The Thread and the Turning: How American Evangelicalism Reached Its Breaking Point

By Joseph Carvalko | 9 February 2026
Substack

(Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

I was raised to believe that faith could steady a life. Many of us were.

Whatever our differences, most Americans—religious or not—recognize the longing for meaning, belonging, and moral purpose that draws people into communities of belief. I honor that longing. I have felt it myself. And I know that for generations, churches have offered comfort in grief, structure in chaos, and a language for hope when the world felt unsteady beneath our feet.

That shared inheritance, whether you are a believer, an atheist or agnostic, deserves respect. It is the ground on which this reflection stands.

Yet the same institutions that once shaped conscience have, in our time, become engines of something far more troubling. The central contradiction is stark: a movement that claims to follow a gospel of mercy has aligned itself with cruelty, exclusion, and political idolatry. The moral stakes could not be clearer. A faith that once challenged empire now blesses it. A tradition that once confronted injustice now excuses it. A people who once marched for civil rights now cheer policies that strip others of theirs.

This is not a theological dispute. It is a moral one.

The roots run deep. My own childhood taught me how early the shaping begins. The church I grew up in trained me—before I could reason—to obey authority, to accept guilt as a condition of existence, to memorize doctrine by rote. For better or worse, those lessons formed a template for institutional loyalty that followed me into adulthood, into corporations and bureaucracies where hierarchy arranged my time, my duties, even my sense of worth.

That thread of obedience, spun long before I was born, reaches back to the earliest theocratic systems and winds through American culture still.

It arrived on this continent with European settlers who carried more than tools and scripture. They brought inherited hierarchies of human worth—beliefs that judged entire peoples by bloodline, faith, and proximity to European identity. Those beliefs justified the slaughter and displacement of Native nations under the banner of “civilization.” The same logic underwrote the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, whose bodies were bought, sold, violated, and killed under laws crafted to erase their suffering. From the beginning, American institutions encoded exclusion—by race, religion, ethnicity, and sex—into the nation’s operating system.

And yet, within that same history, another tradition took root. Protestant communities raised a prophetic voice against injustice. Evangelicals marched for civil rights, confronted racism, and challenged the seductions of political power. They fought the stain of Jim Crow. They insisted that faith demanded courage, not comfort.

That tradition has withered.

Today, a vast segment of white evangelical America has traded the hard demands of conscience for the easier comforts of political certainty, a retreat sharpened by anxiety over the nation’s rapid demographic change. This latter phenomenon buried in white solidarity i.e. similar extractions, shared fates, kinships, and conspiratorial duty. Christian nationalism has fused religious identity with national identity, insisting that America’s character is inseparable from a Christian lineage—even when that lineage includes conquest, bondage, and exclusion. This fusion has fueled campaigns for prayer in public schools, abortion bans, anti-immigrant policies, and restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights. It has aligned itself with nativism, white supremacy, and authoritarian impulses.

The consequences are visible everywhere. For nearly a decade, white evangelicals have been the most unwavering bloc in American politics, supporting Donald Trump through every revelation, every cruelty, or racist remark, every assault on Constitutional or democratic norms. Their loyalty has become reflexive, impervious to evidence or empathy. When Trump erected a White House Faith Office and an anti-Christian bias task force, it served not religious diversity but the narrow aims of conservative Protestantism. Into its highest ranks he placed men deeply woven into Christian nationalist networks.

And then came the moment that stripped away any remaining pretense.

On February 5, 2026, after a morning of speeches about faith and liberty, Trump posted an image depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Something ancient and rotten rose to the surface. The imagery echoed centuries of dehumanization—chains, torture, lynching, generational trauma. It was a scar ripped open. And yet many evangelicals shrugged. Some defended it. Others claimed not to see the poison in front of them.

To feign ignorance is to participate in the humiliation.

On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo allowed race or ethnicity to count as a “relevant factor” in ICE stops, reviving practices that lower courts had condemned as racial profiling. The decision, rooted in Trump era operations where agents targeted those who appeared Latino, leaned on old precedents even as dissenters warned it would usher in a quiet, daily erosion of dignity—a return to a world where some must carry proof of belonging simply to move through their own streets.

The pattern continues. ICE raids reminiscent of Cold War secret police. Citizens killed. Children detained. Homes invaded without warrants. Instead of lamentation, many evangelical leaders offered applause. They called it righteous. They called it necessary. They called it faith.

This is not the language of compassion. It is the language of power.

Meanwhile, the Christian celebrity economy thrives. Televangelists live in mansions worth eight figures. Pastors travel by private jet. Megachurches operate with budgets rivaling professional sports teams. High-profile evangelical leaders and megachurch pastors have been among Trump’s most consistent supporters. The faith that once challenged empire now imitates its extravagance, and worse yet, some pastors explicitly back new immigration raids, even when those raids target churches or immigrant communities. The contrast with the gospel’s original ethic—humility, mercy, solidarity with the defenseless—is stark.

Millions of followers have been swept into this current. They are told whom to fear, whom to trust, whom to obey. They are promised certainty in a chaotic world, victory in a polarized one, and salvation without introspection. They are encouraged to outsource their moral agency to pastors, pundits, and politicians who claim to speak for God.

The prophets warned of this. They warned against leaders who blessed injustice, against people who mistook might for righteousness, against communities that built golden calves because waiting for truth was too difficult.

A small minority of evangelicals—perhaps one in five—feels the dissonance. They sense the gap between the faith they were taught and the faith now preached. Their unease is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of life.

The question facing American Christianity is not whether it will remain politically influential. It will. The question is whether it will rediscover the moral courage that once defined its greatest moments. Whether it will reclaim the prophetic tradition that confronted power rather than sanctifying it. Whether it will choose the hard work of the soul over the easy seductions of grievance and triumphalism.

A faith is measured not by the size of its congregations or the budgets of its churches, but by the integrity of its witness. And right now, that witness is faltering.

But faltering is not the same as finished. The thread that shaped so many of us—sometimes constricting, sometimes sustaining—can be rewoven.

The prophetic voice can rise again. The moral imagination can be restored. The horizon is not closed.

The work begins with a simple truth: a faith that blesses cruelty cannot call itself righteous.

A movement that confuses power with virtue cannot claim the mantle of the gospel. A community that forgets its own history cannot lead a nation toward justice.

The turning is still possible. The witness can still be redeemed. But only if those who feel the dissonance choose conscience over comfort, truth over tribe, and courage over certainty.

In the end, the future of American Christianity will not be decided by its power, but by its willingness to remember what it once promised the world—and what it must promise again.

Joseph Carvalko is an American lawyer, who for over four decades has represented numerous organizations and individuals, from billionaires to indigents. He has been actively engaged in organizations such as Amnesty International, as its Legislative Coordinator for the State of New Mexico; the Sioux City American Indian Center, board member/activist; and Chairman, Technology and Ethics Working Research Group, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University, and Adjunct Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University, School of Law, teaching Law, Science and Technology. He has also worked as a technologist, where he’s been awarded 18 patents in various fields. Carvalko has authored over twelve books which include novels, poetry, law, science and the humanities. His articles appear regularly in a variety of publications and blogs. He lives on the U.S. east coast and in the New Mexico mountains.

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