Journal of Power, Politics & Governance

Authoritarian Drift: The Fundamentalist tendencies of Evangelicalism in the US: An Attitudinal Assessment from Trump to Biden
Diarra O. Robertson

RESUME
In 2018, several legal scholars published a work entitled Can It Happen Here: Authoritarianism in America. The conclusion of many of these scholars suggested that the possibility of authoritarianism in America was highly unlikely (Sunstein 2018). These assessments were published almost two years prior to the events of January 6, 2021, when some supporters of President Trump attempted to overrun the United States Capitol. Several participants in the failed January 6 insurrection held posters and signs with Christian signs and imagery that suggested God ordained a Trump presidency. Although much of the previous research focuses on the influence of party identification, Republican in most instances, this study focuses on evangelical fundamentalism. Looking at the events of January 6, 2021, the people who stormed the US capital represent a potentially dangerous subset of evangelicals and the republican party. This study advances two arguments (1) Christian fundamentalists pose an even greater risk to democracy than republican supporters due to their openness to anti-democratic mechanisms, and (2) Christian fundamentalist views closely mirror republican party identification in public evaluations of racial/ethnic groups and presidential preferences. I employed a series of OLS models to evaluate these claims using the 2016 and 2020 ANES datasets.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/jppg.v10n1a1