Hillary And Tom O'Halleran Were Once Republicans. So Was Robb Ryerse. I Trust Him, Though Not The First Two

We first met up with Robb Ryerse in 2017 when he was an evangelical pastor running for Congress in the reddest district in Arkansas-- and as a progressive. Not just as a progressive, as a progressive Republican. I was a little skeptical. When I spoke with him what I saw was that Ryerse really wanted to get sewer money out of politics and welcome immigrants into the country. He talked about good policies from sketchy Republican presidents like Reagan and Nixon. He talked about Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex and even referred to the far right fanatic he was running against, Steve Womack, as "a good man." Womack isn't a good man any more than Adolf Eichmann was a good man, but Ryerse saw Republicans as salvageable. I gathered he was anti-Choice and pro-gun... and Blue America didn't endorse him.

He didn't win his primary. But he was named head of Brand New Congress, political director of Vote Common Good and a year after our first conversation, he did a guest post for DWT, writing that "In Jesus, we see someone who sided with the marginalized and the oppressed. We see someone who spoke truth to people with religious and political power. We see someone who welcomed refugees and immigrants as neighbors. We see someone who offered people the healthcare they needed without blaming them for being poor. We see someone who was really quite progressive." Whew! It was Jesus... not the GOP.

This week Robb did a guest post for a bigger venue-- Time Magazine, that should help promote the book he wrote that's coming out this month, Running For Our Lives: A Story of Faith, Politics, and the Common Good. In the Time piece he wrote that Trump "made history last Friday as the first U.S. president to attend March for Life, the annual anti-abortion rally held in Washington, D.C. For that he received widespread praise from conservative political and religious leaders and voters around the country, including many, unsurprisingly, from my home state of Arkansas. Trump’s decision to attend was motivated by politics. He wasn’t against abortion until he started running for President, and yet he has heard mounting questions raised about the sturdiness of his support among evangelicals, whose backing in 2016 was key to his victory. The kerfuffle around Christianity Today’s December editorial calling for Trump’s removal sparked a reexamination of the durability of that support. Enter March for Life, an opportunity to double down on what Trump knows is the linchpin of his appeal to many religious voters. The transactional nature of Trump’s relationship with evangelicals and other religiously motivated voters is a two-way street. He doesn’t live by nor ostensibly even aspire to the values of most of these voters. They see his flaws but support him anyway because he helps advance elements of their policy agenda, namely, anti-abortion judges and legislation." Last week, Ryerse helped organize a rally for voters in Fayetteville against Trump and in support of Democrats.

When I’m not preaching, I work with a group called Vote Common Good, which aims to get evangelicals and other voters of faith to make the common good-- not political parties-- their primary voting criteria. And this year, voting for the common good means getting Trump and his enablers out of office.

Trump is an anathema to everything I was taught to love about Jesus, everything I was taught about how to live out my faith. His disdain for decency, disrespect toward basic tenets of right and wrong and complete disregard for the most vulnerable among us could not be more fundamentally un-Christian. To vote for him because he sees the political expediency of supporting restrictions on abortion is a Faustian deal with the devil that is ultimately more likely to exact greater cost than reward. Case in point: the astounding about-face in evangelical support for refugee resettlement since Trump took aim at the program.

The unholy alliance some religious voters have struck with Trump is part and parcel of the one the Republican Party as a whole has embraced. The GOP has become the party of Trump, most recently exemplified by the number of Republican senators who have expressed a willingness to abandon their responsibility as part of a co-equal branch of government and vote against allowing witnesses to appear in the president’s impeachment trial. Tribalistic, blind loyalty to Trump because of the power he is able to confer as President has led both evangelicals and the GOP to abandon previously held values.

Now more than ever, at a time of unprecedented polarization, it’s important that voters think beyond political party. Republicans don’t have to become Democrats-- they should just consider voting for one this year. Voters of faith should set aside their personal interests and predilections and instead prioritize the common good for all.

Traveling across the United States on VCG’s 50-state bus tour, which launched in Iowa at the start of January and has hit six other states since, I’ve met voters of faith who are looking for an alternative to Trump. They voted for him in 2016 but can’t bring themselves to do it again. We are working to mobilize them and train Democratic candidates to engage religious voters more effectively.

If a critical percentage-- say 5%-- of evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 don’t this year, he can’t win. That’s why I’ve decided to dedicate much of my time and efforts in 2020 to reaching those voters. Because a deal with Democrats is better than a deal with the devil.

