The Art of the Deal with the Devil - Issue #3
Evangelicals largely fell in line behind Donald Trump believing he'd end abortion. This week they learned that he never had any intention of doing so.
Welcome to Issue #3. Fitz here. Jason and his family have been without electricity since thunderstorms whipped through Massachusetts on Wednesday. He tells me, “out of all of Framingham, we are part of the elite 3% whose power outage lasted into a third day.” Here’s hoping they come back online today!
In this week’s issue, you’ll find an essay about the Trump administration’s bait and switch on repealing Roe v. Wade, followed by an update on what’s been happening at “…in Progress. ” Then, we launch a new feature in the newsletter—music & book recommendations! Oh, also, there’s a pretty picture of a butterfly. In fact, after the week we’ve just had, you might want to scroll down to see that first. Finally, we’re so grateful that you subscribe to the newsletter and we’d love it if you’d be willing to share it wherever you share stuff online.
Evangelicals Made a Devil’s Bargain. This Week, the Deal Fell Through.
by Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
I was a sixteen-year-old evangelical Christian in 1998, when news of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. For some reason, my memory of learning about the affair is tied to another vivid memory of sitting in a church sanctuary with my family for a Sunday evening worship service. I’m sure I didn’t learn of the scandal in church, but it was discussed. Hearing that President Clinton—who was deeply unpopular in our evangelical circles anyway—engaged in an extramarital affair while in office horrified me, horrified all of us. I think that’s why I remember that church sanctuary; there was a kind of collective disgust. For us evangelicals, morals mattered, especially in our leaders.
This formative experience is why, eighteen years later, in 2016, I couldn’t wrap my head around white evangelical support for then-candidate Donald Trump, who’d racked up so many dalliances and divorces that the Clinton scandal seemed like small potatoes by comparison. I no longer identified as an evangelical by then, but I kept a close eye on the culture I grew up in. So many of my friends and family members were still in the evangelical camp, and it seemed that Trump’s indiscretions, of which he bragged on tape, hardly mattered to them.
Of course, evangelicals largely identify as Republican, which is one reason that they obsessed over Clinton’s moral failings, but were willing to overlook Trump’s. But even more important than that was a promise Trump made on the campaign trail and, significantly, during a presidential debate: if he was elected president, he would get to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade would be overturned “automatically…because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.”
It turns out, that’s all most evangelicals needed to hear. They went on to vote for him over Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming margin of 80-16 percent, and their support for the president has hardly wavered since. While some far-right evangelicals have come to venerate Trump, others followed Rev. Franklin Graham’s invocation back in 2016 to, “Hold your nose and go vote.” He didn’t approve then of Trump’s “language or inexcusable behavior,” but, he told followers in a Facebook post, “This election is about the Supreme Court and the justices that the next president will nominate.” It’s worth noting that, four years later, Graham is now firmly in the venerate Trump camp.
It’s difficult to say to what extent evangelicals really did hold their nose while voting for Trump. In a new book, Calvin University professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez argues that the 2016 election was “the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.” She’s right, but evangelicalism has never been a monolith, and the variations within evangelicalism are regional as well as generational. Being surrounded by young evangelicals in New England, for example, I often find a misalignment between the popular perception of the group and the reality around me. And indeed, a Pew Research survey conducted over the summer did show some slippage among evangelicals, and young evangelicals, in particular, are less likely than their parents and grandparents to support Trump.
But then, that all seemed like a moot point after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away last month. Trump is now poised to nominate his third Supreme Court justice, thus securing a conservative majority on the court and delivering on his promise to evangelicals.
Shortly after the news of Ginsburg’s death broke, I had lunch with Ben, a friend from college who is now a lawyer. His upbringing, like many of my college friends, mirrored mine. He attended Christians schools his entire life, including the college where we met. He, too, no longer calls himself evangelical. I was lamenting to Ben that when Trump announced his nominee for Ginsburg’s seat, he will have effectively sealed the deal with evangelical voters—our friends and families—once again.
Ben, however, wasn’t so sure. Like me, the evangelicals he knows are more of the “hold your nose and vote” persuasion. They voted for Trump solely on the promise of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and now that it seemed all but certain that he’d deliver that, Ben argued, evangelicals can unplug their noses. They are free to not vote for Trump.
They had made a devil’s bargain, and the deal seemed to have paid off.
