Hosts and Commonweal contributors Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Nick Tabor chat with historian Joseph Slaughter, assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University, about why so many evangelicals support Donald Trump—and why the word “evangelical” may no longer mean what it once did.

Together, they trace three competing definitions of evangelicalism—doctrinal, cultural, and political—and how the political one increasingly overrides the other two. They discuss the mainstreaming of Pentecostalism, the “seven mountains” dominionism that now unites prosperity-gospel televangelists with hardline Calvinists, the fading of old disqualifications for Catholic and Mormon candidates, and where a conservative Christian resistance to Trumpism still stands. 

Episode production and original music by Joel Myers.