You totally can understand how you end up with Donald Trump.

Philosophically, I believe this goes back to origins of the Protestant Reformation.

In that time, there were two big streams of Christianity:

* The catholic church had grown fat, corrupt and political. (The contemporary pope Alexander VI is the best example.) The contradiction to Jesus Christ's teachings of love, poverty and and political anti-authoritarianism became bigger and bigger.

* At the same time, an occult, syncretic, magical version of Christianity was emerging: Some Christians began mixing Christianity with philosophical and religious concepts from Kabbala, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt... This was done to bring Christianity back to its original roots, but to those outside of the movement it looked like a perversion of Christianity.



The protestant reformation was about rejecting all the things that had polluted Christianity. It was about purifying it.

Ironically, today's Evangelicals are now engaging in the very same decadence and corruption and politization that the original Evangelicals rejected.

I think the Protestant Reformation was corrupted pretty much from its inception by Kings and Princes who wanted to limit the influence of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. In essence, it was used from the very beginning for political ends.

Later, you had the Puritans and Calvinists who took it a step further where they tried to justify people who had political and economic power had that power because it was "God's will." It was essentially a decentralized version of the Chinese "Mandate of Heaven" where political and economic success is interpreted as having God's favor.

Not saying that Martin Luther didn't have a point when he nailed up his 95 Theses, but he would never have survived the Catholic Inquisitors if it wasn't for the German princes who saw the opportunity to weaken papal influence over their rule, and therefore protected Luther.