Faith Versus Trump

Religious leaders are at the forefront of the Trump opposition.

by

On Monday, December 4, the day after the first Sunday in Advent, a group of Christian clergy and leaders of other faiths gathered in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. They were there to challenge the pending Republican plan to rewrite the nation’s tax laws—a plan that will shower billions of dollars of tax breaks on the wealthy while effectively raising taxes on those making less than $30,000 a year.

The multifaith collection of clerics had first requested meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but the Republican lawmakers declined, organizers said. Then, as the several dozen religious leaders gathered in the Capitol rotunda to pray, Capitol police officers issued an ultimatum: Leave, or face arrest.

For many of those gathered—including the Reverend William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina-based activist organization Repairers of the Breach—arrest would have been a familiar experience. But on this day that outcome was avoided.

Instead, the group left the rotunda and walked to the United Methodist Building down the street. There, the faith leaders announced the launch of a new national Poor People’s Campaign, cochaired by Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, a Presbyterian minister and codirector of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The campaign will employ direct action and civil disobedience, as well as public education and voter registration, to draw attention to issues and mobilize disenfranchised citizens.

Drawing its name from an initiative that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was building when he was assassinated in 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign seeks to address moral challenges on multiple fronts: poverty and racism, deepening class divisions and environmental degradation, state violence and anti-LGBTQ discrimination. “This is not about saving any one party or policy agenda,” Barber told the assembled throng, “but about saving the soul of America.”

The group’s pledge to nonpartisanship is genuine. Barber spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 that nominated Hillary Clinton for President, but he also tells The Progressive that “Democrats have not done enough to talk about the working poor.” None of the many presidential debates held during the primary or general election campaigns, he says, included any substantive discussion about poverty, restoring the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby County vs. Holder ruling in 2013, or “moving from the Affordable Care Act to universal health care. That is a moral crisis.”

But Barber is clear about where the greatest fault lies: with the GOP leadership that holds power in both houses of Congress and in the presidency of Donald Trump.

“He has exacerbated and exposed the moral crisis in a very profound way,” Barber says. “He has exposed the hypocrisy of the religious right, who claim that they support the values of Jesus but have chosen to spread the gospel of greed.”

What Trump represents, Barber says, isn’t new. It’s just the latest incarnation of an ongoing cycle in which advances in social justice are met with extremism and pushback on behalf of wealth and power. “The time has come for us to launch this Poor People’s Campaign, not just to fight Trump but to reset the moral narrative in this nation,” Barber says. “Because until we have a more just, moral narrative, we’re not going to have a more just, moral agenda.”

The new Poor People’s Campaign is on the leading edge of a faith-based resistance to Trump and Trumpism. It is a movement that stands in opposition to the real estate mogul’s persistent popularity among conservative, white, evangelical Christians.

Trump’s opposition includes liberal and moderate Catholics, mainline Protestants, and adherents to other religious groups, some increasingly outspoken in their activism. It also includes some current or former evangelicals who see nothing in common between their faith and Donald Trump.

“Trumpism has certainly accentuated the separateness of the church, and how clearly different the politics of Jesus are as compared to the politics of this world,” Missouri pastor Derek Vreeland tells The Progressive. “For Jesus, politics are built upon love and care for the most vulnerable. For Trump, politics are built upon nationalism, arrogance, and suppressing voices of dissension.”

‘For Jesus, politics are built upon love and care for the most vulnerable. For Trump, politics are built upon nationalism, arrogance, and suppressing voices of dissension.’

More than a year after his Inauguration, the reasons behind Trump’s surprise 2016 victory remain hotly debated. But one detail has proved especially startling: his deep vein of support among evangelical Christians.

In the 1990s, the religious right and the GOP had used Bill Clinton’s sexual scandals as an argument for opposing and ultimately trying to impeach him. Yet two decades later, the thrice-married, sometimes adulterous Trump—who had no apparent religious life before his presidential run—was enthusiastically embraced by a large swath of conservative Christians. Backers included Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Franklin Graham, head of the evangelical organization founded and named for his father, Billy Graham.

Appalled, the moderate evangelical critic Jonathan Merritt wrote an August 10, 2016, article for The Atlantic headlined, “Trump-Loving Christians Owe Bill Clinton an Apology.” In it he noted, “Although both Bill Clinton and Trump have a morally checkered past, only one of them has apologized for his failings.” It was Clinton who admitted “I have sinned,” while Trump boasted that he has never asked God for forgiveness.