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.”

Is There Really NOTHING That Will Change Evangelicals' Minds About Trump? How About Fox News Addicts?

Is there anything likely that could persuade you to change your position on Trump? Same for most white evangelicals. Reporting on the new polling from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), The Atlantic's Emma Green wrote that new polling shows Trump’s base totally unified behind him, no matter what investigations might reveal. Start with this: 98% of Republicans who get their news primarily by watching Fox oppose removal and 71% of them strongly approve of Trump, which is all the more interesting single only 39% of non-Fox-watching Republicans strongly approve. For all his huffing and puffing about Fox lately, the station is his biggest firewall.

Green wrote that in mid-September 94% of self-identified Republicans opposed impeachment. "A month later-- after the news about Trump’s fateful phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and after House Democrats formally launched an impeachment inquiry-- their views are essentially unchanged. Even with these revelations, 93 percent of Republicans remained opposed to impeachment in mid-October, according to data released today from the Public Religion Research Institute. Of all Republican voters, two subgroups stand out for their unwavering support of Trump: those who primarily get their news from Fox, and white evangelical Christians."

Vote Common Good-- progressive evangelical pastors and laymen-- are disproving the sweeping generality that white evangelical Christians are incapable of changing their minds.

Doug Pagitt is an evangelical pastor in Minneapolis and co-founder of Vote Common Good. "Of course, Evangelical voters are capable of changing their minds in regards to Trump," he told today. "They changed their minds toward him in early 2016, as this article points out. I am confident that up to 15% are prepared to change their support away from Trump in 2020 as compared to 2016. The poll questions about the support of impeachment will not serve as a pre-curser of election support. I’ve recently overheard high profile evangelicals expressing their personal concern about the President and his statements of his “unsurpassed wisdom,” the retreat in support for the Kurds, and general incompetence. These polls are late-indicators of what happens in the election. Trump will not lose all Evangelical support, obviously, but as we saw in the 2018 mid-term election, Evangelical support for Republicans dropped from 81% in 2016 to 75% in 2018. This number will move downward again in 2020." 

A significant portion of Trump’s Republican supporters are open about their belief in his infallibility: 42 percent of Republicans said there is virtually nothing the president could do to lose their approval. Among Republicans who cited Fox News as their primary news source, this number was even higher, at 55 percent. And Trump’s most steadfast supporters are also most likely to condone his behavior: Nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals said Trump has not hurt the dignity of the presidency. By contrast, majorities of all other religious groups said Trump has damaged the image of the office.

These numbers reinforce the idea that some of Trump’s supporters have come to see American politics as an all-out war. Whatever reservations they may have had about Trump when he first ran for office have apparently been soothed, either by his full-throated defense of his supporters’ priorities or because these voters resent what they see as unrelenting attacks against him and his administration. Trump’s evangelical surrogates have said as much. The Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress recently said that Democrats were inviting a “civil war” by pursuing impeachment proceedings

Hard-core Trump supporters are not representative of America, and they’re not the only voters who have hardened their political position in the past few years. Only 29 percent of registered voters told PRRI that they would vote for Trump in the 2020 election, no matter who becomes the Democratic nominee. By comparison, 40 percent of registered voters said they would support the Democratic candidate no matter who it is, while 29 percent said their ballot remains up for the taking.

Regardless of how impeachment plays out in the coming months, the proceedings are not likely to bring any semblance of political unity or compel committed Trump supporters to change their mind. Even if the president goes down, some Americans have apparently decided that they’re willing to go down with him.

Frank Schaeffer, whose father, Francis Schaeffer, helped "invent" the religious right, has a very pessimistic view of this subset of Americans that he shared with us early this morning. "What secular commentators don’t 'get' is that Trump has passed from the political to the supernatural for white evangelical supporters in the same way as they don’t care what 'science says' about virgin births in order to believe in one. Evangelicals don’t care about facts related to Trump being 'sent by God to save America.' It’s now a matter of faith. Trump has been 'raised up by God' not because he is good but because he is being used by God set the conditions for the end of the world. Trump is a holly mystery that can’t be argued about but just needs to be believed."

Another Side Effect Of Trumpism: Americans Are Losing Their Religion-- Rapidly

The latest Gallup poll concludes that Christianity is rapidly declining in the U.S.. "The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009. Both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses of population share... The share of U.S. adults who are white born-again or evangelical Protestants now stands at 16%, down from 19% a decade ago."

