseudonymously in the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016, in Katherine Stewart's reading, gave many evangelical voters an eschatological frame: voting against Trump was not a moral option because the alternative was civilizational death. The essay was amplified across the evangelical and conservative media ecosystem and absorbed into the religious framework already provided by figures like Robert Jeffress. It transformed the question from 'can a Christian vote for Trump?' to 'can a Christian afford not to?' — a framing that resonated perfectly with the spiritual warfare theology the NAR and dominionist networks had been cultivating for decades.
• Franklin Graham influenced (2016) — Franklin Graham's 'Decision America Tour' in 2016 — 50 state capital prayer rallies ostensibly nonpartisan — functioned as a voter mobilization infrastructure that primed evangelical audiences for Trump's candidacy. Graham said he was not endorsing any candidate, but after the election credited God's intervention for Trump's win, and used his inherited platform of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (with its list of millions of evangelical households) to reach audiences that the Republican Party's own ground operation could not. Graham's framing — that America was in moral freefall and needed a leader who would fight for Christian values — mapped directly onto Trump's campaign message.
• Wayne Grudem influenced (2016) — Wayne Grudem published 'Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice' in July 2016, providing academic theological cover for evangelical support of Trump. He partially retracted after the Access Hollywood tape, then re-endorsed. The arc illustrated the logical endpoint of a theology that privileges authority and political outcomes over character — the same trajectory that defined the evangelical advisory board's collective decision.
• Hillary Clinton influenced (2016) — Opposition to Hillary Clinton was a powerful mobilizing force for the Religious Right in 2016. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical voters backed Donald Trump, according to exit polls — a thrice-married former casino magnate who had bragged on tape about sexual assault, many of them citing opposition to Clinton. Du Mez argues that Clinton, a feminist who sought the presidency, was a lightning rod for a movement built partly in opposition to feminism.
• Eric Metaxas influenced (2016) — Eric Metaxas, who was not a member of the campaign's evangelical advisory board, was among the evangelical intellectuals and media figures who publicly championed Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and presidency. He endorsed Trump explicitly, dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as irrelevant, and delivered cultural-war framing that positioned Trump support as Christian duty. By 2020 he was declaring Trump the rightful winner of the election and urging Christians to 'fight to the last drop of blood.' Metaxas's function was to supply the intellectual and pseudo-historical scaffolding — via his distorted Bonhoeffer biography — that made authoritarian political loyalty legible as Christian resistance. Du Mez documents his role as part of the evangelical intellectual infrastructure that produced and sustained Trump-era Christian nationalism.
• Robert Jeffress influenced (2016) — Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, was among the earliest high-profile evangelical endorsers of Trump, giving the candidacy credibility with Southern Baptist and megachurch audiences at a moment when many evangelical leaders still hesitated. Jeffress said he wanted 'the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what' in the Oval Office, adding that he was 'not going to choose Donald Trump to be my child's third grade Sunday school teacher, but that's not what this election is about' — a formulation that encapsulated the transactional theology that would define evangelical support for Trump. His platform of 12,000 members and prominent media presence made his endorsement a signal to the broader evangelical leadership class.
• Steve Bannon influenced (2016) — Steve Bannon served as CEO of the Trump campaign from August 2016 through the election and, in Joshua Green's account, shaped a strategy that fused Christian nationalist, populist-nationalist, and anti-establishment grievances into a unified electoral bloc. Bannon understood the evangelical base as the indispensable structural foundation of a Trump coalition, and he operated Breitbart as the media infrastructure that held together the different wings — paleoconservative Catholic, evangelical Protestant, and nationalist secular — under a shared civilizational threat narrative.
• Trump Evangelical Advisory Board (2016) influenced (2016) — The Trump Evangelical Advisory Board — assembled in June 2016 and including Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Paula White, and James Dobson — provided the theological cover that transformed a politically transactional vote into a sacred mandate. Their endorsements lent religious credibility to the campaign and gave many evangelical voters permission to back a candidate some had doubts about. Trump's share of the white evangelical vote (81% in exit polls) was close to what George W. Bush (2004) and Mitt Romney (2012) had received (79% each), according to Pew.

Sources

• Election 2012 Post-Mortem: White Evangelicals and Support for Romney — Pew Research Center (2012)
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020)
• Taking America Back for God — Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry (2020)
• White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity — Robert P. Jones (2020)