It should surprise no one that after going all-in for Donald Trump, the religious right is positively giddy about Trump’s shocking victory on Election Night. But there’s a good chance that social conservatives may wind up paying a very stiff price in the long run for their role in powering the Donald to victory.
A number of fundies think that they literally helped shift the election in Trump’s favor. For instance, during a live webcast sponsored by Kenneth Copeland’s organization, Michele Bachmann and David Barton claimed that Trump seized the momentum from Hillary Clinton right around the time everyone in attendance started praying. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
However, veteran religious right watcher Neil Young suspects that Bachmann, Barton, and others may live to regret their boast. In a revealing article for Religion Dispatches, Young suggested that the religious right potentially “destroyed its witness to the nation” by throwing its weight behind Trump.
According to exit polls, 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Even allowing for the fact that Hillary has been one of the religious right’s pet hates for three decades, that figure is absolutely staggering. However, Young was stunned to discover that white evangelicals backed Trump slightly more than they did George W. Bush–who, you may recall, is one of their own. According to figures from the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of white evangelicals supported Bush in 2004.
To Young’s mind, the “historical outrageousness” of such overwhelming white evangelical support for Trump is almost certain to come back to haunt the religious right later. Although some social conservatives would have you believe that visceral revulsion for Hillary drove them into the Donald’s waiting arms, Young doesn’t think it will look that way in the history books.
“But votes against Clinton’ is not what history will record. Instead, white evangelicals will forever be associated with Donald Trump in the minds of the American people. And they will pay the price for that association.”
To Young’s mind, the religious right will be forever known as “Trumpvangelicals” for telling us that “character and conscience mattered” while turning a blind eye to Trump’s outrageous behavior on the campaign trail. In so doing, Young believes that the religious right has “permanently damaged their moral witness.”
It’s hard not to agree. After all, history will show that Bachmann, Barton, and the rest of the religious right convinced their followers that stopping abortion and marriage equality meant throwing their weight behind a man who plastered a private cell phone number on social media, mocked the disabled, condoned violence at his rallies, and publicly demeaned a woman who dared ask him a critical question.
All of this, however, paled in comparison to how they reacted during two of Trump’s biggest outrages after the conventions. When Trump was caught on tape reveling in how he felt he could grope women because of his wealth and power, a number of religious right leaders said it wasn’t as high a priority as ending abortion, scrapping the Iran nuclear deal, and ensuring a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Translation: they are perfectly fine with building a “culture of life” on the backs of victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, some of whom were actually triggered by Trump’s behavior during the campaign. As a domestic violence survivor myself, this makes me want to retch.
If that wasn’t enough, when Trump made a blatantly anti-Semitic speech in October, the religious right didn’t even peep. And when Trump incorporated the audio from that speech into a closing ad full of anti-Semitic dog whistles, America’s so-called moral guardians not only kept quiet, but actually helped him in his final push for votes. I can still hear Reed claiming that the Iran nuclear deal had to be derailed because it posed “an existential threat to Israel.” Apparently a raving anti-Semite in the White House isn’t a threat to Israel in Reed’s world.
The religious right went low in this election when it backed Trump. But we’re going high over the next two years. In that time, we’re going to make sure that Bachmann, Barton, and friends own every last bit of the fail that is going to come from Washington over the next two years–and that they, along with the rest of the Trump/Ryan/McConnell gang, pay the price in full.
(featured image: screengrab from YouTube)