Are Trump and his satanic bagmen, disguised as religious leaders, driving people away from Christianity? If you know anyone who's losing their religion-- or their faith-- suggest they start reading, a progressive pastor's blog: John Pavlovitz's Stuff That Needs To Be Said-- for a refreshing and reinvigorating perspective on faith.





Yesterday's post, I Resist Because I'm A Christian starts with the words evangelical leaders have moved far away from in their twisted decision to worship Trump. "As a Christian," wrote Pavlovitz, "I take the words of Jesus seriously. They matter to me. I don’t think they’re theoretical ideas meant to be uttered for an hour on Sunday or kept locked in stained glass museums or contained solely in memorized prayers or resigned to live only in Twitter bios-- I think they’re supposed to propel me out of privilege and prejudice, and into the places where grieving, hopeless, hungry, tired people are so that I can give comfort and be a help. I think they’re supposed to cause trouble for the powerful and be good news for the poor. I think they’re supposed to bring peace and justice and equity-- even if they put me in harm’s way. I don’t think I can call myself a Christian without living the words."

[I]t is because of the words of Jesus and my commitment to trying to emulate his character in the world, that I resist right now.

It is not a political affiliation that moves me, but a moral conviction, a spiritual agitation.

My faith compels me to push back.

I resist this Administration’s bigotry, because I see Jesus celebrating Samaritans and dining with prostitutes and touching the lepers and welcoming outsiders.

I resist its callousness, because I see Jesus embracing the grieving and healing the sick and defending the oppressed.


I resist the bloated arrogance and spitting malice and unrepentant cruelty of this Presidency, because I hear Jesus say that the peacemakers and the meek and the pure in heart, walk the path that good people are called to humbly walk.

I resist all of this because the Jesus I find in the gospels first resisted it. He opposed power, hatred, greed, and contempt for difference. That was the whole story: loving loudly and being willing to suffer and die on behalf of someone else.

Jesus lived a life fueled by compassion for hurting people, one fiercely devoted to bringing equity and letting more people come to the table. He dismantled the walls between people, leveled the ground that separated them, showed their inherent worth.

He wouldn’t be abiding white nationalism or gun-waving hubris or the bullying of gay couples or the defending of Confederate monuments. He wouldn’t be tolerating  religious people making their beds with dictators or a Church that cowered to hateful power.

These would be the very tables he would be turning over, so I too am upending them.

Resistance isn’t a hashtag or a catch phrase or a bumper sticker slogan and it has nothing to do with a party or a President.

It’s the most sincere prayer I can utter, the most tangible expression of belief I can offer, the clearest declaration of my faith that I can make in these moments.

Resistance to hatred is continuing the work of Jesus and so I do this work-- so help me God.

This morning the New Yorker published an essay by Eliza Griswald, Teaching Democrats To Speak Evangelical, about the role Vote Common Good is playing in make a space for evangelicals turned off by Trump's nature and by his excesses. A few weeks ago, at the invitation of Ted Lieu, Vote Common Good founder Doug Pagitt and VCG political director, Robb Ryerse, both pastors, explained the group's work to progressives in Congress. "Trying to memorize John 3:16 in the car on your way to the event and then quote that is probably not the best way to connect with faith-based voters,” said Ryerse. "He had seen a candidate try this trick on the way to a rally in Kansas and then struggle to remember the phrase onstage."

The exodus of religious voters from the Democratic Party over the past several decades is typically explained by the culture wars, most notably over abortion. As the historian of religion Randall Balmer notes in his book Thy Kingdom Come, in the sixties and seventies, the Democratic Party had a large Catholic contingent and mostly opposed abortion. By contrast, many prominent Republicans-- including Nelson Rockefeller; Ronald Reagan, during his time as the governor of California; and Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the opinion in Roe v. Wade-- affirmed and expanded abortion rights. But, beginning in the early seventies, evangelical preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson worked with Republican strategists to press the Party to more vigorously oppose abortion. At the same time, the second-wave feminist movement pushed the Democratic Party to defend women’s reproductive rights. As a result, pro-life Democrats, most notably religious voters, began defecting from the Party.

