These evangelicals are voting their values – by backing Kamala Harris

WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Rev. Lee Scott publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president during the Evangelicals for Harris Zoom call on Aug. 14, the Presbyterian pastor and farmer said he was taking a risk.

“The easy thing for us to do this year would be to keep our heads down, go to the ballot box, keep our vote secret and go about our business,” Scott told the group, which garnered roughly 3,200 viewers according to organizers. “But at this time, I just can’t do that.”

Scott lives in Butler, Pennsylvania, the same town where a would-be assassin shot former President Donald Trump in July. Scott told The Associated Press that the attack and its impact on his community pushed him to speak out against Trump and the “vitriol” and “acceptable violence” he normalized in politics.

Trump has maintained strong support among white evangelical voters. According to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of the electorate, about 8 in 10 white evangelical voters cast a ballot for him in 2020. But a small and diverse coalition of evangelicals is looking to pull their fellow believers away from the former president’s fold, offering not only an alternate candidate to support but an alternate vision for their faith altogether.

“I am tired of watching meanness, bigotry and recreational cruelty be the worldly witness of our faith,” Scott said on the call. “I want transformation, and transformation is risky business.”

Exploiting cracks in Trump’s evangelical base

Trump has heavily courted white conservative evangelicals since his arrival on the political scene almost a decade ago. Now he is selling Trump-themed Bibles, touting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and imploring Christians to get out the vote for him.

But some evangelicals have used perceived cracks in his political fidelity to further distance themselves from the former president, especially as Trump and his surrogates have waffled over whether he would sign a federal abortion ban  should he become president.

The Rev. Dwight McKissic, a Baptist pastor from Texas who spoke on the Evangelicals for Harris call, said he saw no “moral superiority of one party over the other,” citing the GOP’s decision to “abandon a commitment to ban abortion with a constitutional amendment” and to soften its stance against same-sex marriage in its party platform.

Though he has historically voted Republican, McKissic said he would vote for Harris, whom he said has stronger character and qualifications.

“I certainly don’t agree with her on all matters of policy,” said Scott, who identifies as evangelical and is ordained in the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “I am pro-life. I am against abortion. But at the same time, she has a pro-family platform,” citing Harris’ education policies and promise to expand the child tax credit.

Grassroots groups like Evangelicals for Harris are hoping they can convince evangelicals who feel similarly to support Harris instead of voting for Trump or sitting out the election altogether.

With modest funding in 2020, the group, formerly known as Evangelicals for Biden, targeted evangelical voters in swing states. This election, the Rev. Jim Ball, the organization’s president, said they’re expanding the operation and looking to spend a million dollars on targeted advertisements.

While white evangelicals vote strongly Republican, not all evangelicals are a lock for the GOP, and in a tight race, every vote counts.

In 2020, Biden won about 2 in 10 white evangelical voters, but performed better with evangelicals overall, according to AP VoteCast, winning about one-third of this group. A September AP-NORC poll found that around 6 in 10 Americans who identify as “born-again” or “evangelical” have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Harris, but around one-third have a favorable opinion of her. The majority — around 8 in 10 — of white evangelicals have a negative view of Harris.

Vote Common Good, a similar group run by progressive evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, has a simple message: Political identity and religious identity are not a package deal.

″There’s a whole group who have become very uncomfortable voting for Trump,” Pagitt said. “We’re not trying to get them to change their mind. We’re trying to work with them once their minds have changed to act on that change.”

Working with the campaign

In August, Harris’ campaign hired the Rev. Jen Butler, a Presbyterian (U.S.A.) minister and experienced faith-based organizer, to lead its religious outreach.

Butler told the AP she has been in touch with Evangelicals for Harris. With less than two months until Election Day, she wants to harness the power of grassroots groups to quickly engage even more faith voters.

“We want to turn out our base, and we think we have some real potential here to reach folks who have voted Republican in the past,” Butler said.

They are focusing on Black Protestants and Latino evangelicals, especially in key swing states. They are reaching out to Catholics and mainline Protestants across the Rust Belt and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arizona and Nevada. Butler’s colleagues are working with Jewish and Muslim constituencies.

Catholics for Harris and Interfaith for Harris groups are launching. Mainline Protestant groups like Black Church PAC and Christians for Kamala are also campaigning on behalf of the vice president.

Butler, who grew up evangelical in Georgia, said the Harris campaign can find common ground with evangelicals, particularly suburban evangelical women.

“There’s a whole range of issues that they care about,” she said, citing compassionate approaches to immigration and abortion. “They know that the way to address any pro-life concerns is really to support women.”

A tough sell

Even for evangelicals who dislike Trump, it can be difficult to support a Democrat.

Russell Jeong, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and speaker on the Evangelicals for Harris call, told AP that the group doesn’t “agree with everything that Harris stands for” and that evangelicals can “hold the party accountable by being involved.”

Others on the call noted they would use their vote to pressure Harris on issues where they disagreed, with Latina evangelical activist Sandra Maria Van Opstal saying she’d push the potential Harris administration “to do better on Palestine-Israel and do better on immigration.”

Soong-Chan Rah, a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, describes himself as a nonpartisan progressive evangelical and a “prophet speaking to broken systems.” Though he’s never endorsed a candidate before, he said the stakes of this election are so high that he wanted to throw his public support behind Harris.

“Not only do I find this candidate, Trump, repugnant and repulsive,” Rah said, “it is to such an extreme that I want to endorse his opposition.”

But the chorus of evangelicals who find voting for a Democrat unconscionable remains loud.

Trump-supporting evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht ridiculed the existence of Evangelicals for Harris on X: “HERETICS FOR HARRIS rings so much truer!”

The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump supporter, took issue with one of the group’s ads and its use of footage of his late father, the Rev. Billy Graham. “The liberals are using anything and everything they can to promote candidate Harris,” he wrote on his public Facebook page, which has 10 million followers.

Imagining a new evangelical identity

But the project of shoring up Democratic evangelical voters goes beyond partisan politics. It gets at the core of what evangelicalism means.

The term evangelical itself is fraught and has become synonymous with the Republican Party, argues Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University.

“More people are probably evangelical theologically,” said Burge, “but they’re not going to grab that word because they don’t vote for Trump or they’re moderate or liberal.”

Evangelicalism has historically referenced Christians who hold conservative theological beliefs regarding issues like the importance of the Bible and being born again. But that’s changed as the term has grown more connected with Republican voters.

For many, evangelicalism has largely been defined along racial and socio-political lines and in endorsing Harris, Rah hopes to “show that there are other voices in the church aside from the religious right and Trump evangelicals.”

Latasha Morrison, a speaker on the Evangelicals for Harris Zoom, told the AP that as a Black woman, “I never associated myself with the word ‘evangelical’ until I started attending predominantly white churches.”

For years her anti-abortion views led her to vote Republican, but now the Christian author and diversity trainer says, “I feel like women and children have a better opportunity under the Harris administration than the Trump administration.”

For Ball, the Evangelicals for Harris organizer, he’s not looking to “tell people if they are an evangelical” or not.

“Diversity is a strength for us. We’re not we’re not looking for total unanimity. We’re looking for unity,” Ball said. “We can be united while we still have differences.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration  with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Curtis Yee And Tiffany Stanley, The Associated Press