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.
“In your wisdom, goodness, and power, you have once again established Gov. DeSantis to serve the people of Florida,” he prayed, arms stretched out. It was inauguration day for the governor. Ascol declared him “God’s servant for the good of Floridians.”
DeSantis has not formally launched a presidential campaign, and Ascol has not formally endorsed him. But as he has continued to heap excessive amounts of praise on the governor, even as Trump lashes out at DeSantis, Ascol has taken a step that most white evangelical leaders have so far hesitated to take: He has indicated support for DeSantis as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
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.
Tom Ascol is not a megachurch pastor. His church, Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, reports fewer than 300 people in weekly attendance. And yet Ascol is now considered one of the primary leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention’s most radical hard-right wing—so much so that he was able to win 34 percent of the votes for the denomination’s 2022 presidential election, forcing a runoff. (The winner, Bart Barber, ultimately received 61 percent of the final vote.) Ascol was able to do this through one simple strategy: stoking culture war fears about creeping liberalism—inside the ultraconservative convention.
The Southern Baptist Convention isn’t a governing body: Technically, it’s just the country’s largest Protestant denomination, a decentralized coalition of aligned but autonomous churches. But the SBC acts like a de facto governing body in that it coordinates missions and funding for new churches, schools, programs, and other organizations; owns several major seminaries; holds a major annual meeting; and, more controversially, has expelled churches for welcoming LGBTQ members or allowing women to preach.
Ascol has always been a hard-liner within the coalition. In the 1980s, he founded an organization called Founders Ministries to try to return the SBC to its “conservative roots,” arguing that the denomination was flouting the Bible’s commands by allowing liberal theology to take root. Ascol and those associated with Founders Ministries believed, among other things, that allowing women to preach was a violation of God’s law. Through Founders, Ascol slowly gained a following.
“They’re influential as the right flank of the SBC,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian of white evangelicalism in the United States. “They’re always exerting pressure in the center, calling out some of the more moderates.”
But in recent years, Ascol’s profile has grown in corresponding measure to larger cultural battles. In 2020 he railed against COVID lockdown measures. In May 2022, a month before Roe was overturned, Ascol asserted that not only should there be no abortion exceptions in the law for rape or the health of the mother, but that women who have abortions should be charged with homicide.
And most notoriously, Ascol is known for campaigning against the boogeyman of critical race theory.
Every year, SBC has a meeting in which voting members, known as “messengers,” elect officials, set policies and budgets, and pass resolutions to offer opinions or concerns. (These resolutions don’t steer doctrine. They simply “capture the feeling” of the annual meeting.)
In 2019 voting members passed a resolution that stated that evangelical scholars could consider critical race theory and intersectionality in their studies of social dynamics and social ills—as long as they considered those concepts “subordinate to Scripture.” It wasn’t terribly earth-shattering: Resolution 9, as it is known, basically stated that Baptists could gain insight into the human condition by examining race, as long as it didn’t supersede what they read in the Bible.
But Ascol was enraged. He rallied a multiyear campaign to rescind the resolution, demanding that the SBC budget be “amended to prohibit any funds being allocated to any institution, agency, or entity that in any way supports, promotes, or advocates any tenets of critical theory, critical race theory, or intersectionality.” Then–SBC President J.D. Greear shot down Ascol’s motion for being “impossible to administer,” so Ascol publicly challenged him too.
His campaign was unrelenting and impassioned. “He is the DeSantis of the SBC,” said John Fea, a historian at Messiah College who specializes in American evangelicalism. “It’s a perfect fit.”
In Ascol’s view, critical race theory is a rejection of the inerrancy of Scripture because, as he wrote in a February 2020 blog post, it “strik[es] out against God-ordained hierarchies and authority structures” and “clouds the fact revealed in the Bible that every person’s fundamental problem is that they have sinned against the holy God who created them.” (This is quite the loaded statement, especially considering the history of the SBC; the convention was founded in 1845 by Southerners who split from Baptists in the North over the Southern members’ support of slavery.) The failure of other Southern Baptists to recognize the problems with critical race theory and intersectionality, Ascol argues, indicates deep rot in the denomination.
“We still have churches filled with unregenerate people,” Ascol told the Religion News Service in 2021. “Our evangelism, our church practice, is still very much influenced by principles derived from something other than what we believe or say we believe in Scripture.”
In December 2019, Ascol and the Founders Ministries released a nearly two-hour-long documentary called By What Standard? God’s World … God’s Rules. The documentary targeted the SBC resolution that had so offended them alongside other perceived failures, taking particular aim at Baptists who expressed tolerance toward women preachers.
There was backlash from many Southern Baptists against, among other things, the film’s tone about sexual abuse. (The SBC is being investigated by the Department of Justice for its widespread mishandling of clergy sexual abuse.) Two Founder Ministries board members publicly apologized, and they and a third member of the board resigned.
But the backlash did little to thwart Ascol’s rise.
In 2022 Ascol launched a bid to become president of the Southern Baptist Convention, promising he would guide the convention away from “wokeness.” He brought his campaign to the right-wing media circuit, appearing on shows on the Daily Wire, OANN, Real America’s Voice, and BlazeTV, and with pundits including Eric Metaxas and Charlie Kirk, skipping over more traditional Baptist media.
Even though he lost the bid—and never succeeded in rescinding the resolution he hated—Ascol, by all accounts, altered the conversation. Between 2019 and 2021, at least eight state-level Baptist conventions passed resolutions condemning critical race theory. In 2020 the presidents of all six Southern Baptist seminaries signed a statement opposing it as well. At the 2021 annual meeting, 7 of the 9 submitted resolutions had to do with condemning CRT. (These did not end up making it onto the floor for a vote.)
“This guy has significant play within Southern Baptist circles,” Fea said. “Most Southern Baptists will take note of what he does.”
According to Du Mez, while Ascol is far from the most significant person in the SBC, he wields power as a disrupter. “Looking at Ascol’s role in Founders and the SBC, it’s all about race and gender/sexuality,” she said. “Pushing back against the reckoning with sexual abuse and exerting pressure on those who are working to bring some justice there … and also working to stoke the anti-CRT movement inside evangelism. He’s been the guy behind both of those movements inside the SBC. And I think, to understand right-wing Republican politics, you can look at the intersection of those two movements.”
It’s hard not to draw parallels between Ascol and DeSantis, the culture warriors obsessed with matters of sexual identity, academic acknowledgment of racism, and “wokeness.” Both Ascol and DeSantis have shifted the cultural conversations in their respective worlds, working up genuine moral panic over their pet grievances. It remains to be seen how influential these shifts will be.
“DeSantis portrays himself as someone who will not only talk the talk of anti-wokeness but do something about it,” Fea said. Ascol is clearly attracted to that.
“Within conservative evangelicalism, the SBC plays a pretty prominent role,” Du Mez said. “It’s the right flank that’s been the most ardent Trump supporters. So if one of its leaders is putting weight behind DeSantis, it’s a sign.”
