Can Evangelicals Get Behind Harris?
Sept 28, 2024 21:44:43 GMT
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Post by kiwi on Sept 28, 2024 21:44:43 GMT
Can Evangelicals Get Behind Harris?
A coalition of believers, including many conservatives, is embracing the Democrats.
By Eliza Griswold
The New Yorker
September 28, 2024
Kamala Harris
Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty
During a recent online strategy session, Jim Ball, an evangelical minister and founder of Evangelicals for Harris, lifted the United States up in prayer. “We pray for the healing of our country,” he offered. “We pray that we can be the folks who help bring people back together.” Behind him, in his basement in Vienna, Virginia, two placards leaned against each other, reading, in English and Spanish, “Faithful, Compassionate Evangelicals Exercising Our God-Given Citizenship.”
Of the numerous efforts that have coalesced since August to support Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign, Evangelicals for Harris—which claims two hundred and fifty thousand people who’ve signed up to volunteer or to receive information from the group—is one of the most ethnically and ideologically diverse. Participants are Black, white, Latino, and Asian American. They include disaffected conservatives, independents, and a smaller number of liberals who’ve banded together to stop the reëlection of Donald Trump and to challenge a troubling strain of American Christianity.
“White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the church today,” Jemar Tisby, a public theologian and the author of “The Spirit of Justice,” which connects the history of racial justice to the Christian faith, had warned on an earlier Evangelicals for Harris Zoom. He joined the call to bear public witness against the hijacking of evangelicalism. “For a long time, people of color within evangelical circles have seen the unholy alliance between religion and right-wing politics,” he told me.
Some white evangelicals are beginning to see the same issues. Lee Scott, a pastor and cattle farmer from Butler County, Pennsylvania, has become one of the group’s volunteer leaders, and, during the recent strategy call, he laid out plans for a service day in Pittsburgh later this month, when members of Evangelicals for Harris will participate in a community cleanup. “We’re going to need T-shirts,” he told his fellow-volunteers.
Another volunteer, who coördinates merchandise and social media, reported that merch sales were brisk. Evangelicals for Harris sells an array of branded items designed to spark conversations, including yard signs, insulated mugs, pet tank tops, and camouflage trucker hats. “Folks are wearing their witness,” she told me. The volunteer, who was concerned about her safety, preferred to remain anonymous. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who’s travelled with Trump, has targeted Evangelicals for Harris, calling them “insane” and arguing that they’re helping Kamala Harris bring “illegal Aliens” into the country.
“The great news is that we’re receiving a massive outpouring of gratitude online,” the volunteer reported on the call. She read one such message from X aloud: “I left my church 7 yrs ago due to ugly awful blasphemy. You showing me daily, the Word the TRUE word of the Lord, love and empathy makes me want to find a new home to worship.” This was particularly inspiring to the group: not only were they reaching voters but they were also portraying a kind of evangelicalism that might bring people back to church.
Evangelicals for Harris has one principle aim: to persuade Christian voters to reject Donald Trump. “What MAGA missed is that evangelicals were key to immigration reform, prison reform, child tax credit, U.S. support for Ukraine,” Jim Ball told me in a text message. “Anyone who prioritizes these issues, and now abortion, has been Left Behind by the MAGA G.O.P.” The group’s spirit, however, reflects a larger push among white evangelicals to wrest their faith from Christian nationalism, and to restore a more welcoming and expansive vision of evangelicalism that transcends party politics.
During the past several decades, the political alignment of evangelicals has shifted dramatically. Until Ronald Reagan was elected, giving rise to the Christian right, the most famous American evangelical President was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Today, of the some thirty million white Americans who are evangelical Christians, eighty-five per cent identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Tens of millions of white Democrats have left the church. These figures are almost diametrically opposed among Black Protestants, most of whom are evangelicals; eighty-four per cent are aligned with the Democratic Party.
And yet anti-Trump evangelicals point to the fact that their fellow-believers can be swayed to cross party lines. In 2008, Barack Obama won twenty-six per cent of the white evangelical vote. One reason was Obama’s position on abortion; he described himself as pro-choice but spoke about a desire to reduce the number of abortions. In 2016, under pressure from reproductive-rights advocates, Hillary Clinton offered more definitive support for abortion rights, dropping her use of her husband’s old slogan, “Safe, legal, and rare.” This, among other factors, cost her white evangelical voters. Only sixteen per cent voted for her; eighty-one per cent voted for Trump.
The attempt by moderate evangelicals to peel away their fellow-Christians from Trump really began in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Some formed groups, such as Vote Common Good, which travelled the country by bus, holding sing-alongs and rallies in swing-state counties that are heavily populated by evangelicals. Jim Ball, who’d spent twenty years running the Evangelical Environmental Network, formed Evangelicals for Biden, with the aim of winning back as many evangelicals who’d voted for Obama in 2008 as he could.
