Can Gary Johnson Win Over Evangelical Voters Disappointed With Trump?

IV. “Very few true evangelicals…”

Peter Montgomery, senior fellow at the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, was skeptical that a significant number of evangelical Christian voters would reject Trump’s embrace of the Religious Right agenda in favor of the laissez faire Johnson.

“I suspect that the number of white evangelicals who are willing to support a pro-gay marriage, pro-choice candidate who decries religious liberty exemptions as a ‘black hole’ issue would be vanishingly small,” he said.“Abortion, marriage, and religious liberty are the Religious Right’s top three issues.”

Polls bear out the reality that an overwhelming number of evangelicals will back the Republican candidate for President, as they have in the last three elections. According to exit polls, 79% of evangelicals voted for George W. Bush in 2004, 73% voted for John McCain in 2008, and 79% voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

However, Pew polling in June shows that evangelicals’ support for Trump is driven at least as much by opposition to Hillary Clinton as it is by confidence in Trump. White evangelicals who said they would choose Trump mainly as a vote against Clinton (45%) outnumbered those who said they were voting for Trump (30%). The same June poll showed that 55% of white evangelicals said they were unhappy with both major party presidential candidates.

A more recent Pew poll, conducted in early August, shows that Trump’s favor with evangelicals has shrunk since June (when he carried 78%), although he still has the majority of support. In a four-way contest, 63% of evangelicals support Trump. Meanwhile, Clinton gets almost twice as much support from evangelicals as Johnson (17% to 9%), with Green Party candidate Jill Stein trailing at 3%.

Scrimshaw foregrounds Christian values in his appeal to evangelical voters. But the results of the Republican primary call into question whether that’s really the best way to reach them.

During the primary, Trump leveraged fear about cultural changes and shifts in the racial makeup of the country, rather than advance a socially conservative agenda against abortion and gay marriage. And it worked for him. Evangelicals backed Trump over more aggressively socially conservative candidates, such as Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee. It was an early indication that self-described evangelicals weren’t necessarily voting on their faith.

Dan Cox, research director at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), says that evangelical voters “gravitated toward his message of hostility toward immigrants, that the globalized economy is failing them, that America has lost its greatness and prestige.”

PRRI’s CEO Robert P. Jones, author most recently of The End of White Christian America, has argued that white evangelicals are no longer swayed by social issues to the extent they once were.

He wrote in The Atlantic in February:

Trump’s success has demonstrated that the conventional mode of thinking about white evangelical voters as “values voters” is no longer helpful, if it ever was. The Trump revelation is that white evangelicals have become “nostalgia voters:” a culturally and economically disaffected group that is anxious to hold onto a white, conservative Christian culture that is passing from the scene.

According to Brian Tashman, a writer for Right Wing Watch, the Religious Right establishment had pushed Republican candidates to campaign hard on defunding Planned Parenthood and advocating for religious liberty bills, but that wasn’t enough to lure the evangelical voting base away from Trump. “That doesn’t mean they don’t agree with [these social issues], but they were more interested in deporting immigrants and putting up tariffs,” Tashman said in a recent interview with the podcast An Ear for Baby (which I co-host).

One of the first evangelical leaders to endorse Trump was Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the Baptist school Liberty University and son of the founder of the Moral Majority. Defending his endorsement in a January op-ed in the Washington Post, Falwell Jr. cited the Gospels (“Render unto Caesars…”) to bolster his argument that a divide between the sacred and the secular was particularly useful in the case of Trump. Falwell Jr. said he did not believe that Jesus would want his followers to “elect only someone who would make a good Sunday School teacher or pastor.”

“Let’s stop trying to choose the political leaders who we believe are the most godly because, in reality, only God knows people’s hearts,” he wrote.

If Trump won the rank-and-file evangelical voters with his rhetoric on trade and immigration, he converted the Religious Right establishment when he signed on to their tentpole issues: defunding Planned Parenthood, rolling back progress on gay rights, and expanding religious liberty protections. With his tacit approval, the GOP platform became the most socially conservative it has ever been.

Trump has been particularly adamant about repealing the 1954 Johnson Amendment to the federal tax code, which forbids churches from endorsing political candidates or else risk their tax-exempt status. Trump has said repeatedly that the amendment stifles the free speech of Christians.

In this, Trump seems to be beholden more to the desires of the movement’s gatekeepers than the average evangelical voter. According to Pew, “[T]here is a strong consensus that church endorsements of political candidates is crossing the line. Fully two-thirds of Americans say churches and other houses of worship should not come out in favor of one candidate over another during political elections, while 29% say churches should get directly involved in electoral politics in this way.”

In June, as then-presumptive nominee Trump began to seal the deal with the Religious Right establishment, Michael Farris, one of the earliest members of the Moral Majority movement, penned a blistering op-ed in The Washington Post, chiding the faith leaders meeting with Trump for having “forgotten the very premises on which the Moral Majority and the social conservative movement was founded.”

Farris recalled his own role in the beginnings of the movement and argued that Trump’s “candidacy is the antithesis of everything we set out to achieve.” (Scrimshaw begins his Open Letter by quoting Farris’ op-ed.)

In a separate op-ed published two days earlier in the Christian Post, Farris was even blunter. “This meeting marks the end of the Christian Right,” he wrote. “In 1980 I believed that Christians could dramatically influence politics. Today, we see politics fully influencing a thousand Christian leaders.”

“This is a day of mourning,” he concluded.

Speaking to me by email last week, Farris remained pessimistic about the current state of the Christian Right and utterly unmoved by Trump’s concessions to the social conservative agenda.

The surge of support for Trump from evangelicals was evidence to Farris that any Trump fans who identified as a conservative Christian, in fact, lacked the values they purported to espouse. “Very few true evangelicals supported Trump during the primary,” Farris said. “Self-described evangelicals maybe aren’t the real thing.”

In a New York Times op-ed published Sunday, Daniel K. Williams argued that in hitching their movement to Trump, the Religious Right had effectively surrendered its soul. “For most conservative evangelical voters, pragmatism has trumped theological purity, and the comprehensive vision of national moral renewal that once animated the Christian right has given way to a single-minded focus on the Supreme Court,” Williams wrote.

Clearly, something had changed. Whether Trump wins or loses, it begs the question: Where do evangelicals go from here?

Continue reading: “It would require a fundamental shift…”

[image: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr]