Is the religious right waning?
This election season, the emergence of a virulent anti-establishment and white nationalist ethos has raised serious questions about the nation’s moral character and the future of democracy. Yet religion and religious interest groups occupy a curious place—or lack of place—in the national conversation. The religious right, so consequential for the Republican Party in recent elections, has little pull with Donald Trump. Furthermore, despite the fealty to Trump pledged by many white evangelical leaders, recent polling indicates some cracks in the larger coalition of conservative Christian voters that have supported Republican presidential candidates over the past three decades.
When Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off last week in their final debate, they had the chance to expound on their proposed economic policies as well as their stances on immigration, foreign relations, and abortion. Although Trump nodded to the religious right when he vowed to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court, in general such hot-button cultural issues have taken a back seat in this election. Outside discussions about religious liberty, especially during the primaries, the Republican candidate has spent little time on the Christian right’s priorities.
In light of these developments, the media has devoted considerable attention to exploring the fracturing of the evangelical vote in response to questions about Trump’s morality and treatment of women and minorities. A recent editorial in Christianity Today declared that “evangelicals, of all people, should not be silent about Trump’s blatant immorality.” White evangelicals still tend to support Trump over the other candidates. But polling demonstrates that among evangelicals in general “party affiliation is a much “stronger predictor of voting preferences than faith,” and Asian, African-American, and Latino evangelicals overwhelmingly support Clinton. Demographic change has left some white evangelicals feeling besieged, but evangelicalism—never monolithic to begin with—may be in a process of adapting to the new American pluralism.