Pagitt believes that this history is overly simplistic. He points out that a large percentage of Democratic voters--sixty-seven per cent, according to a Pew poll from 2018--still claim a religious affiliation. He believes that many moderate evangelicals would be happy to vote for Democrats, but that the Party often overlooks them during campaigns. In 2008, Barack Obama courted evangelicals, along with Catholics, mainstream Protestants, and Jewish voters, by asking religious leaders to appear as campaign surrogates and to take part in a regular conference call. Pagitt worked on behalf of the campaign, approaching conservative leaders and calling evangelicals who had voted for George W. Bush in 2004. “It wasn’t just me; they kept calling hundreds of leaders and asking if we could spare one more weekend,” Pagitt said. Obama succeeded in taking a large number of white evangelical and Catholic Bush voters.

But, in 2016, Hillary Clinton failed to woo these voters: between 2008 and 2016, the percentage of people who voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate declined among voters in every religious affiliation, and the dropoff was especially sharp among evangelicals. Pagitt pointed out that, though Clinton is a devout Methodist and received daily devotional readings during the campaign, she almost never spoke about her faith in public. “I don’t even know what her favorite Bible passage was,” he said. “I thought, Well, her polling numbers must tell her she doesn’t need religious voters.”

Pagitt describes himself as an evangelical, though he thinks of this as more of a sociological term than a strict theological one. “It’s like saying I’m Midwestern,” he told me. “It locates me.” He grew up near Minneapolis, in a non-religious family, and converted as a teen-ager. He spent eleven years as a pastor at Wooddale, an evangelical megachurch in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. In 1999, he planted a progressive, nondenominational church in Minneapolis called Solomon’s Porch. But, in 2018, feeling disappointed by Clinton’s loss, he founded Vote Common Good to target the voters that Clinton had overlooked. In the leadup to the midterm elections, he and fourteen other members held religious revivals in support of candidates across the country. The events featured beer on tap and thumping music from dirty-gospel acts, including Reverend Vince Anderson and Meah Pace. The family-friendly party atmosphere was modelled on revivals that the conservative evangelist Franklin Graham was holding for Donald Trump and other Republicans. “The larger goals were loving your neighbor and creating a check on power,” Diana Butler Bass, a prominent progressive theologian who joined Pagitt’s tour, told me.

Pagitt felt hopeful after the votes were cast. In 2016, eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for Trump; last year, in the midterm elections, seventy-five per cent of white evangelicals voted Republican. Pagitt and the other members of Vote Common Good saw this small decline as a sign of progress: in ones and twos, evangelicals were becoming disenchanted with Trump--especially with his overt racism and misogyny, which some saw as against their values. “I don’t think it’s a silent majority,” Ryerse, Vote Common Good’s political director, told me, “but I think there’s a significant silent percentage.”

Katie Paris, a media trainer with Vote Common Good, discussed campaign tactics with the representatives. She noted that, during the midterms, Republicans had contacted religious leaders district by district to shore up their support, and often remained in close touch with them between election seasons. “You need to make it more difficult for the right to organize against you,” she said. She suggested that the representatives also reach out to religious leaders to introduce themselves. They didn’t have to fake piety, she said, but they should acknowledge that these communities were important to their constituencies. She also felt that Democrats had become afraid to mention religion at campaign events, which ceded faith to the right. She urged the representatives to discuss spirituality “wherever your values come from”--whether or not they were believers. The important thing was to make it clear that they took religion seriously and didn’t look down on the devout.

...After the meeting in Washington, Pagitt decided that the group would do more good advising candidates in the field and decided to take it back on the road. Since then, Vote Common Good has run several training seminars in New York City and around the country for Democratic congressional candidates. “In all five boroughs, there are evangelicals and other religiously motivated candidates,” he told me recently, while in New York. “We give candidates a breakdown by religious affiliation in their districts, and it’s shocking how many religious voters there are.” Last week, they launched a love-in-politics pledge, which is based on I Corinthians 13:4-7 (“Love is patient, love is kind . . .”) and calls on politicians to hold others to a standard of decency and compassion. “We’re skeptical of Mike Pence’s willingness to be swayed,” he said, of the Vice-President. “But we’re helping religiously motivated voters to have the rationale and support to change their votes.” The group is also planning a forum in Iowa, in January, where Democratic Presidential candidates could reflect on their vision of faith. Pagitt says that the major campaigns have indicated interest, though none has committed. “I think they should take religiously motivated voters seriously,” he told me. “If they don’t, it’s at their own peril.”

