The Religious Rhetoric of Anti-Trump Evangelicals in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

• Main Author: Martin Medhurst
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Polskie Towarzystwo Retoryczne/ Polish Rhetoric Society 2017-07-01
• Series: Res Rhetorica
• Online Access: http://resrhetorica.com/index.php/RR/article/view/203

This essay examines three arguments made by anti-Trump evangelical Christians in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. By explicating the arguments from character, policy, and evangelical witness, I show how this group of minority rhetors – a minority both within American evangelicalism and within the American electorate at large – used their minority status to project a prophetic warning against the Trump candidacy and in so doing developed a rhetoric that was politically potent while remaining faithful to evangelical theology and history. Paradoxically, it was by losing the election that these anti-Trump rhetors won the opportunity to articulate clearly and forcefully an evangelical political rhetoric and an implicit policy agenda.