Elizabeth Dias covers religion for the New York Times, and I spent a half hour this morning reading through her latest piece, which focuses on the bond between white evangelical Christians and Donald Trump. I know a lot of people are sick of these types of articles, but this one is rewarding. The setting is Sioux Center, Iowa, a rural community of white Protestants and, increasingly, Hispanic meat-packers and agricultural workers. The two groups keep mainly to themselves, but it mildly annoys the white folks that the newcomers work and shop on Sunday. They seem to blame it on their Catholicism.

Everything in Sioux Center is insular, and that’s how they like it. Even the coronavirus stays away, for the most part. If not for the news they receive on their televisions and phones, they’d be as comfortable as a bug in a rug. At least, that’s the impression you’ll get from reading this profile of their lives. The economy is not discussed. There is no mention of opioids.

The outside world, however, frightens them and insults their sensibilities. And it is encroaching in the form of those Hispanics, whose children are now filling their public schools. The main thing, though, is a strong sense that their beliefs are not respected. Nothing about them is respected, really, and they feel like they can be insulted by anyone without the slightest consequence.

They’re pretty much right about that. Even many “woke” people on the left feel no pang of conscience about blasting white people or evangelical Christians in terms they would never use against any other race or religion. Dismiss a black man’s opinion by calling him a ‘Tyrone,’ and you could be out of a job by lunchtime, but call a white woman a ‘Karen’ and you can expect applause.

Micah Schouten works at a cattle reproduction company. His wife, Caryn, doesn’t feel like the beneficiary of systemic privilege.

After the election of President Barack Obama, the country seemed to undergo a cultural shift, she said. “It was dangerous to voice your Christianity,” she said. “Because we were viewed as bigots, as racists — we were labeled as the haters and the ones who are causing all the derision and all of the problems in America. Blame it on the white believers.”

None of them said they had wanted to vote for Mr. Trump, but they did — “When he was the last option,” Heather Hoogendoorn said. The group laughed.

There are seemingly no black people in Sioux Center, so the Black Lives Matter protests are hard to comprehend. It seems like one more example where whites are taking criticism and others’ grievances are being put before their own.

“We are making this huge issue of white versus Black, Black Lives Matter. All lives matter,” she said. “There are more deaths from abortion than there are from corona, but we are not fighting that battle.”

“We are picking and choosing who matters and who doesn’t,” she said. “They say they are being picked on, when we are all being picked on in one shape or form.”

I agree with Caryn Schouten that most of us are getting “picked on” in this country, to one degree or another. I also think she and her husband should be able to raise their family in peace in their calm and traditional little community. She can hold her opinions about abortion and homosexuality, she can send her kids to a nice Christian school, and she can live out her days doing her best to find the American Dream. If that means she’s going to support politicians I abhor, that’s her right as an American citizen.

In this sense, I don’t really care one way or the other about Caryn or her husband Micah, or the other people who make up their small town. I’m happy to respect their choices and leave them alone. If I think people are picking on them, I’m likely to offer some form of defense. Yet, if they want to debate the issues, I am more than willing to do that too

The Schoutens are representative of the evangelical community in general, which gave 81 percent of its vote to Donald Trump in 2016 and looks primed to give numbers almost as good in 2020. Their basic position is that Trump is a terribly flawed human being who is also the only person around willing to be their champion. And the important thing, I think, is to take this perspective out for a ride rather than staying locked in the perspective that focuses only their racism and intolerance.

The key point is that they feel belittled and threatened. They feel this way even when they never leave their little towns. Sioux Center has 7,500 people and 19 churches. Their cultural anxieties are not coming from within. They have the same right as anyone else to have representatives who respect them. They have the right to reject anyone who doesn’t.

I think it’s time to stop focusing so much on the white evangelical support for Trump. It’s not mysterious, but it’s also not as dangerous as it might seem.

What I mean is that while Trump is an extremely dangerous political actor, his success comes from leading these evangelical voters astray. He fills a vacuum for them, but there are alternative ways to satisfy this demand. They rally behind Trump because they don’t see other politicians who will defend them, but it’s a deal with the devil. You can respect and defend their traditional beliefs without being supportive of business fraud, sexual assault, election tampering, and habitual dishonesty. Everytime someone sticks with Trump after he commits some new outrage or demonstrates some novel level of incompetency, they lower their standards and lower themselves. At this point, Trump is leading his followers away from support for the basic institutions of our country, from the balance of powers, and from the rule of law. Evangelicals have always been at odds with the larger culture on a host of issues, but not on these bedrock American norms.

So, what happens if Trump loses the election? The evangelicals always saw this relationship in mostly practical terms. Trump had power and he would use that power to protect them and advance their interests. Trump without power is a mostly useless figure for them. They will seek a new champion, and that champion can lead them in a better direction. The new champion can stop feeding off and bolstering their insecurities and instead feed and bolster their better angels. These folks actually believe in honesty.  They’re patriotic Americans, proud of our heritage which includes our system of government. They used to support William Jennings Bryan, a man as different from Trump as it is possible to be. Teddy Roosevelt thought they were dangerous fanatics, but he won a good deal of their support, too, because he had his own form of appeal and offered his own form of defense.

Trump demonstrated that a lot is negotiable with evangelicals, including many things most thought were not, like cavorting with porn stars. They’re pretty locked in their ways on some things, though, like opposition to abortion and lack of acceptance of the LGBTQ community. Small town evangelicals are uneasy about racial change, and that’s a pattern that repeats itself throughout American history with each new wave of immigration. The Republican Party has fed off these issues for a long time, and they’re not things that will simply go away.

But we don’t need some magic trick that will dissolve people’s differences. We need someone who will represent evangelicals in a way that emphasizes their virtues and call them to be the best people they can be. For the foreseeable future, they’re going to support the political right in this country, but that still leaves a huge amount of variation on the direction things can go. Preferably, they will become a more politically diverse bloc, but I’d settle for them getting the respect they deserve and leadership that tamps down their insecurities rather than depends on them.