The Devil's Bargain-- Republican Religion

On Friday, Trump AG William Barr spoke at the Notre Dame Law School, decrying the ascendancy of secularism and vowing "to do all he can to assure continued religious freedom for Americans." More a political hack for the far right than an actual Attorney General, Barr babbled, incoherently to the students that "Among the militant secularism are many of the so-called progressives, but where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system?"

Trudy Ring's piece for The Advocate puts the lie to the manufactured grievances Barr and the rest of the Trumpists are trying to stir up among religious-right voters. This weekend was the annual the Values Voters Summit-- nothing more than a GOP conclave-- and progressive evangelicals Vote Common Good went... and got kicked out by the Trump-oriented anti-Jesus Family Research Council.

It’s been said that it’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness-- and that’s what the progressive Christian group Vote Common Good aims to do at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit.

“We want to just be a small candle in the corner of what tends to be a pretty dark narrative,” Doug Pagitt, cochair and executive director of Vote Common Good, told The Advocate in an interview ahead of the event.

...The list of speakers at this year’s VVS, which opened Friday at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., reads like a who’s who of homophobes, including FRC President Tony Perkins, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, current Congressman Louie Gohmert, International Religious Freedom Ambassador Sam Brownback (set to appear Saturday night with Trump), and many more. Anti-LGBTQ sentiment is, of course, not the only thing the conference is about-- there are sessions devoted to anti-abortion activism, opposing gun restrictions, resisting “socialism,” and other causes close to the religious right’s heart.

But Vote Common Good will be represented at the VVS to show there’s an alternative path for religious believers, including evangelical Christians-- they don’t have to be part of the Christian right, Pagitt said.

The word evangelical is often associated with conservative Christianity. One of its definitions in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “emphasizing salvation by faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ through personal conversion, the authority of Scripture, and the importance of preaching as contrasted with ritual.” Another is “marked by militant or crusading zeal.” And evangelicalism is sometimes connected with Christian fundamentalism, a belief that everything in the Bible is to be taken literally.

But Pagitt, who describes himself as an evangelical pastor of a nondenominational church in Minneapolis, said there’s not a single agreed-upon definition of evangelicalism, although there are some general guidelines as to what it means. People who identify as evangelical, he said, tend to have a deeply personal sense of faith, organized around the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and use the Bible as a guide to living. What his faith has guided him to is a belief in inclusion, of love for all people, including LGBTQ people.

“For many of the people who are in this movement, it has been the fight to include gay and lesbian people in their churches that has pushed them,” he said.

He and Vote Common Good also break with the Christian right on a variety of other issues. The group opposes the criminalization of abortion and limitations on contraception. It supports political action to reduce environmental destruction, poverty, gun violence, and international conflicts. These are all part of the priorities Pagitt calls the “four P’s”-- people, poverty, peace, and the planet.

...At the Values Voter Summit, Pagitt is promoting his organization’s “Love-in-Politics Pledge,” which urges leaders to act with the kind of love described in the New Testament’s First Corinthians, which says in part, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

“It seems the opposite of what Donald Trump does in his life and his political positions,” Pagitt said.

The group doesn’t have a spot on the conference stage-- to obtain that, it would have to agree to a set of beliefs that Vote Common Good doesn’t endorse. So Pagitt and his colleagues will be spreading the word about the pledge in public spaces at the Omni. “We’ll do it with a wink and a smile,” he added, not by being disruptive.

Doug, in the den of the Beast

Maybe smiling is a no-no, because the Vote Common Good folks were kicked out of the event. Saturday, Pastor Pagitt wrote to Vote Common Good supporters that they went to the VVS "with a mission: Bring together Christians who are interested in elected officials who will lead in the way of love. And they kicked us out. The Family Research Council kicked us out because they are afraid. They’re threatened. When we engage in conversation with Christian voters, those people will realize that their values compel them to vote for the common good-- which means voting against Donald Trump and his allies, including the Family Research Council. They’re scared of losing support. We didn’t go to the Values Voter Summit with a mission of division or hate. We traveled to unite Christian voters behind our Love-in-Politics Pledge, calling on faith-full voters to support candidates who lead in the way of love. We are disappointed, but sadly not surprised, that the Family Research Council rejected our outreach. But we will persist. Our message of love resonates with Christians all across America. We know that when our movement opens up the conversation, others will join us."

