How Can It Be That Most White Christians - and 80% of White Evangelicals - Voted for Trump?

Galen Carey, Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals, explains the Evangelical movement, its ministries among people in poverty, and its politics in this week’s webcast. The webcast is an hour long, but worth your time.

The Evangelical movement has great strengths - fervent faith, sacrificial service, effective outreach, global vision, and active citizenship. Galen tells us about his parents - global missionaries from rural Kansas - and they exemplified all these strengths.

But more than half of White Christians - and about 80 percent of White Evangelicals - voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. President Trump’s policies and, even more obviously, his character are antithetical to Christian teaching. I attribute this spiritual failure to three sources: effective political organizing, electronic media, and long-standing weaknesses of the Evangelical movement and of U.S. Christianity generally.

Effective organizing

In the 1970s a network of religious and political leaders set out to organize conservative Christians, and the Religious Right emerged as a powerful, well-publicized force within the Republican Party. Among the most prominent leaders (Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Richard Land), only Land had the support of a national church body (the Southern Baptist Convention). The others were independent operators. Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson were television and radio personalities. They focused on hot-button issues - protecting the Christian schools that sprouted up to avoid racial integration and, later, abortion and same-sex marriage - but they also embraced conservative causes with less obvious connections to religion (such as free-market capitalism and U.S. military might). The Religious Right organized within the Republican Party, with a focus on elections rather than legislative advocacy.

The Republican Party was influenced by and drew strength from the Religious Right. The two parties took opposites sides on the abortion issue in 1980. In the George W. Bush campaign of 2004, the Republican Party presented itself as the pro-religion party - and helped to convince many Americans that abortion and same-sex marriage were the main political issues of religious importance. In 2010, the Religious Right melded into the Tea Party movement. President Trump managed to convince many White Americans that he was their best defender of America the way it used to be. Many White Christians were also convinced that he was their best defender on issues such as abortion, even though his own faith commitment and morality are subject to question.

Electronic media

Fox News and social media now have more influence on the politics of many conservative Christians than Christian teaching. While many pastors are hesitant to talk about political issues in church, conservative Christians are prime targets for right-wing disinformation campaigns.

Long-standing weaknesses

The popularity of Trumpism among White Christianity is also connected to three long-standing weaknesses of Christianity in general and the Evangelical movement in particular.

First, the Christian churches have, for the most part, tolerated or embraced racism for centuries - in the conquest of the Americas, colonialism, the enslavement of Africans. In this country, churches in the South found ways to live with the oppression of African Americans through biblical justifications of slavery and the idea that churches should “stay out of politics.” These churches became an important part of what is now known as the Evangelical movement, forming an uneasy alliance with other evangelical churches with roots in the abolitionist movement. Trump’s racist rhetoric and harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants are not out of step with how many White Evangelicals and other White Christians feel.

Second, religious faith is often in tension with evidence. I think the best theology is consistent with what we know about the cosmos and human experience. But the Fundamentalist movement of the late 19th century squared off against what scientists were learning about evolution and the modern world generally. They held up a handful of doctrinal statements - the six-day creation, for example - as a litmus test for true Christian faith. Nearly all the major U.S. church bodies opted for forms of Christianity that take evidence seriously and are responsive to social problems, but Fundamentalism became an important stream within the Evangelical movement.

Forms of religion that downplay evidence-based analysis might leave people vulnerable to groupthink and disinformation campaigns - about the integrity of the 2020 elections, for example, or Q-Anon. They might also make people inclined to insist on traditional rules of morality and thus be closed to learning from what we now know about sexual diversity.

Finally, U.S. Christianity generally and elements of the Evangelical movement in particular have loose connections to broad church structures. In this country, anybody has the right to found a new church, and many people have done just that. Fundamentalism has stayed alive in independent local congregations, networks of like-minded congregations, and the work of travelling preachers (later, television and Internet preachers). Many of the biggest, fastest growing churches nowadays are Evangelical churches with no denominational ties or responsibilities. Galen Carey shared a great chart that shows the host of different, often relatively small organizations that comprise the modern Evangelical movement.

Church authorities and national/international church structures have weaknesses of their own, but institutions (especially institutions that span generations and geographies) carry wisdom. I’m struck that the Christian Right has been able to thrive partly because many Americans are more attentive to religious entrepreneurs than to bishops, ordained clergy, and elected church leaders.

The Digital Revolution, Religion, and Politics

Eric Sapp’s work with Bread for the World during the 2016 elections taught me about the power of digital technology in the politics of poverty. In this week’s webcast, he talks about that experience and other work he has done - to repair the divide between the Democratic Party and faith-based voters, to communicate with vaccine-hesitant people, and to counter digital propaganda. In each case, Eric has grounded his digital communication in careful listening to people - often to people who feel their views are not usually heard.

I’ve learned a lot about technology over the past year. Retirement from the leadership of Bread and the pandemic have made me learn how to use different equipment and programs. In the process, I have come to understand that digital technology is a new form of literacy. It takes effort, but allows us to think and communicate in powerful new ways. We all benefit tremendously from digital technology.

