A lot of evangelical pastors were really caught off guard by the politicization of the pandemic. Meanwhile, broadly speaking, Christianity is declining in the US. What you seem to be describing now is churchgoers who increasingly identify with this sort of Trumpist worldview and are expecting church leadership to reflect that back. It's so parallel to what's happening in the Republican Party because it's the grassroots, like getting ahead of the leadership and then the leadership scrambling to either adapt or be left behind.