I think it may have been evangelicals’ commitment to Biblicism that ultimately did us in. In our attempts to define inerrancy, we really just equated evangelical interpretations and applications of the Bible with inerrant truth — and viewed even the softest criticism as an existential threat. I think this created an authoritarian culture in which evangelical Christians abdicated their responsibility to study the Bible like the Bereans and gave in to group think. Trump represented the epitome of all the qualities evangelicals had been looking to for decades: authoritarian, entertaining, imperious. We were like moths to a flame.

White evangelicalism is a culture, so it can change. But because it’s a culture, change will take many decades. Also, it will be a change of a million tiny course corrections in individual hearts that feel insignificant in the moment but will eventually result in something new.