Chipping Away At Trump's Core Supporters-- Even Evangelicals

There was some interesting new polling released this morning. "An analysis of VoteCast, a nationwide poll of more than 115,000 midterm voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, highlights the fractures. Compared with the 27% of voters who describe themselves as strong Trump supporters, the "somewhat" Trump voters are much more likely to disapprove of Trump on key issues such as immigration and health care, and to express divergent opinions on a need for a border wall, gun control and climate change. They are much more likely to question his trustworthiness and temperament. They are less likely to call themselves conservative, less likely to be evangelical Christians and more likely to have voted for Democrats in 2018. They are more educated, somewhat more likely to be women, and more likely to live in suburbs... Trump's political future may depend on whether he can retain their support, particularly among the more educated and affluent suburban women who set aside their concerns about Trump two years ago and will be asked to do so again in 2020. Their backing helped Trump carve a path to the presidency through the industrial Midwest, but with little margin for error. The president won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by fewer than 80,000 votes combined. VoteCast found that 16% of those who 'somewhat' supported Trump's job performance decided to vote for Democratic House candidates in the November midterms. That's compared with 6% of those who self-identified as Trump's 'strong' supporters. That difference helped Democrats capture the House majority, picking up 21 of their 40 new seats in districts Trump carried only two years earlier."

VoteCommonGood was just getting started in 2018.Their goal-- to help Democrats flip Congress as a check on Trump-- was realized. 16 candidates for whom they campaigned-- in-district-- in the evangelical community will be starting their new jobs in Congress in a week. Those include Susan Wild (PA), Angie Craig (MN), Dean Phillips (MN), Cindy Axne (IA), Sharice Davids (KS), Kendra Horn (OK), Colin Allred (TX), Lizzie Fletcher (TX), Veronica Escobar (TX), Xochitl Small (NM), Mike Levin (CA), Harley Rouda (CA), Katie Porter (CA), Gil Cisneros (CA), Katie Hill (CA) and TJ Cox (CA). Three others-- Kara Eastman (NE), Mike Siegel (TX) and Ammar Campa-Najjar (CA)-- are already gearing up for a 2020 rematch and another, J.D. Scholten, is likely to run for office in 2020 as well. VCG was primarily white progressive evangelicals working towards peeling off some white evangelical Trump supporters.

This week Eliza Griswold reported about evangelicals of color are also fighting back against the religious right. Writing for the New Yorker Griswold focused on Lisa Sharon Harper, a prominent evangelical activist from New York, who is now the president of Freedom Road, a consulting group that she founded last year to train religious leaders on participating in social action.

One of the speakers at Berniepalooza last month was former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, who ran for president of Brazil this year as the Workers Party candidate. Harper went down to Brazil to work with evangelicals of color supporting Haddad and opposing his opponent, neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump-like character who won-- with an estimated 70% of the evangelical vote.)

"In the United States," wrote Griswold, "evangelicalism has long been allied with political conservatism. But under Trump’s Presidency right-wing political rhetoric has become more openly racist and xenophobic. In evangelical circles, hostility toward people of color is often couched in nostalgia for the simpler days of nineteen-fifties America. 'Sociologically, the principal difference between white and black evangelicals is that we believe that oppression exists,' Harper said, citing a nationwide study of Christians from 2000 called Divided by Faith. 'A lot of white evangelicals don’t believe in systemic oppression, except lately, under Trump, when they’ve cast themselves as its victim.' To Harper, the 2016 election revealed the degree to which white evangelicals were 'captive' to white supremacy. 'They’re more white than Christian,' Harper said, echoing the words of her former boss at Sojourners, Jim Wallis, a white evangelical leader and part of a progressive push against racism within the church. At the same time, people of color are the fastest-growing demographic within evangelicalism. 'Two things are contributing to this,' Robert Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of The End of White Christian America, told me. 'The first is demographic: the absolute number of whites in America is declining. But the decline is really turbocharged by young white evangelicals leaving the church.'"

