Dear Evangelicals: A plea for moral common sense
By David Baggett - Posted at Substack:
Published July 13, 2026
For most of my adult life, I would have happily described myself as an evangelical. My theological convictions were formed in evangelical churches. I spent decades teaching at evangelical institutions. I wrote books defending the faith alongside evangelical scholars. Many of my closest friendships have been with fellow evangelicals. Whatever good I’ve been able to do in my teaching and writing owes much to this community. That is why this is such a difficult essay to write.
Marybeth and I no longer call ourselves evangelicals, and we want to clarify our reasons. It is not because we have abandoned historic Christian theology, but because we have become increasingly troubled by what the evangelical movement in America has become. Our faith remains intact. If anything, these years have deepened our commitment to Christ. What has changed is our confidence that the evangelical movement is still being shaped primarily by the gospel rather than by politics.
I don’t write this with anger, though I have had to work through quite a bit of it. I write it with sadness. The first intimations of a sea change came years ago while we were at Liberty University. Marybeth discerned before I did that something wasn’t quite right. During the 2016 Republican primaries, our chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., became one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. At the time, I didn’t think Trump would even win the nomination. When he did, I voted for him. Marybeth voted for a third-party candidate. Looking back, she saw something I was slow to recognize. The next few years, however, provided that difficult but necessary education, especially as we saw the real and devastating consequences of the institution’s misplaced priorities play out, harming faculty and students alike by prizing profits over people and the school’s purported gospel mission.
We left Liberty presuming its problems were largely unique. We accepted positions at Houston Christian University with excitement and gratitude, hoping to help build something wonderful there. Instead, we gradually came to realize that the partisan and fear-driven mindset we had seen at Liberty reflected a much broader pattern within American evangelicalism. Enthusiastic support for Trump, culture-war rhetoric, and increasingly tribal political identities seemed to permeate much of the movement. A form of religious devotion was on full display, but much of the substance seemed displaced by loyalties to political ideologies.
I don’t write this with anger, though I have had to work through quite a bit of it. I write it with sadness. The first intimations of a sea change came years ago while we were at Liberty University. Marybeth discerned before I did that something wasn’t quite right. During the 2016 Republican primaries, our chancellor, Jerry Falwell Jr., became one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. At the time, I didn’t think Trump would even win the nomination. When he did, I voted for him. Marybeth voted for a third-party candidate. Looking back, she saw something I was slow to recognize. The next few years, however, provided that difficult but necessary education, especially as we saw the real and devastating consequences of the institution’s misplaced priorities play out, harming faculty and students alike by prizing profits over people and the school’s purported gospel mission.
We left Liberty presuming its problems were largely unique. We accepted positions at Houston Christian University with excitement and gratitude, hoping to help build something wonderful there. Instead, we gradually came to realize that the partisan and fear-driven mindset we had seen at Liberty reflected a much broader pattern within American evangelicalism. Enthusiastic support for Trump, culture-war rhetoric, and increasingly tribal political identities seemed to permeate much of the movement. A form of religious devotion was on full display, but much of the substance seemed displaced by loyalties to political ideologies.