Doug told me that he had requested a media pass last week, which had been turned down. They were told though that, with permission from the hotel, they could make recordings.  "When we arrived they changed that. They stopped up from recording ourselves in the hallway. We stopped recording. Then they came back 10 minutes later and said, 'we are revoking you participation and you must turn in your registration badge.' When we asked for the reason we were told, 'we don’t need to give you a reason. You need to turn in your badge and leave immediately or you will be escorted out by the city police.' Then we were told that we could not be in the part of the hotel where the conference was being held. We did as instructed after asking about a refund for our registration. We were told that we would have to email their office and request a refund."

Is that part of William Barr's Judeo-Christian moral system? They go mad when they hear this kind of thing-- which he wrote on Thursday in conjunction to Ralph Reed's upcoming book, Render to God and Trump-- from influential pastors like Doug Pagitt:

Ralph Reed has chosen Jesus’ statement to "Render to God what is God’s and to Cesar what is Cesar’s" for his argument calling Evangelical voter’s to support Trump. He should have however considered Jesus' other statement, "what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose their very soul."

Just as Reed has misread the "Render" passage-- it has nothing to do with giving blind allegiance to a President, so, I assume he would misread the "lose your very soul" quote.

Jesus was of course not referring to a an afterlife narrative of heaven or hell-- in fact Jesus never spoke of those dimensions.

Jesus was referring to losing the very sense of one’s self, losing touch with reality, losing, your own core self, becoming endlessly awash in the whims of the day.

And, that is precisely what Reed and the Right Wing religious fanatics he leads have done-- they have lost their souls, or some might say, "their minds."

I am reminded of the old joke about a stock trader who when he heard Jesus’ warning that you could gain the whole world and lose your soul responded by saying, "actually that’s a pretty great deal. Think about it, the entire world… for just one soul." It seems Reed has made that same calculation.

And, he is even willing to call his Christian fringe of followers to go down to the trading floor with him.

As it turns out Reed will not actually get the "whole world" in this trade. He will get a Tumpian, gold-plated, knock-off version of it. Because in the end, Trump will lose on November 3, 2020. And, as it turns out so will Ralph Reed and all the others who make this Devil’s bargain.

Far Right Anti-LGBTQ Evangelical Extremists On The Warpath For Trump And His Republican Enablers

You may recall that last cycle Blue America teamed up with a group of progressive evangelical pastors, Vote Common Good, to help progressive candidates across the country get in touch with evangelical voters who were not feeling Trump and his enablers were good for their families and our country. They helped elect more than a few Democrats to the House, including Katie Porter (D-CA) and Veronica Escobar (D-TX). This cycle they are continuing their work with Mike Siegel (TX), Kara Eastman (NE), Audrey Denney (CA), J.D. Scholten (IA).

Right Wing Watch reported yesterday that the viciously anti-LGBTQ neo-Nazi operation, Family Research Council is targeting Vote Common Good with their typical abuse against progressive organizations and are fundraising by denigrating them and lying about them.

The most recent mail item signed by Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and distributed to supporters takes direct aim at Vote Common Good, a liberal faith organization whose stated purpose is “changing the narrative that has under-girded white Evangelical and Catholic support for President Trump Republicans who, for a variety of reasons, have put other priorities over the common good.”

“The Democrat Party often feels resistant to connecting with religiously-minded voters, while the Republican Party is held hostage by religious extremism. We will work hard to help both parties engage Common Good religiously oriented voters in ways that will add benefit to their political expression and not allow religion to be a wedge issue in our politics,” Vote Common Good’s website states.

But the envelope containing the fundraising letter from Family Research Council declares in bold font: “SOROS EXPOSED! His plan to send out liberal Christians quoting Scripture to deceive and divide Evangelical Voters.”

Family Research Council tells supporters in the fundraising letter that Vote Common Good “sends out ultra-liberal pastors and speakers who identify as Christians and dress up their radical political agenda in biblical terms” and asks supporters to donate “the most generous gift you can manage at this time.”

“You and I must act now to alert our brothers and sisters in Christ not to fall for this deception,” Perkins writes, going on to characterize faith leaders working with Vote Common Good as “deceivers” who “sow confusion and division among Bible-believing Christians.”

In another fundraising letter received last week, Perkins urged supporters to send Family Research Council “the most generous donation you can manage” with a signed piece of paper pledging to pray for President Trump. Perkins wrote that the signed cards would be delivered to the White House “as soon as possible.” But those who send the prayer pledge back to Family Research Council are told to keep an attached bookmark that reminds them to pray for Trump.

