John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, has written a thought-provoking book, Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Fea dedicates his book to the 19 percent of evangelical Christians who didn’t vote for Trump.

Nostalgia can be a form of fear, a longing for a supposedly better time which actually never existed, Fea says. He portrays Trump as using this kind of nostalgic fear.

Many of the 81 percent who voted for Trump did so because of fear, the author believes. Since colonial times some evangelicals have feared witchcraft, Catholics, immigrants, Communists, and liberals. Now they fear secularism.

Fea names as idolatry the tendency of some evangelicals to see the United States as the kingdom of God. Trump touts “making America great again.” Which time in American life is so great that we should return to it?

American life in the 1950’s, as Fea points out, might have been generally benign to American middle class whites. It wasn’t that for many American blacks.

He uses the term “court evangelicals” for some religious leaders who support Trump. He compares them to past leaders who served kings and risked being corrupted themselves.

Fea finds a different hope for Christians who decry the current cultural morass. He is inspired by the model of the civil rights movement, “a Christian approach to politics.” This involves: “Hope, humility, and a responsible use of American history.”

My takeaway: evangelical Christians may have to decide between serving political ends to advance their kingdom or returning to the example of their leader, Jesus. He built a community that changed the world through the way they lived.