10 Reactions to Trump's Evangelical White House Dinner

By Samuel Smith, Deputy Managing Editor Wednesday, August 29, 2018

6. John Fea

Fea, a left-leaning professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania who has been critical of evangelical engagement with Trump, commented on Tuesday about Trump's statement at the dinner that the left will resort to violence.

"I have to give Trump credit," Fea wrote on his blog. "He knows that fear-mongering is one of the best ways to motivate evangelicals in the public square."

Fea wrote that Trump's remark about "violence" reminds him of the 2016 Republican primary election "when Ted Cruz said the federal government would soon be removing crosses from tombstones."

"This kind of rhetoric, as I argued in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, works very well with evangelicals," Fea argued.