Vote Common Good did several successful high-visibility events in evangelical communities with J.D. Scholten in western Iowa last year. This morning, J.D. reminded me that "The Democratic Party shouldn’t automatically cede religious voters to the Republican party. It’s when we write off people and places like Rural America, and Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, that we lose elections, and our country is worse off. We need to get out there and connect directly with the people and fight for every vote. We have to show up and prove that we are the party of family values: fighting for affordable and comprehensive healthcare, quality education, safe communities to live in and raise a family, decent jobs with benefits-- the list goes on!"

It was author and filmmaker Frank Schaefer, an expert on the religionist right, who first introduced us to Vote Common Good. This morning he wrote that "America's white evangelicals were asked by Trump to choose between himself and Jesus. "They chose Trump." I asked him what to make of this attack on fellow Christians. He told me this morning that "In targeting VCG there is an echo of what Jeffress said:

I’ve literally spoken to thousands and thousands of evangelical Christians, I have never seen them more angry over any issue than this attempt to illegitimately remove this president from office, overturn the 2016 election and negate the votes of millions of evangelicals in the process. And if the Democrats are successful in removing the president from office, I’m afraid it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this nation from which this country will never heal.

"Now Trump is conducting an all-out assault on the impeachment process, calling it a coup in a pair of tweets posted on Tuesday:

As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!

What drives the depth and intensity of support for Trump? And how far are those supporters willing to go to keep him in the White House? A desire for the imposition of a whites-only theocracy is what drives the white evangelical Trump vote-- 'Christian America.'"

UPDATE: Sign Me Up:

Ted Lieu (D-CA) took note of the Family Research Council attacks on VCG as well. "Vote Common Good must be doing good work if the Family Research Council is fear mongering about them. If protecting the planet, providing affordable healthcare, and cleaning up our government is a 'radical political agenda' then sign me up!"

If Evangelicals Are Supporting Trump Because They Can't Cope With Women's Bodies, Maybe They Should Skip The Election This Year And See A Psycho-Therapist Instead

Trump's support among white evangelicals hasn't sunk much despite the discomfort some of them feel about a few of his noticeably anti-Jesus policies and about the way he comports himself. 80% of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016 and, if the election were held today, 77% of them say they would do the same now. Writing for the Washington Post, Andrea Lucado cited a Maris poll for NPR and PBS from last month, in her piece that ran yesterday, How the female body became the scapegoat for white evangelicals. She pointed to the fact that 70% of white evangelicals reported hating Hillary Clinton, overwhelmingly because of her stand on women's Choice. "As a white, evangelical-raised Christian," wrote Lucado, "I am frustrated, angry and confused by the continued support of Trump even when his first term is coming to an end, but I can’t claim to be surprised." Not only do 65% of evangelicals oppose abortion-- a relatively new phenomenon; American evangelicals used to back Choice and deride Catholics for opposing it-- but "Americans who oppose the legality of abortion (27%) are significantly more likely than those who support the legality of abortion (18%) to say they will only vote for a candidate who shares their views on the issue."

I have grown suspicious of the way some evangelicals identify with their pro-life status so deeply that it affects every political decision they make.

French literary critic and philosopher René Girard studied how ancient civilizations relied on the tradition of the scapegoat. Girard claimed that scapegoating was necessary due to what he called “mimetic desire,” which, put simply, is the fact that we want what others have. This coveting ultimately leads to conflict only resolved through an act of violence, usually cast upon one victim chosen by the tribe: the scapegoat.





Girard found that this method of scapegoating changed when Jesus arrived in ancient Palestine. Jesus himself was described as a scapegoat, a “lamb led to slaughter” (Acts 8:32). But Girard argued that the circumstances around Christ’s crucifixion symbolized the end of the need of scapegoating. As he explained in his book “I See Satan Fall Like Lightening,” “Jesus is innocent, and those who crucify him are guilty.”





Girard theorized that because Jesus’ innocence was known by those in attendance at his crucifixion (See the accounts of Pontius Pilate in Matthew 27:23-24 and of the centurion in Matthew 27:54), the curtain was pulled back on the scapegoat method. It was finally clear that the truly guilty are those who scapegoat, not the scapegoat. The crucifixion symbolized the final sacrifice and negated the usefulness of the scapegoat tradition.

