Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille for BuzzFlash: Christian Nationalists Sticking with MAGA-Man and Gearing Up for Georgia Run-Offs
November 20, 2020
Ralph Reed, founder and head of the faith and freedom coalition (Gage Skidmore)
By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are at the helm of an “ideology” that is “anti-Christ, anti-Biblical to its core.” Jim Garlow, an evangelical pastor whose Well Versed Ministry whose goal is, “Bringing biblical principles of governance to governmental leaders,”
According to several Exit Polls, Donald Trump received somewhere between 76-81 percent of the white conservative evangelical Christian vote. "The religious landscape in terms of voting has been remarkably stable," Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told NPR. "Since Reagan, we have essentially seen this: white Christian voters have tended to support Republican candidates, and Christians of color and everyone else, including the religiously unaffiliated, have tended to support Democratic candidates."
In a recent column in The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin quoted Jones as stating: While White evangelical Protestants have declined as a proportion of the population over the last decade -- from 21 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2019 – they have maintained an outsize presence at the ballot box, somewhere between one-fifth and one-quarter of votes.”
With the help of Frederick Clarkson and Rob Boston, two veteran observers of and writers on the Religious Right, this column examines the role Christian nationalists will play in the Georgia elections, and how several major Religious Right organizations are processing -- or are still in denial about -- the defeat of Donald Trump.
Georgia on Our Minds
With the Biden’s agenda in the balance, all eyes are now turning to Georgia, where the power of the Senate will be decided on January 8. According to a November 11 Politico article, the Biden campaign made a concentrated effort to court both the Catholic and evangelical vote, and this small shift from Trump 2016 to Biden my have made the difference in Georgia: “white evangelical make up about 35 percent of the electorate, exit poll data shows Biden grew white evangelical support for the Democratic ticket by 9 percentage points, drawing 14 percent support to Clinton’s 5 percent in 2016.”
Will the Democratic candidates for Georgia’s two Senate seats be able to cultivate or grow that small white evangelical Biden vote or will ramping up Democratic voter turnout prove to be their only chance at winning the runoffs? My bet is on the latter.
“The presidential race was barely over before Georgia runoffs began,” Frederick Clarkson, a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Somerville, Massachusetts, said in an email exchange. “The Washington, DC headquartered Faith and Freedom Coalition, the Christian Right group, headed by Georgian Ralph Reed, says, ‘We cannot let the Senate fall into the hands of the radical Left!’”
According to Clarkson, “We can expect Reed's organization and the wider Christian Right to put everything they've got into the Georgia runoffs in order to preserve a Republican Senate firewall against Democratic legislation and judicial appointments that could undo many of their gains of the past four years.
“The Christian Right has developed advanced micro-targeting of likely sympathetic voters -- and non-voters that they seek to turn into voters -- from years of compilations and analysis of decades of computerized voter files, and they know how to use them.
“This is going to be something of a showdown between the largely White Christian Right that has dominated Georgia politics for decades, and the new, hard charging multiracial coalition led by former State Senator Stacey Abrams, that turned the state blue for Biden, but did not do nearly as well in down ballot races.”
Religious Right Groups on the Election
A few days after the election, Rob Boston, Senior Adviser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Editor of Church & State, AU's monthly membership magazine, spent some time visiting Religious Right sites.
Here’s what Boston found:
“Tony Perkins, president of this rabidly homophobic group, has assured us that we just need to count all the votes. … Perkins alluded to ‘radical forces out there who will do whatever it takes to stop Donald Trump’ – and he’s got his eye on the culprit: ‘[B]illionaire George Soros started plotting a sophisticated campaign to subvert the election process,’ a breathless Perkins writes. Perkins is like any number of conspiracy theorists who insist that they are just asking questions. He lacks just one thing: even a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing.”
“It’s always sunny with Ralph Reed’s group. The homepage plugs a copy of Reed’s latest book, which makes the ‘Christian’ case for Trump. There is a column noting that it looks like Trump lost, but boy, oh, boy – look at all those voter guides Reed’s organization distributed. Plenty of blue skies ahead!”
As of November 15, F&F pivoted toward to Georgia run-off election. “The eyes of the political world have shifted to Georgia, where two runoff elections are set for early January. The stakes could not be higher: these elections will determine who controls the US Senate in 2021 and beyond. We cannot let the Senate fall into the hands of the radical Left! We need every patriotic American to stand up and fight back with us.”
“Down in Tupelo, Miss., they’re hot on the heels of a big story. The AFA links to a piece from something called The American Thinker, which is not really accurately named because the people who run it don’t seem to do a lot of that. Anyway, it looks like the fix was in because the voting machines were all built overseas! Is George Soros involved? You bet!”
On November 10, Tim Wildmon, President of AFA and son of AFA’s founder Donald Wildmon, produced a statement headlined, “The judicial system should rule on these lawsuits.” Wildmon wrote: “it is important to remember that the Constitution clearly defines that electors from each state choose the president once each state has certified its respective results. None of that has occurred. Furthermore, there is ongoing litigation in multiple states concerning the results of the election.”
David Barton, a peddler of ‘Christian nation’ mythology posing as history, assures us that ‘The presidential election is far from over. …. Pray for truth to prevail!’ I won’t bother to ask for proof because Barton is allergic to things like facts and data. This is the guy, after all, who wrote a book about Thomas Jefferson that was so riddled with errors that the publisher had to withdraw it.”
“With control of the U.S. Senate at stake, I’m sure Religious Right groups will be heavily involved in the Georgia runoff elections, especially since Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, is based in Georgia and will likely do all it can to intervene in the elections,” Americans United Rob Boston said in an email. “The Coalition’s weapon of choice is biased ‘voter guides’ that purport to tell where the candidates stand on issues. In reality, these ‘guides’ are partisan campaign literature designed to promote Republicans.
“President Donald Trump frequently boasts that he did away with the Johnson Amendment, the federal law that bars tax-exempt nonprofits, including houses of worship, from intervening in elections by endorsing or opposing candidates. It’s not true – the Johnson Amendment remains the law of the land. Any religious leaders who are tempted to distribute Reed’s guides should think twice. Passing out distorted material like that isn’t just illegal – I’d submit that it’s also a dangerous mixture of religion and partisan politics.”
While Christian nationalists may eventually accept the Biden/Harris victory, “There is no indication, however, that this will temper their apocalyptic vision, according to which one side of the American political divide represents unmitigated evil,” Katherine Stewart, the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism recently wrote in The New York Times.
Christian nationalists have been playing hardball politics since the late 1970’s and early 1980s, when their organizing, fundraising and infrastructure building were a major force in Ronald Reagan’s election. Over these past forty years, through wins or losses, their resolve has only been strengthened. Christian nationalists play the long game: a game that Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham and their congressional allies have perfected.
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