Who Would Jesus Vote For?
A look at one effort to persuade people of faith not to pick Donald Trump.
ON THE SIXTH DAY OF CREATION, the ad says, “God made all of us. God said we need leaders who can unite rather than divide, who stand on morals and values, and who don’t idolize dictators and bullies.” God, a rather talkative fellow, goes on to say: “I need someone to protect consumers and farmers from corporate greed, workers from wage theft, students from crushing debt, homeowners from discriminatory lending, seniors from overpriced medicine, and loved ones from gun violence.” It must be someone “willing to give their whole life in service.”
Happily, the ad continues,
President Biden answered the call. God made us all. Together, we make our democracy strong. Thank God we chose a faithful president who doesn’t worship himself nor undermine the Constitution he swore to uphold. For such a time as this, we pray to God what is true in our hearts: Four more years.
This digital ad is the first salvo in a new campaign launched by a group called Faith Forward, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to sway religious voters in swing states. But unlike many groups that make political appeals on the basis of religious faith, this one aims to explicitly point people away from Donald Trump and toward Joe Biden. Their “God Made All of Us” video is both a parody of and a counterpoint to the “God Made Trump” video that raised eyebrows when the former president shared it on Truth Social in January. That video begins:
And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned Paradise, and said, I need a caretaker. So God gave us Trump. God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state. So God made Trump.1
Rev. Jennifer Butler, Faith Forward’s executive director, explains in an interview that the tone of her group’s response ad, with its underlying suggestion that God is taking an active interest in the 2024 election, is meant to be tongue-in-cheek—a spoof intended to “undo the theology” of the Trump video. But, she says, the Faith Forward ad is also intended as a sincere affirmation of the belief many religious people hold that “voting [is] a moral choice” and that, through God, they are “given a certain mission in life” to help bring about a better world.
Faith Forward is the resurrected form of a similar campaign, Faith 2020, that operated during the last presidential election and the 2022 midterms. The group purports to have “played a significant leadership role in informing the public amidst rampant disinformation” from Trump and his administration, as well as organizing events in December 2022 that helped Rev. Raphael Warnock win his runoff election against Trump-backed nutcase Herschel Walker.
The group declares that its mission is to “engage our audience in issues . . . including reproductive health, LGBTQ+ rights, the meaning of true religious freedom, the threat of Christian nationalism, climate justice, and much more.”
This election year, Faith Forward will be focusing its efforts on the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. Butler says the group already has more than 5,000 members and plans to spend about $1 million in targeted efforts in these states, where “just a few thousand votes could swing the difference in the election.”
Faith Forward’s “God Made Us All” ad drew national attention on April 3 when it was aired on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Guest Claire McCaskill, formerly a Democratic U.S. senator from Missouri, called it “powerful,” adding that “the Biden campaign needs to lean into every single area that Donald Trump is trying to claim, including faith,” especially given the sharp contrast on this score between two men who would be president.
On one hand, McCaskill said, is Biden, a devout Catholic who knows the Scriptures and whose faith “is fundamental to who he is.” On the other is Trump, who “clearly is uncomfortable with the contours of Christianity. He’s never lived it. He’s never looked at God’s commandments or Jesus’s teachings as instructive to him. He said that he didn’t need to ask for forgiveness for anything.”
McCaskill thinks this is an issue that Biden and his supporters should embrace, especially when it comes to immigration. “What would Jesus think of a guy who said that these people who are desperate at our borders, desperate, that they’re vermin, and they are not people? I mean, Jesus would be appalled at that.”
FAITH FORWARD’S BOARD IS made up of individuals who have one foot planted in politics and the other in religion. Board chair Max Finberg held appointments under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, including in the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Board member Rachel Kobrin is a rabbi and “leader in faith-based political activism.” Board member Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, an author and former associate editor of Sojourners magazine, once served as an aide to Republican Senator Mark O. Hatfield. And board member Rev. Dr. Derrick Harkins is the former director of interfaith outreach for the Democratic National Committee as well as a Biden-Harris appointee as director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Butler is the founder and former head of Faith in Public Life, a nonprofit that has worked to promote religious freedom, help pass the Affordable Care Act, and defend immigrant and voting rights. She was also the chair of former President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and the author of the 2006 book Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized. She says Faith Forward’s board was drawn together out of a sense of regret that religious progressives have failed to take a strong enough stand against Christian nationalism.
