Donald Trump's support among evangelicals shows signs of weakening

At a Believers for Trump event at an Atlanta church last Friday, the assembled Maga devotees raised their smartphones, ready to record rallying cries in support of their political hero.

Instead, former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson told a crowd nestled among dozens of empty seats that his ex-boss had poor bedside manners, nonetheless urging them to choose the lesser of two evils.

Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Liberty coalition and former aide to televangelist Pat Robertson, said that although Donald Trump had been accused of lying to his wife, the public must remember that he also kept his promise to put three pro-lifers in prison. judges of the Supreme Court.

Republican National Convention Chairman Michael Whatley found it necessary to reassure rally attendees that his party remained absolutely pro-family, even as he alluded to concern among brothers over the refusal to Trump to support a national ban on abortion.

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Such cautious exhortations have become a hallmark of the Trump campaign's efforts to ensure that white evangelicals among the Republican nominee's most ardent supporters in the last two presidential elections vote for him in similar numbers on November 5.

With two weeks left before the race for the White House, the outcome could depend on how many of these believers vote for him again.

Although polls show that Trump continues to attract support from the vast majority of practicing white Christians, a recent study from Arizona Christian University concluded that enthusiasm among believers is significantly lower than in 2020. It predicts that of the more than 80 million regular churchgoers in the United States, as many as 32 minutes would stay at home.

Trump, who has enjoyed almost universal support from white Christians over the past eight years despite his alleged infidelities and criminal convictions, has continued to court believers by describing the upcoming election as a referendum on religious freedom and endorsing the comparisons. of his legal and other difficulties with those of Jesus Christ.

Donald Trump, center, and his supporters pray during an Evangelical Coalition for Trump event in Miami in 2020 Marco Bello/Bloomberg

Although not a practicing Christian himself, Trump's vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, is a devout convert to Catholicism, who has argued that American economic and social policies should be guided by religious belief .

Yet at recent rallies, Trump has once again risked alienating devout Christians among his supporters. Over the weekend, he opened a speech with a vulgar story about the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer's penis. He also mocked his opponent's mental acuity and continued to ignore evangelical leader Franklin Graham's request to refrain from swearing.

Aside from weariness with Trump's vulgarities, the relative lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy among the faithful might be because on moral issues evangelicals care about, like abortion, Trump is actually backtracking, said Michael Emerson, a religion and public affairs scholar. political expert at Rice University.

The watering down of pro-life commitments in the RNC platform, which now contains only a cursory reference to the power to ban abortion having been given to states, has caused disappointment among key figures in the Southern Baptist Convention, a group that overwhelmingly supported Trump. in 2016 and 2020.

A recent survey of Protestant pastors found that almost a quarter were reluctant to reveal who they would vote for in this election, compared to just 4% in 2020. Only half of those who responded said that They would vote for Trump.

Sensing an opportunity, a group called Evangelicals for Harris spent millions of dollars targeting believers in swing states. A broadcast ad juxtaposes the late evangelist Billy Graham's sermons on greed with clips of Trump celebrating his greed or admitting he's not sure he ever asked God for forgiveness.

The group, founded by the Rev. Jim Ball, a Virginia-based minister who previously led environmental campaigns, has more than 300,000 members. This is a tiny portion of the tens of millions of evangelical Protestants in the United States, but a potentially large group in swing states like Georgia, where Trump lost in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Now that Roe vs. Wade has been overturned, Trump's reluctance to explicitly endorse a national abortion ban has given us an opportunity to tell our fellow evangelicals that there is no anti-abortion candidate in this race , Ball said.

Additionally, a Pew poll found that white evangelicals are more likely to care about immigration, the economy and foreign policy than abortion in this election.

White evangelicals' support for Democrats reached an all-time low in 2016, with only 16% voting for Hillary Clinton over Trump. But Ball, who organized for Biden in 2020, said raising that figure to 24 percent helped deprive the former president of a second term, and that an additional two percentage point increase in the Next month's election could push Kamala Harris across the finish line.

Ben Carson, a former cabinet secretary in the Trump administration, told the crowd that his former boss behaved poorly at the bedside, but he nevertheless urged them to support former President Jose Juarez/APR. Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Liberty coalition, reminded his audience that Trump nominated three pro-life justices to the Supreme Court Chris Kleponis/AFP via Getty Images

Our goal is 26 percent…this would be a record level of support. [among white Evangelicals]Ball said. President Obama reached 26 percent in 2008.

Reaching such a threshold will depend more on combating widespread apathy among white evangelicals than on winning over die-hard Trump fans.

The number of churchgoers in America, a group that Rice University's Emerson says is far more likely to vote than everyone else, has been in steady decline since Covid-19 forced houses of worship to close.

Since the last election, the rate of church attendance in the United States has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in American history, according to a long-running Gallup poll, as young people increasingly move away in addition to organized religions.

Worse still for activists, fewer pastors are willing to preach politics from the pulpit, for fear of alienating their flock.

Research from Arizona Christian University has shown that a large number of Christian churches have distanced themselves from elections, refusing to encourage congregants to vote and avoiding teaching on many of the key social issues which will determine which candidates people will support.

At an hour-long service Sunday at the largely white evangelical Stonecreek Church in northeast Atlanta that included a section weighing the benefits of intermittent fasting, no mention of politics or voting was not made. Afterward, worshipers were privately caustic about Trump's rhetoric.

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Across town, Harris, who has her own Souls to the Polls initiative to build support among non-white Christians, received enthusiastic applause at two black churches after appearing on stage with Stevie Wonder. Following his remarks, buses took worshipers to the anticipated voting booths.

Although they are not as publicly enthusiastic as their black counterparts, a growing silent majority of white evangelicals are more supportive of the Democrats and Harris' platform, said James Talarico, a Texas state representative working for Evangelicals for Harris.

We finally see, to use a biblical expression, the fruit of the tree, Talarico said. They see what Trump stands for and see the results of his actions and the results of his policies.

While Talarico said he remains realistic about the prospect of a broad shift away from Trump among white evangelicals, he added: Just bringing a few people to our side could make all the difference.

Additional reporting by Madison Darbyshire in New York

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