alt Hacker NewsI think this is def part of it. Trump was not doing well in 2016 at all until the final debate when he cornered Clinton into a (legitimate) strong defense of her pro-choice position.
All the "moderate" Christians who couldn't stomach Trump before suddenly had no choice.
Essentially all Christian denominations + Mormons think abortion is murder. How can a candidate win a majority in a society where a plurality identifies as Christian and therefore probably takes that position?
Secularization of the majority, and the liberal culutral values that go with it just alienates these people more and more around abortion, gay rights, and most markedly, trans issues.
Although the devoutly religious are becoming more of a minority, they are far more homogeneously aligned on these core issues, and therefore easier to cohere around a "right wing" electoral block even when they do not think "right wing" around economic and political / international issues. They're willing to tolerate Trump on a whole pile of things as long as they feel he's accomplishing their "moral" goals -- and so far he mostly is.
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I think you probably follow politics too closely if you think that's why Trump won in 2016. HC was such a terrible campaigner that she simply stopped campaigning 3 weeks before the election because it wasn't helping. That and her major policy position was pro-globalism which hasn't been the position of the winning POTUS candidate since the 1980s. That's why she lost, not something that happened in a debate that maybe 0.3% of the population watched.
A majority of American Christians support legal abortion, aside from white evangelical Protestants where support for legal abortion is 24%. Overall, 60% of Americans support it. So this doesn't really add up. I'm pretty sure Trump's sudden change in fortunes was due to James Comey suddenly announcing that Buttery Males were back on the table at the last moment. And let's not overstate how much support he actually had in the end. He won with the worst margin in history.
Tying anti-abortion positions so tightly to Christianity (especially, popularizing it among protestant sects) and elevating that to a concern above most or all others (American conservative catholicism) was a deliberate move by propagandists in the last century, not something that somehow arose naturally.
Ditto trans stuff becoming a huge concern all the sudden. That wasn't "organic", it's a moral panic ginned up by people with microphones.
There's at least as much cynical-politics-affecting-religion as the reverse in the topics and positions you raise.
[EDIT] My point, as it occurs to me it may not be clear, is that "well most are christian so of course pro-choice or other 'liberal' positions struggle" is not a great explanation of what's going on, because that association isn't so guaranteed as this suggests. Things like social and economic justice are heavily connected to and promoted by christianity in some countries outside the US, but much less-so here. Historically, they have been here, too! More-Christian or less-Christian isn't the only axis here, what "Christian" tends to mean as it relates to politics hasn't been static, and that change has been in no small part driven by elite opinion and propaganda for the purposes of capturing religion for political ends, not from grass-roots demand.