Can Gary Johnson Win Over Evangelical Voters Disappointed With Trump?

V. “It would require a fundamental shift…”

As Farris’ letter showed, Scrimshaw is far from the only conservative Christian to voice his disapproval for the Religious Right’s embrace of Trump, though it is precisely Johnson’s “weakness” on social issues and his defense of individual liberty that makes him equally unpalatable to other anti-Trump evangelicals.

Farris told me that he was not encouraged by Johnson’s platform, noting that the Libertarian candidate’s “views on abortion make him unacceptable to me.”

“I am planning to write my own name in as a protest as of this point,” he wrote to me.

Alan Noble, editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, published a piece in Vox in June, entitled, “Evangelicals like me can’t vote for Trump — or Clinton. Here’s what we can do instead.” In it, he encouraged evangelicals to abstain from voting for president altogether and focus instead on down ballot races.

“To vote for Donald Trump is to betray the values of both conservatism and Christianity, and the results may do serious harm to our nation and our souls,” he wrote.

As repelled as he was by Trump, Noble was also put off by Johnson’s emphasis on libertarian values. He wrote that the governor’s “support for nearly unrestrained personal freedoms will be acceptable to few evangelicals who view community and limits as social and moral goods.”

Two months later, Noble affirmed that he still believed Johnson was not a satisfactory option for evangelicals. The high value placed on individual liberty was fundamentally at odds with Christian morality, he said.

“My stance is that from its premise, libertarianism wrongly relies upon individualism and maximizing individual freedoms. While I believe in rights, I also believe that a Christian anthropology shows that people were meant to live in community, that we have obligations, duties, and relationships to our community,” he wrote in an email.

Noble took issue with Johnson’s stance on religious liberty laws, arguing that he was too dismissive and didn’t seem to understand what was at stake for, say, wedding photographers of faith who didn’t want to be complicit in a ceremony they didn’t agree with. He also disputed Johnson’s argument that Muslims or other non-Christians could harness these laws to discriminate against the people they were nominally passed to protect, a warning that “sounded rather Trumpish, in my opinion,” Noble wrote.

Regarding Scrimshaw’s open letter, Noble told me, “I found [Scrimshaw]’s comments on abortion to be particularly weak.” He added, “I have no faith that Johnson will act to protect the unborn or to prevent the inhuman practice of assisted suicide.”

Noble says he’s looking into Evan McMullin and recommending others to do the same. McMullin, a former Goldman Sachs banker and CIA staffer, launched his long shot candidacy as an independent conservative in August. McMullin has affirmed that he is anti-abortion and his platform suggests that he supports the defunding of Planned Parenthood. “A culture that subsidizes abortion on demand runs counter to the fundamental American belief in the potential of every person – it undermines the dignity of mother and child alike,” his website says.

McMullin recently made the ballot in Utah, a state where Johnson is polling particularly strong, thanks in part to Mormons’ dissatisfaction with Trump. According to a PPP poll of Utahans released Tuesday, Johnson is polling third at 12% and McMullin is at his heels with 9%. While unpopular, Trump still leads the state with 39%, and Clinton has 24%.

Cox, the research director at PRRI, noted that evangelicals “tend to be anything but libertarian.” He added, “It’s difficult to see a way in which evangelicals embrace a politics of ‘live and let live.’ It would require a fundamental shift away from 30-40 years of political activism.”

Polls bear out the reality that Johnson evangelicals are unlikely to make an impact this year — at least it appears so at this point. But perhaps a fundamental shift is occurring, albeit quietly. Cox noted that the pro-Johnson evangelicals I spoke to skewed younger and that it was possible they were charting a course for a new generation of American evangelicals less wedded to the Republican party. Whether Trump wins in November or not, his candidacy appears to have put at least a dent in the monolith that was the evangelical Right.

If Scrimshaw and other anti-Trump evangelicals are not necessarily unified on Johnson, they are at least in agreement that the conservative Christian leaders made a critical and consequential error in backing the real estate tycoon leading the GOP. For many of them, the strange marriage of the social conservative leaders to Trump signals the end of an era and the collapse of a once mighty movement.

“I believe that the Christian Right is dead. It was ill before Trump. It is now dead,” Farris told me. “Something new may arise that is a more comprehensive set of values that can appeal to the generations that are coming.”

“Cultural warrior talk isn’t the path to victory anymore. Cultural engagement is the future,” he added.

Or as Scrimshaw put it: “The church is feeling the pressure of the social wars that we’ve been fighting, but the problem is we’ve been trying to do it from the top down. What we have to realize is that it’s done by relationship, it’s done from the bottom up.”

“With Jesus,” he said, “it’s always the bottom up.”

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[image: Johnson in 2012. Gage Skidmore, via Flickr]

Sam Reisman (@thericeman) is a staff editor at Mediaite.