Ralph Reed

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Trump support weakens among white evangelicals: So @NYTimes talks to lots of old folks

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I was reading a New York Times piece the other day — “Trump’s Approval Slips Where He Can’t Afford to Lose It: Among Evangelicals” — when I found myself thinking about the Rev. Pat Robertson and quarterback Tom Brady.

This may take some explaining.

For starters, if you know anything about the 2016 election, you know that white evangelicals helped fuel Trump’s success in the GOP primaries. Then, in the general election, white and Latino evangelicals were crucial to his pivotal win in Florida. But the key to his election was winning the votes of Rust Belt (a) Democrats who previously voted for Barack Obama, (b) conservative and older Catholics, (c) angry labor union members/retirees or (d) citizens who were “all of the above.”

Catholic swing voters were much more important to Trump than white evangelicals — in the 2020 general election (as opposed to primaries).

But back to aging NFL quarterbacks and this sad Times political desk feature. Here is a key passage, which is linked — of course — to the bizarre Bible photo episode:

Unnerved by his slipping poll numbers and his failure to take command of the moral and public health crises straining the country, religious conservatives have expressed concern in recent weeks to the White House and the Trump campaign about the president’s political standing.

Their rising discomfort spilled out into the open … when the founder of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, scolded the president for taking such a belligerent tone as the country erupted in sorrow and anger over the police killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis.

Speaking on his newscast, “The 700 Club,” the televangelist whose relationship with Mr. Trump dates to the 1990s said, “You just don’t do that, Mr. President,” and added, “We’re one race. And we need to love each other.”

This leads us to some summary material that could have been written by some kind of automated writing program on a blue-zip-code newsroom computer:


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Yes, there's still a November election and propaganda about religion will merit examination

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Despite the dormant U.S. campaign and 24/7 news coverage on COVID-19, political verbiage continues unabated, some of it religious in flavor.

Writers are unlikely to scan this scene at the moment, but The Religion Guy thinks it merits examination sometime before Election Day seven months hence.

The overriding trait of U.S. political propaganda in our time — from left and right — is that it ever more narrowly “preaches to the choir,” as the old saying goes, reinforcing prior mindsets and allegiances rather than trying to persuade fence-sitters or people with opposite views. Ditto with religious verbiage.

There are two categories of propaganda. (1) Promotional material disgorged by political groups themselves. (2) Opinion journalism that drifts toward the rabidly partisan newspapering of the Adams-Burr-Hamilton-Jefferson days. Click here for a sample.

A typical example of appeals to hidebound attitudes is a direct-mail plea that Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition says went to 10 million Christians. They were asked to donate $22.5 million to register 5 million new voters in 16 battleground states, re-elect President Donald Trump, and maintain Republicans’ Senate control.

The mailer said 81% of “conservative Christians” voted for Trump, which signaled that the intended audience here was white evangelical Protestants, not minority Protestants or Catholics who resent it when the “Christian” label is co-opted this way.

Reed’s mailer came in mid-March, just before the president shifted to sterner warnings about COVID-19, so that looming crisis went unmentioned while the then-booming economy was touted. The pitch cited federal judge appointments but notably skipped past other evangelical concerns like support for Israel, religious liberty, LGBTQ and gender identity disputes, the drug epidemic and abortion.

Instead, believers were told to combat the “OPEN BORDERS, socialist, anti-God, anti-family agenda of today’s Democrat Party” whose “VOTE FRAUD” threatens democracy, all of this abetted by the “dishonest media.” The enemy would “erase Christianity from America” and have the U.S. “governed by the United Nations” instead of its Constitution. Those “vicious and unhinged” liberals “can destroy America forever” so it becomes “a failed, corrupt, one-party socialist country like Cuba or Venezuela.” Etc.

With propaganda via journalism, let’s start at the elite level with Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, emeritus economics prof at Princeton and New York Times columnist. His March 28 opus accusing the Trump administration of inadequate COVID-19 response blamed its “denialism” in part upon “the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives.”


