For the sane folks: This NYT essay on the WH and Christians

Nov. 3, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET

As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump’s ambitions for America’s future are almost impossible to miss. He has sworn an era of “retribution” for his enemies. Vowed to deport millions of immigrants. Fueled concerns about rising fascism.

But he is making another promise that may be overlooked, but equally transformative: He will champion his followers’ brand of Christianity across American life and government.

Publicly, the former president has avoided boasting about the main accomplishment that made him a hero to conservative Christians: ending Roe v. Wade. And he has distanced himself from Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a Trump presidency.

Instead, his support for “my beautiful Christians,” as he calls them, leans heavily into their fears about losing power in a secularizing and pluralist country — where a majority of women support Vice President Kamala Harris.

In his final campaign events with conservative Christian activists and politicians, Mr. Trump is promising to elevate not only their policy priorities but also their ideological influence. He says he will affirm that God made only two genders, male and female. He will create a federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias. And he will give enhanced access to conservative Christian leaders, if they elect him.

“It will be directly into the Oval Office — and me,” Mr. Trump told pastors in Georgia. “We have to save religion in this country.”

His vision of emboldened Christian power stands in stark contrast to the pluralist and feminist vision of Ms. Harris.

She embodies the multifaith and increasingly secular America she hopes to lead, with a personal faith in which Christianity and liberal feminism do not conflict. In her closing argument on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., Ms. Harris recalled her parents taking her to civil rights marches where “people of all races, faiths and walks of life came together to fight for the ideals of freedom and opportunity.”

On a call for Black pastors last Sunday afternoon, Ms. Harris urged them to live their faith through action, to benefit everyone. “It is a power to advance freedom, justice and opportunity for all God’s children,” she said.

Mr. Trump and his allies are framing the choice facing voters on Tuesday as a kind of holy war. They have rushed to paint Ms. Harris as anti-Christian, and particularly anti-Catholic, a tactic they used effectively in their closing arguments against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Attacking Ms. Harris on the basis of Christianity is particularly bound up in conservative evangelical views of womanhood. At a gathering for conservative Christian women on the National Mall last month, leaders prayed for the election — as they took sledgehammers to a concrete altar, which they said represented “the spirit of Ishtar,” an ancient feminine goddess.

It was “the altar of abortion, the altar of sexual immorality, the altar of pornography, the altar of transitioning of children, of mutilating them!” one leader shouted. “The altar of the goddess of the rainbow, the altar of the goddess of June and pride, the altar that has led to divorce!”

At a recent event, Ms. Harris was interrupted as she spoke about how the Supreme Court justices nominated by Mr. Trump had overturned Roe.

“Jesus is Lord,” young men in the crowd shouted back. She replied, “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.”

At his own rally later, Senator JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, weighed in, “That’s right — Jesus is king.”

Asked what Mr. Vance meant, Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for the senator, wrote in a statement that “Senator Vance acknowledged the millennia-old Christian belief that Christ is King over all creation.” He added, “The Trump-Vance administration will defend religious liberties for Americans of all faiths.”

But Mr. Trump’s opponents fear that he would prioritize conservative Christianity, and erode the traditional boundaries that have limited religious influence in public life.

“This is a make-or-break election for church-state separation,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 

“The overreach is threatening our core freedoms, our equality and our democracy like never before,” she said. “The stakes are truly so high.”

For nearly a decade, right-wing Christian power has intensified, largely under Mr. Trump’s watch. He won the White House in 2016 promising that “Christianity will have power.” In 2020, federal agents used flash grenades and chemical spray to disperse racial justice protesters in Lafayette Square in Washington, before Mr. Trump walked through and brandished a Bible in front of a nearby church — a symbolic twinning of Christian and government might.

The idea that American government should be grounded in a Christian worldview found a place in Mr. Trump’s administration, as well as at the Supreme Court, state legislatures and school boards. Its strength can be seen in and outside of government, in the fall of Roe, opposition to transgender rights, push against to critical race theory, bans on books, crackdown on female preachers and move to punish women for abortion.

Even with a Democrat in the White House, Christian power strengthened its grip in Republican strongholds. The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court invoked God in a landmark ruling declaring that frozen embryos had rights as children, imperiling in vitro fertilization. Oklahoma required that public schools teach the Bible, in an extraordinary blurring of religious instruction and public education.

Nationally, a position elevating Christian teaching over government represents a distinct minority view. According to the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of Americans say that the government should stop enforcing the separation of church and state. A larger share, 28 percent, says that if the Bible and the people’s will conflict, the Bible should prevail.

The movement has also experienced some pushback, especially in the 2022 midterms, when many candidates who called for the end of separation of church and state lost. The overturning of Roe, spearheaded by conservative Christian activists, also unleashed backlash even in conservative states.

Liberal evangelicals, Catholics and interfaith groups are mobilizing for Ms. Harris in the final stretch of the campaign, in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona. They have deployed ads that show women recounting the trauma of sexual abuse in their churches and comparing it with Mr. Trump’s sexual abuse conviction; wives diverging to vote differently from their Trump-supporting husbands; and women telling their pregnancy traumas after the fall of Roe.

Bishop Michael Curry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who retired on Friday, said he could never have predicted 10 years ago that his term would be ending with a “Christian Nationalism that today threatens our country’s soul,” as he wrote in a recent church report.

The current rise of this kind of Christian power, Bishop Curry said in an interview, reminded him how Christian ideology was used to justify the subjugation of Indigenous people in the 1400s and chattel slavery.

“It is a similar way of thinking, that one particular way and people are superior to others and therefore they can subjugate others,” he said.

The election is a real-time test of the strength of the liberal coalition and whether it can cut into Mr. Trump’s steadfast support from conservative Christians.

Republican Christian strategists are blasting a unified final message throughout their national network of churches, pastors and policy groups, asking evangelicals and Catholics if they knew that many of them actually do not vote. If they did, the thinking goes, millions of new votes would go to Republicans.

“You cannot be a sincere Christian in this nation and vote for the Democrat Party who supports things that are absolutely against what the Bible says,” said Jason Rapert, president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which began in 2019 to expand Christian influence in elected positions.

Mr. Rapert attended the event for pastors in Georgia when Mr. Trump promised access to the Oval Office. Mr. Rapert’s group pushes for legislation based on their Christian values, like giving embryos constitutional rights.

“There is a revival in America, but it’s an Antichrist revival that has been spread by the evangelists: Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris,” Mr. Rapert said. “It’s an altar call to nothing.”

Kelly Shackelford, president of the First Liberty Institute, a legal group in Texas, also attended the Trump meeting. He hopes to further conservative legal victories.

The Supreme Court, with three Trump-nomiated justices, has greatly expanded the place of religion in public life. Three days after they overturned Roe in 2022, the justices ruled that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line. The ruling disavowed a major precedent, which required courts to apply a demanding test to determine whether the government is effectively endorsing a religion.

“The major weapon that was used by the government to say, ‘You can’t do that,’ is now gone,” Mr. Shackelford said, looking ahead to additional potential victories.

Even if Ms. Harris wins, the elevation of conservative Christian values will continue in many places across the country, raising longer-term questions for Democrats.

The conservative Christian power system is strong in many states. In Alabama, Republican state lawmakers often cite the Bible when passing legislation to limit voting rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and women’s rights, said JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama.

“It is going to take decades to shift this nation in a way that really values the Constitution,” she said.