A panel of distinguished experts on religion, race and American politics took the stage in George Washington University’s Jack Morton auditorium to discuss the role of Christianity and religion in the 2024 presidential election, focusing primarily on Christian conservative voters and how they act out their identity in the political and religious realms.
As the moderator, NPR Morning Edition host Michel Martin said the aim of the discussion was “to figure out what do [Christian conservatives] want, what they hope for, what goals they have” and how they “interact with those goals with other groups in a multiethnic, multireligious democracy.”
In opening remarks at the Nov. 20 event, Elliott School of International Affairs Dean Alyssa Ayres noted general awareness “of the central role played by religious identity and faith practices in politics the world over from the close association of the Russian Orthodox Church to Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia to the growing importance of charismatic Christianity in Latin America and Africa.”
“We note the central role played by faith communities in the normative ordering of society,” Ayres said.
The event was part of a two-day conference organized jointly by the Elliott School Illiberal Studies program, led by professor Marlene Laruelle, and School of Media and Public Affairs’ professor Steven Livingston, founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. The GW schools worked closely on the panel with the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice led by Jim Wallis.
Panelists included Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history at Calvin University; Wallis, Georgetown professor and inaugural holder of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice; Samuel Perry, professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma; E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist, Georgetown professor and scholar at Brookings Institute; Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute; and Andrew Thompson, assistant professor in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Martin began the discussion by asking Du Mez who are the conservative Christians we are talking about.
In general, Du Mez explained, it’s a reference “to the Christian right that includes conservative Catholics, conservative protestants, sometimes Mormons…and conservative white evangelicals in particular. “It tends to [define] real Americans in terms of a particular political agenda versus other Americans who can be perceived as a threat,” she said.
The religious demography of the United States, Jones said, has undergone a sea change, from a predominantly white Christian country to a country in which white Christians represent 41% of the population. That’s down from 54% in 2008 when President Barack Obama was elected.
“No group has dropped steeper than white evangelical protestants,” Jones said. “I think that is going to come as a shock to many people because they’re loud and very visible, particularly in the MAGA movement and the Trump coalition,” he said. “They, in fact, only make up 14% of the country, down from about a quarter only 20 years ago. But they turn out and vote in very high numbers.”
Every time Trump’s name has been on the ballot, there’s been the same alignment on the ballot, according to NBC News and AP VoteCast exit polls, Jones said. “White Christian groups, all of them, vote in a majority for Trump every time he has been on the ballot.” Other religious groups, Jews, the religious non-affiliated, non-Christian groups, non-white Christians, vote Democratic, he said, except Latino protestants who tend to vote Republican.
Dionne pointed out that the support of evangelicals for Republicans is not a new phenomenon and goes as far back as the election of President George W. Bush when the numbers were the same and there was a slight shift to the right among white Catholics.
Perry said that over the past 40 years a kind of racial sorting has taken place in which ethno-racial groups are increasingly aligned more along partisan ideological lines, with a similar shift in more recent elections occurring among Blacks and Hispanics.
“Support for Trump is decided largely by the ideological and political tribe they belong to and whoever is representing them,” Perry said. “It is going to be all for that person. No matter who they appoint. No matter what they do. No matter what they say.” Conservative Black and Hispanic voters used to vote consistently Democratic, he said, “but are becoming more like white Americans in that if they are conservative, they vote Republican, and if they are liberal, they vote Democrat.”
Dionne jumped in to point out Latinos have not always supported Democrats, adding that “37 or 45% of the Latino vote [particularly] among evangelical Latinos went to George W. Bush for about the same margin they voted for Trump.”
Thompson said this is where “the idea of Christian Nationalism comes in, a direct reaction to Obama or just this idea of a diversifying country… a rise in Trumpism,” involving people who had previously not been involved in politics.
“We’re talking about threats directly to people’s forms of identity and existence,” Thompson said. “What comes next begs the question of to what lengths are people willing to go to protect their identity if in fact they feel it is threatened.”
Martin turned to Wallis and asked what, in fact, is Christian Nationalism? He ascribed some of the movement in the country toward Trump to the impact of inflation and people suffering the effects of the economy but noted not every group responded the same way.
“The reasons elected a result,” Wallis said. “And the result is an autocrat president who has run on racism his whole career. That’s who is now president"-elect.
“We are closer in this country to a multiracial democracy, not multifaith, but multiracial than we’ve ever been before, and if we ever succeed, we will be the first nation to do that and that to me was underlying all this election, a whole lot of white people who are just worried about that,” Wallis said.
Offering a bit of political ballast, Dionne pointed out that most people in this country in recent times have voted the same way in every election. He said it is important to remember that Trump won by just 1.5% of the vote “and 10% of the voters deciding this election said they didn’t like Harris or Trump.”
“While on the one hand, there’s good reason to talk about what we’ve just talked about,” he said, “an awful lot of voters who will change the country again are not in this group.”