The US Christian Right at the end of the Trump-Pence Administration

Recent articles by two of the best analysts of the Christian Right in America look at the current state of the Christian Right and what trends we should keep in focus.

• Frederick Clarkson; Still Here: The Christian Right in the 2020 Election Political Research Associates 01/13/2021
• Chrissy Stroop, Attack on the US Capitol ... Religion Dispatches 01/14/2021

Clarkson calls our attention to the "diversity" side of the overwhelmingly white Christian Right. "Overwhelmingly" does not mean "exclusively". He makes an observation that could be very relevant to the much-discussed increase in minority support for Trump in the 2020 election among blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, which he describes here:

If the White evangelical demographic is all you look at, White evangelicals are all you see. But that’s not all that the Christian Right is. Conservative Catholics count, and the Christian Right and Republicans have been targeting minorities for a long time. Much of the diversity they’ve achieved to date comes from the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), an emergent regrouping of historically Pentecostal and neo-Charismatic leaders into a loose, but deeply theocratic religious network. Contrary to the stereotype of the Christian Right, many of the churches in this movement have been historically multi-racial and multi-ethnic. Some even have women leaders.

In December, The New York Times compared election results in 28,000 precincts in more than 20 cities between 2016 and 2020, finding that “many areas with large populations of Latinos and residents of Asian descent” experienced “a surge in turnout and a shift to the right, often a sizable one.” Republicans, the Times reports, claim that this “represents the beginnings of a realignment of conservative, religious working people in immigrant communities and communities of color into their party.”

To whatever extent this is true, the Christian Right - including the less-understood NAR [the conservative, Pentecostal New Apostolic Reformation] - is part of the trend. The Trump campaign made outreach to Latinx and Asian voters a focus in 2020, apparently to great effect. For example, the Times reports that while Biden won the Latinx vote overall, Trump improved on his 2016 performance by 61 percent in Miami, 49 percent in Chicago, 33 percent in Dallas, and by similarly large percentages in 15 other cities or metro areas studied by the Times. [my emphasis in bold]

What Clarkson adds to the story is the particular role of Christian Right groups in improving their own data-mining and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations. Organization matters, and GOTV operations matter a lot. One big problem in Democratic losses among the heavily Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas was the reported weakness of the local Democratic Party organizational efforts in that area in 2020.

Clarkson discusses some of the more significant players in the Christian Right's political operation, including the United in Purpose (UiP) organization. This is very important, because the Christian Right groups are extremely important in Republican GOTV. (The NRA has also been in past elections, but they have encountered serious internal problems more recently.)

For several election cycles, the strategic Christian Right organization United in Purpose (UiP) has sought to unite the various factions of the Christian Right in a common electoral direction, centered on sophisticated data analysis that is widely shared in the movement. Under the leadership of former realtor and ex-convict Bill Dallas, the California-headquartered UiP has engaged in deep data mining, and constructed databases and online tools to help the Christian Right meet its strategic goals in the 21st Century. In 2014, for example, the group launched a voter registration app that allowed pastors to compare church membership rosters with voter registration files, to identify which congregants could be recruited as voters.

By 2016, Dallas, who is a member of the secretive conservative leadership group Council for National Policy, had become such a powerbroker that he was tapped to organize the infamous meeting between Trump and evangelical and Christian Right leaders in New York City.

... Katherine Stewart [has] noted how the Christian Right had acquired various databases and integrated them into their own. This included files that were apparently obtained from the public release of a national computer file of 191 million voters in 2015. It’s a little unclear exactly how this happened, but it appears that UiP got a hold of those files. As Dallas told the Christian Broadcasting Network 2016, “We have about 200 million files, so we have pretty much the whole voting population in our database.” He added, “What we do is we track to see what’s going to make somebody either vote one way, or not vote at all.”

UiP was also a leader in the Christian Right effort to target evangelical voters of color in 2020. As an investigation by The Intercept noted, “UIP’s 2020 election plan” — named “Ziklag,” after a town referenced in the Bible — “is a multipronged effort to connect Trump with evangelical leaders and increase support among minority voters through appeals to faith-based messages and church outreach.” [my emphasis in bold]

Organization matters. GOTV matters. A lot. One long-standing media cliché about the Republican appeal to minorities is that they can win over voters of color through "family values". But it takes organization to make that happen. And we're seeing signs that groups like UiP are making some notable headway in that effort.

Clarkson knows this scene in depth, and he discusses here some important figures that don't get as much critical attention as one might wish in the mainstream press: George Barna, Brian Burch, Todd Lamphere, Cissie Graham Lynch, Guillermo Maldonado, Joseph Mattera, Ralph Reed, Paula White. Yes, Ralph Reed is still around, still working the Christian Right grift.

Both Clarkson and Stroop remind us that the refrain we hear from establishment pundits every four years after Presidential elections about how the Christian Right seems to be losing steam keeps turning out to be wrong. For 2016 and 2020, The shock of Trumpism at least seemed to tamp down a closely related trope that Democrats need to try to appeal to the Christian Right by pandering to anti-women's-rights sentiments.

Stroop complains about the lack of realistic attention and analysis of the Christian Right by the corporate press:

I’ve long lamented the general state of American religion journalism, which tends to whitewash evangelical authoritarianism, thereby enabling it. And in the aftermath of last Wednesday’s insurrection, in which the Christian flag and the Confederate battle flag were both among the symbols displayed by terrorists occupying the Capitol, some of the first prominent commentaries on the Christian nationalist character of the rioting continued in that pattern. They essentially painted the Christian terrorists as fringe—they are not — and pinned the blame for their actions solely on Donald Trump while allowing prominent white evangelical leaders to go unchallenged in distancing themselves from the events they had very much laid the groundwork for. [my emphasis]

The specific Christian Dominionist mode of thinking has been a major influence on the violent far-right groups, an influence whose effect is often ignored in major media reports on the radical right.

But Stroop finds some reason for optimism on the reporting:

Thankfully, some of the reporting and commentary that’s emerged since is more intellectually honest, giving me some hope that perhaps, at long last, the Trump years will force a reckoning with the ways in which conservative Christianity upholds white supremacist patriarchy in the United States. Not as a fig leaf, not as window dressing, but substantively, as religion. Christianity comes in many varieties, not all of which are benign, pro-social, or conducive to the embrace of pluralism and democracy among their adherents.

He offers example of what he considers solid reporting on the Christian Right, including recent articles in the New York Times and USA Today, as well as one from The Atlantic that he finds all-too-typically deficient.

Stroop's article provides its own rogue's gallery of bad actors among Christian Right leaders: Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Albert Mohler, and Pat Robertson.