Such efforts succeeded. In 2020, Biden captured about twenty per cent of the evangelical vote, which helped secure him the election. Ball’s group received messages on social media from voters who indicated that they’d planned to vote for Trump but changed their minds during the campaign. “Each flip actually represents two votes,” Ball told me. Last spring, he longed to return to his climate work but felt that he had to focus on defeating Trump again.
When Biden dropped out of the race, in July, a new energy suffused Ball’s effort. Within two hours of Harris announcing her candidacy, he had rebranded the group Evangelicals for Harris. Ball, who was hiking along the Potomac River that Sunday afternoon, immediately texted his core group of volunteers, “We are going to win!”
Like White Dudes for Harris, and so many other campaign groups, Evangelicals for Harris gained traction with a mid-August Zoom call that drew in thousands of participants. But it was an ad, released several days later, that drove its explosive reach. The ad features a clip from a sermon by Billy Graham, calling on believers to atone for their sins. It then smash-cuts to Donald Trump admitting that he’d never asked God for forgiveness. “Is there any greater denial of Christ,” the ad asks, “than to say ‘I do not need his forgiveness’?” It stands in stark contrast to the videos that, following the July assassination attempt, conflated Trump with Jesus. More important, the ad drew the ire of Billy Graham’s son Franklin, an avid Trump supporter. On X, Graham dismissed the group as “liberals” who “are trying to mislead people” about the fact that his father was a staunch conservative.
Evangelicals for Harris replied, saying, “The issue, Franklin, is that in your worship of Trump you have forsaken the Gospel. We are voting for Harris but we only worship Jesus.” Franklin Graham’s niece Jerushah Duford is a member of Evangelicals for Harris and thinks differently than her uncle. “My grandmother Ruth Graham said, ‘When two people agree on everything, one is unnecessary,’ and I’ve been raised to be necessary,” she told me. “What’s important is that Christian leaders don’t hold up a man like Donald Trump who calls names and makes racist remarks.”
Duford, like many members of Evangelicals for Harris, differs from Harris on a number of issues, particularly on abortion. “Abortion is a significantly more nuanced issue than simply proclaiming pro-life or pro-choice” she told me. “When I’m talking pro-life, I’m talking birth to death.” Duford, a registered Independent, has never voted for Trump. “It’s important to me to vote for someone who would put in place systems to support mothers who choose life and children long after they’re born.”
Some theological conservatives who’ve teamed up with Evangelicals for Harris have taken note of Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the pro-life movement, by calling for abortion to be left to the states. They hope this will make it easier for white evangelicals to turn away from him. “Evangelicals largely vote Republican behind the abortion issue,” Dwight McKissic, a conservative Black pastor, told me. With Trump, McKissic said, “We’ve been scammed.” Lee Scott, the cattle farmer and pastor who helps lead Evangelicals for Harris, opposes abortion. But, similarly to Duford, he says he’s voting “pro-family.” He told me, “I personally disagree with Harris on abortion, but life is bigger than that, and I agree with her on the childhood tax credit, care for the elderly.”
Scott and the others may have an opportunity to sway evangelicals who have mixed feelings about Trump, but there are obvious limits to what they can achieve in the evangelical community as a whole. “Donald Trump’s impact on white evangelicalism is akin to Moses parting the Red Sea,” Ryan P. Burge, a Baptist minister and a professor at Eastern Illinois University, told me. “It’s true that he’s managed to push out a lot of moderates who are theologically evangelical but can’t stomach maga’s policies or rhetoric.” And yet, Burge added, evangelical maga adherents remain firmly committed, if fewer in number. “Trump will still carry eighty per cent of white evangelicals, even as their numbers continue to dwindle.”
There are also meaningful divisions among evangelicals who oppose Trump. Evangelicals for Harris is largely made up of conservatives, but another segment of evangelicals swings much further to the left. They are committed to a radical vision of peace and disagree with Harris around other issues. First, they vehemently oppose U.S. military support for Israel, and are especially vocal on this issue to stand apart from fellow-evangelicals who believe that Israel’s survival is instrumental to Christ’s return. They are also critical of Harris and the Democrats’ recent decision to remove opposition to the death penalty from the Party platform. “I still can’t believe it,” Shane Claiborne, a leader of the progressive evangelical movement, tweeted recently, calling the surprise move “disappointing.” Still, Claiborne is supporting Harris, saying that it’s much less about choosing her as a candidate than it is about voting for the person more likely to uphold the rule of law. “We’re not electing a savior,” Claiborne told me. “We’re electing someone we can protest against for the next eight years.” ♦
A coalition of believers, including many conservatives, is embracing the Democrats.
