Let’s consider this an educational moment. Since journalists are paying lots of attention, right now, to Christianity Today and other things linked to the late Billy Graham, let’s do a flashback to some poll numbers published in the fall of 2018.
This polling was done by the Billy Graham Center Institute at Wheaton College, working with LifeWay Research. One of the goals was to understand why evangelicals voted the way that they did in 2016.
Lots of things grabbed my attention, but here are some numbers that I think journalists need to ponder at the moment in light of the recent CT editorial by departing editor Mark Galli. You may have heard about it. The headline proclaimed: “Trump Should Be Removed from Office.”
But back to CT in 2018. The bytes that jumped out at me:
* Only half of the evangelicals polled voted for the candidate that they truly wanted to support in the White House race.
* One out of three said that they voted AGAINST Hillary Clinton or AGAINST Donald Trump.
* One in four white evangelicals said that they voted AGAINST Trump. One in three black evangelicals said the same thing.
* At least 20% of evangelicals didn’t vote (and I’ve seen figures as high as 40% elsewhere).
Put it all together and a high percentage — 77% in this poll — of white evangelicals did said that they voted for Trump. However, echoing earlier CT reporting, only about half of them said that they wanted to do so.
I wrote a national column about that with this headline: “Complex realities behind that ‘81 percent of evangelicals love Trump’ media myth.” Here’s how it ended:
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’s the Big Idea that journalists need to learn from all of this, including the Galli editorial?