Trying to Understand the Evangelical Mind: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

Trying to Understand the Evangelical Mind

The question of how so many American evangelicals justify support for agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—particularly after the tragedy in Minneapolis—deserves something more than the slogans and counter-slogans of our polarized moment. It calls for the kind of sober examination that refuses caricature and instead confronts the deeper currents shaping the evangelical mind. Those currents run older and deeper than many realize.

Evangelicalism has never been a single thing. It contains revivalists and scholars, political activists and contemplatives, global missionaries and suburban megachurches. This diversity matters, yet certain patterns appear with enough regularity that they require attention.

A first rationale for supporting ICE grows out of the evangelical reading of law, order, and civil authority. Romans 13 is often foregrounded. For many evangelicals, the passage provides a clear mandate: governments possess legitimate authority, and the enforcement of law—including immigration law—is part of that divine ordering. Christians, in this view, can personally care for immigrants while still endorsing the state’s duty to enforce its statutes. The line drawn between private compassion and public obligation becomes central.

Moreover, this approach often shields evangelicals from the moral questions embedded in policy. If ICE is merely an instrument of rightful authority, then Christians can distance themselves from the ethical weight of its actions. What is lost is the broader biblical context in which Paul himself confronted unjust power, and in which he insisted that love fulfills the law. A selective reading of Scripture allows the harder questions to remain unasked.

A second dynamic is cultural anxiety. For many white evangelicals, immigration has come to symbolize rapid demographic change. The America they once recognized, with its familiar cultural assumptions, is slipping away. These anxieties are seldom expressed as such; they appear rather in the language of sovereignty, security, or economic burden. Yet beneath the surface lies a fear of cultural displacement. In this context, ICE is not merely a law-enforcement agency but a bulwark against perceived national unraveling.

Political alliances intensify this pattern. For decades, evangelicals have been mobilized around a set of issues—abortion, religious liberty, education, and resistance to secularization. The political partnerships formed to advance those causes have often aligned them with movements prioritizing stricter immigration policies. Over time, the alliance hardened into identity. Supporting ICE became a marker of belonging within a particular political and religious coalition. The theological justifications followed the political commitments rather than leading them.

However, any honest account must address the role of race. The data makes this unavoidable. Racial identity is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward immigration among white evangelicals—far more powerful than doctrinal or devotional measures. This does not suggest that every evangelical supporter of ICE acts out of conscious prejudice. The truth is both more subtle and more pervasive. The language of “law and order,” so widely used in evangelical circles, has long functioned in American political life as racially coded speech. Evangelicals absorbed that language into their moral vocabulary without interrogating its history.

Moreover, evangelical institutions—churches, colleges, publishing houses, and mission agencies—were largely shaped during eras marked by segregation. That formation continues to shape perceptions and instincts, even where explicit racism is rejected. The pattern is clear: the more racially homogeneous the evangelical community, the stronger the support for punitive enforcement; the more diverse the congregation, the lower that support becomes. These are not accidental correlations. They reflect a formation that has been as cultural as it has been theological.

A further psychological pattern emerges. Many evangelicals begin not with Scripture but with a felt sense of cultural loss. The theological rationale is supplied afterward. The reasoning typically follows this order: immigration destabilizes the familiar; ICE enforces stability; therefore, supporting ICE is framed as Christian responsibility. What appears as moral clarity is often an instinctive reaction later sacralized through selective biblical interpretation.

However, the picture is not uniform. Many evangelicals—especially younger believers and nearly all evangelicals of color—resist this narrative entirely. They appeal to the biblical mandate to welcome the stranger, to Israel’s identity as sojourners, and to the example of Christ who identifies with the vulnerable and the displaced. In Minneapolis and across the country, evangelical congregations are advocating for immigrant families, protesting abuses, and calling for reforms. They do this not by abandoning evangelical theology but by retrieving its deepest resources. Their witness reminds us that the evangelical tradition contains profound impulses toward hospitality, justice, and mercy.

The real challenge is understanding what all this reveals about the evangelical imagination. The movement has always lived at a crossroads: between the radical ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and the pragmatic calculations of political power; between a global gospel and the provincial anxieties of American culture; between the call to be a pilgrim people and the desire to preserve a familiar national identity. These tensions have always shaped the evangelical mind. They shape it still.

Moreover, understanding these dynamics does not excuse harmful policies. It clarifies the forces at work. Evangelicals who support strict enforcement draw upon elements of their tradition they believe to be faithful, though often in isolation from the fuller witness of Scripture. Evangelicals who resist draw upon equally authentic strands, usually more deeply rooted in the biblical narrative. The conflict between these visions is not superficial. It concerns the very nature of Christian moral formation.

The question, finally, is not simply why evangelicals support ICE. The deeper question is what vision of Christian life is guiding the evangelical imagination. Is it a vision shaped by fear or by hospitality? By cultural preservation or by the reconciling work of God? The answer to such questions will determine not only the evangelical approach to immigration but the credibility of its witness in the years ahead.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD