Please, Morning Joe, Just Stop!
Once again, political pundits are fixated on evangelicals
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I confess — on most mornings, I watch Morning Joe on MSNBC. Over the years, the network’s signature morning program featuring Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski has emerged as one of those “must view” political shows among journalists and political junkies, especially where I live, right outside Washington, D.C.
One of the reasons I generally appreciate Morning Joe is that the hosts pay more attention to religion than many programs in the mainstream news media. But — and here’s another confession — I’m increasingly frustrated with its narrowing vision of religion and its conflation of white evangelicalism with Christianity as a whole. When it comes to faith, nearly every story is about what white evangelicals think, how they vote, and (frankly) mocking them for hypocrisy on multiple fronts.
This morning, Morning Joe served up yet another package on evangelicals and Donald Trump (it seems to be a near-daily standby at this point). The reporter (who wasn’t terrible) interviewed a standard array of semi-freakish looking white evangelical churchgoers wearing outrageous Trump accessories. Pretty much, they all made uninformed comments and said wildly heretical things about divine providence.
The reporter seemed to try and draw a distinction between her subjects and other Christians, even making one off-handed comment that not all Christians were evangelicals (thank you!). And yet, she used a mishmash of data from a variety of sources, including the notoriously unreliable count that puts evangelicals at 24% of the American population — a number which was true about twenty years ago but has dropped precipitously since.
The best survey organizations place the percentage of white evangelicals at 13.4% of the total population, with evangelicals of color adding far fewer than an additional 10% to that total. It is also difficult to categorize Black Americans and Latino churches as “evangelical” in the same way white evangelicalism has been defined. In other words, depending on how you define “evangelical,” and adding in the elusive percentages for evangelicals of color, evangelicals make up somewhere from 13% - 20% of all Americans. That’s around 1 out of 7 or 8 people in the nation.
That’s a big number. But it isn’t much different from the percentages of other, white non-evangelical Protestants (13.3%) and white Catholics (12%).
Evangelicals do vote in high numbers, but so do mainline Protestants. (I don’t know the voting numbers among white Catholics). Yet evangelicals have formed a significant voting block for the Republican party over the last four decades — a percentage that has mostly gone up over the years and reached a new high in the last presidential election for Donald Trump. Mainline Protestants, who were historically Republicans, have shifted slightly to the middle, with their votes being more evenly divided (in most elections) across party lines (as is the case for Catholics) somewhere in the vicinity of 55-45% (GOP to Democrat; this varies).
When it comes to the white Christian vote, the softer “blocks” of swing voters — or potential swing voters — are mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants and Catholics. Not evangelicals.
Yet, the media is fixated on evangelicals. And big-profile moderate and liberal evangelicals get lots of press — and seem to have convinced Democrats that if they can just flip a few evangelical voters, then Democrats win elections.
The Morning Joe panel today made this exact point — claiming that if just 2% of evangelicals changed their votes to Harris, then the Democrats would win in November.
Here’s the rub: moderate and liberal evangelicals have been saying the exact same thing for the twenty-three years that I’ve lived in Washington, D.C., and been hanging around with them (many of whom are my friends … and maybe still will be after they read this essay?) but the strategy NEVER works. As I said above, the percentage of evangelicals voting for Republicans has steadily increased over the last four decades — and the evangelical GOP voting block is now stronger than it has ever been. Trying to flip the evangelical vote is probably a waste of time and money.
There are seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election. And, in only two (Georgia and North Carolina) are evangelicals more than 20% of the population. Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all have larger populations of white mainliners and white Catholics than white evangelicals — and Nevada has a higher percentage of white Catholics than either of the white Protestant groups.
As the panel on Morning Joe said, elections are won on margins. And, given the data below, the religious margins in the swing states aren’t found among white evangelicals (again, the exceptions are Georgia and North Carolina). The religious margins are among white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics. (We’ll talk about the unaffiliated and “nones” below.)