“Had there been a robust case from the progressive side around how our religious values connect with progressive values,” she muses, “we wouldn’t be in a situation that we’re in now, in which a certain type of Christianity has aligned itself lockstep with the Republican Party and is being used to do harm to people and to dismantle our democracy.”
A big part of what the group hopes to do is to run digital ads to reach religious voters who may have voted for Trump in the past and are now “questioning their allegiance to him.” And so, in each of the targeted states, “we’ll be producing ads with local folks expressing their own opinions on the elections and what matters to them from a place of faith. We’ll do that in conjunction with local groups that we’ve worked with in the past.”
Brad Bowman, a public relations consultant for Raben, the communications firm at which Harkins serves as a senior advisor, says Faith Forward will also be hosting events in these battleground states in conjunction with religious leaders. And, perhaps most importantly, Faith Forward is “going to fight the spread of misinformation around the counting and tabulation of ballots during early vote and in November that could lead to some being manipulated into believing that the election was illegitimate.”
IN A RECENT INTERVIEW FOR AN MSNBC opinion column, Butler said the group’s goal is to help religious swing voters “understand the moral choices that are at stake” in the upcoming election. “We’re going to make sure, through really targeted outreach strategies, that we’re able to give people a really clear moral choice that we need to put God and human dignity of all people first and foremost as we consider our choices in the election.”
It’s difficult to see how they could ever have been confused to begin with. While Biden regularly attends Mass, Trump sees other folks in church only if the windows are clean. While Biden teared up while listening to the hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” at a St. Patrick’s Day brunch with religious leaders at the White House, Trump shamelessly seeks to bilk his devotees out of $59.99 for a “God Bless the USA” edition of the Bible. Featuring the American founding documents alongside the text of scripture, it’s just the sort of Bible you can picture him using as a prop following the tear gassing of peaceful protesters in a park near the White House.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social. He added: “I’m proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again.”
In a 2015 interview with Bloomberg Politics, Trump was asked to identify some of his favorite verses in his favorite book. He refused. “I wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal,” he said, clearly drawing a blank. “When I talk about the Bible, it’s very personal, so I wouldn’t want to get into it.” He added: “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.” He wouldn’t even say whether he’s “an Old Testament guy [or] a New Testament guy,” as the interviewer put it. (“I’d say, about equal,” Trump replied.)
As in so much else, Trump is such a complete and obvious phony when it comes to religion that the question must be asked: How is it possible that anyone accepts it? How could any person of faith, especially someone who professes to be a follower of Jesus Christ, throw their support behind a foul-mouthed, mean-spirited, self-absorbed, adjudicated sexual abuser who jokes about grabbing women by the genitals and is now on trial for allegedly breaking the law in making illegal hush-money payments to a porn star he had sex with while his third wife was at home with their newborn son?
White evangelicals, in the main, made their peace with Trump a long time ago, even though Christian leaders still publicly debate the issue. They did so for various reasons, and they justified their decision in various ways: Some interpreted him as a Cyrus-like figure God would use for the church’s benefit even though he doesn’t belong to it. Some saw Trump’s Supreme Court picks and prospect of overturning legal abortion as an overriding concern. And some were, and are, low-information voters who have simply been habituated by decades of political activism to vote for Republicans, no matter what.
Butler acknowledges the success Trump has had in consolidating the support of white Christians—something she, as a pastor, has been “appalled” to see. But she thinks it’s important to remember that religious supporters of the former president “are not a monolith.” While some are “charlatans who use Christian trappings for political and financial gain,” others “have been trapped in disinformation bubbles, primed for decades to think that they are not being faithful unless they vote Republican.” Butler, echoing a recent survey, says that 10 percent of Americans fully adhere to the sort of Christian nationalism that characterizes Trump’s strongest religious supporters, but another 20 percent are more tentative “sympathizers” whose minds could, in theory, be changed. It is these Christians that Faith Forward is seeking to persuade.
“There’s no reason we can’t make the religious case against Trump clear to these folks, not just based on his character but his agenda and how anti-Christian it is,” Butler says. “Biden won in places like Michigan and Georgia by reaching out to Christian conservatives. I’d like to see broader societal efforts to do more outreach at scale to disarm religious polarization altogether.”
Amen to that.
The Trump ad was itself apparently inspired by a Ron DeSantis ad, which in turn borrowed from a 1978 Paul Harvey speech that took on new life in a 2013 Super Bowl ad.
 | A guest post by
|