Slate: “On Jan. 3, almost two months after Donald Trump first started to attack Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious”—acknowledging the ascendance of a new political rival—the pastor Tom Ascol took to a stage in Tallahassee, Florida, to thank God….
White evangelicals will vote as a powerful bloc in the upcoming presidential general election. But there’s no such promise of unity in the Republican primary, and both Trump and DeSantis know this. Despite being Catholic, DeSantis has so far proven himself adept at speaking the language of white evangelicals, urging conservatives, repeatedly, to “put on the full armor of God”—a common exhortation among Christian nationalists—and vowing, in a controversial ad, to be a “fighter” for God.
Trump, who likely assumed he would retain white evangelical support going into 2024, has lashed out publicly at former evangelical allies who have not yet endorsed him, including the prominent megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress. Some early reporting has indicated that evangelical leaders are breaking with Trump in favor of the more baggage-free DeSantis; other experts I spoke to predict most major players will wait for the primaries to shake out before they speak up. The big, household-name evangelicals have so far largely stayed quiet.
But while Ascol isn’t a household name, he is one of a number of figures with significant sway inside the evangelical world, and it’s no minor thing that he has portrayed DeSantis as a savior, much in the way other evangelicals have with Trump….
More importantly, Ascol’s support can be understood as something of a bellwether for a certain type of hard-line evangelical. To understand whether Ron DeSantis can redirect evangelical votes away from Trump—or even the more authentically evangelical probable 2024 Republican candidate, Mike Pence—it’s worth looking at Ascol’s rise to prominence. Ascol represents a marginal but important cultural shift in the world of white evangelicals, and it might make all the difference for DeSantis and his “anti-woke” crusade.”