When Donald Trump’s Supreme Court erased decades of precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, evangelicals and conservative Catholics (the “Religious Right”) cheered. However, their long fight against abortion was not over.
Republicans immediately leapt to work in “red” states to enact draconian anti-abortion bills. Thanks to these new laws, pregnant women and girls seeking abortions face state surveillance and criminalization.
Those who help women and girls cross state lines to obtain abortions and those who provide abortions can now expect severe punishments, including prison time and even death. (How ironic that the “pro-life” movement has brought the death penalty for doctors who break their new laws.)
Trump proudly boasted when Roe fell. He thought installing those radical justices and ending Roe was a political winner.
Surprise!
For the past several months, Trump has been trumping himself, backpedaling on his signature accomplishment. Turns out that these new Republican laws are extremely unpopular.
Trump has not just waffled on abortion. He has come out in favor of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that anti-abortionists believe is tantamount to “murder.”
For anti-abortionists, abortion is an evil that trumps every other moral consideration. Trump is an anti-abortion hero. No Trump lie or action is bad enough to diminish him in the eyes of ardent anti-abortionists.
Here’s a short list of Trump’s words and deeds that the Religious Right has chosen to ignore, to excuse, or to explain away.
- Cheating on his wife, sexual assault, hush money payments to a porn star to influence the 2016 election
- Stoking white supremacist tropes and fears of darker-skinned immigrants (latest examples: Harris “turned Black;” Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio)
- Cheating with business fraud, for-profit school fraud, tax fraud and election fraud
- Being convicted of 34 felonies
- Exploiting white grievance and Christian fears of “persecution”
- Threatening revenge against political opponents
- Threatening Taylor Swift for endorsing Harris
- Promulgating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen
- Whipping his supporters into a brownshirt-like frenzy to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021
- Calling the rioters “patriots” and promising he’ll pardon those who were convicted
- Blaming Jan. 6 on Nancy Pelosi
- Heaping praise on dictators such as Putin, Orban, Kim and Xi
- Calling neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates “very fine people”
- Promising to be dictator (if he wins) “on Day One”
- Taking an oath to defend the Constitution and instead attacking it
- Vowing to repeal the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”)
- Profiting from hawking “God Bless the USA” Bibles
- Ghoulishly ripping asylum-seeking families apart at the border
- Comparing himself to Jesus
- Undermining free and fair elections, rule of law and peaceful transfer of power
- Denying he knew anything about Project 2025, the plan to make the United States into a fascist dictatorship—then admitting he’d implement it
- Scapegoating immigrants, minorities and the poor for the problems in the United States
- Promising to round up the homeless and relocate them to concentration camps
- Promising to conduct immediate mass deportations of more than 20 million people
The list could go on and on.
But wait. If nothing Trump does disqualifies him in the view of the Religious Right, what about Trump’s flip-flops on abortion and IVF?
Albert Mohler, president of the evangelical Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., is warning Trump that softening on abortion could cause him to lose the upcoming election.
A question for Mohler and other Religious Right Christians: What does Trump’s flip-flopping on abortion feel like? Betrayal?
Well, what did you expect? Did you actually think Trump was going to act with anything other than crass self-interest?
Even if Trump tries to keep his options open by refusing to commit to veto a nationwide abortion ban—you’ve been conned.
Don’t feel too badly, though. It’s not just you. It’s also Cabinet members, military leaders and other insiders who served Trump’s administration and who saw—in person and up close—Trump’s vile character and unfitness for office.
And it’s not just Trump’s inner circle. Trump is even losing the confidence of Christian neo-Nazis such as Nick Fuentes. Fuentes pointed to Trump’s admission to podcaster Lex Fridman that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker.” Fuentes nailed Trump for pushing for four years the lie that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen.”
Fuentes elaborated: Trump lost, and he knew he lost all along. That means Trump abused the trust of his loyal followers. It means Trump is responsible for the failed Jan. 6 coup attempt. It means that people who believed Trump’s lie, who attacked the Capitol, who were arrested, convicted and who suffered for their actions—sacrificed themselves for a liar.
The Religious Right can no longer count on Trump regarding abortion, IVF and even his Big Lie. Will Mohler and other Religious Right Christians still stick with Trump? Will they now say of Trump, as they said of Biden, that Trump has “sold his soul to the culture of death”? We all caught a glimpse of Trump’s craziness during the debate—will the Religious Right cut loose from the old, decrepit Trump who’s getting crazier by the day?
We can hope. But let’s face it: The Religious Right was never really about “respect for the sanctity of life.” It was about power, “our tribe” (the good guys) versus “the others” (the bad guys). It was a cynical political ploy to get Christians to fear or hate everyone (“murderers!”) who didn’t follow their playbook. It was a convenient and effective wedge issue that could be weaponized come election time.
We are talking about cultural control. Mohler and the Religious Right have a Christian nationalist agenda for America. Whites in charge, males dominating, “Judeo-Christian values,” “God’s law” trumping human-made civil law. They are deeply suspicious of genuine diversity, inclusion, pluralism and democracy. Upholding white supremacy and the patriarchy are moral imperatives. That means keeping women and minorities in their place.
LGBTQ+ people, and LGBTQ+ equal rights, are an existential threat to the Religious Right’s vision of a “Christian America.” If Trump gets elected, expect discriminatory laws and hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people to increase. This is already happening, with Republicans across the country sponsoring 500 anti-gay bills in the past year.
Another existential threat to the Religious Right is demographics. When “America was great,” white Protestant Christians dominated the culture. They were both pre-eminent and privileged. However, from 2006 to 2020, white evangelical Protestants declined from 23% to 14% of the U.S. population. Plus, white evangelical Protestants are aging out and the electorate is getting younger. If you’re Religious Right, becoming aware of these shifting sands of social position is disorienting and discomfiting.
Enter Kamala Harris. From a Religious Right perspective, she has significant defects. She is not white. She is not male. She’s not soft and accommodating to “fine people” racists. She doesn’t pal around with dictators. She is not anti-LGBTQ+. She is not anti-abortion. She is not threatening a “bloodbath” if she loses. She’s not nearly hardline enough against Palestinians, immigrants and Muslims.
But from the perspective of equality for all, justice for all, decency for all and the common good, her character and platform outshine Trump’s by many miles.
Whoever you are, wherever you come from, it’s not easy to rise above your cultural conditioning. The programming goes deep. However, for Christians who are trying to follow Jesus, it really isn’t such a big stretch to vote for Harris, or at least decide not to vote for Trump. Jesus trumps Trump.