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Complex evangelical landscape: But Old Gray Lady listens to the same choir, again

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Whenever I talk to evangelicals — including the infamous “white evangelicals” of 2016 infamy — I am always amazed at the wide variety of viewpoints that I hear about issues linked to politics.

Note that I said “issues linked to politics,” instead of saying “politics” — period.

That’s crucial. For millions of Americans, and not just evangelical Protestants, it’s easier to talk about the details of their faith and their doctrinal beliefs than it is to discuss the horse-race details of party politics. For many, their political choices are too painful to discuss. They are battling to find ways to act on their religious convictions in a hellish political landscape.

When it comes to moral and cultural issues, they know what they believe. When it comes to political realities, they tend to be rather cynical or depressed about their choices.

These complex realities are not, however, what I find when I click into the hallowed digital pages of The New York Times. Consider this recent religion feature that ran with the headline, “Evangelicals, Looking to 2020, Face the Limits of Their Base.” The overture:

WASHINGTON — After Democrats delivered a resounding counterpunch to President Trump at the polls, one of his most reliable voting blocs — social conservatives — now faces the repercussions of its uncompromising support for Mr. Trump’s agenda.

That result is mixed: Social conservatives are celebrating a slightly expanded Republican majority in the Senate, which advances their top priority, confirming conservative judges, as well as their anti-abortion rights agenda. But steep Republican losses in the House, particularly in suburban areas, have some strategists reflecting on how to proceed as they pivot their efforts to re-electing Mr. Trump in 2020.

“Social conservatives need to maximize turnout from the base and expand the map by stressing the softer side of the faith agenda: education reform, immigration and criminal justice reform, and anti-poverty measures,” said Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which has extensive outreach to conservative evangelicals in battlegrounds across the country.

Let’s pause for a moment and think about who is speaking, in these framework remarks.

Who is Ralph Reed? If you were describing his stature in the world of modern evangelicalism, would you say that he is a leader among old-school evangelicals or the young-blood networks that represent the future? Is he the rare person who has stature in both camps?

I ask this for a simple reason.


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Is the open U.S. Supreme Court seat a religion story? Do we even need to ask that?

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If you live in Washington, D.C., or have sojourned there in the past, then you know that a high percentage of folks in the Beltway chattering classes wake up every morning with a dose of Mike Allen.

This was true in his "Playbook" days at The Politico and it's true now that he has moved on to create the Axios website, which is must-reading in this troubled Donald Trump era.

So if you want to know what DC folks are thinking about -- after King Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court -- then it's logical to do a quick scan of Allen's punchy offerings today in the "Axios AM" digital newsletter (click here to see it in a browser). At this here weblog, that means looking for religion-beat hooks. It doesn't take a lot of effort to find them. For example:

Behind the scenes: Trump doesn’t personally care that much about some of the social issues, such as LGBT rights, energizing the Republican base over the Supreme Court.

But Trump knows how much his base cares about the court. He believes that releasing his list of potential court picks during the campaign was a masterstroke, and helped him win.

What part of the GOP base is Allen talking about? That's obvious. However, journalists covering this angle really need to see if many cultural conservatives are all that interested in rolling back gay-rights victories at the high court.

Most of the people I know understand that this ship has sailed, in post-Christian American culture, and they are primarily interested in seeing a strong court decision defending some kind of conscientious objection status and/or a clear rejection of government compelled speech and artistic expression. In other words, they would like to see an old-school liberal ruling on First Amendment grounds.

As I have said here many times, I know very, very few religious conservatives who wanted to vote for Trump. However, I heard lots of people say something like this: I don't know what Donald Trump is going to do. But I do know what Hillary Rodham Clinton is going to do. I'm going to have to take a risk. They were talking about SCOTUS and the First Amendment.

Back to Allen:


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