Are White Evangelicals and Catholics Finally Opening Their Eyes?

As noted over the weekend, Donald Trump has a problem with Mormon voters.  True, a majority of Mormons may still vote for Trump, but a significant exodus from the top of the GOP ticket could spell trouble for Trump in some western states.  Now, a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican who was raised in the evangelical tradition looks at some growing evidence that some portion of white evangelicals and Catholics may be opening their eyes and ears and realizing that Trump is the antithesis of the values they claim to support and seek to uphold.  As with Mormon voters, a majority of white evangelicals and Catholics may still vote for racism and hatred of others that Trump symbolizes - proving yet again they are today's version of the biblical Pharisees - but a significant defection could tip the election outcome in critical some swing states.  Personally, I hope this signs prove accurate and a larger percentage of these voters abandon Trump and demonstrate that not all Christians are morally bankrupt.  Here are column highlights:

Jeremiah was as good as it gets in the prophet business, but he could be a bit of a downer. In this respect, the opinion columnist is his natural successor. But it is worth trying now and again to look on the bright side of our political cataclysm. And there are hints — tentative hints — that White evangelicals and Catholics are beginning to open their ears.

An August Fox News poll found support for Joe Biden among White evangelicals at 28 percent — significantly higher than the 16 percent who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 exit polls. A recent Vote Common Good survey indicated an 11 percentage point shift toward Biden among evangelicals and Catholics who supported Donald Trump in 2016. These surveys are not evidence of collapsing approval for Trump among these groups, but they may signal an erosion of support. And Trump can’t afford to lose any ground among the base of his base.

I suspect that some of this shift is coming not because these are religious voters, but because they are voters. Like everyone else, they see the disastrous incompetence of an administration that never gained its footing in the fight against covid-19. They see the economic suffering caused by Trump’s delay, denial and tenacious stupidity. They see the packed Trump rallies that amount to negligent homicide. They see the heartless claims of success while the ill and elderly continue to die.

It is also true that Biden simply does not provoke the same level of partisan fear and loathing that Hillary Clinton did in 2016. The Republican charge of radicalism against Biden did not stick. And the charge that he will be manipulated by radicals lacks both credibility and political urgency. Whatever his limits and faults, Biden exudes decency and normality.

Biden has the opportunity to do some outreach. Even minimal assurances about how his administration would respect institutional religious liberty might go a long way toward confirming the comfort of some evangelicals with the Democratic ticket.

I would like to think that White evangelical and Catholic support for Trump might also be cooling because of the divisive and disturbing moral choices being made by the Trump campaign. In the 2018 midterm election, Republicans lost control of the House largely because they got blasted in the suburbs. A similar performance in 2020 would dramatically weaken Trump’s reelection chances. Any of the pre-Trump, Republican presidential candidates would have responded to this challenge by talking more about education, health care or transportation. For Trump, it is an opportunity to warn against Black people invading suburban neighborhoods.

Trump is conflating protests against racial injustice with criminal activity and warning that angry faces are coming to suburbia if Biden wins.

Elsewhere, Trump has warned that “low income housing and projects” will undermine the “American Dream.” Note Trump’s consistent use of the word “projects,” which evokes images of decaying and dangerous apartment buildings filled with minorities. Trump’s twisted definition of the American Dream is White flight from urban poverty and decay.

Cultivating fear of the coming melanin invasion is now the defining theme of the Trump campaign. It is also the rawest recourse to bigotry on the national stage since Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the 1960s and ’70s.

And it puts White evangelicals and Catholics in a bind. The protection of nascent life remains a deep commitment of most moral conservatives, and Trump has been an antiabortion president. Yet supporting Trump involves the affirmation that blatant racial prejudice is not disqualifying in an American president. Publicly identifying with the Trump campaign scandalously associates the Christian faith itself with brazen bigotry.

This creates soul-rending ethical complexities (which I fully intend to address). But if a racist campaign does not shake Christian support, what possible difference is that faith making?