Article

America

Character

Culture

Leading

Politics

21 April 2025

6 min read

Why some evangelicals back Trump - and why character is necessary for Leadership

Whatever leaders say, it's what they do and who they are that matters.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

The White House.

The USA is a strange place. At least to us foreigners. Already this year I have spent two separate weeks there. The first was a week in Texas where Trump/Vance flags flew triumphantly and shops proudly displayed MAGA hats and related merchandise. The second was a week on the liberal west coast, in San Francisco and Seattle, where it was Pride flags that fluttered in the wind, and Trump and his lackeys were viewed as the enemy of everything good and true. There could hardly be a greater contrast.

I've been trying in particular to get my head around why evangelicals have so solidly backed Donald Trump, especially so since I grew up with and still to an extent own that label here in the UK. I spoke recently with Walter Kim, a gentle, thoughtful Korean-American leader of the National Association of Evangelicals. He pointed out that the evangelical constituency in the USA is far more ethnically diverse than the image of the white, country-music loving, confederate flag-flying southern Republican that we often assume in Europe. Many evangelicals worship in churches which are ethnically very mixed, and who have no time for Trump whatsoever.

For him, the name ‘evangelical’ had been hijacked by a political movement. Many people assumed that if you are Republican in your sympathies, voted for Trump, and are resistant to the ‘woke’ policies of the Democrats, then you must be an ‘evangelical’ regardless of your religious or theological convictions. Bizarrely, he pointed out that in a recent survey, a significant number of Muslims had claimed the designation ‘evangelical’. I told you America was a strange country.

Now of course, many evangelicals do support Trump. Yet even among them, it is hard to find anyone who will mount an argument for him as a moral exemplar, a shining example of virtue and integrity. Even those who support him acknowledge his own moral frailty, his murky past in relation to women, financial dealing, and truth-telling. Be that as it may, there appear to be two broad positions evangelicals take for supporting Trump.

One is to say that his character may be flawed, but his policies are good. Tim Alberta's book on American Evangelicalism, The Kingdom the Power and the Glory, suggested that for some evangelicals, voting for Trump was “nakedly transactional - Christians trading their support sans enthusiasm in return for specific policies.”

Most evangelicals are of the opinion that there is something fundamentally wrong with putting an essentially male boxer in a ring with a female one. They feel distinctly uneasy with the widespread and cavalier destruction of what they consider to be nascent human lives in the womb. They value traditional marriage and the family as a key building block of a healthy society and as the best means to bring new lives into the world and nurture them through their formative years. Some think the right to carry a gun is a safeguard against lawlessness and encroachment on the privileges of the individual.

They may also be nervous of the impact on the USA of illegal immigration, dislike economic policies which have raised the cost of living - especially tough if you are poor, are anxious about the rise of China as a world power which, if its growing influence across Africa is anything to go by, threatens domination across the globe in coming decades with an atheistic regime hostile to Christianity and religious freedom.

For them, the Democrats under Joe Biden seemed to ignore all of these things. They seemed to be wrapped up in a small bubble of their own marginal issues and grew out of touch with ‘mainstream America’. And so many evangelicals voted for Trump, with deep reluctance given his moral frailty. His polices were OK, but the deal was worth it, even if his character was dodgy.

Yet, as Alberta observes, there is now a different strand of evangelical support for Trump, much more bullish and brazen. He is, they claim, yet another of many flawed leaders that God has used for his purposes in the past. In the Bible, King David had his mistress’s husband murdered so he could marry her; his son Solomon had a weakness for women and yet was used by God to build the great Jerusalem Temple; King Cyrus was a Persian king who allowed the Israelites to return from exile. Trump is now the chosen one of God to restore America as a Christian nation, despite his flaws.

In both of these approaches, the assumption is that good character is desirable, but not essential for leadership and establishing good government.

I am not so sure.

Of course, getting good policies matter. Yet character matters just as much, if not more.

As it happens, the story told in the Bible doesn’t think flawed, unrepentant leaders are good leaders for a nation. After the contract killing, King David realised he had done something terribly wrong and was deeply remorseful for his actions. Solomon's wandering eyes caused untold damage to Israel in future years, leaving it open to all kinds of destructive idolatry. And Cyrus was never a king of the nation of Israel anyway, just a neighbouring potentate whose foreign policy enabled something good to happen.

The problem with adopting an unrepentant leader with deep moral failings is that leaders set the tone for the organisations that they lead. It's true of any school, church, business or government. Whatever leaders say, it's what they do and who they are that matters just as much. And that is because what they do and how they are gives an idea of the kind of behaviour that is least permissible, but at most recommended, to get things done.

A leader who achieves results through bullying, demeaning opponents, getting rid of the people who confront him, and who thinks that making a lot making a lot of money is both the main aim in life and the marker of success, sends out the unspoken message that bullying, domineering and making money are the thing to do. This is how to get on. Such behaviour will always be overlooked with a smirk, or even rewarded. He - or she - sets the tone for the nation / business / organisation / church.

It's an age-old rule. Kids pick up the behaviour of their parents. Churches reflect the personality of their pastors. Businesses end up taking on the character of their CEOs. Boris Johnson fell from grace as Prime Minister of the UK not because of his economic or social policies (if he had any), but due to his character – an inability to tell the truth eroded trust and came home to roost in the end.

Of course, getting good policies matter. Yet character matters just as much, if not more. We might argue the toss over whether Trump's tariffs, his standing up to China, his approach to getting a peace deal in Ukraine, his reversing of illegal immigration is, or is not, the right policy. But the way he goes about these things speaks more loudly than the policies he adopts. The way we do things is as important as what we do.

In leadership, competence and chemistry matter. But in the long run, character matters the most.

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Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

1 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”