(1) NBC asks, “What’s behind evangelical support for Donald Trump? Less than you think”
***It is simply amazing how the “Evangelicals and the 2016 election” story has not dissipated for 18 months. Here’s a well-sourced piece by NBC:
… When Jimmy Carter was elected president, a famous Newsweek cover story proclaimed 1976 to be “the year of the evangelical.”
Almost exactly 40 years later, many Americans are struggling to understand how twice-divorced casino owner Donald Trump could end up as the evangelical of the year.
… a survey released Monday by the religious polling group Barna reported that Trump leads Hillary Clinton by 55 percent to 2 percent among likely evangelical voters in next month’s general election.
Such support has been remarkably consistent since Trump emerged as the Republican nominee — hitting a high of 78 percent in a July survey by the nonprofit Pew Research Center’s Project on Religion & Public Life.
… And if you define evangelicals that way, many of them are going to support Trump — more or less grudgingly — for one simple reason: He is not Hillary Clinton, said religious historian R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
Mohler said in an interview with NBC News that if you’re a religious, older, white, Southern Republican, you’re likely to consider Clinton “an absolute disaster,” regardless of whether you’re an evangelical.
Now, many scholars and polling organizations are coming around to a different way to identify evangelical voters, Mohler said — not by what they believe they are, but by what they actually believe.
…For Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and son of the famous evangelist, “this election isn’t about Donald Trump’s behavior from 11 years ago or Hillary Clinton’s recent missing emails, lies and false statements.”
“This election is about the Supreme Court and the justices that the next president will nominate,” Graham said in a statement this weekend. “Evangelicals are going to have to decide which candidate they trust to nominate men and women to the court who will defend the constitution and support religious freedoms.”
David Brody, senior national correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, agreed that many of those voters are going to stick with Trump.
“For the most part, they’re saying they’re going to have to hold their nose much tighter after these Trump tapes,” Brody told NBC News. “The reality is that Hillary Clinton, for them, is just the worst option.
(2) Trump Reveals Evangelical Rifts That Could Shape Politics for Years (New York Times)
***And here’s yet another one, this time from the New York Times.
… Several polls show that Mr. Trump is underperforming among evangelicals compared with previous Republican nominees, who commanded about 80 percent of the white evangelical vote. Mr. Trump received 65 percent to 70 percent of white evangelical support, recent polls show. A new poll from LifeWay Research, which specializes in surveys of churches and Christians, found that nonwhite evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump, 62 percent to 15 percent.
Significant opposition to Mr. Trump has also come from evangelical leaders who are white and baby boomers or older. Many younger evangelicals said they took note when Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention and Erick Erickson, a conservative writer and radio host, rejected Mr. Trump early in the campaign. Last week, both Christianity Today and World magazine ran editorials rejecting Mr. Trump.
(3) Ross Douthat writes, “In Defense of the Religious Right”
I RISE to offer a defense — not a full-throated defense, more of a limited one — of the beleaguered, battered, all-but-broken religious right.
…Trump is exposing the folly of certain old-guard evangelicals, but he’s also exposing a major generational struggle over what the religious right should be — one that matters to the country and not just the participants, because …
America needs a religious right. Maybe not the religious right it has; certainly not the religious right of Carson and Falwell Jr. But the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism: A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush.
When religious conservatives were ascendant, the G.O.P. actually tried minority outreach, it sent billions to fight AIDS in Africa, it pursued criminal justice reform in the states. That ascendance crumbled because of the religious right’s own faults (which certain of Trump’s Christian supporters amply display), and because of trends toward secularization and individualism that no politics can master; it cannot and should not be restored.
But some kind of religious conservatism must be rebuilt, because without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.
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