If you follow American evangelicalism closely, you know that there are quite a few divisions and fault lines inside the movement. I’m talking about evangelicalism as a whole, but this is also true among the infamous “white evangelicals.”
It’s true that, heading into the 2016 election, white evangelicals played a major role in Donald Trump’s success in the primaries. However, many evangelicals supported other candidates — including the most active evangelicals in Iowa. I continue to recommend the book “Alienated America” by Timothy P. Carney, for those who want to dig deeper on that subject.
In the end, about half of the white evangelicals who supported Trump in the general election really wanted to vote for someone else. They were voting against Hillary Clinton.
Now, there is evidence — thank you GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge, as always — that some white evangelicals have started to rethink their reluctant votes for Trump.
To be honest, I have been telling reporters, since 2016, to watch for this mini-trend. But, in the end, the force that will pull many of these voters back to Trump has nothing to do with Trump himself. The support is rooted in opposition to Democratic Party actions on crucial issues linked to abortion and also the First Amendment ( that’s “religious liberty” in most news reports),
While pointing readers to these recent Burge tweets, let me frame them with some material from an On Religion column I wrote two years ago about the whole 81% of white evangelicals love Trump myth.
The bottom line? It’s the issues, not the candidate.
Most "evangelicals by belief" (59 percent) have decided they will have to use their votes to support stands on specific political and moral issues, according to a … study by Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Institute, working with LifeWay.
This time around, 50 percent of evangelical voters said they cast their votes to support a candidate, while 30 percent said they voted against a specific candidate. One in five evangelicals said they did not vote in 2016.
A Christianity Today survey analysis — "Debunking the 81 Percent" — put it this way: The 81 percent total represented "strategic, goal-oriented and issue-oriented" voting, not mere enthusiasm for Trump.
So why has the myth been so hard to debunk?
In part, the Democrats deserve a bit of blame. Even today, if Democrats ran a centrist on moral and cultural issues — someone like the Joe Biden of long, long ago — more evangelicals would risk voting for that candidate.
But it’s crucial to see the larger picture. To be blunt, white evangelicals didn’t elect Trump — although a large chunk of them may have handed the nomination for him in the primaries.
In the end, Trump was elected by Catholics and many mainline Protestants in the Rust Belt, along with the reality that some Democrats in that region who supported Barack Obama didn’t turn out for Hillary Clinton.
So why was there so much negative ink about white evangelicals, in recent years?
For starters, these conservative Christians believe all the wrong things on moral, social and cultural issues. But that’s been true for decades. So what happened the past three years?
Here is how I ended that column:
Waves of news about this 81 percent vote have "created a simplistic, negative caricature of who evangelicals are, right now," said Ed Stetzer, director of the Billy Graham Center. "It allows lazy people to keep saying that all of those evangelicals are 'all in' for Donald Trump. … They're trying to turn Trump voters into Trump.
"Trump voters are not Trump, and that's certainly true for most evangelicals."
So what does this “fading support” reality look like in coverage in the mainstream press?
You can see some hints of what is going on in this recent New York Times piece that ran with this headline: “Trump’s Approval Slips Where He Can’t Afford to Lose It: Among Evangelicals.” Again, that headline points away from where the election will be won or lost (unless Trump’s numbers completely slide into an abyss). I’m talking — again — about Catholics in the Midwest.
But notice how the tone has changed, in this Times discussion of the voters — including white evangelicals — who are weakening in their support of Trump:
These 2016 Trump voters might not all be considered part of the president’s base — many were not enthusiastic about him four years ago. As 6 percent of battleground-state Trump voters, they are just a sliver of the overall electorate. Also, 2 percent of battleground-state voters who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 say they will vote for Mr. Trump.
But Trump defectors play an outsize role in the president’s challenge. He won by a narrow margin in 2016, and he has made limited efforts to broaden his appeal. Even a modest erosion in his support imperils his re-election chances. Another 6 percent of Trump voters in these states say they no longer support Mr. Trump, while allowing “some chance” that they’ll vote for him again.
A majority of the defectors disapprove of his performance on every major issue, except the economy, according to the Times/Siena polls. Somewhat surprisingly, they are demographically similar to the voters who continue to support him.
The key phrase?
That would be this, of course — “many were not enthusiastic about him four years ago.”
Yes, that’s true. It was also true during that ongoing tsunami of ink about how all those white evangelicals just love that Trump guy.
Stay tuned. Burge is a must follow on Twitter — now more than ever.