Have Evangelicals Had Enough of Trump?

Ours is a time of internet prophets forecasting Donald Trump’s return to office. Trump endorsed—and made $300,000 from selling—a branded “God Bless the USA” Bible. Pastors pray at Trump rallies, framing the upcoming election as a spiritual battle against demonic spirits. For many believers, the GOP candidate has displaced the old Holy Trinity: Now, it’s God, Guns, and Trump.

But as Oprah Winfrey suggested in her speech before the Democratic National Convention last Wednesday evening in Chicago, Trump’s supporters are not the country’s only values voters. 

“I’ve always voted my values,” Winfrey said. It’s a timely reminder that Republicans don’t hold the market on politics informed by personal, even spiritual conviction.

Even the evangelical vote could be more readily split. There are more than 200,000 members of Evangelicals for Harris—a once pro-Biden group founded by Rev. Jim Ball and with ties to evangelist Billy Graham’s granddaughter Jerushah Duford—that pivoted to Harris after the vice-president became the presumptive Democratic nominee. According to its website, Evangelicals for Harris argues, “Evangelicals don’t have to change who they are” in order to vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris. “They just need to reaffirm who they are by voting for someone who better reflects Christian values.”

It is politically savvy to welcome believers and voters of all kinds. It also appears to be personally authentic for the Harris campaign to remind the country that Christian faith does not only come wrapped (and warped) in a Christian nationalist package. A person can believe fiercely in justice informed by faith and allow that belief to shape political choices—without deifying a particular candidate.

Evangelicals for Harris could motivate a needed voting bloc for the Democrats and help defuse the drumbeat of dominion that has harmed churches, threatened our democracy, and damaged the faith of many Americans.

That’s one tall order for a political committee. But already, I see ground softening, Americans welcoming the shift.

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I’ll start with what’s personal: There was a period as a young adult believer when I attended Christian peace gatherings and supported international debt relief as a form of Biblical jubilee. I was a mainline Protestant kid whose extended family was part of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers movement. My aunt, uncle, and cousins lived in poverty in order to spend all their resources serving hungry immigrants, many of whom arrived in America after surviving brutal sexual assaults along their path northward to the U.S.

I had a vision of faith shaped by a Jesus figure who wept, who cared for the less fortunate, whose great lesson had been about loving one’s neighbor. I still don’t fully understand how such a beautiful view of the world fell apart, but I remember the moments that broke my faith. It was being told by other Christians that God didn’t want women to preach, and that gay people were damned. And it was witnessing George W. Bush—a president who wore his faith like a banner (and a personal brand)—as he plunged our generation into a war in Iraq, one that never seemed warranted by facts.

I’m no outlier. Over more than a decade reporting on faith, I’ve met more people than I can count who lost their Christian faith in response to its white, evangelical extremes. Some were raised in churches that insisted women must submit. Some left years back over post-9/11 Islamophobia or ongoing racist dog whistles. Some fled over bigotry against LGBTQ people. They were told to be pure—and then were gobsmacked when pious leaders who would have shamed them for an above-the-knee skirt or spaghetti straps threw their lot in with Donald Trump, despite dozens of allegations of sexual assault and his “grab them by the pussy” comments. Some were shocked by their churches reopening early in the pandemic, not requiring masks (not caring for the vulnerable), and spiraling into political conspiracies.

Since the 1990s, record numbers of Americans have turned away from religion, and Christianity in particular. Growing numbers of American women have had enough. Gen Z women are now less likely to say they are religious than men. Such an abundance of former church goers have left that analysts at Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey predict that by 2070, America’s “nones” (non-religious) could outnumber Christians.

There are a variety of reasons, but the marriage between conservative faith and politics that has dominated the past 40-plus years in America certainly contributed to this great divorce—and drove a wedge between millions and their interest in Christianity.

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I’m a person who has reported extensively on abuse within church environments. I have witnessed the personal toll of people under the thumb of religious dominion. I’ve seen what happens to believers when those in positions of authority justify their behavior with a version of God who seeks to dominate. I have a fairly clear idea of what that dominion would look like blown-out to a national scale. Project 2025 was a fever dream of this worldview, in the shape of a policy blueprint. What some of my sources have described as a personal hell under unyielding authority could become a national norm if Trump assents to his Christian nationalist backers.

For some younger Americans, this winner-takes-all mentality that bends and reshapes the rules of Christianity (with a bonus cultic reverence for Trump), is the only version of faith they’ve known. 

Of course this has made Christianity repellent to many of them.

This is why VP Harris’s embrace of progressive Christian voters is smart and crucial on many fronts. She was raised Baptist with a social-justice theology and also went to a Hindu temple. Her maternal grandmother was part of India’s Gandhian resistance. Her mother participated in civil rights demonstrations at Berkeley, where she met Martin Luther King Jr. For Harris, it seems, the sacred has long been wed with uplifting the vulnerable. Her team likely won’t have to make excuses for her struggling to think of a single time she asked God’s forgiveness (like Trump) or quoting from “Two Corinthians.” Social justice appears to be an authentic part of her faith story.

There are other Christian voters—some who call themselves evangelical—who are eager to hear this reach toward faith from the Harris campaign. Even the Christian Broadcasting Network, the on-air dynasty of Pat Robertson (founder of the Christian Coalition), recently aired a thoughtful segment by David Brody that made space for Christians who come from a social-justice tradition. (It’s a vision of Christian faith that recently has been more often disparaged by the Right as socialist and linked with Marxism.) So it’s interesting that CBN anchor Gordon Robertson recently said it’s “always been a wonderful thing that both parties had strong Christians and belief in God.” 

That’s a far cry from assertions that “You just can’t vote Democrat. They’re against religion. They’re against your religion in particular,” as Trump told an audience of Southern Baptists this summer.

Last, in putting out a narrative that centers faith and values, the Harris campaign is doing better than calling out Christian nationalism as dangerous, it’s modeling an alternative.

I’ve seen a number of ex-vangelicals (former evangelicals) posting wistfully about Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz, not just for his gubernatorial policies, but because he reminds them of the fathers they lost to political division, conspiracy theories, and the FOX News vortex. This Midwestern, football-loving, gruff-voiced, hunter and dad fiercely loves his children and neighbors and is an echo of the fathers they knew growing up. Ones whose faith used to make them better versions of themselves.

The DNC has invested copious energy into talk concerning healing America’s divides. As former President Barack Obama said in his remarks, “All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise, the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach Little League and look out for our elderly neighbors. We still feed the hungry, in churches and mosques and synagogues …” He continued, “Because the vast majority of us don’t want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better.”

Talking about values as an extension of faith—and similar values that exist for people who lost or never had a common set of beliefs—breaks the stranglehold of a Christian nationalist narrative that insists our nation’s history and future can only be one thing, one power-takes-all manifestation of God’s will. Instead, the Harris campaign’s values talk offers space for pluralism, which is both an accurate reflection of today’s electorate, and acknowledges Christianity in America is not homogeneous.

It’s a route that creates a path for believers to vote for Harris, to be sure, but it also has a shot at lifting the veil that Christian nationalism has dropped over the eyes of many Americans, damaging their relationships with loved ones and their relationship with the civil sphere. (We need look no further than January 6, 2021, for evidence of that.)

The wounds that need healing in America span politics, religion, and family. Healing them may start by tacking out some common ground from which to fight for justice, a shared space to remember who we used to be as we consider what America could become.