Protestants & Politics 10/21/20
Election polls. Christian political scientists. Church-going presidential candidates. National Mall worship. How The Christian Post Sold Its Soul For Trump.
News
Trump won 81 percent of white evangelicals in 2016. Ralph Reed says he’ll do better this year.
Ralph Reed, a veteran Republican operative who has helped corral the evangelical vote for Republicans for the last 30 years, said he thinks white evangelical support for President Trump is likely to be higher in the 2020 election than it was four years ago.
“I think the 81 percent of the evangelical vote that Trump received four years ago is the floor,” Reed, president of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that he could end up in the mid-80s.”
Reed said that by Election Day his organization will have knocked on between 3.7 million and 4 million doors in a get-out-the-vote effort.And he predicted that the efforts of his group, and others like it, combined with white evangelical enthusiasm for Trump, will produce votes from 5 million to 10 million white evangelicals who did not vote at all in 2016. Reed claimed that there were 31 million white evangelical votes for Trump four years ago.
White Evangelicals Are Actually for Trump in 2020, Not Just Against His Opponent
While white evangelicals’ support for President Donald Trump is close to the strong backing he enjoyed in 2016, voters’ motivations have shifted during his first term at the White House.
This year, a majority are excited to get behind Trump, rather than being primarily motivated by a distaste for his opponent. Among white evangelical Trump supporters, most characterize their vote in 2020 as “for Trump” (57%) and not “against Joe Biden” (20%), according to new Pew Research Center survey breakouts provided to CT.
Both candidates went to church this weekend. Their experiences were very different
Joe Biden and Donald Trump both visited churches over the weekend, a common practice for presidential candidates in the lead up to an election.
Yet their experiences showcased not only dramatically different forms of American Christianity, but also contrasting examples of how religion can intersect with politics.
Feds to Let 15,000 Worship on National Mall—Masks Be Damned
For weeks, Sean Feucht has presided over thousands of maskless worshippers experiencing the “joy of salvation” even as America grapples with the terror of the coronavirus pandemic. From California to Nashville, the evangelical leader has defied public health experts and local officials with his “Let Us Worship” tour—leaving behind fear of superspreader contagion in already hard-hit areas.
Now Feucht’s grand finale is set for this weekend at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. And federal officials appear to be doing absolutely nothing to stop Feucht and his (expected) 15,000 guests, with the National Park Service approving an application to hold a “demonstration or special event” without mention of any guidelines to mitigate COVID-19 exposure.
“It’s disgraceful,” Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who advises the World Health Organization, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “It violates D.C.’s COVID-19 plan and it’s almost certainly going to lead to a superspreader event—and cause many new cases, hospitalization, and even death. It violates virtually every principle to mitigate this pandemic.”
Opinion
How The Christian Post Sold Its Soul For Trump: The inside story of a major Christian publication gradually joining Team Trump and losing itself along the way
I was politics editor of The Christian Post from 2011 to 2019. I watched it go from anti-Trump to reluctant-Trump to pro-Trump. When leadership made it clear the site would pledge its allegiance to Trump, I faced a tough choice: Should I stay or should I go?
This is the story of CP’s gradual descent into Trumpism, and how its embrace of a man who is a walking repudiation of all that Christianity holds dear provides a microcosm of the festering wounds within American evangelicalism itself.
(Note: I’m the author. It’s a long form article about my decision to leave The Christian Post after it joined Team Trump. If you like it and share it, your support is greatly appreciated. The link above will get you give you access even if you don’t have a Medium subscription.)
Evangelicals Made a Bad Bargain With Trump: People of faith should embody moral and intellectual integrity.
But if politically conservative evangelicals have things they can rightly claim to have won, what has been lost?
For starters, by overlooking and excusing the president’s staggering array of personal and public corruptions, Trump’s evangelical supporters have forfeited the right to ever again argue that character counts in America’s political leaders. They might try, but if they do, they will be met with belly laughs. It’s not that their argument is invalidated; it is that because of their glaring hypocrisy, they have sabotaged their credibility in making the argument.
Research
Dueling Realities: Amid Multiple Crises, Trump and Biden Supporters See Different Priorities and Futures for the Nation
Majorities of nearly all religious groups say the coronavirus pandemic is a critical issue, including Black Protestants (79%), Hispanic Catholics (72%), non-Christian religious Americans (70%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (66%), other Christians (62%), white Catholics (58%), white mainline Protestants (55%), and Hispanic Protestants (54%). The pandemic is significantly less critical to white evangelical Protestants (35%).
White evangelicals in particular stand out from all other religious groups in their issue priorities. They are the only religious group for which the coronavirus pandemic does not rank among their top three issues, as only 35% say the issue is critical. White evangelical Protestants are also the only religious group in which a majority (63%) say abortion is a critical issue, and it registers as their top issue. No other religious group has a majority saying abortion is a critical issue.
White Christians continue to favor Trump over Biden, but support has slipped
President Donald Trump continues to be White Christians’ preferred candidate for the November election, but support among voters in three major traditions – White Catholics, White Protestants who are not evangelical and even White evangelical Protestants – has slipped since August, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.
Christian political scientists prefer Biden in 2020: A majority of those surveyed said they'll vote for Biden over Trump, a 20 point increase for the Democratic candidate compared to 2016
I received responses from 105 political scientists. Nearly 81 percent of the sample was between 35-64 years old, and almost 80 percent were male. A majority (53 percent) identified as either strong or lean Republican, compared to 25 percent identifying as strong or lean Democrat. Those who answered this survey reported similar behavior in past election choices to those surveyed earlier, as there was a clear preference for Republican presidents prior to 2016.
Asked about their vote choice in 2020, a majority (56 percent) said they would be voting for Biden, roughly 20 points higher than Hillary Clinton’s support among this group in 2016. Interestingly, of these Biden voters, 31 percent identified as either strong or lean Republican. By contrast, just 23 percent of those surveyed said they would be voting for Trump (a similar figure to 2016), and all but one respondent identified as strong or lean Republican.
Odds & Ends
NAE Podcast: Amy Black | Civics for Christians
Should believers join parties? Absolutely. I want to see individual believers active in political parties. I want them to be salt and light. If we think about it, one of the best ways to influence the direction of political parties and of elected officials, is working from within those parties — raising questions, sharing ideas, offering critiques when needed. This can happen obviously at the grassroots level when people are working on campaigns or they’re part of a county party organization. It can also happen all the way up at the leadership level, helping direct priorities and policy choices. I want to see Christians involved in both parties at all those levels.