In 2003, soon-to-be New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller tried to explain what was happening at the intersection of evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party to an audience that was most assuredly anxious.
Democrats were worried in those days about creeping theocracy; that born-again President George W. Bush was using the post-9/11 conflict with militant Islamism and the fight against gay marriage to turn America into some kind of Christo-fascist state.
The rediscovery of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,“ Bill Maher’s proselytizing atheism and, most explicitly, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” all pointed to the left-wing fears about evangelical and fundamentalist Christians moving the United States away from a pluralistic, religiously free nation into some kind of Bible-beating dystopia.
Keller was writing for the same audience that Moore, Maher and Atwood were all reaching for, but he offered a different, much more accurate view: “The interesting story, then, is not that Mr. Bush is a captive of the religious right, but that his people are striving to make the religious right a captive of the Republican Party.”
What Keller could not have known, but might have been able to foresee, was that it wasn’t just one party doing that work. Far more effective than anything Karl Rove could have imagined was what Democrats did to stampede the devout into the opposing side.
As it turned out, being called “America’s own Taliban” by people who demanded that Christians bake cakes for gay weddings and who were pro-choice absolutists did not make the devout feel welcome on the left. The old bargain in which liberal Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, could preach social justice and traditional values was broken.
It wasn’t all Maher-Moore mean-spiritedness, nor was it anyone’s plan. If a person sincerely believes that a church refusing to sanction same-sex marriages or a state banning elective abortions is a human rights issue, that has implications for what that person will demand of his or her political party. But sincerity of purpose did nothing to stop the exodus of a very valuable bloc of high-propensity voters.
According to the best data on the subject, which come from the Pew Research Center, in 1994, white evangelicals broke 65 percent Republican, 33 percent Democratic. In 2024, it was 85 percent Republican, 14 percent Democratic. More ominously for the blue team, among white Catholics, it went from an even split in 1994 to 61 percent Republican, 37 percent Democratic in 2024.
Meantime, mainline Protestant denominations moved left themselves, and saw a similar flight from their pews as Democrats were seeing at the polling place. But all of the departees weren’t going to conservative congregations, many were just dropping out altogether. The fastest growing major group in America’s religious life this century have been the “nones,” people without a particular faith or who are determinedly atheistic. And those folks are even more overwhelmingly Democratic than the devout are Republican.
Democrats lost a lot of Christians, and Christianity lost a lot of Democrats, with radical, compounding implications for both groups.
Into this alienated landscape strode Donald Trump, the opposite of what conservative Christians found so appealing in Bush. Even aside from Trump’s own enthusiastic personal immorality and impiety, his political style — the pugnacious smear artist and demagogic braggart — was the antithesis of what evangelicals had sought before. But, a combination of the power of partisanship and anxious anger at Democrats allowed for a very unlikely union between the most devout Americans and Mr. “Two Corinthians.”
What followed revealed Keller’s prescience. The religious right was indeed captive to the Republican Party. But as the Trump era was getting underway, another Keller in New York, Rev. Timothy Keller, the leading Protestant theologian of the time, was less interested in what Christians were doing to politics but what politics was doing to Christians. He asked in 2017, “Can evangelicalism survive Donald Trump?”
His answer was yes and no. Yes, the ideas that had animated the evangelical movement characterized by Billy Graham in the 1970s — a doctrine of radical, grace-based forgiveness and salvation paired with a strong, personal relationship with Jesus — would survive and prosper. No, the label “evangelical” would probably cease to be useful as a theological term since it had been so thoroughly muddied by politics.
The other Keller was proved right on Sunday at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. The world saw a service that would be very familiar to any American megachurch member and heard, especially from Kirk’s widow, Erika, a message that would have been very much at home in one of Keller’s pulpits. To forgive the man who killed her husband is the definition of radical grace.
“The answer to hate is not hate,” she said. “The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Trump’s response was, well… different. He may have actually been being self-effacing when he said, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” But it was self-criticism with an edge, saying essentially that, yes, Kirk is a better person than he is, but still holding on to his status as tribal chieftain, the same guy who said, “I am your justice … I am your retribution.”
As Trump rattled on in a campaign-style speech, name-checking his many enemies and whichever of his policy initiatives came to mind, the juxtaposition became clearer and clearer. In an event that was probably the biggest altar call since Graham’s satellite-beamed preaching four decades ago, it was the politics that didn’t fit.
That’s not to say that Christians will be breaking for the Democrats anytime soon, or that they would be welcome if they did.
But the strain was evident between a political movement whose leader calls for “an eye for an eye” and a spiritual project that says to forgive “because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’”
Source: The Hill
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