Dave O’Bannon, 62, cast his first presidential ballot, in 1976, for a fellow evangelical — Jimmy Carter.
“I fell in love with Jimmy Carter,” he sighed on an October phone call. “I just fell in love with his love of God.”
At the time, Mr. O’Bannon was 18 years old, and the Republican campaign to capture the white evangelical vote was just gaining momentum. Mr. O’Bannon was shortly swept up by the party’s alliance with conservative Christians, and for the next four decades, he would not cast a single presidential ballot for a Democrat.
It seemed like a reasonable bargain for evangelicals, Protestant Christians whose distinctive mix of activism, biblical focus and emphasis on being “born again” makes them unusual. Political objectives could advance evangelicals’ religious convictions — ending abortion, halting the sexual revolution and permitting demonstrations of faith in public settings, like prayer in schools. Theirs was a politics of piety intended to spiritually renew a broadly Christian country that often seemed to lose sight of its moral guideposts. They brought their fervor to a party otherwise concerned with lowering taxes and limiting government reach. The Republican Party would lend their moral aspirations the force of law, and they would be the party’s conscience.
Yet as years went by, the salt would lose its savor. Their spiritual political crusade lapsed into worldly partisanship. White evangelicals have now blended so seamlessly into the broader Republican base that adherents and observers say that the label has become more a political than religious one. Electing Republicans has become, for many evangelicals, an end in itself.
But that transformation would take time. “I was one of those rabid Republicans in the early ’80s,” Mr. O’Bannon said. He had gone to Washington, D.C., as an intern for Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma around that time and went on to serve as a city councilman and mayor in Yukon, Okla. He spent time in the tech industry and eventually taught marketing at his alma mater, Southern Nazarene University. He was vehemently opposed to abortion, and the Republican Party was willing to fight it.
Yet, by the time he voted for George W. Bush in 2000, something in Mr. O’Bannon had begun to change.
“I had a real transformation from the standpoint of — always calling myself a Christian, but I was a hypocrite,” he said. Mr. O’Bannon found himself spending so much time agitating against various issues — like abortion and same-sex marriage — that he spent relatively little time evangelizing.
He wanted to present a vision of Christianity that was welcoming, capacious, appealing. The political orthodoxy of white evangelicalism, its style and methods, had driven him far from that.
With the careful cadence of a Sunday school teacher, he spoke of the need to follow Christ’s Great Commission, his exhortation to his apostles to make disciples of all nations, baptize believers and teach them God’s commandments.
“And I don’t see where the Republican Party and, my gosh, Donald Trump, check hardly any of those boxes,” he said.
White evangelicals were not always a Republican auxiliary. Before the 1970s, they were, in the words of a prominent conservative activist, Morton Blackwell, “the largest tract of virgin timber on the political landscape.” They only needed to be cultivated — and eventually harvested — for the Republican cause.
Charles Mathewes, professor of religion and politics at the University of Virginia, observed in an unpublished paper he shared with me that evangelicals had formed a vibrant subculture before they formed a voting bloc. Relying on their own institutions — “places like Wheaton College, Calvin College, Fuller Seminary and media forces like Christianity Today,” Dr. Mathewes writes — they had “Christianized their everyday life.” That they were organized and cohesive made them an especially attractive political asset.
One of evangelicals’ first forays into politics as a cohesive group unfolded in 1960, when John Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon. They vociferously opposed Mr. Kennedy, fearing a Catholic president would limit their religious freedom. Some conservative activists saw promise in their capacity to mobilize.
Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell Sr., said he had tried to organize white evangelicals since the Barry Goldwater campaign. But they became interested only after the Internal Revenue Service denied tax exemptions to an evangelical college for racial discrimination in the 1970s, said Randall Balmer, a historian and professor of religion at Dartmouth.
Once Mr. Weyrich realized abortion would be a more widely appealing issue than racial discrimination for grass-roots evangelicals, a new voting bloc was created. White evangelicals soon became the single largest religious constituency inside the Republican Party, which they remain today.
White evangelicals found a number of issues to rally around: prayer and Bible studies in public schools, rapidly shifting sexual mores, widely available pornography. As Republicans took on these issues, evangelicals grew ever more comfortable being allied with them.
