We are starting to get good data on how Americans voted in the 2024 election. President re-elect Donald Trump carried a majority of religious groups with two exceptions. He also did very well with male voters of all ages, making a strong showing with young males.
While analysts will rehash the election for some time, it should be noted that in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic every incumbent party among the Western democracies lost its bid for re-election. The backlash has been pervasive and inevitable. Although the pandemic began under Trump and he mismanaged it, the voters blamed President Biden and the Democrats, even though, compared to the other western democracies, the United States had less inflation and by far the strongest economy. It didn’t matter. Throw the bums out. The voters conveniently forgot the last year of Trump’s first term.
The nation’s Covid pandemic experience teed up Trump’s campaign based on grievances. He focused on inflation and immigration with an openly misogynist and raciest rhetoric, or as I would phrase it, he announced a return to patriarchy. While the Covid pandemic jump-started inflation, since his first campaign Trump has employed anti-immigrant rhetoric, misogyny, and racism as a standard part of his toolkit. The trauma of the pandemic made Trump’s standard grievances more pressing and expanded the base to which those grievances appealed.
The question remains: Why did a majority of Christians, across religious denominations, vote for a convicted sex offender, a misogynist, and a racist? Is Christianity to blame or was Christianity irrelevant in his election? Does Christianity help explain his win?
White evangelicals provided Trump with his strongest support among Christians. That 81 percent voted for him is no surprise, because they long have been among his most devoted followers. Christian nationalism has made strong inroads among this group, fusing religion and nationalism, while proclaiming America a Christian (White) nation. White evangelicals got serious about politics in the late 1970s when the IRS threatened to revoke their Christian academies’ tax-exempt status for segregationist practices.
Black Protestants were diametrically opposed to White evangelicals. Only 13 percent voted for Trump. The logical conclusion here is that Black Protestants perceive racism as a major threat, while White evangelicals do not see it as a problem. White evangelicals have consistently opposed integration and racial equality. Conservative campaigns first against political correctness and now against wokeism are rhetorical strategies designed to neutralize charges of racism and misogyny.
White non-evangelical Christians gave Trump a 58 percent majority. Hispanic Protestants voters favored Trump by 63 percent, while Hispanic Catholic voters favored him by 52 percent. White Catholics gave him 60 percent of their vote, eight percentage points more than their fellow Catholic Hispanic voters. The Catholic vote was firmly in the Republican camp, part of a long term trend. The pro-life/anti-abortion position of the Catholic church has a good deal to do with this. Pro-life is a patriarchal position.
White and Hispanic Christians lined up in the Trump camp, which would indicate that race and patriarchy may be as important as religion in his appeal to this religious demographic. It also may be true that race and/or patriarchy are important aspects of these religious groups.
The religious groupings that opposed Trump are equally interesting. In the non-Christian groups, “Other Religions” were 60 percent in opposition, while Jews were 79 percent opposed to Trump. The religiously unaffiliated were 72 percent in opposition. Finally, as noted above, Black Protestants were the group most in opposition: 86 percent.
Interestingly, the Trump campaign made significant appeals to Jewish and Muslim voters. While they peeled away some voters, these groups remained overwhelming in the Democratic column. The appeal to Protestant and Catholic Hispanics was much more successful.
American religious groups reflect the underlying divisions within the American population. We are divided along racial and gender lines that play out in distinct religious ways.
Why were the White Protestant and Catholic voters susceptible to Trump’s appeal? First, they buy into his grievance politics, and second, he makes a potent mythological appeal.
Trump’s grievance politics, which solidifies his iron hold on his base, stroke his voters’ anxiety about loss of status in American society. This anxiety is fundamental to Trump’s appeal. He plays it like a virtuoso, hitting each note perfectly. Anxiety about loss of status is the common denominator binding Trump’s various supporters. He never elaborates the root causes for this anxiety but points to a bogeyman, like immigrants, Blacks and women demanding equality, LGBTQ. Someone else, he tells them, is the cause of your problems.
