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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged

2024 voting starts: What will happen Monday in the presidential campaign’s first formal test at the ballot box?

“Donald Trump seems to have locked down a majority of the evangelical Iowan vote in this year’s Republican caucuses, even as local leaders have tried to steer them toward his competitor, Ron DeSantis,” Axios’ Linh Ta writes.

But who are these evangelicals?

“They are not just the churchgoing, conservative activists who once dominated the G.O.P.,” according to the New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Charles Homans.

The Times explains:

Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large.

“Politics has become the master identity,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.”

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, scholar Thomas S. Kidd laments:

Some self-identified evangelical voters don’t even attend church. Many in the media seem to define “evangelicals” as white Republicans who consider themselves religious. Such a definition, in both a spiritual and a historical sense, is ludicrous.

‘Bob Vander Plaats is a kingmaker’: Reporting from Urbandale, Iowa, Christianity Today’s Harvest Prude interviews a key evangelical leader who is urging Christian voters to move on from Trump.

But are such voters still listening to his advice?

He remains confident, according to the magazine:

Vander Plaats is bullish that Iowa polling is getting it wrong, and that Trump’s support may be more fragile than it appears: “Iowa always, always, always breaks late. I believe they’re going to break late again,” he told CT.

Faith in Trump: Iowa’s Christian conservatives follow their faith when voting, and some say it leads them to Trump, according to The Associated Press’ Michelle L. Price.

“I think he’s an imperfect individual just like the rest of us, but I think God used that man to govern in godly principles,” Cliff Carey, a 73-year-old member of a Des Moines church, told AP.

His sister-in-law, Cindy Carey, offered a similar assessment to the wire service: “I wouldn’t vote for him as my pastor. I want him to lead our nation back to that city on a hill, shining city on a hill.”

Read the full column.

This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.

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