The growing number of evangelicals of color have begun pushing in earnest for more of a political voice in the church. In 2015, Michelle Higgins, a black evangelical leader from Ferguson, stood up at a conference in front of thousands of young Christians and called out white evangelicals for caring so much about abortion and so little about the young black men being killed by police officers. “She punched a hole in the universe when she talked,” Harper told me. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, the call for social justice within evangelicalism continued to grow. At Sojourners, Harper was involved in a public campaign called Evangelicals Against Trump, and has since taken an active role in leading the #MeToo movement in the evangelical community by helping to spearhead a campaign called Silence Is Not Spiritual. Although there’s scant evidence to suggest that the pushback Harper helps to lead is enough to threaten white-evangelical support for Trump, her ability, alongside many others, to mobilize evangelical African-American and Latinx voters may become a factor in the 2020 election.

Texas' Mike Siegel is one of the VoteCommonGood candidates who came close and will be running again in 2020

...Harper and others argue, racism persisted among evangelicals and fuelled the rise of the religious right. In the seventies, Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist who co-founded the Heritage Foundation and coined the term “Moral Majority,” was searching for a way to organize evangelicals around a political issue. “Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion,” the historian Randall Balmer wrote in a Politico piece on the history of the religious right. Eventually, Weyrich hit on school desegregation. Bob Jones University, a traditionally all-white evangelical university in Greenville, South Carolina, had recently lost its tax-exempt status for trying to exclude students of color. Religious leaders, including the televangelist Jerry Falwell, rallied behind the university, and Weyrich helped to mobilize conservatives to his cause. In 1983, the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled against Bob Jones. But the ruling galvanized members of the religious right, who came to see themselves as embattled soldiers in a fight for religious freedom.

Although, more recently, the evangelical push for conservatives to dominate secular politics has been cast as a fight over abortion, Harper sees this as a form of whitewashing. Earlier battles over segregation, she explained, had been more important in motivating conservative Christianity’s bid for political power. “The religious right was motivated far, far before Roe v. Wade,” she told me. “The evangelical culture wars began with Brown v. Board of Education.”

...[T]he fundamentalist emphasis on individualism had allowed many white believers to distance themselves from the needs of their community. By contrast black evangelicals can’t avoid the oppression within their communities. “One of the strengths of the black church has always been there wasn’t this false dichotomy between personal piety and civic engagement,” Humphreys said. Since the nineteen-forties, black evangelicals had been actively fighting for equality within the church. In the sixties, John M. Perkins, Harper’s mentor, was an early voice in the Black Evangelical Movement, which emphasized both spiritual development and social change, focussing on education, literacy, and voting rights in the Jim Crow South. In 1973, Perkins was one of the first signatories to the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Concern, a commitment to reject the growing influence of racism, militarism, gender roles, and economic materialism in Christian communities. Although to many ears now this sounds uncontroversial, at the time it faced significant opposition. Perkins, who is eighty-eight, told me by phone that he believes in “a need for Biblical, not racial, reconciliation,” which centers on Jesus’ message of love for all people. “Race is a construct superimposed on both people and scripture to justify repression,” he said.

For Harper, the theology and practice of evangelicals of color provide a reminder of the strong social concerns of early evangelical movements. Thirteen years ago, Harper had led a pilgrimage that took her across ten states in four weeks, tracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears along with the history of slavery. She wondered what her slave ancestors would make of a religious movement that emphasized personal salvation and was unconcerned with justice on earth. Could she go up to them and say that Jesus had died for their sins and now they were saved? “No,” she told me. “Any concept of salvation that doesn’t deal with earthly and state-sanctioned slavery isn’t good news.” Since then, she has focussed more strongly on integrating social justice in her understanding of salvation. “The whole Bible and evangelical faith, along with Protestant faith and Catholic faith, has all been interpreted through the lens of empire,” she told me. “All of it. All of it has been interpreted through the lens of Caesar. And Caesar killed Jesus. And Jesus was an indigenous, brown, colonized man.”