What's with these people?

I think that, as the Republican Party has reconstituted itself (or been revealed?) as a vehicle for outright American semi-fascism in the years of Donald Trump, the rest of us can't stop taking an occasional pause to try to understand. What's with these people? Fruitful communication between those who are appalled and the adherents of the Orange God-King is usually impossible. The major media resorted to sending bemused reporters to diners to attempt to have the conversation. And there is a genre of books that take a stab at explanations, especially of this right wing plague's Christian component, such as Sarah Posner's Unholy and Robert P. Jones' White Too Long.

Angela Denker's Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump is a worthy contribution on this group. Her perspective is not what we get through the big media. She's a white, married, midwestern, middle-of-the-road Lutheran pastor who resides in Minnesota. She's got plenty of connections including family who have been Trump voters. And she's a former sportswriter who presents her travels to and among various Trump-sympathetic churches and venues as she might have written profiles of teams and athletes.

The book is a kind of pilgrimage between Christian institutions from Florida, through Orange County, on to Missouri, Appalachia, New England, with a smidgen of Texas thrown in, all to listen and attempt empathy with people whose sort of Christianity and whose politics are not hers, but whom she seeks to treat with respect.

Some of what she records we have gotten used to over the last six years. An awful lot of Trump-voting Christians simply found Hillary Clinton repulsive, not only because of her support for abortion, but in some deeper sense which remains opaque to me. (I'm no Hillary fan, but I never got the Hillary-hate.) Many of these folks feel that American culture has pushed them aside and they feel dissed by elites. We know that. And we know that there's plenty of racism behind the American authoritarian phenomenon. But just when I would think there's nothing new here, Denker would offer an observation I found thoughtful and broadening.

For example, at the anti-abortion DC March for Life in 2017, she mingled with the crowd as they listened to Trump orate on the Jumbotron:

Trump had the fortune of looking like a sheepish little boy in need of love, and even at his most offensive, I wondered if the women and mothers in the crowd who'd managed to vote for him had done so in the same way we excused our husbands and sons, think of grown men as petulant, overgrown little boys.

In Florida, she attended River at Tampa Bay Church whose worship leaders ostentatiously carry guns and preach fear of immanent attack ... by someone or something. This is worship shaped by paranoia. Denker has a very Lutheran take and writes:

Lost at the River [Church] is the biblical idea that we aren't the ones who are called to earn or defend our salvation. We are called instead to gratitude for life rather than ultimate fear of death, for Easter follows Good Friday, and eternal life follows death. But grace is unsatisfying in the winner-takes-all world of the River ....

Few of this author's red state Christians are this bellicose. But they are very much attuned to their respective American cultures.

Trump, with his own combination of bombast and celebrity, would not have appealed to conservative American Christians had they not first been warmed up bo the idea by conservative celebrity preachers, many of whom had their genesis in Orange County and Southern California. ... It's not surprising that American Evangelicals, thus desensitized, were willing to sacrifice purity for popularity. They'd already done so in the largest and most profitable and influential churches.

In the midwest and Appalachia, she delves into the feelings among white Christians of being left behind, perhaps as retribution for ancestral crimes which they could not bring themselves to recognize.

They had felt chastened by President Obama and by Democrats. They did not want to be called racist, but they hesitated to confront past instances of racism and injustice. ... The rural midwestern Americans I met carried a mix of pride and a sense of shame, a hesitation to admit America's original sins because their identity was tied so strongly to being an American and the pride that went along with it.

At ultra-conservative Roman Catholic Thomas More College in New Hampshire, where this Lutheran pastor felt herself very much an anomaly,

they fear their culture is being threatened. For the conservative Catholic families that send their children to Thomas More, the truths that have sustained their power are changing and they are losing their grip on Western society. Much of that fear is about changes in acceptable family structures and increased racial diversity, about the loss of absolute truth and what that means for a church that has been dependent on hierarchy and obedience.

Denker ends her odyssey among midwestern family, certain that what endures are the bonds we preserve, rather than those we sever. She is undoubtedly correct, and also aware that this stance may be easier for her than for others who enjoy less security,

This isn't a great book, but I found it a broadly helpful response for my question: What's with these people?