It’s no secret that a large segment of the religious right has gotten on the Donald Trump train. But what about garden-variety evangelicals? Well, the folks at FiveThirtyEight have discovered a lot of evidence that suggests they are not only rallying behind him, but doing so in staggering numbers.
As an example, FiveThirtyEight offers Chris and Kimarie Nickels of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina; a suburb of Charleston. They are both members of Seacoast Church, a large evangelical multi-site church based in Mount Pleasant. During the February primary, they both voted against Trump. Chris voted for Marco Rubio; he said at the time that evangelicals who considered church life important to them could not even consider voting for the Donald. Kimarie voted for Ted Cruz in hopes of derailing “a certain crazy train.”
Fast forward to Monday. Both Chris and Kimarie had decided they would vote for Trump–in large part because they, like many other evangelicals, were scared at the prospect of Hillary Clinton being in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices. Chris said that the importance of putting another conservative in Antonin Scalia’s old seat was very important to them.
However, evangelicals seemed to be rallying to Trump well before September. In June–a month after Trump effectively locked up the GOP nomination–the Pew Research Center found that a staggering 94 percent of white Republican and Republican-leaning evangelicals would vote for Trump over Hillary Clinton. What makes this even more staggering is that in April, only 44 percent of white Republican and Republican-leaning evangelicals were willing to back Trump over Hillary.
According to R. Marie Griffith of Washington University in St. Louis’ Danforth Center on Religion in Politics, it’s not just the Supreme Court that’s driving this pro-Trump trend. Griffith says that Trump strikes a chord among evangelicals who fear “they and their values are being displaced” by both foreign forces as well as domestic concerns like gay rights and women’s rights. They also see Hillary as someone who represents “threatening values that will topple America” as they know it.
As many of you know, I’m an evangelical myself. Specifically, a charismatic/pentecostal. But I’m having a really hard time getting my head around how so many evangelicals seem to be flocking to Trump like moths to a flame. Are they so concerned about the Supreme Court, gay rights, and abortion that they’re willing to give this country to a guy who plasters private cell phone numbers on social media, mocks the disabled, condones violence at his rallies, and has a bad habit of disrespecting women, among other things? Apparently so.
Then again, for the better part of 30 years, the religious right has brainwashed its followers into thinking that voting for Democrats is nothing less than a violation of their faith. As a result, a significant number of the American people will vote for anything or anyone with an R next to his name–even if he is the most manifestly unfit and unqualified major-party candidate in memory. But in that world, none of that matters–all that matters is ending abortion and marriage equality.
It’s not the first time I’ve run up against this mentality. As many of my longtime readers know, I was tricked into joining a hypercharismatic and borderline cultish campus ministry in my freshman year at Carolina. After I left, I discovered that the church with whom this ministry was aligned, King’s Park International Church in Durham, had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious “campus cults” from the 1970s and 1980s.
However, when I told my former “brothers” and “sisters” that KPIC and its pastor, Ron Lewis, had been blatantly lying to them, their collective response was, in so many words, “So what?” Never mind that Lewis had put the campus ministers–and KPIC as a whole–in great legal danger. Never mind that he put the rank-and-filers at risk of suspension or expulsion. They remained loyal to him, presumably to be part of “what God’s doing.” I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t understand it now.
If Nate Silver’s crew had a chance to talk to some of my evangelical friends, they would discover that a good number of them won’t even consider voting for Trump. I know of at least five friends who are strongly conservative, and yet have ruled out supporting Trump. It may have taken awhile, but it now seems that a growing sector of evangelicals realize that social issues aren’t the be-all and end-all of everything. Hopefully we can see a difference by 2020.
(featured image: screenshot from YouTube)