But I have also gained understanding of some of its negative effects. Social media disseminate misinformation, including sophisticated disinformation campaigns. Social media also aggravate the divisions in society. They help us connect with like-minded people and craft jabs at the people we love to hate. These activities are satisfying - almost addictive. They keep us on-line, where the technology companies can gather information about us that they sell to advertisers.

I think electronic media, especially social media, have strengthened the voice of low-income, less-educated Americans in politics. More people feel informed, and social media give them an easy way to make themselves heard. Both the Trump and Sanders presidential campaigns benefited from a surge of voting among many people who hadn’t voted before, and both sides in the Trump-Biden election were powered by record voter participation. If social media have indeed increased political participation among low-income, less-educated voters, this is a historic change for the better. As documented by Henry Brady (featured in last week’s webcast), the political participation of these groups has been unchangingly low for many decades.

On the other hand, our politics are now crippled by disinformation and division. U.S. religious life has also been corrupted. Most white Christians voted for Trump again in 2020, partly because Fox News and social media influence them more than the hour they spend in church on some Sunday mornings.

As large numbers of Americans become more critical consumers of social media, some companies will develop innovative ways to meet a growing demand for social media that are less manipulative and more consistently socially responsible. My son Andrew works for a fast-growing technology company (Hopin) that helps groups hold diverse and engaging conferences - a big step up from Zoom calls. But Andrew has cut way back on his personal involvement in social media. At his suggestion, he and I together watched The Great Hack, a Netflix documentary that convinced me that our government needs to develop regulations to address the problems digital communications are causing. We regulate radio, television, and the press. An update of the regulations on digital companies, especially digital monopolies, will be hard to design and negotiate but is much needed.

Eric Sapp is exploring ways to use social media to listen to people and build empathy among different groups. Savvy regulation could encourage such activities on a much larger scale.

Eric gave us too much good material to keep his webcast as short as some of the others, but I hope you will watch it. You might also want to watch The Great Hack.

A Data-Based Picture of Religion and Politics

This week’s webcast features Henry Brady, one of the nation’s foremost political scientists and dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy. His most recent book (with two co-authors) is Unequal and Unrepresented. Based on many years of data, it reports that church attendance encourages political participation, partly by teaching participation skills and partly by encouraging people to get involved in morally-charged political causes.

Brady begins his presentation with commentary on Robert Putnam’s book, American Grace. Putnam is one of the country’s foremost sociologists, and American Grace is one of my favorite books. Based on a different set of surveys, Putnam found that attendance at religious services is correlated with increased contributions to charity and a higher level of civic engagement. He found that specific doctrines don’t change this effect very much, except that people who experience God as a loving presence in their lives are more likely to trust other people and support progressive government action, such as food stamps and foreign aid. I think the link may be that people who believe that God forgives them all the time are more inclined to be forgiving toward other people and worry less that somebody will get more help than they really deserve.

Brady’s data show that members of labor unions are even more charitable and politically active than church-goers and much more likely to participate in demonstrations. Churchgoers prefer elections and negotiation, but Brady points out that protest and conflict are also important in confronting the deep racial and economic divides in our country.

The main finding of Unequal and Unrepresented is that the political participation of low-income and less educated Americans has always been relatively limited. Their interests have thus always been under-represented. But Unequal and Unrepresented was published in 2018, and the authors noted that the surprising strength of both the Sanders and Trump campaigns in 2016 might finally signal a change in this grim reality. The unprecedented voter turn-out in 2020 provides more evidence that lower-income people may be getting more involved, and this just might turn out to be a transformational change in the politics of poverty.

Putnam and Brady both found that church-goers are less inclined than other Americans to live and let live, and since the 1970s church-goers have become increasingly Republican. The shift of the South (a churchgoing region) toward the Republican Party after Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats passed civil-rights legislation started this trend in the 1970s. It accelerated when the two parties took opposite sides of the abortion and same-sex marriage issues in the 1980s.

Partly because of the deep decline in union membership, attention to economic issues (such as funding for social programs) is now more often crowded out by concern about issues like abortion and gay rights (which are more important to many religious voters).

The number of Americans who don’t identify with any religious body or tradition has been steadily and rapidly increasing since the 1970s. One third of people under 30 now say they have no religious affiliation. Religiously unaffiliated people are often turned off by the intolerance, extremism, and anti-science attitudes they see in much organized religion. But they usually believe in God, maintain active spiritual lives, and are politically progressive.

As I reflect on all this data, here are some lessons for those of us who are both religious and progressive:

> Respect the spirituality of religiously unaffiliated people. Listen.

> Maintain high standards of morality without being judgmental of others.

> Be clear that intolerance of sexual diversity is wrong and that pro-life ethics should include more than concern about unborn children.

> Advocacy campaigns on poverty issues should include low-income people.

> Some situations call for conflict.

> Regular attendance at religious services is good for us.

> The gospel of God’s love is the best thing we’ve got going.

My favorite bits of Brady’s presentation are his brief comments at the beginning and end of his presentation about the development of his own philosophy and religious life.