By Eliza Griswold
The New Yorker
September 28, 2024
Kamala Harris
Photograph by Joe Raedle / Getty
During a recent online strategy session, Jim Ball, an evangelical minister and founder of Evangelicals for Harris, lifted the United States up in prayer. “We pray for the healing of our country,” he offered. “We pray that we can be the folks who help bring people back together.” Behind him, in his basement in Vienna, Virginia, two placards leaned against each other, reading, in English and Spanish, “Faithful, Compassionate Evangelicals Exercising Our God-Given Citizenship.”
Of the numerous efforts that have coalesced since August to support Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign, Evangelicals for Harris—which claims two hundred and fifty thousand people who’ve signed up to volunteer or to receive information from the group—is one of the most ethnically and ideologically diverse. Participants are Black, white, Latino, and Asian American. They include disaffected conservatives, independents, and a smaller number of liberals who’ve banded together to stop the reëlection of Donald Trump and to challenge a troubling strain of American Christianity.
“White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the church today,” Jemar Tisby, a public theologian and the author of “The Spirit of Justice,” which connects the history of racial justice to the Christian faith, had warned on an earlier Evangelicals for Harris Zoom. He joined the call to bear public witness against the hijacking of evangelicalism. “For a long time, people of color within evangelical circles have seen the unholy alliance between religion and right-wing politics,” he told me.
Some white evangelicals are beginning to see the same issues. Lee Scott, a pastor and cattle farmer from Butler County, Pennsylvania, has become one of the group’s volunteer leaders, and, during the recent strategy call, he laid out plans for a service day in Pittsburgh later this month, when members of Evangelicals for Harris will participate in a community cleanup. “We’re going to need T-shirts,” he told his fellow-volunteers.
Another volunteer, who coördinates merchandise and social media, reported that merch sales were brisk. Evangelicals for Harris sells an array of branded items designed to spark conversations, including yard signs, insulated mugs, pet tank tops, and camouflage trucker hats. “Folks are wearing their witness,” she told me. The volunteer, who was concerned about her safety, preferred to remain anonymous. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who’s travelled with Trump, has targeted Evangelicals for Harris, calling them “insane” and arguing that they’re helping Kamala Harris bring “illegal Aliens” into the country.
“The great news is that we’re receiving a massive outpouring of gratitude online,” the volunteer reported on the call. She read one such message from X aloud: “I left my church 7 yrs ago due to ugly awful blasphemy. You showing me daily, the Word the TRUE word of the Lord, love and empathy makes me want to find a new home to worship.” This was particularly inspiring to the group: not only were they reaching voters but they were also portraying a kind of evangelicalism that might bring people back to church.
Evangelicals for Harris has one principle aim: to persuade Christian voters to reject Donald Trump. “What MAGA missed is that evangelicals were key to immigration reform, prison reform, child tax credit, U.S. support for Ukraine,” Jim Ball told me in a text message. “Anyone who prioritizes these issues, and now abortion, has been Left Behind by the MAGA G.O.P.” The group’s spirit, however, reflects a larger push among white evangelicals to wrest their faith from Christian nationalism, and to restore a more welcoming and expansive vision of evangelicalism that transcends party politics.
During the past several decades, the political alignment of evangelicals has shifted dramatically. Until Ronald Reagan was elected, giving rise to the Christian right, the most famous American evangelical President was Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Today, of the some thirty million white Americans who are evangelical Christians, eighty-five per cent identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Tens of millions of white Democrats have left the church. These figures are almost diametrically opposed among Black Protestants, most of whom are evangelicals; eighty-four per cent are aligned with the Democratic Party.
And yet anti-Trump evangelicals point to the fact that their fellow-believers can be swayed to cross party lines. In 2008, Barack Obama won twenty-six per cent of the white evangelical vote. One reason was Obama’s position on abortion; he described himself as pro-choice but spoke about a desire to reduce the number of abortions. In 2016, under pressure from reproductive-rights advocates, Hillary Clinton offered more definitive support for abortion rights, dropping her use of her husband’s old slogan, “Safe, legal, and rare.” This, among other factors, cost her white evangelical voters. Only sixteen per cent voted for her; eighty-one per cent voted for Trump.
The attempt by moderate evangelicals to peel away their fellow-Christians from Trump really began in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Some formed groups, such as Vote Common Good, which travelled the country by bus, holding sing-alongs and rallies in swing-state counties that are heavily populated by evangelicals. Jim Ball, who’d spent twenty years running the Evangelical Environmental Network, formed Evangelicals for Biden, with the aim of winning back as many evangelicals who’d voted for Obama in 2008 as he could.
