Next week, Americans vote in the midterm elections, which some commentators believe are a test of democracy. An editorial comment in the National Catholic Reporter told its readers to “Vote as if your country’s existence depends on it”, urging them to turn out and to opt for candidates who will stand for the rule of law and accept the results of the elections.
Dr Sam Martin, the Frank and Bethine Church chair of public affairs at Boise State University in Idaho, told a Religion Media Centre briefing that there was a lot at stake.
“A constituency of voters has come to endorse what we call in the United States ‘The Big Lie’ — this idea that the election [of President Joe Biden] was stolen, that there was rampant fraud, and that we can no longer trust our democratic system in the United States. And, and so the big question is: will we have an electorate in the United States that trust the results, that accepts the results?”
Research from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 58 per cent of Republicans and 54 per cent of white evangelicals believed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. If the Republicans do well — as opposition parties usually do in the midterms — they will no doubt celebrate. How will Democrats respond to the idea that elections are valid only when they emerge as the losers?
They will be hoping that the Supreme Court decision in June to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling guaranteeing the constitutional right to abortion will work in their favour. In a Pew Research Center poll taken after the decision, 75 per cent of Democrats said this would be a very important election issue for them compared with 39 per cent of Republicans.
“That’s different from past patterns in many elections where Republicans have been more voted motivated to vote on the abortion issue than Democrats,” said Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion and research.
Robert Jones, PRRI’s founder, said that among religious voters, white evangelicals are now no longer the people who rank abortion as the most critical issue in the country. “It’s actually non-Christian religious groups like Jews, who rank it much higher right than they do. And African-American Protestants and the unaffiliated … And I guess it’s the worst-kept secret ever in the US Catholic world that Catholics are supportive of abortion rights and have been for decades.”
“I guess it’s the worst-kept secret ever in the US Catholic world that Catholics are supportive of abortion rights and have been for decades.”
– Robert Jones, PRRI
Six out of 10 white and Latino Catholics say abortion should be legal in the US. “Catholics as a voting bloc are not a monolithic group,” said Heidi Schlumpf, executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter. “I think what abortion has become is a signifier for whether you belong in this group or that group. It becomes a totem that stands for something else.”
Kim Jackson, a Democrat state senator in Georgia, says abortion is an issue in her state. “We’re seeing people who consider themselves pro-birth who are showing up to the polls and then we’re also seeing a number of people who are very much pro-choice. And we’re seeing more and more women show up to vote. And we think that that is an indicator that women are showing up because they want to have choice.”
The Rev Brandee Jasmine Mimitzraiem, director of institutional engagement and public theology at the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, said the coalition had been considering what the Supreme Court decision meant for the lives of all American women.
“What does it mean for our Muslim members?” she said. “What does it mean for the African traditional religions in this country? What does it mean for black women, whose mortality rate when we carry pregnancies to term is so much higher than everybody else’s? What does it mean if we can access what we need to keep ourselves alive?
“And our primary concerns as our [coalition] since the summer have been not just abortion, but the rise of Christian nationalism, and its prominence.”
Dr Jemar Tisby, professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky, and author of the bestselling The Color of Compromise, says Christian nationalism was “chilling” in terms of the threat it posed to democracy.
“There are many people who adhere to this subtle idea, this understated or underlying idea, that the United States is a Christian nation meant for Christians, and should privilege a certain kind of Christian, and they are willing to do all kinds of things, including subvert democracy in order to establish that vision.”
Mr Jones told the briefing that half of Republicans and half of white evangelical Protestants believed that God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that would be an example to the rest of the world.
“When we look at white Americans who believe this idea … we find that two-thirds of them also agree with the so-called ‘great replacement theory’, that immigrants are replacing so-called true Americans. And on the question of violence, white Americans who believe this idea … are four times as likely as whites who do not believe it to say the true American patriots may have to resort to violence.”
Dr Hisham Hellyer, from the Centre for Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said he would be looking at the impact of the elections on religious hate crime. He said there was evidence that Islamophobia increased during electoral campaigns.
“That’s when Islamophobia goes up. It’s not in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. It’s in the aftermath or during election campaigns, because unfortunately, it’s a vote-getter. People aren’t penalised for engaging in that sort of bigotry. On the contrary, it’s rewarded.”
– Dr Hellyer
Pew Research Centre found that 45 per cent of Americans believe that America should be a Christian country, but Mr Cooperman cautioned against alarmist readings of that finding.
“We shouldn’t give an overly gloomy view in which we see the entire country as being overtly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and inclined toward violence,” he said. “When we ask Americans about this term Christian nationalism, 54 per cent of American adults say they’ve never heard of it. Five per cent say they’ve heard a great deal about it.
“The notion of a Christian nation has a lot of currency and a lot of support. And people who are progressive shouldn’t necessarily imagine that that is pure racism or a desire for a theocracy. Forty-five per cent of Americans say the United States should be a Christian nation. But when we ask them what they mean by that, they still favour separation of church and state.
“And what Christianity is, to most people is a good thing. It’s broadly good moral values.”
Fr Tom Reese SJ, a Jesuit priest and senior analyst with Religion News Service, said the Democratic Party and white progressives had failed to engage with religion.
The Republican Party had made a concerted effort over decades to use religious language to attract voters, he said. “The Democrats don’t know how to use religious language or the language of the social gospel. Black Protestants do this very well and use it to motivate people to go to the polls.
“But Democrats are very nervous about using religious language at all. And as a result, they get very frequently trapped by the Republicans into denouncing Christian nationalism, a term like that, which as Alan [Cooperman] points out, 50 per cent of the public haven’t even heard of, until the Democrats denounce it. And then they say, ‘Well, I’m a Christian, I’m a patriot, I must be a Christian Nationalist’.”
Senator Jackson said Tom Reese’s criticism did not apply to all parts of the country. “Because we are in the south in the Bible Belt, you do see Democrats who are running very openly with religious stances.
“I was very clear that I am a pastor and a priest and I use religious language, particularly to talk about affordable housing, because that’s my area of expertise. And I talk about the ways in which God calls us to care for one another, to clothe those who are naked, to feed those who are hungry, and to visit those who are in prison.”
According to Mr Cooperman, the most worrying aspect of these elections was that everyone appeared to think they stand to lose from them.
“If we divide this out by religious groups, 75 per cent of white evangelical Protestants say that they think their side has been losing recently on the things that matter to them,” he said. “If you look at the religiously unaffiliated, which are a very liberal group, roughly equal in size to white evangelical presence, 75 per cent of them say they feel they’ve been losing. And Catholics and Jews feel they’ve been losing.
“Across the whole spectrum of identification in the United States. 72 per cent of the general public feels they’ve been losing. How is it that everybody can lose? I don’t know. But the fact that everybody feels they can lose is part of the poison in our politics. Everybody feels on the defensive, everybody feels aggrieved.
“And when you feel aggrieved, you give yourself more a licence to do things and treat other people in a way that you would not otherwise.”
Watch the entire briefing here >>
