According to a new PRRI poll, 60% of white evangelicals “support the goals of Obama’s executive action” on immigration (which isn’t too far below the nation at large, at 72%).
Yet 67% of white evangelicals believe that Obama shouldn’t have taken that executive action.
So what gives?
Perhaps it’s similar to Matthew Avery Sutton’s explanation for evangelical opposition to health care. In an interview published yesterday on RD, Sutton hypothesized that contemporary evangelical opposition to many policies they would otherwise seem to support may have its roots in The End of Days:
My argument in a nutshell is that the apocalyptic theology that developed in the 1880s and 1890s led radical evangelicals to the conclusion that all nations are going to concede their power in the End Times to a totalitarian political leader who is going to be the Antichrist. If you believe you’re living in the last days and you believe you’re moving towards that event, you’re going to be very suspicious and skeptical of anything that seems to undermine individual rights and individual liberties, and anything that is going to give more power to the state.