The grand bargain seemed to be working: They had found a way to exert outsize influence over politics and society. White evangelicals flocked to the Republican Party in the last decades of the 20th century and into the new millennium, Ryan Burge, a professor at Eastern Illinois University, pointed out in a data-based blog post early this year.
They were crucial to George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, particularly because of their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. The Barna Group, a research firm specializing in surveys and polling concerning religion and public life, marked the occasion with a note tracking the cohort’s contributions to Mr. Bush’s wins.
“In 1996, born-again adults gave Mr. Dole a slim 49 percent to 42 percent margin of preference against Mr. Clinton,” George Barna, founder of the Barna Group, was quoted as saying in the note. “In 2000, they awarded Mr. Bush a 15-point margin. They upped the ante this time, giving Mr. Bush a 24-point margin. Upon examining their reasons for doing so, it is clear that they were more interested in the character of the candidate than they were in specific issues.”
But how could a movement based on Christian principles and guided by concerns about character deliver a win to Donald Trump?
Bart Barber, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Texas, voted for Evan McMullin, an independent, in 2016 before overcoming his reservations to vote for the president this year.
“Well, he has done his best to try to keep me from voting for him,” Pastor Barber said with a laugh. “I’ll say that.” He isn’t unaware of who else supports Mr. Trump, nor is he impressed with the president’s character. “I’m ashamed to think of who some of the other people are who will be voting with me for President Trump,” he told me, “white supremacists and generally angry, meanspirited people.”
Nevertheless, a six-week Bible study class he offered his parishioners helped to make up his mind. After considering their options, they decided that “policy is character.”
“I guess I’m voting more this party versus that party than I am the individuals,” he admitted, “because I don’t like President Trump at all.”
“One thing that sometimes gets overlooked is that white evangelical protestants are not only Republican; they have been and continue to grow more Republican over time,” Greg Smith, an associate director of research on religion and public life at Pew Research Center, told me. “In our most recent data on party identification,” gathered in 2018 and 2019, Mr. Smith said, “78 percent of white evangelical protestants identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.” Two decades ago, in 2000, that number was “56 percent. And there’s no indication that trend has changed over the last four years.”
At the same time, their priorities have begun to shift. Dr. Burge pointed to an analysis of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study he’d conducted, in which white evangelicals ranked political issues by importance. Same-sex marriage — once a point of bitter contention between white evangelicals and some of their moderate Republican allies — came in last, after jobs, crime, gun control and a variety of other matters. Abortion, too, came in surprisingly low on white evangelicals’ ranking of priorities — underneath, for example, immigration. According to Mr. Smith, Pew found this year that “81 percent of white evangelical Protestants said that the economy would be a very important issue in making their decision about who to vote for in the 2020 presidential election, while 61 percent said the same about abortion.” In 2016, he added, a similar finding also held.
“I think what happened was, over time, white evangelical orthodoxy on politics sort of just melded into Republican orthodoxy, and there’s no difference anymore,” Dr. Burge told me. “We used to always believe that religion was the first cause and then politics was downstream of religion,” but newer studies suggest that “those two lenses have switched places now and that partisanship is the first cause and now religion is downstream of partisanship.”
There has recently been talk of abandoning the label “evangelical” among those who answer to the descriptor, largely because of its transformation into a mainly political term.
This year, Mr. Biden’s campaign took care to reach out to religious voters who were exasperated with the president’s behavior — and that appears to have had some success. Still, Mr. Trump lost only a little ground. Preliminary exit poll results indicate that 76 percent of white evangelicals voted for the president, a touch lower than the 81 percent who voted for him in 2016, but still higher than John McCain’s 74 percent and neck-and-neck with George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Some states — North Carolina, for instance, where 85 percent of white evangelicals said they voted for the president — demonstrated an especially impressive showing. And why not? Trump is a Republican; so are they.
But it is possible for people to change: This may be the most scandalous tenet of the Christian faith.
Dave O’Bannon doesn’t call himself an evangelical anymore, just a follower of Jesus Christ. He wants to spend the balance of his years carrying out that Great Commission. And his sense of what that entails politically has transformed.
“Four more years of Donald Trump will move our culture further away from the church,” Mr. O’Bannon said. “And sadly, some further away from a relationship with God.”
This year, he cast his vote for Joe Biden.
Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig) is an Opinion writer.
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