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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Explainer

Belief

Books

Creed

Poetry

23 May 2025

6 min read

Why a book? The words that change the world and me

Living by a literature that’s imbibed in countless cultures.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man sits on a pier intently reading a book on his lap.

Ben White on Unsplash.

I have a belief system, a story that I live by, a lens through which I perceive the world. That doesn’t make me unusual or in any way different to you – we all have those, whether we’re aware of them or not. What may make me different to you is that mine are primarily explained to me through a book – or, more accurately, a library of sixty-six books – which we call the Bible.

The story that I live by, that I breathe in and out, is bound. It sits within a cover, it moves through pages, it unfolds according to a contents page – it has genre, it has authors, it has punctuation.

And I’ve never really found this odd.

I think it’s because I’m what Charles Taylor would call a ‘storied creature’, my default is to make sense of the world on a largely imaginative level. I’m also quite romantic; poetically inclined, one could say. It sometimes feels as though words flow through my veins – if you were to cut me open, I may just bleed a puddle of my favourite Jane Austen monologues straight onto the floor. And so, my personality happens to lend itself spectacularly well to living my life according to a spiritual, sixty-six book wide, library. I’ve never really had to wrestle with the strangeness of such a thing, I’ve never sat down and stared the oddness of it in the eye, I’ve never even really asked myself (or God): why a book?

I feel I should pause here, and offer a quick Rory Stewart-esque explainer, just so that we’re all on the same page.

What I, and Christians through time and place, call the Bible is an anthology of sixty-six books, written by around forty authors, in three languages, over the span of 1,400-ish years. Within it, one can find poetry, narrative, apocalyptic literature, erotic literature, lists and figures, instructions and explanations. It is – year in and year out – the bestselling book in the world, with over 100 million copies sold or gifted each year. The New York Times Bestseller List actually omits it from its rundown, because otherwise it would always be so boringly there – sitting comfortably right at the top. No other book ever comes close. Words from this anthology of literature are graven into the floors and walls of the Houses of Parliament, they’re woven into almost every work of Shakespeare, they’re spray-painted clumsily onto billboards in the city I call home.

And so, I guess, in one way, the answer to my question – why a book? – is all of that. The peculiar far-reaching resonance of the methodology speaks for itself. I think of Robin Williams’ impassioned monologue in Dead Poets Society…

‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.’

… And I get it. I understand why it was literature that was compiled, why language and words were the tool of choice. For better and for worse, biblical words and ideas have changed the world – they have been ‘the making of the western mind’, just ask Tom Holland. And so, pragmatically, one could argue that the Bible being a book (or a book of books) means that it has successfully imbedded itself in countless cultures, while also transcending them. It’s gone further, lasted longer, sunk deeper than any other form of communication could. Such is the power of words.

But to stop my pondering there feels like I’d be stopping short. I’m not sure that a distant, pragmatic, academic answer is one that I feel satisfied with.

So, this morning, I sat down with a cup of tea, a pen, my notebook, and a newfound curiosity - and I asked myself, and God, why a book?

Why poetry?

Why story?

Why wordplay?

Why have I – an educated, arguably disenchanted, most definitely left-brained, twenty-first century adult - been so willing to let these things mould my interior life? Why am I so moved by them? Moved to action, moved to tears, moved to rage. How can I read something that was written a millennia ago, in a part of the world I have never trod on, and somehow feel as if it is a love letter written exclusively to my own soul?

I think that those are the real questions - the questions to which I have both a thousand and zero answers.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Zero answers, because I fundamentally think that it’s a spiritual thing, a God-designed thing, a thing that sits beyond any explanation I could piece together. The God that I believe exists wants me to know about him, wants me to learn and study, wants me to get glimpses of how thinks, how he works, he feels about me – and you. That’s a wild and wonderous thing. That reality leads me be stunned not only at the methodology, but the desire behind it, as St. Augustine wrote,

‘the whole Bible does nothing but tell of God’s love’.

And so, this literature, to me, is a source of truth, leaning into Iain McGilchrist’s inkling that,

‘the fact that religions and mystical and spiritual traditions have always had to use language in a poetic way doesn’t mean that what they’re talking about is not real, it means it is ultimately real.’

The biblical literature uses words to take us to the edge of them.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Sometimes reading it feels like a balm on my heart, other times it feels like a wrestle in the dirt. But I guess that’s the beauty of it being a book, right? My worldview sits within a piece of literature that is adorned with my scribbles, tear stains, tea spills. A book that meets me every single day, ready to read me as I read it, giving my as many questions as it does answers.

So, why a book? Because now that I think about it, it is odd. The powerful resonance of words for all cultures at all times, perhaps? Or the way that poetry was designed to make a bee line for the deepest parts of us? Or the fact that it is only through language that we can talk about the things that go beyond it?

There are a thousand human-sized answers, if you really need them. I happen to enjoy the mystically-charged zero answers, myself.

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

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