A piece published Friday in the Boston Globe highlights President Donald Trump’s continued stronghold of support among white mid-western Evangelicals moving into the 2020 election. On Monday, Reverends Irene Monroe and Emmett G. Price III joined Boston Public Radio to discuss the political identity of American Evangelicals in 2019.

“One of the things that we realize is that within the white Evangelical bubble … there’s a culture of Evangelicalism, and then there’s the values of Evangelicalism,” Price said. "I’ve talked about this before, about … distinguishing cultural Evangelicalism and biblical Evangelicalism.”

Support for Trump remains high among white Evangelicals, with one poll from the Public Religion Research Institute finding that 77 percent support the president, compared with 54 percent of white Catholics. The same group found that 86 percent of black Protestants disapprove of the president’s job performance.

Monroe posed that the outspokenness of certain white Evangelical sects could be a factor in the polarization of politics among all white Evangelicals. "The biblical folks would not be against immigration,” she said. “Because the more cultural Evangelicals have had a much bigger megaphone, you’ll now be getting the more … progressive Evangelicals who want to relinquish the name of Evangelical. And then you have the younger Evangelicals too, who don’t want any association with the title of Evangelical because of the way it’s been bankrupt and co-opted."

Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist and the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a Visiting Researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology.

Price is Professor of Worship, Church & Culture and Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Together they host the All Rev’d Up podcast, produced by WGBH.