“Soul-Searching on the Eve of the Election: Religion and the Future of American Politics,” a panel discussion held by the Center on Religion and Culture, tackled everything from Catholics’ role in the 2016 election to the silence surrounding ISIS’ genocide of Christians and Yazidis.

A large part of the night was devoted to discussing white evangelical voters’ support for Donald Trump. David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, said that in 2016, race, gender, and partisan identity are more influential than religion. Levels of social capital and age are also a factor, as white evangelicals who are younger and have more social networks are resisting their leaders’ embrace of Trump.

Eddie Glaude Jr., the author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016), said in the black community, religion still has a place in the political arena. Bree Newsome, the woman who climbed a flagpole in June 2015 to remove a Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, recited Psalms 27 as she was alighting from the pole.

Tom Reese, S.J., columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, pointed out parallels in the decline of both religious and political groups. In 2014, 39 percent of Americans identified politically as independents. Likewise, the number of people identifying as having no religious affiliation (“nones”) has increased to about 25 percent of the U.S. population.

Panelists criticized the Obama Administration’s inattention to religiously motivated killings. Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom, said that in March, the administration correctly labeled the killing of Yazidis by ISIS as a genocide, yet has done little to publicize the issue since then.

Perhaps due to her Methodist background, Hillary Clinton seems uncomfortable talking about her religion, said Father Reese. Her campaign is trying to simultaneously appeal to Hispanic Catholics, black Protestants and most importantly, young people who identify as “nones.” Push religion too hard, he said, and they risk alienating nonreligious voters.

“The Democratic party is quite conflicted when it comes to how they want to talk about religion. They’ll talk about  [it]one way in the black community and with Hispanics, but with a different crowd, it’s just not an issue,” he said.

When it comes to Catholic voters, Father Reese said, although they traditionally lean Republican, it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll vote this year. The primary exit polls only asked if a voter was evangelical; not if they were Catholic.

What is clear, he said, is that many religious leaders have become like “generals without troops.” Black religious leaders championed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but then switched their support for Barack Obama when Obama started winning votes on the ground in primaries. In this election cycle, white evangelical leaders supported Ted Cruz, yet their followers backed Donald Trump.

Blankenhorn said the Church of Latter Day Saints is a rare exception. Its leaders and followers traditionally vote Republican, but are both shunning Trump in such numbers that Trump may lose the state of Utah. It’s not a coincidence that the church is growing, and members have high levels of social capital.

“One thing that’s interesting to me is this trend where a few groups take a different path,” he said.

Video of the discussion can be found here.

Scholars have linked this anti-intellectual bent to a variety of influences—for instance, the growing insularity of the Evangelical community, or the sway of charismatic church and political leaders. However, James Van Wyck, an English doctoral student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, believes that it in fact stems from something seemingly innocuous: the last century-and-a-half of fictions that Evangelicals have been reading and writing.

To prove his point, Van Wyck has taken a daunting plunge into the archives to chronicle Evangelical literary trends and how these have influenced contemporary Evangelical thought. He argues in his doctoral dissertation that 19th-century Evangelical texts relied heavily on an appeal to readers’ emotions, a technique born from a sentimentalist ethos that continues to inform Evangelical reading habits today.

Emotional value

According to Van Wyck, 19th century religious fiction was used to evangelize to “unsaved” readers and push a particular Christian social and moral agenda. To do so, Evangelical writers tended to emphasize “emotional utility over intellectual stimulation,” Van Wyck said. Books such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin were written to make people “feel right,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe herself put it.

“Evangelicals retain an old, mid-19th-century understanding of fiction as a utilitarian instrument,” said Van Wyck. “A work of fiction does something to you. They want fiction to make you think right, feel right, and act right—to guide you on your pilgrimage to heaven.”

Contemporary Evangelical authors such as Janette Oak, Beverly Lewis, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins—co-authors of the popular end-of-times book and movie series, Left Behind—carry on this sentimentalist tradition. What separates them from their predecessors, though, is that contemporary Evangelical fiction is produced and consumed by an insular audience. Consequently, these authors aim to provide an emotionally gratifying experience for Evangelical readers, rather than to explicitly convert non-Evangelicals.

Topping the bestsellers lists

However, there is more to this story than simply illuminating the sentimentalist roots of Evangelical anti-intellectualism, Van Wyck said. Novels written by Evangelicals dominated the literary marketplace in the mid-19th century. The sheer numbers warrant a closer look, as Evangelical fictions have distinguished themselves as some of the most strikingly popular works in the American literary canon. In 19th-century terms, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was as popular as Harry Potter. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World was acclaimed by author Henry James and artist Vincent van Gogh.

And today, though they tend to no longer attract non-Evangelical readers, these fictions boast sales in the hundreds of millions of copies and consistently top the bestsellers lists—seven of the Left Behind series reached #1 on New York Times bestsellers lists.

“Most of us in the literary criticism business got into it by reading the classics, which don’t generally encompass these religious bestsellers,” said Van Wyck’s dissertation adviser, English Professor Leonard Cassuto. “But there was a moment when I realized that the American literary tradition as it was presented to me is bigger than I thought it was.

“For me, and other critics too, there is an evolving realization that we can’t understand the book markets of the 19th century unless we also widen our view to encompass the role of religious fiction,” Cassuto said. “James Van Wyck has taken a remarkable route into the archives to do this.  Nobody has ever looked so closely at how Evangelicals actually read, and at what they were taking into account when they did so.”

But do they have an impact on anyone outside of religious circles? Van Wyck thinks so.

“Ronald Reagan, who charted much of the course of international and American identity in the 20th century, ascribed his conversion to Christianity to the book That Printer of Udell’s, which he read as a young boy,” Van Wyck said. “His whole worldview was essentially informed by a book that is all about the individual’s relationship to God and how that changes after a conversion experience.

“[To that end, one could say] Evangelical fiction has altered the course of history.”

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