Such efforts succeeded. In 2020, Biden captured about twenty per cent of the evangelical vote, which helped secure him the election. Ball’s group received messages on social media from voters who indicated that they’d planned to vote for Trump but changed their minds during the campaign. “Each flip actually represents two votes,” Ball told me. Last spring, he longed to return to his climate work but felt that he had to focus on defeating Trump again.
When Biden dropped out of the race, in July, a new energy suffused Ball’s effort. Within two hours of Harris announcing her candidacy, he had rebranded the group Evangelicals for Harris. Ball, who was hiking along the Potomac River that Sunday afternoon, immediately texted his core group of volunteers, “We are going to win!”
Like White Dudes for Harris, and so many other campaign groups, Evangelicals for Harris gained traction with a mid-August Zoom call that drew in thousands of participants. But it was an ad, released several days later, that drove its explosive reach. The ad features a clip from a sermon by Billy Graham, calling on believers to atone for their sins. It then smash-cuts to Donald Trump admitting that he’d never asked God for forgiveness. “Is there any greater denial of Christ,” the ad asks, “than to say ‘I do not need his forgiveness’?” It stands in stark contrast to the videos that, following the July assassination attempt, conflated Trump with Jesus. More important, the ad drew the ire of Billy Graham’s son Franklin, an avid Trump supporter. On X, Graham dismissed the group as “liberals” who “are trying to mislead people” about the fact that his father was a staunch conservative.
Evangelicals for Harris replied, saying, “The issue, Franklin, is that in your worship of Trump you have forsaken the Gospel. We are voting for Harris but we only worship Jesus.” Franklin Graham’s niece Jerushah Duford is a member of Evangelicals for Harris and thinks differently than her uncle. “My grandmother Ruth Graham said, ‘When two people agree on everything, one is unnecessary,’ and I’ve been raised to be necessary,” she told me. “What’s important is that Christian leaders don’t hold up a man like Donald Trump who calls names and makes racist remarks.”
Duford, like many members of Evangelicals for Harris, differs from Harris on a number of issues, particularly on abortion. “Abortion is a significantly more nuanced issue than simply proclaiming pro-life or pro-choice” she told me. “When I’m talking pro-life, I’m talking birth to death.” Duford, a registered Independent, has never voted for Trump. “It’s important to me to vote for someone who would put in place systems to support mothers who choose life and children long after they’re born.”
Some theological conservatives who’ve teamed up with Evangelicals for Harris have taken note of Trump’s efforts to distance himself from the pro-life movement, by calling for abortion to be left to the states. They hope this will make it easier for white evangelicals to turn away from him. “Evangelicals largely vote Republican behind the abortion issue,” Dwight McKissic, a conservative Black pastor, told me. With Trump, McKissic said, “We’ve been scammed.” Lee Scott, the cattle farmer and pastor who helps lead Evangelicals for Harris, opposes abortion. But, similarly to Duford, he says he’s voting “pro-family.” He told me, “I personally disagree with Harris on abortion, but life is bigger than that, and I agree with her on the childhood tax credit, care for the elderly.”
Scott and the others may have an opportunity to sway evangelicals who have mixed feelings about Trump, but there are obvious limits to what they can achieve in the evangelical community as a whole. “Donald Trump’s impact on white evangelicalism is akin to Moses parting the Red Sea,” Ryan P. Burge, a Baptist minister and a professor at Eastern Illinois University, told me. “It’s true that he’s managed to push out a lot of moderates who are theologically evangelical but can’t stomach maga’s policies or rhetoric.” And yet, Burge added, evangelical maga adherents remain firmly committed, if fewer in number. “Trump will still carry eighty per cent of white evangelicals, even as their numbers continue to dwindle.”
There are also meaningful divisions among evangelicals who oppose Trump. Evangelicals for Harris is largely made up of conservatives, but another segment of evangelicals swings much further to the left. They are committed to a radical vision of peace and disagree with Harris around other issues. First, they vehemently oppose U.S. military support for Israel, and are especially vocal on this issue to stand apart from fellow-evangelicals who believe that Israel’s survival is instrumental to Christ’s return. They are also critical of Harris and the Democrats’ recent decision to remove opposition to the death penalty from the Party platform. “I still can’t believe it,” Shane Claiborne, a leader of the progressive evangelical movement, tweeted recently, calling the surprise move “disappointing.” Still, Claiborne is supporting Harris, saying that it’s much less about choosing her as a candidate than it is about voting for the person more likely to uphold the rule of law. “We’re not electing a savior,” Claiborne told me. “We’re electing someone we can protest against for the next eight years.” ♦
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