White MAGA-loving evangelicals have never cared for the "least of these." They're now lashing out against Christians who do.

Aug 20, 2024

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If the exit polls from the past two presidential election are accurate, then roughly 80% of white evangelicals voters backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. That also means, however, that nearly 20% of them supported Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. If Kamala Harris can put a dent in that 80%, especially in the swing states, her path to the White House would become that much easier because white evangelicals are one of the GOP’s most reliable voting blocs.

That’s why we ought to celebrate groups like Evangelicals for Harris.

The group was the creation of Faith Voters, a 501(4) organization that previously sponsored Evangelicals for Biden in 2020. During their Zoom call last week, a handful of progressive Christians made the case for why there was nothing hypocritical about supporting Democrats in this year’s election. (A similar “Christians for Kamala” call days earlier had an estimated 40,000 people tune in and raised $200,000 for her campaign.)

It’s not like making the case for Harris as a Christian is hard to do; both Harris and Tim Walz are Christians themselves (Baptist and Lutheran, respectively) and they’re pushing for policies that would help Americans who have been struggling—with jobs, health care, raising families, etc. Even their support of climate change policies can be framed as trying to preserve the home God gave us and what could be more Jesus-like than that?

On the other side, as I’ve said many times before, Trump hasn’t just taken the Christian vote for granted; he’s leaned into the worst stereotypes of evangelicals in order to argue they have no other choice, even holding up a Bible outside a church for a photo-op after having his team use tear gas on peaceful protesters.

Trump is, famously, the thrice-married racist who paid hush money to porn stars he was having affairs with when his current wife was pregnant with his fifth child. A sexual abuser. The Two Corinthians guy. The candidate caught bragging about non-consensually grabbing women because he was a celebrity. The guy who lies about everything. The guy who couldn’t name his favorite Bible verse. The guy who sold a freely available Bible, branded it with his name, and raked in a whopping $300,000 in royalties from gullible supporters.

Of the many, many things you could call Donald Trump, devout isn’t one of them. Not a single white evangelical church in America would ever allow this guy to be their pastor if they wanted to be taken seriously, and yet more than half of Republican voters (a good chunk of whom would describe themselves as conservative Christians) seriously believe Trump is a person of faith.

It’s not because he does any of the things you’re supposed to do as a Christian. He sure as hell hasn’t put any thought into theological debates.

If Donald Trump worships anyone, it’s himself.

The only reason anyone would think he’s a person of faith is because Trump just tells people he is. They believe the lie. They buy into the pandering. Or else they think installing right-wing justices on the Supreme Court for political reasons is the equivalent of accepting the divinity of Christ, and they’ll pretend to accept his lie in order to achieve a far different goal.

If that’s how white evangelicals want to be defined, then so be it. But the people behind Evangelicals for Harris refuse to just sit back and let that happen. So they’re pushing back.

The group’s first ad even called out the hypocrisy of Trump by showing a clip of the Rev. Billy Graham saying Christians needed to ask God for forgiveness… followed by a clip of Trump saying he never did that.

It’s not clear if the group has any money to produce more ads like this, much less put them on TV in swing states, but there’s plenty of material out there to work with if they wanted to. After all, Trump is nothing if not a highlight reel for Christian hypocrisy.

By making this argument, Evangelicals for Harris gives white evangelicals permission to do what so many of them know is the right, moral, and Christian thing to do: vote for a Democrat.

That plan even has the approval of Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, who said during the Zoom call, in a recorded video, that supporting Harris wasn’t a tough decision at all:

"I was thinking this morning that if you told me 10 years ago that I would be taking an active role in politics, I'd have laughed. But then I had to stop and realize this is so much more than politics," Duford said in her recorded video.

"In 2016, when a man bragged about assaulting women, various leaders of my faith then propped up this man as a poster boy for godly manhood and leadership," she continued. "This broke my heart as I have watched — quite frankly, for the last eight years — people who were curious about Jesus and His teachings [have] done a 180 and walked in the other direction from my faith."

While it takes courage to say all that given her family history, it wasn’t exactly new ground. Duford also criticized Trump, along with the Christians propping him up, in 2020:

It seems that the only evangelical leaders to speak up praised the president, with no mention of his behavior that is antithetical to the Jesus we serve. The entire world has watched the term “evangelical” become synonymous with hypocrisy and disingenuousness.

