White Christians in the US once served as a pillar of the civil rights movement. The white evangelical embrace of Trump – 81% supported him in 2016 – represents the tail end of a broader shift, according to John W Compton, a professor of political science and author of the 2020 book The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors.

Compton connects the shift to expanded higher education and social mobility after the second world war, which made membership in mainline Protestant churches less important to those seeking middle-class respectability. “Focused on personal salvation and stripped of any concern with social justice, post 1970s evangelicalism struck a chord with white middle-class Protestants who now had little reason to concern themselves with the plight of the less fortunate,” Compton writes.

Crucially, leaders of the religious right rose to positions of prominence because they voiced the political views of their followers, not because they had formed them, Compton argues. In the early 2000s, when these leaders made concerted efforts to promote immigration reform and the fights against the climate crisis and HIV/Aids, they saw little success. Compton sees this dynamic at work again with the rise of explicitly anti-empathy messaging. “Increasingly politics drives religion instead of religion driving politics,” he said in an interview.

When politics informs religion, that’s a sign you’re not really working off the word of God.