WASHINGTON (AP) — When the Rev. Lee Scott publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president during the Evangelicals for Harris Zoom call on Aug. 14, the Presbyterian pastor and farmer said he was taking a risk.
“The easiest thing for us this year would be to keep our heads down, go to the polls, keep our vote secret and go about our business,” Scott told the group, which organizers said drew about 3,200 spectators. “But right now, I just can’t do that.”
Scott lives in Butler, Pennsylvania, the same town where an assassin shot and killed former President Donald Trump in July. Scott told the Associated Press that the attack and its impact on his community prompted him to speak out against Trump and the “anger” and “acceptable violence” he has normalized in politics.
Trump still enjoys powerful support among white evangelical voters. About 8 in 10 white evangelical voters voted for him in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a comprehensive poll of voters. But a tiny and diverse coalition of evangelicals is trying to draw their fellow believers out of the former president’s fold by offering them not only an alternative candidate to support, but also a completely different vision of their faith.
“I’m tired of seeing meanness, bigotry and recreational cruelty as the secular witness of our faith,” Scott said in the call. “I want change, and change is risky business.”
Exploiting cracks in Trump’s evangelical base
Trump has been courting white, conservative evangelicals intensively since he burst onto the political scene nearly a decade ago. Now he’s selling Trump-themed Bibles, promoting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and imploring Christians to vote for him.
But some evangelicals are using the perceived cracks in Trump’s political loyalty to distance themselves even further from the former president, especially as Trump and his surrogates remain undecided on whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if he became president.
Texas Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic, speaking at the Evangelicals for Harris rally, said he saw no “moral superiority of one party over the other,” citing Republicans’ decision to “abandon their commitment to banning abortion through an amendment” and to soften their stance against same-sex marriage in their platform.
Although he has voted Republican in the past, McKissic said he would vote for Harris because he believes she has the stronger character and better qualifications.
“I certainly don’t agree with her on all policy issues,” said Scott, who describes himself as an evangelical and is ordained in the immense Presbyterian Church (USA). “I’m pro-life. I’m against abortion. But at the same time, she has a pro-family platform,” referring to Harris’ education policies and her promise to raise the child tax credit.
Grassroots groups like Evangelicals for Harris hope they can convince evangelicals with similar mindsets to support Harris rather than voting for Trump or skipping the election altogether.
With modest funding in 2020, the group formerly known as Evangelicals for Biden targeted evangelical voters in swing states. This election, the organization’s president, the Rev. Jim Ball, said they plan to expand the operation and spend $1 million on targeted advertising.
While white evangelicals overwhelmingly vote Republican, not all evangelicals are a sure-fire Republican candidate, and in a close race, every vote counts.
In 2020, Biden won about 2 in 10 white evangelical voters but did better with evangelicals overall, winning about a third of that group, according to AP VoteCast. A September AP-NORC poll found that about 6 in 10 Americans who identify as “born again” or “evangelical” have a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Harris, but about a third have a favorable opinion of her. The majority – about 8 in 10 – of white evangelicals have an unfavorable opinion of Harris.
Vote Common Good, a similar group led by progressive evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt, has a basic message: “Political identity and religious identity are not a package deal.”
“There’s a whole group that is very uncomfortable voting for Trump,” Pagitt said. “We’re not trying to get them to change their minds. We’re trying to work with them once they change their minds so they can act accordingly.”
Working with the campaign
In August, Harris’ campaign hired the Reverend Jen Butler, a Presbyterian minister and experienced organizer of religious missionaries, to lead the religious mission.
Butler told AP she is in touch with evangelicals on Harris’ behalf. With Election Day less than two months away, she wants to employ the power of grassroots groups to quickly reach even more religious voters.
“We want to mobilize our base and believe we really have the potential to reach people who have voted Republican in the past,” Butler said.
They focus on black Protestants and evangelical Latinos, especially in the essential swing states. They reach out to Catholics and mainstream Protestants in the Rust Belt, as well as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Arizona and Nevada. Butler’s colleagues work with Jewish and Muslim voting groups.
The groups Catholics for Harris and Interfaith for Harris are founded. Established Protestant groups such as Black Church PAC and Christians for Kamala also campaign for the vice president.
Butler, who grew up as an evangelical in Georgia, said the Harris campaign could find common ground with evangelicals, especially suburban evangelical women.
“There are a whole range of issues that are important to them,” she said, pointing to compassionate approaches to immigration and abortion. “They know that the best way to address all pro-life issues is to support women.”
A challenging sale
Even for evangelicals who don’t like Trump, it can be challenging to support a Democrat.
Russell Jeong, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and spokesman for the evangelicals’ call for Harris, told AP that the group “does not agree with everything Harris stands for” and that evangelicals “can hold the party accountable through their engagement.”
Other participants on the call indicated they would employ their voices to pressure Harris on issues they disagree with. Latino evangelical activist Sandra Maria Van Opstal said she would push the potential Harris administration to “do better on the Palestine-Israel issue and on immigration.”
Soong-Chan Rah, a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, describes himself as a nonpartisan progressive evangelical and “a prophet speaking to broken systems.” Although he has never endorsed a candidate before, he said there is so much at stake in this election that he wants to publicly endorse Harris.
“I find this candidate, Trump, not only repulsive and disgusting,” Rah said, “it is so extreme that I want to support his opposition.”
But the chorus of evangelicals who think it is unconscionable to vote for a Democrat remains raucous.
Trump-supporting evangelical worship leader Sean Feucht mocked the existence of Evangelicals for Harris on X: “HERETICS FOR HARRIS sounds so much more true!”
The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump supporter, criticized one of the group’s ads and the image it featured of his slow father, the Rev. Billy Graham. “Liberals are using everything they can to support candidate Harris,” he wrote on his public Facebook page, which has 10 million followers.
Introducing a novel evangelical identity
But the project of bolstering the Democrats’ evangelical voters goes beyond party politics. It goes to the heart of what evangelicalism means.
The term “evangelical” itself is tricky and has become synonymous with the Republican Party, argues Ryan Burge, professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University.
“Probably more people are theologically evangelical,” Burge says, “but they won’t embrace that word because they’re not voting for Trump or they’re moderate or liberal.”
The term evangelicalism has historically referred to Christians who hold conservative theological views on issues such as the meaning of the Bible and the novel birth, but that has changed as the term has become increasingly associated with Republican voters.
For many, evangelicalism is largely defined along racial and sociopolitical lines, and by supporting Harris, Rah hopes to “show that there are other voices in the church besides the religious right and Trump evangelicals.”
Latasha Morrison, an evangelical spokesperson for Harris Zoom, told AP: “As a black woman, I never associated myself with the word ‘evangelical’ until I started attending predominantly white churches.”
Her anti-abortion stance led her to vote Republican for years, but now the Christian author and diversity coach says, “I feel like women and children have better opportunities under the Harris administration than under the Trump administration.”
Ball, the evangelical organizer for Harris, doesn’t want to tell people whether they are evangelicals or not.
“Diversity is a strength for us. We are not looking for total unanimity. We are looking for unity,” Ball said. “We can be united even when there are still differences.”
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