Still Here

The real numbers may be somewhat murkier. Percentages of the White evangelical vote vary in different polls, with some surveys of early voters and exit polls showing Trump maintaining the roughly 81 percent^[3] he won with in 2016, and others showing a modest decline to around 76 percent.^[4] But even if the latter figure holds up, it still demonstrates the staying power of the White evangelical voting bloc, since the same poll counts them as 28 percent of the electorate in a year when overall voter participation so enormously increased.

The 2020 exit polling is consistent with a long-term trend first identified by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI),^[5] which showed that from 2004 to 2018, the White evangelical share of the national vote increased from 23 percent to a steady 26 percent—which it has maintained since 2008—even while their portion of the population declined from 23 to 15 percent.^[6]

That the Christian Right has been able to keep pace as a share of the electorate—and in 2020, perhaps even gained—even as the numbers of White evangelical Christians are decreasing in the overall U.S. population, is a remarkable achievement. This is in no small part due to their ever-more sophisticated voter identification, registration, and mobilization capacity, which has continually evolved from its earliest days in the 1980s to the age of Trump.

The Colors of the Coalition

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.^[7] 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.”^[8] 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—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.^[9]

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.^[10]

By 2016, Dallas, who is a member of the secretive conservative leadership group Council for National Policy,^[11] 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.^[12]

As I reported in 2018, this was the culmination of a longstanding Christian Right effort to track and refine electoral information in the service of Christian Right goals.^[13] In her 2020 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart 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.^[14] 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.”^[15]      

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.”^[16]

Christian Right Strategy and the NAR

A key part of the evolving strategy, tactics, and indeed, the very composition of the Christian Right, is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose leaders receive the title of “Apostle” or “Prophet” in an effort to reassert offices of the early Christian church.^[17] Although the NAR receives little press and is largely ignored outside of the Republican Party, it has become a driving element in the Christian Right.

One episode speaks to their centrality in U.S. politics. In 2016, Apostle Joseph Mattera, convener of the United States Coalition of Apostolic Leaders, one of two top NAR leadership networks, was among the small invitational committee for the Christian Right conclave in New York. Top NAR figures led by Apostle Paula White—Trump’s longtime spiritual advisor, who joined the White House staff in November 2019—have been part of Trump’s core movement supporters ever since.^[18]

Christian Right strategist and pollster George Barna has long been part of NAR and was close to its late founder, C. Peter Wagner.^[19] (Barna is also coauthor of a book, U-Turn: Restoring America to the Strength of its Roots, with the Christian Right strategist and revisionist historian David Barton, who in turn sits on the board of United in Purpose.) In 2017, Barna’s firm, the American Culture and Faith Institute, a division of UiP, advised the Christian Right that it is risky to assume that registering new voters in theologically conservative churches will necessarily net ideologically conservative voters. “Future registration efforts,” he wrote in his book The Day Christians Changed America, “need to be carefully orchestrated to prevent adding numbers to the ‘other side.’”^[20]

The NAR’s most visible role in the 2020 election was Evangelicals for Trump, an official campaign organization, which regularly featured appearances by such NAR figures as Paula White, Todd Lamphere, Pastor of Global Outreach for Paula White Ministries, and the late African American Bishop Harry Jackson.^[21] The group held its launch event in January 2020, at El Rey Jesús (King Jesus Ministry), a Miami megachurch headed by Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, which may be the largest Spanish-speaking congregation in the country.^[22] El Rey Jesús has eight churches across Florida, and one each in Chicago and Dallas. The location of the launch highlighted the Trump campaign’s efforts to expand their base among the evangelical Latinx community in Florida and beyond.^[23]

The targeting of Latinx and Asian evangelicals was the logical extension of the long-term plans and organizational capacities of the Christian Right. By 2018 the strategy of the Christian Right could be distilled to a simple principle: grow, sustain, train, diversify, and mobilize the electoral base. Ralph Reed, the early Christian Coalition leader who now heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition, reminded a UiP breakfast at the annual Values Voter Summit that year, “Remember how we were told we were going away? How we would recede as a political force? Not true, because the thing that matters is not your share of the population. That is declining. It’s the share of the electorate. It only matters who actually turns out.”

Reed continued, underscoring how the Christian Right’s evolving strategy, makeup, and success gives them leverage in the GOP:

The effort to target conservative Catholic voters was illustrated in 2020 by the Trump-supporting group CatholicVote (whose president Brian Burch works for UiP),^[25] which used a method called “geofencing” to track the cellphones of Catholic mass-goers, in order to learn where and how often they attended church, and then to combine this data with voter registration status and voting history, generating profiles for targeted outreach in swing states. (Geofencing has also been used to track evangelical churchgoers.^[26])   

Another tactic deployed by the Christian Right is “ballot harvesting,” which involves collecting sealed absentee ballots from central locations such as churches, and delivering them to election officials. According to a video obtained by The Washington Post, Ralph Reed told a meeting of the Council for National Policy in February 2020 that the Faith and Freedom Coalition “is going to be harvesting ballots in churches,” adding, “We’re going to be specifically going in not only to White evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches, and collecting those ballots.”^[27]      

Words, Not Deeds

While in the long run-up to the election, a handful of prominent evangelical Trump critics made news calling on the faithful to reconsider their support for the president, there’s no indication that this swayed many voters. Perhaps the most prominent such voice was then-Christianity Today editor Mark Galli, who received wide attention following his December 2019 editorial blasting Trump’s morality and calling for his removal from office. Galli wrote:

But as The New York Times reported the next day, “No leaders in the evangelical movement said they could see any clear signs of an organized resistance to Mr. Trump rising from the editorial.”^[28] Nor did any significant evangelical resistance emerge at any time during the 2020 campaign. Although Trump was concerned enough to try to counter Galli’s editorial by featuring Cissie Graham Lynch—a granddaughter of Billy Graham, the founder of Christianity Today—at the Evangelicals for Trump campaign in early 2020,^[29] in the end, the key metrics changed little from 2016. In November, White evangelicals accounted for about 40 percent of Trump’s overall votes.^[30] And while it is likely that some of their number defected from Trump, they didn’t abandon down ticket races. Instead of the anti-Trump landslide Democrats hoped would flip a number of state legislative chambers, the party ended up losing about 137 state legislative seats overall,^[31] as well as both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature.

The 2020 election season demonstrates that the more things change, the more things stay the same. The mainstream narratives that downplay the significance of the organized Christian Right, ignore the role of the NAR, and measure Republican success and failure narrowly by whatever White evangelicals may do, is missing the forest for the trees.