I would like to believe the second model applies, but I don't. Evangelicals are first and foremost authoritarians. They got their faith not by love or reason but by fear and believing what they wanted to believe. And sadly they vote the same way, e.g., for a phoney, vain lifelong loser who portrays himself as being a strong leader with Jesus in his heart and tells them it's a black and white, good or evil world.
Well, that's an awfully broad brush. I certainly don't like their voting patterns, but I'd hardly presume that even a majority of them "got their faith not by love or reason but by fear and believing what they wanted to believe". And actually, this is too important a question to settle with such a simplistic statement. How evangelicals come to their belief system is a very complex and important question, which has tremendous implications beyond politics. It deserves really serious data, which, unfortunately, seems to be sorely lacking.
