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Are Religious Voters Even Backing Trump?

Depends which religion you're looking at

Damon Linker asks a question in his column today at The Week:

The evangelical embrace of Trump (after considerable early skepticism about his bid for the White House) is remarkable for several reasons. It indicates that evangelicals are considerably less concerned about the personal moral and religious character of presidential candidates than many (including, I suspect, many evangelicals themselves) have typically presumed. It also demonstrates that social conservatives are more willing than members of the Republican Party’s other two major factions — pro-business economic libertarians and hawkish foreign policy internationalists — to embrace a brash, populist insurgent. Many members of the first group have remained on the sidelines and some appear willing to entertain defecting to Libertarian Party ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld; members of the second, meanwhile, have gravitated to Hillary Clinton.

But not evangelicals.

The question is why. Why would voters who engage in politics in large part because of their attachment to a social-conservative agenda rally around a blustering, bragging vulgarian who’s on his third marriage; who specializes in such un-Christ-like behavior as mocking a reporter with a disability; who favors such policies as rounding up and deporting millions, torturing terrorism suspects, banning the members of specific religions from entering the United States, and striking first with nuclear weapons; and perhaps most pertinent of all, who shows no interest in, knowledge of, or sympathy for the social-conservative agenda?

He goes on to dispense with possible reasons for an actual affinity, before coming to the following conclusion:

Today the religious right’s theoconservative agenda of injecting orthodox Judeo-Christianity into the nation’s public life has shriveled into an effort to protect devout Christians from being forced by the government to conform with the dictates of anti-discrimination law in all of their dealings with the wider world. Which means that a movement to reclothe the “naked public square” in vestments has become a rear-guard defense of religious freedom.

If you’re part of an ambitious, self-confident movement out to transform the country in a traditionalist Christian direction, you want a president like Dubya, who will speak boldly and unapologetically about his faith and how it informs his policy agenda. But if you’re feeling defeated and demoralized, weak and vulnerable, you probably want a president who will serve as your protector.

That’s what I suspect a fair number of evangelical Trump supporters believe they’ve found in the Republican nominee.

That’s pretty much what Rod Dreher has been arguing in our dialogue on the subject (see here, here and here to catch up). I’ve made my argument in those previous posts about why religious conservatives shouldn’t be looking at it that way. But are they?

One reason I’m skeptical is that it’s really only evangelical Protestants who have rallied to Trump’s side.

Catholics are tilting the other way. As Leah Libresco reported recently at fivethirtyeight.com, Clinton is not only winning Catholics generally — she’s winning Catholics who attend mass at least weekly by a comparable margin of around 20%. And this isn’t just a Hispanic effect. White Catholics went roughly 3-to-2 for Romney over Obama in 2012. But they are split roughly 50-50 between Clinton and Trump — not because they like Clinton better than Obama, but because of extremely negative feelings about Trump.

Mormon voters were obviously especially strong supporters of their co-religionist in 2012. But they have been a solidly Republican bloc of voters for a many cycles. Not this time, though. The LDS Church made a point of explicitly rebuking Trump back in December, and the Republican nominee’s reputation among Utahns remains so bad that people are speculating he could even lose the state.

Mass-attending Catholics and Mormons are key parts of the religious conservative coalition that George W. Bush cemented. And they have been very vocal about their fears about the application of anti-discrimination law. But they are not getting on the Trump train the way evangelical Protestants are. Why not?

Well, let’s look at evangelical Protestants themselves. It’s notable that the most regular churchgoers are supporting Trump at the same overwhelming rates to their support for Romney and McCain. It’s possible that this group is looking for a “protector.” But it’s also possible that they are just being loyal to their party — or that they have more of a Manichean mindset than, say, mass-going Catholics. In that regard, it’s worth recalling that prior to 2012 there was real concern that evangelical Protestants might not come out for Romney because he is a member of a church some evangelical groups consider to be a pagan cult. But they didn’t falter in their support. Which suggests that we already knew that evangelical Protestants were perfectly willing to support a nominee who wasn’t “one of them” provided he checked some other set of boxes.

On the other hand, mass-going Catholics may abhor Clinton’s stance on abortion but find other things appealing about the Democratic message. And Mormons, who place such great emphasis on personal rectitude, may be less-willing to forgive Trump his appalling personal behavior than are sola fide Protestants. Finally, Catholics and Mormons are likely far more sensitive to the fact that Trump is actively hostile to a minority religious group, and apprehensive about the precedent thus set. White evangelical Protestants may not see that as a problem in the same way.

But the real movement towards Trump has been among relatively unchurched evangelical Protestants — people who don’t go regularly even on Sundays. This group has moved more than 20 points in Trump’s direction, according to Pew. It seems to me very unlikely that they are moved by the search for a specifically religious protector.

In any event, I strongly suspect that evangelical leaders have noticed who is showing up for Trump rallies. So one possible reason why they have been lining up behind Trump is that they know where their flock is — as well as where the lost sheep are flocking. And that’s where they need to go politically to continue to be heard. After all, they largely backed other horses like Rubio during the nomination fight, and saw their parishioners rush to Trump’s banner. If they don’t support Trump now, who’s going to listen to them if he loses?

 

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