For people of faith, religious community is an expression of identity. White evangelicals are basically lock-step with the GOP (some 8 of 10 evangelicals are now solidly in the Republican party). It is very difficult to get even a small percentage of them to move away from the group consensus to vote differently from their tribe. Most of those who have are now called “ex-evangelicals” or have learned to not speak out — and I suspect many consider themselves unaffiliated at this point.
White mainliners and white Catholics are part of religious communities that lean Republican as a whole but are more fluid in their theo-political identity. That means it is easier to vote differently than the person next to you in the pew on a given Sunday. While stories abound about evangelicals getting kicked out of their churches for being Democrats, such anecdotes are far less common regarding, say, the local Presbyterian church. You may feel uncomfortable in some congregations if your particular community leans more strongly one way or the other and you hold different views from them, but the minister isn’t likely to tell you that you can’t be a Democrat and a Christian or that it is idolatry to vote for Donald Trump and attend their church.
In short, white mainliners and white Catholics can be convinced to change their votes in any given election, around a variety of issues, by considering larger concerns of the common good, or if influenced by their friends and family (especially by younger relatives). Religious tribe isn’t as hardened around a single party or partisan concern.
All of this, however, may be a tempest in the religious teapot. Because the largest group of “religious” voters in the United States right now are those who don’t identify with a single church, denomination, or tradition. They are the “unaffiliated” and the “nones,” some of whom consider themselves Christian without a church, spiritual but not religious, or post-religious altogether. For the most part, unaffiliated voters tend to vote for Democrats — perhaps as a counterweight to the remaining white evangelical voting block for the GOP.
But if you think religion is still important — and you want to flip religious voters — you need to find those people who are actually willing to change their minds. And those voters aren’t in evangelical churches. The religious “margins” are in congregations more influenced by nostalgic patriotism than Christian nationalism and in faith communities that cherish democracy and diversity over authority and conformity. Those sorts of Christians don’t believe in one-time conversions or think that doubt is evil or that changing your opinion is heresy. Indeed, they cherish the idea of faith as a journey to follow grace and goodness wherever it takes them — even to unexpected ideas and places. And those sorts of religious people are more likely to be in white mainline and white Catholic churches than in evangelical congregations — especially in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Trust me, there are more congregations like this than you may guess. I know. I’ve been there. I hang out with those “marginal” Christians (those who were once called “mainline”) all the time. They never cease to surprise me.
If you don’t get the Convocation, my shared religion and politics digest (with Robert Jones, Kristin Du Mez, and Jemar Tisby), you may have missed our conversation on Tim Walz and mainline Protestantism. Check it out!
PAID SUBSCRIBER UPDATE
IMPORTANT: Eliza Griswold had to reschedule and we will NOT gather on Thursday for a live Zoom. (Sorry - she had a last minute conflict. It will probably be next week instead).
BUT … TRIPP FULLER AND I are pulling together a RUINING DINNER episode for FRIDAY at 1PM Eastern.
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INSPIRATION
He tells her that the Earth is flat—
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong….
— Wendy Cope, “He Tells Her” Read the entire poem HERE
The Cottage is about many things — including tackling important issues of faith and society. It is no secret to anybody that I’m not a Donald Trump fan and that I’ve written widely criticizing both the old Religious Right and Christian nationalism over decades.
I won’t be turning The Cottage into part of the political campaign. But I am excited by Harris and Walz — and I recently lent my voice to support them as a person of faith.
Last Monday night, I participated in Christians for Kamala via video recording. You can get a sense of how I’m thinking about this election — and my hopes for a genuinely different sort of politics in this short presentation.
If you’re timid about sharing your political views, you are welcome to share mine with your friends or with your church group. I hope that our churches and communities will have robust conversations about the future of faith and the common good.
THE CHRISTIANS FOR KAMALA folks CHANGED THE LINK!!!!!!! Here's one that should work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-boeKMRHKaI
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