The real cause behind the nativist fear of the other is the huge gap in wealth inequality in this country, which is at an all-time high. It has hollowed out American manufacturing and the good jobs that went with it, as well as depriving rural America of resources. Those claiming an equal piece of the pie are forced into a zero-sum game. There is not enough to go around. For them to want more means there is less for others. If Trump were to admit this problem, he would have to step forward as a member of the class that is the problem. His boast that he is a billionaire who pays no taxes puts him in the 1 percent. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison own more wealth than the bottom half of the population put together. Trump need not propose a solution to a problem he does not admit exists. Moreover, the Republican Party’s policies of constant reduction in taxes and war on regulations are the root causes of the problem. Trump’s one significant piece of legislation in his first term was cutting the taxes of the rich. His often-announced infrastructure bill never saw the light of day. At the beginning of his first administration, he surrounded himself with generals. This time around he is turning to tech billionaires.
Anxiety about loss of status appeals to religious conservatives who feel that religion’s importance in society is slipping away, especially as younger Americans become increasingly less religious. Christianity is becoming a minority in a country they believe was founded as a Christian nation. This anxiety leads White Christians to see themselves as persecuted. Whites are becoming yet another minority. Trump promises to reverse this. Afterall, he reversed Roe v. Wade when other Republican presidents had failed. He can build the wall and keep out the immigrants. His transgressive hyper-masculinity appeals to those young men who experience female claims to equality as a zero-sum proposition. Female gain is a male’s loss.
This zero-sum formula underlies much of Trump’s appeal to those anxious about their loss of status. What is being lost is vaguely described because what is important for Trump is the experience created by the anxiety of loss. Any exposure of the true cause of the anxiety to which he appeals would bring his house of cards down. This strategy enables him to appeal to those who are anxious about a variety of different losses of status, without any clear definition of the losses’ causes. His solution is simply the bogeyman other. Fear, not analysis, is the solution he offers.
Trump addresses his voters’ anxiety about a loss of status by presenting himself as their savior. As he said in his first acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in 2016, “I alone can fix it.” He did not ask his voters to place their trust in God or one another, as in traditional political speeches, but in him!
As a savior Trumps fits a peculiar American mythology. The cowboy is a central figure in American mythology and John Wayne personifies that mythology. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in her Jesus and John Wayne, shows, as the subtitle says, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. John Wayne’s Hollywood persona became the image of American manhood. She stresses how this hyper-masculine view denigrates women in a strictly patriarchal worldview. What she misses is that John Wayne’s movie persona is transgressive, often outside the law. Even as a law man, he operates apart from the law, not bound by it. Wayne’s true successor was Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. As his nickname indicates, he is a lawman who has to break the law to keep the law. Dirty Harry takes on those soft on crime, or in today’s terms, Dirty Harry owns the libs. (I examined both these figures in Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories, John Wayne in chapter 3 and Dirty Harry in chapter 5.)
The John Wayne persona and Dirty Harry are not real persons but movie characters, entertainers. As such they are not judged by the same standards as a real person. Why? Because they are imaginary. Yet these imaginary characters have real-life consequences, especially when they become models for male behavior.
Trump as savior fits the model of John Wayne and Dirty Harry. His transgressive behavior, breaking the law, fits the myth. Sometimes you must break the law to keep the law. The transgressive savior is strong enough to take on the system which is arranged against the rest of us. You can’t send a milquetoast to take on the villain. All of Trump’s bad behavior is excused because of his call to be the savior. Trying to hold him accountable is persecution. This transgressive male behavior in service of the myth also appeals to young men who feel threatened by women’s claim of equality. Should you take what Trump says seriously, literally? No, he's an entertainer, it’s just Trump being Trump, true to himself. The myth provides him with an out at every turn. He is the perfect incarnation of the American savior myth.
* See the PRRI report “Religion and 2024 Presidential Election” (November 8, 2024) for election data.
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