As Trump’s positions on deporting undocumented immigrants and banning Muslim immigration hardened through December and January, his support among white evangelicals grew, culminating in his victories in many evangelical-heavy states, including South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. More than six in 10 Republican voters in these Southern states support his proposed Muslim ban, according to exit polls.

White evangelicals also are ardently pro-gun. Just ask the Rev. Rob Schenck, who has futilely sought to end what he calls evangelicals’ “unholy alliance” with the National Rifle Association after he experienced his own change of heart. Schenck readily acknowledges the link, too, between gun worship and race. Evangelicals, he has told me, are driven by fear of a president they think “might be a crypto-Muslim” as well as black-on-white crime.

Trump appears to have tapped into the disaffection among neo-Confederates and white supremacists, who can be counted among Trumpvangelicals. While the religious right has for decades worked to distance itself from its segregationist roots, Trump has played games with the press questioning his white supremacist support. He claimed not to know anything about David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and well-known anti-Semite and white nationalist. Trump’s surrogate, Jeffrey Lord, defended him from criticism on national television by claiming the KKK was a “leftist” organization.