God and Trump: Evangelicals and Politics in today's America

When the media talks about the evangelical vote today, what or to whom are they referring? Who are the people who self-identify in this way? Should we understand them as a group defined by their faith, their style of worship, by distinctive theological positions – or has the term evangelical itself become so politicised that in practice it is now most meaningfully understood as shorthand for a group of mainly white voters characterised by their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights?

Presenter: Adam Smith, Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford and Director of the Rothermere American Institute

Guests:

EJ Dionne, is a distinguished journalist and author, political commentator, and longtime op-ed columnist for the Washington Post. He is also a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University, and co-author of the recent New York Times bestseller One Nation Under Trump.

David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative. He is the author of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics (with Geoff Layman and John Green), and American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (with Robert Putnam)

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

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