Even though Christianity was founded upon this very sacrifice, some have not gotten the message that scapegoating has ended.

Although the pro-life movement has made steps toward helping women through pregnancy, many of its tactics to prevent abortion are sometimes driven by shame. Each movie that portrays the horrors of the procedure, each image of a fetus, each hand-scribbled sign bobbing up and down outside a Planned Parenthood seems to be pointing a finger and asking, How could you? And the finger is always pointed at the woman. Her decision, her body, her fault.

What I have seen in the pro-life movement and elsewhere in evangelical culture is this ancient reliance upon the scapegoat mechanism, and the scapegoat is always the same-- the female body.

Purity culture-- an evangelical movement that reached its height in the late 1990s and early 2000s-- promoted a core message of abstinence before and outside of marriage. The way this sexual ethic was taught to me and many others badly warped my view of sex, the body and gender. Only in recent years have I been able to clumsily untangle the message from my faith, namely the weight, guilt and responsibility the movement put on females.

When learning about sex and purity, I was taught my virginity was my greatest commodity, therefore, I must protect it at all costs until I was married. Marriage and childbearing would be the pinnacle of my existence-- a belief many evangelicals still hold today. Just this week, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, suggested being a parent is what makes one human.

According to purity culture, the protection of my virginity was up to me. I remember many lectures about the importance of girls’ dressing modestly so as not to let our brothers stumble into the sin of lust. I once heard a youth leader say that a mere glimpse of a bra strap would cause a boy to have impure thoughts.

I was warned about how often boys thought about sex and the warning’s undertone was a warning for me: Don’t lead him into temptation. It was up to me to keep myself pure and to keep my brothers in Christ pure, as well. If I had sex before marriage, I would not only taint myself, but I would also own the guilt of causing the male I had sex with to have sex with me.

It made for a world nearly impossible for a girl to do right and for a boy to do wrong.

The shame and guilt that drove purity culture is the same shame I see driving the pro-life movement today. And like purity culture, the woman is the scapegoat. She is the one making the decision. She, and she alone, is at fault.

The fact that white evangelicals still as a whole support Trump for a 2020 reelection with abortion as the flag over their crusade points to an important truth: Evangelicals are still obsessed with female bodies, controlling them and blaming them.

Recalling Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, this leads me to wonder, what is the desire behind the scapegoat of the woman’s body? What do evangelicals want that others have? Is it power? Is it fame? Is it women themselves?

Or, do they fear what an end to their scapegoat mechanism would do? When the woman, or scapegoat, speaks, it causes unrest. It causes a dismantling. Look what it did to former Southern Baptist seminary president Paige Patterson, one of the most prominent religious leaders of the late 20th century. Is the pro-life movement just a convenient, moral excuse to keep the woman as scapegoat, and, therefore, maintain order?

Whatever it is, the pull to isolate a presidential vote to one issue is strong enough to blind many evangelicals to what Jesus would care about today: the poor (He was.), the immigrant (He was one.), the marginalized (He was.), the person of color (He was one.). It seems the primary rock some evangelicals are standing on is one in which the woman’s body is scapegoat, in which she is sacrificed.

President of the Evangelical States of America, Pig Man

And this isn't just about people in some backward part of Alabama or Oklahoma. How about Long Island? Nancy Goroff is running for a Suffolk County congressional seat held by anti-Choice fanatic Lee Zeldin. Yesterday, Goroff told her supporters that "Trump has instituted a 'gag rule' that prevents doctors from giving full medical advice to their patients. It has forced Planned Parenthood out of Title X, putting at risk wellness exams, STD and HIV screenings, birth control, and contraceptive education that millions of people count on. As a scientist, I believe medical decisions need to be made with the best information possible, and I don’t believe the government should stand between a patient and their doctor. Anti-choice politicians, like my opponent Lee Zeldin, are part of the problem and need to be replaced. Zeldin has voted to defund Planned Parenthood, to allow for 'personhood' legislation and to repeal the Affordable Care Act-- stripping health insurance from tens of millions of Americans. Overall, he’s voted against Planned Parenthood 30 times THIS YEAR-- and not once in favor of the women who need their help. When it comes to women's healthcare, Zeldin chooses policies that ignore the facts and data. As a scientist and a mom... I will work to debunk the lies about Planned Parenthood and fight to restore critical funding for it."

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.”