You’ve heard the same stat over and over: 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
That is true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Yet in the three years since Trump’s shocking upset of Hillary Clinton, many in the mainstream press have pushed the idea that all white evangelicals — well, 81 percent of them anyway — love Trump and everything about him.
In typical stories along those lines, there’s no room for nuance and no room for white evangelicals to have complicated feelings about Trump. It’s as if the reporters conveniently forget that there was another candidate on the ballot. A candidate who, like Trump, was one of the most unpopular major party nominees in history. And who, unlike Trump, clashed with many white evangelicals on issues such as abortion.
Given the preponderance of the aforementioned narrative, it’s especially nice when an award-winning Godbeat pro like The Atlantic’s Emma Green produces a piece — as she is so apt to do — that defies the worn-out stereotypes and digs deeper on the familiar stat so often repeated.
I’m talking about Green’s report out of Iowa this week titled “They Support Trump. They Want Him Impeached.”
The headline is partly clickbait and partly a mostly accurate assessment of Green’s report, which opens with this compelling scene:
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — The small towns that run across Iowa’s northwest corner form a district that is as politically red as it gets in America. There are vast stretches of farmland; public-school football teams pray together after games; Christian music regularly plays over the loudspeakers in shopping centers. Voters here in Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District have sent Representative Steve King back to Washington every year since 2003, and 81 percent of those in Sioux County, near the district’s northwest corner, chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, a higher pro-Trump percentage than anywhere else in the state.
Still, even some of these hard-core Republicans wouldn’t mind if Trump were impeached before Election Day 2020.
Polling suggests the president’s base nationwide is firmly opposed to impeachment, and that people’s opinions on the inquiry are split neatly along partisan lines. But at least in Sioux Center, where Republican presidential candidates regularly make pit stops during the primary season, some conservatives still feel ambivalent about Trump’s policies and character. In my conversations around town, people were skeptical that the impeachment inquiry would go anywhere, but they smiled ruefully at the fantasy of a President Mike Pence and a clean slate of Republican candidates in 2020. While voters in this area clearly preferred Trump over Clinton in 2016 and told me they have appreciated some of his work over the past two and a half years, there’s a difference between defending Trump and supporting him. However skeptical people here may be of Democrats’ motives and the likelihood of success, impeachment offers a distant dream of a return to Republican “politics as usual.”
With Green’s stories, I almost always find myself tempted to copy and paste every single paragraph. She is that good at her craft.
But rather than invite attention from a copyright lawyer, I’ll simply note that if you keep reading, Green offers some really nice context and analysis of Dutch Reformed Christians who dominate northwest Iowa and mostly voted for Trump. She explains how many of those Iowans seem to love Trump’s policies more than they do Trump himself or his approach.
Ever the nuanced journalist, Green notes that “Pat national narratives don’t fit Sioux County well.” I’d argue that “Pat national narratives don’t fit America well.” We are a big, complicated nation, as Green illustrates with her reporting from Iowa.
Later, Green quotes a person of faith with a different perspective from the Reformed pastor whom she features earlier in the piece:
This is one of many factors that can make national politics feel far away in a place like Sioux Center, including the fight over impeachment. Several people told me they don’t think or talk much about the impeachment inquiry; they don’t hear about it from their friends, at church, or at work. Democrats have clearly wanted Trump out since the moment he took office, they said—the latest allegations hardly seem different from past accusations the party has made. “Here’s what the impeachment stuff tells me,” said Jacob Hall, a local sports reporter who helps lead Sioux County Conservatives, a local activist group. Democrats “know they can’t beat him in 2020.”
Unlike some of his neighbors in Sioux County, Hall does not believe Republicans should turn back to an older, more civil style of politics. Impeachment is just one more front in an all-out partisan battle for the nation’s soul. Hall doesn’t love Trump, he said, but he voted for him in 2016 because “the future of the country, in my opinion, was legitimately on the line.” He has no doubt that “at some point in my kids’ lives, in America, they’re going to have to choose between denouncing their faith,” he said, and getting “locked up in a prison somewhere. I fully expect that.”
Bottom line: It’s an excellent, thought-provoking story.
Go ahead and read it all.