Amen to that.

Evangelicals have been fed a steady diet of Trump propaganda for years, often from many of their own pastors. They were told they cannot be faithful Christians and vote for Democrats. They were told that the Republican Party, regardless of its flaws, was anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ and great on other social issues, while ignoring the reality that those GOP policies have led to more suffering (and, ironically, more abortions).

It’s not that Evangelicals for Harris supports all the Democrats’ policies. In some cases, many members strongly oppose them. (Guess what? Join the club.) What sets them apart is that they refuse to be single-issue voters on wedge topics like abortion or LGBTQ rights. They refuse to let Trump destroy our democracy because he promises to appoint Federalist Society judges to the bench. Their idea of “pro-life” means caring for people even after they exit the womb, unlike most evangelicals who stop giving a damn after that moment. They know that the doomsday scenarios about a Democratic administration going after churches are bullshit. They cherish religious liberty for everyone, not just members of their own tribe. And when there are only two viable candidates on the ballot, and one of them is a proven dumpster fire, every person who cares about a particular cause knows it’s perfectly valid to say one option is better while working to advance the change you want to see.

So more power to them. There’s nothing hypocritical about evangelicals supporting Harris even if that’s a common reaction (and the reason they get as much publicity as they do).

Evangelicals who sold their souls to Trump years ago, however, aren’t going down without a whine. Evangelist Franklin Graham, who has coasted on his father’s reputation for decades, condemned that ad featuring his father, saying the late reverend was absolutely MAGA-pilled:

The liberals are using anything and everything they can to promote candidate Harris. They even developed a political ad trying to use my father [Billy Graham’s] image. They are trying to mislead people. Maybe they don’t know that my father appreciated the conservative values and policies of President [Donald Trump] in 2016, and if he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed.

I guess we’re memory-holing Billy Graham’s 2011 interview with Christianity Today in which he said, when asked if he’d do anything differently in his life, said “I also would have steered clear of politics.”

In any case, the “liberals” didn’t create the ad. The ad isn’t misleading. And while no one should equate Billy Graham with morality, given his antisemitism, opposition to LGBTQ rights, and ambiguity on racism, Graham deserves some credit for rejecting the unholy alliance between religious fundamentalists and political conservatives. He famously said in a 1981 magazine profile:

I don't want to see religious bigotry in any form. Liberals organized in the '60s, and conservatives certainly have a right to organize in the '80s, but it would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

Franklin Graham isn’t the only person complaining about Evangelicals for Harris for dubious reasons. Plenty of conservatives who stand to benefit from another Trump term joined the chorus of people claiming Kamala Harris is somehow anti-Christian. One Southern Baptist seminary professor said the Evangelicals for Harris message was a “betrayal of the gospel.” One pastor said the group represents “godless globalism.” Another equated the group to hypothetical “Jews For Hitler.” Conspiracy theorist Sean Feucht claimed the group shows you “just how apostate much of the American church has become.” And another right-wing leader flat-out called them “Nazi Regime theologians.”

Charitably speaking, the critics argue that Evangelicals for Harris is really just anti-Trump, not pro-Harris, as if there’s a meaningful difference there. But the group can be both. If you believe that treating others compassionately, and working to help the “least of these,” and bringing civility and decency to the public square, and centering your faith around forgiveness rather than hatred is what Jesus wants, then there’s no discrepancy.

The only people whining are those who believe in the government using the Bible as a weapon against anyone perceived to be an enemy of Christianity, which, in their case, includes damn near anyone who disagrees with them about anything.

No one is arguing that Evangelicals for Harris will make or break the race. No single group will. However if they can peel off some of those ambivalent Christians who might feel pressured to vote for Trump even though they don’t really want to—and there are many Christians under that umbrella—it could make a difference in a close election. It would be a hell of a lot easier to get some of those white evangelicals to vote for Harris (when their hearts are already there) than spending energy trying to convert hard-core Republicans, third party voters, or people who are generally apathetic about politics.

All the more reason to support their cause even if their reasoning doesn’t align with your own.