Which Side Will James Lankford Take In The Coming Evangelical Civil War?

In 2009 James Lankford stepped down as as the student ministries and evangelism specialist for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma and as director of the youth programming at the Falls Creek Baptist Conference Center in Davis, Oklahoma to run for Congress. His voting record is pure Trumpist and even before Trump, his record was fanatically far right. He claims to believe deeply in Jesus Christ. And yet, for example, he’s an anti-LGBTQ warrior. And so on. In the video of his appearance on Face the Nation Sunday he talked about how a president should be a role model for the nation’s youth and then offered a scathing indictment of the president from whom he has been a lockstep supporter.

“I don’t think that President Trump as a person is a role model for a lot of different youth. That’s just me personally. I don’t like the way that he tweets… some of the things that he says, his word choices at times are not my word choices. He comes across with more New York City swagger than I do from the Midwest and definitely not the way that I’m raising my kids… It’s also been a grand challenge to be able to say, for a person of faith, for a person who believes that there is a right way to go on things I wish that he did. And he was more of a role model in those areas. Now, saying all that, on the area of life where I'm very passionate about, on the issues of abortion, for instance. He's been tenaciously pro-life. He's focused on putting people around him that are very focused on religious liberty, not honoring a particular faith, but honoring any person of any faith to go be able to live and practice that faith and to have respect for that. That's helpful for any person of faith. And to be able to say, give me the space to be able to live my faith and to be able to put people into the administration that will also allow that and encourage that. So for people of faith, it's a bit of a conundrum at times that I look at some of the moral decisions that he's made and go, I disagree with that. But he's also been very, very protective of areas like life and very protective of areas of religious liberty to be able to allow people to be able to live their faith out. And at the end of the day, what we're really looking for in an administration is folks that allow us to be able to live our principles.”

Recently, a group of evangelical pastors and supporters under the rubric of Vote Common Good asked, “What brings you hope? Is it, as Mr. Rogers once famously said, ‘Looking for the helpers’ Is it remembering all the times where love won in the past and having faith that it will happen again? Is it a blind optimism, undamped by the cynicism of the world?  For us, hope is more than just an emotion, it is a way of living. Hope isn’t just that comes to us in life, it is a reason that we live. Hope is essential, it is growing, and it will not be put out. Hope is here, and in 2020, it will trump hate.”

In 2020, their hope will become action as they organize and host the Faith, Hope and the Common Good Summit & Presidential Forum is Des Moines. The summit “will serve as a training for citizens, faith leaders, community organizers, activists, and political candidates on engaging in civic life and the common good” and shortly after the summit, they will begin their Faith, Hope, and Love for a Change on Election Day 2020 National Bus Tour, traveling to every single state to speak with voters of faith and conscience. Their goal with the tour is “to reach those who want to see our common good be elevated, and to encourage those who have been awakened since 2016. In short, 2020 is the year where our hope comes alive.” In 2018 their tour took them from coast to coast where they introduced Democratic candidates to evangelical voters. In CA-45 they helped Katie Porter win a red Orange County seat. In IA-04 and TX-10 they helped bring J.D. Scholten and Mike Siegel closer to election than anyone could have imagined. This cycle they will be working to help both Scholten and Siegel with evangelical voters again.

Writing for the MaddowBlog the day after Christmas, Steve Benen noted that the civil war brewing in the evangelical movement could be catastrophic for the Trump reelection efforts. Evangelicals-- like Lankford-- have overlooked his tsunami of personal failings to get a step up on their innate hatred and bigotry and to see right-wing judges appointed to courts high and low. Benen wrote that “And while it’s best not to overstate matters-- polling suggests Trump’s support among evangelical Christians is much higher than among Americans in general-- these divisions and public conflicts are exactly what the president’s re-election campaign hoped to avoid. For his part, the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson wrote in his latest column, ‘Christians are called to be representatives of God’s kingdom in the life of this world. Betraying that role not only hurts the reputation of evangelicalism; it does a nasty disservice to the reputation of the Gospel.’ That’s almost certainly not what the White House wants to hear.”

An OpEd by Mario Nicolais in the Colorado Sun on Sunday asked if a generational divide over Trump could lead to an evangelical exodus. He wrote of the war of words in evangelical publications between Mark Galli, Timothy Dalrymple and Napp Nazworth and the old guard of the anti-Jesus sell-outs like Trumpists Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham and James Dobson.

For political purposes, depending on whom you believe, the rift either represents the ramblings of an elitist few or the full-fledged veil of the evangelical temple rent in two. The latter represents not just an existential crisis for Trump and his presidency, but a long-term quandary for all Republicans.

In 2018, white, born-again/evangelical Christians supported Republicans running for Congress at a clip of 75%. No other major religious group eclipsed 56%. Any significant dip in those numbers could cause a ripple effect across the electoral spectrum. Republicans simply have no obvious alternative to replace lost evangelical voters.

Unfortunately for them, that is precisely what some analysts already predict. Earlier this year, the left-of-center FiveThirtyEight website released data that young white evangelicals support for Trump had softened. As younger evangelicals tended to be more liberal on immigration and LGBT rights, their support for Trump teetered.

…Now that generational divide may be super-charged by Galli, Dalrymple and Nazworth. Already leery of Trump and other Republicans, the moral cover provided by CT and its allies may grant young evangelical voters the freedom to abandon the party of their parents.

If that abandonment takes place within the next 10 months, the six days before this Christmas may prove to be the most consequential for the Republican Party in decades.

Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, pointed out that theTrumpist faction “got spooked and I think they realized, ‘we don’t have a handle on the many factions.’ You know you’re in trouble when your argument now is, ‘I don’t have all the evangelicals. We just have some and some are breaking off.’ That’s the beginning of a collapse, and that’s something some of us have been saying all along. It feels to a lot of us that the things we were going to say come November 2020 felt like they needed to be said here in December. Impeachment feels like it’s an issue of national crisis, whereas election just feels like it’s part of the natural cycle.”