I found myself encouraged by this view, and I began to talk to evangelicals I know to see whether this would actually bear out the way my friend predicted. While I didn’t get any firm commitments, the evangelicals I talked to seemed at least interested in considering it.
They didn’t have much time to think about it, however, because just as it seemed that the evangelicals’ devil’s bargain had worked, the whole deal seemed to go to hell amidst the fire and brimstone of the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden.
So much happened over those 90 minutes that it’s easy to miss what was actually said. But during the debate, Trump uttered what I believe to be one of the most consequential statements of his presidency. When the topic of the Supreme Court vacancy was raised by the moderator Chris Wallace, Biden argued that the Senate should wait to confirm a new judge until after the presidential election. Roe v. Wade, Biden said, is on the ballot. To this, Trump countered, “Why is it on the ballot? It’s not on the ballot. There’s nothing happening there.”
Just four words: “There’s nothing happening there.” With those four words, Donald Trump undermined a promise he made to evangelical voters back in 2016, a promise that won them to his side, a promise that seemed all but certain to be fulfilled with Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Maybe this notion that “There’s nothing happening there” isn’t terribly surprising to most readers. Others have noted that overturning Roe v. Wade, even with a conservative majority, is unlikely. A couple of weeks ago, Iowa Republican senator Joni Ernst said, “I think the likelihood of Roe v. Wade being overturned is very minimal. I don’t see that happening.” Ernst is against abortion, but seems to be hedging over an issue where her views are not aligned with the majority of voters. And just this week in the VP debate, Vice President Pence very obviously avoided a question about whether he thinks his home state of Indiana should outright ban abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned and the decision goes to states.
Evangelicals are taking note: prominent pastor and editor of the Gospel Coalition (and former comment-sparring partner) Joe Carter tweeted, “Pence had two minutes on national TV to provide a defense of unborn Americans. Instead, he used it to defend his boss.” And just last week, Sarah Pulliam Bailey reported on a group of evangelicals who are abandoning Trump and the Republican party this election; they call themselves “Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden.”
See, evangelicals believed then-candidate Trump when he promised that Roe v. Wade would be overturned. But when he said, “There’s nothing happening there,” and when Pence failed to say that abortion should be illegal in Indiana, they got the message: evangelicals were lied to. As a former evangelical, I can see how tragic this must appear through the eyes of my evangelical friends and family. Once a self-proclaimed Moral Majority, evangelicals Christians largely ceded the moral high ground on a bet that by supporting Donald Trump, by falling in line behind the twice-divorced casino owner, their greater mission of banning abortion in the United States would finally come to fruition.
Like Judas, the villain of the Gospels, they sold their soul for thirty pieces of silver, only to find, upon opening their treasure, that it was empty all along. But, that’s what happens when you engage in “the art of the deal” with a devilish dealmaker.
Still, I empathize with my evangelical friends; you have been duped, but it’s not too late to cut your losses, get out of the rotten deal, and reclaim your soul.
The opinions expressed in the above essay are solely those of their author.
As always, we’d love to engage with you in the comments section on the site or by email if you don’t want your comments to be public.
Image credit: IMDB
Mental health break: because who doesn’t want to see a butterfly. This is on Stacy Boulevard in Gloucester.
Some things you might’ve missed at “…in Progress” this past week:
On October 2nd, Jason published “It is what it is…” chronicling the nonstop news cycle while also encouraging us to “go easy on the schadenfreude” around the president’s Covid diagnosis.
Then, on October 6th, Fitz published “Bewildered,” a rumination on the pandemic, death, literature, change, the seasons, family, and the complexities of being a person who's supposed to know things—all of that in just around 1300 words!
And now, a new feature of the newsletter—completely unsolicited music & book recommendations!
What We’re Listening To:
Fitz: Ruston Kelly, Shape & Destroy. I can’t stop listening to this record (and I mean “record” literally; I loved it so much that I bought the vinyl). Listening to Kelly’s previous album, it’s clear he was going through some difficult times and struggling with addiction. Shape & Destroy chronicles his recovery, and it’s so raw and real. Standout songs include “Radio Cloud,” “Changes,” and “Rubber.” Also worth a listen, Kelly has an EP of Emo covers called Dirt Emo Vol.1; it includes “Screaming Infidelities” (featuring Chris Carrabba!), “Teenage Dirtbag,” and “All Too Well,” among others. Highly recommended.
What We’re Reading:
Fitz: Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. A Calvin University professor details 75 years of evangelicalism’s history to explain how we ended up with Trump.