Even the release of recordings in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitalia without consent did not significantly dampen his evangelical support. In the end, Trump garnered 81 percent of the white evangelical vote—which, Religion News Service noted, was “a higher percentage than any other GOP presidential candidate in history.” Evangelicals accounted for 40 percent of Trump’s winning vote tally.

As Trump’s overall approval rating has plunged during his first year, hovering between 35 and 40 percent, it has fallen among evangelicals, too. Yet, even after a seventeen-point slide in a Pew survey in December, 61 percent of evangelicals still viewed him positively.

Rightwing Christians have found much to like in the Trump Administration’s advancement of their priorities, but for other faith groups, Trump’s priorities have stirred alarm.

Rightwing Christians have found much to like in the Trump Administration’s advancement of their priorities, including opposing Planned Parenthood, restricting abortion, marginalizing gay rights and women’s rights, and favoring private school vouchers. And they were heartened by his appointment of conservative judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

But for other faith groups, Trump’s priorities have stirred alarm, and protest. Michael Rothbaum, a rabbi at a suburban Boston synagogue, guesses that his congregation of 280 families mostly vote Democratic. But few of them were what he calls “rally-goers” prior to Trump’s election. Then, he adds quietly, “absolutely, something shifted.”

Rothbaum has always viewed social justice as a core component of his identity as a Jew. Now congregants seek his help as they navigate the Trump era. “I hear it all the time: ‘I’m not a political person. I’m not an activist, Rabbi,’ they tell me. It’s terrifying to people and they want to react, and they don’t know how.”

The white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer left a handful of his older congregants—some of them Holocaust survivors—“completely triggered,” Rothbaum recalls. A Christian pastor from a nearby town called him after Charlottesville and asked what she and her congregation could do.

“My first response was, ‘You can teach people about the Christian roots of anti-Semitism,’” he says. “She told me, ‘We already do, and we’re recommitting to it.’” The church also dispatched about thirty of its members to visit the synagogue with brightly decorated signs that said, “We love you.”

Meanwhile, Rothbaum’s congregation has connected with an area Ugandan Muslim community. And a class he taught on “standing up and speaking truth” as part of Jewish heritage drew forty people instead of the usual dozen or so for adult education.

“We’re all being targeted—immigrants, black folks, Latinos,” says Rothbaum, a gay man whose husband is black. “When they go after trans folks, when they go after gay folks, we have to all stand together. And it’s happening.”

Laurie Feille, a Disciples of Christ pastor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has long sought to engage issues of justice as part of her ministry, but in the last year her activity has increased notably. The small, mainline Protestant Disciples of Christ denomination has long emphasized unity in the name of inclusion, Feille says. In herexperience, that has sometimes led pastors to temper their statements about controversial issues. In the last year a sense of urgency has led to a more outspoken style.

Feille organized members of her congregation to attend the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., after Trump’s Inauguration, as well as a trip to Standing Rock, North Dakota, to support Native Americans seeking to protect their water from an underground pipeline. She’s also orchestrated visits to federal court to support people threatened with deportation. To aid these efforts, she began a by-invitation Facebook page, Disciples Public Presence. She is part of an increasingly active interfaith monthly breakfast group that also includes Catholic, Episcopal, Muslim, Jewish, and Unitarian Universalist religious leaders.

“My prayer is that we continue this engagement with community, and state, and country,” Feille says. “I don’t believe that what we’re facing are necessarily political issues. I believe they’re moral issues.”

Barber, who like Feille is ordained in the Disciples of Christ, was for more than a decade president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. In that post, starting in 2013, Barber instituted the Moral Mondays campaign—a protest over voting restrictions enacted by that state’s Republican legislature and governor. A small group of demonstrators blocked the door to the state senate chamber and Barber was arrested. In subsequent weeks, the protests grew exponentially.

‘You must engage in a moral discourse. You have to be committed long-term and engaged against extremism.’

Ultimately an ACLU lawsuit led to court rulings striking down many of the changes. But what the protests themselves fostered, Barber says, was a broad coalition that has energized progressive groups in the state.

The Moral Mondays movement taught Barber the importance of making sure the people most affected by laws and policies are visible. “You have to put the faces of people impacted out front,” Barber says. It also reinforced for him the fundamental principle that will inform the upcoming Poor People’s Campaign: “You must engage in a moral discourse. You have to be committed long-term and engaged against extremism.”

The aim is to recapture the moral high ground from a religious right that defined morality only with respect to individual behavior, not what supports the common good.

“Sometimes, I think the media has paid too much attention to white evangelicalism,” Barber says. “People of faith and impacted people are the key to that moral revival in this country. It’s time for us to take our place in this moment.”