A newly-minted political group hosted a Wednesday night “Zoom-style rally,” as MSNBC put it, touting evangelical support for Harris. “Evangelicals for Harris has sought to offer a counter-narrative to evangelicals’ overwhelming support for Trump,” proclaimed The Tennessean, a progressive paper in Nashville. The narrative, as it uncritically repeated it, is that “Harris’ campaign has drawn out more direct support from those who may have sympathized with Democrat ideals but might not have gone out of their way to endorse Biden’s former candidacy.”
Is this true? Here are a few facts to know about “Evangelicals for Harris.”
- Wednesday’s Evangelicals for Harris call attracted modest participation, but scant evidence of a growing movement.
A pledge on the Evangelicals for Harris website to support the Harris-Walz ticket in 2024 has already received over 200,000 signatures. The organization claimed on X that “over 200,000 evangelicals joined an effort called ‘Evangelicals for Biden’” in 2020, and “that same group is growing and is throwing its support behind @KamalaHarris.”
However, this evidence does not show that a growing number of evangelicals are throwing their support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. So far, the evidence shows that a group of approximately 200,000 evangelicals support Democratic nominees for president, whether President Joe Biden in 2020 or Harris in 2024.
The Evangelicals for Harris Zoom rally reached 40,000 listeners, according to MSNBC. This total is about 20% of those who already signed the pledge to vote for a Harris-Walz ticket. While this number may sound large in isolation, it does not necessarily show that the Evangelicals for Harris is reaching large numbers of new hearers.
A 2022 Gallup poll found that 32% of American adults self-identify as “born-again” or evangelical, a little more than 80 million people (numbers vary widely between polling outfits because people define “evangelical” in different ways, but a broad definition seems most appropriate here for an apples-to-apples comparison). Various exit polls conducted in 2020 showed that 76% to 81% of “white evangelicals” (skin color shouldn’t matter, but that’s how pollsters classify people, unfortunately) voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden.
It’s theoretically possible that some evangelical votes have changed their politics in the past four years. But if Evangelicals for Harris wants to demonstrate that such a change has occurred broadly, they’ll have to expand their reach by orders of magnitude. Their website currently boasts that one-quarter of one percent of self-identified evangelicals have pledged to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket.
To back up the narrative that evangelicals have broadly deserted Trump, Evangelicals for Harris needs to gain millions, even tens of millions, more adherents.
- The Evangelicals for Harris rally continued a trend of pro-Harris Zoom meetings, segregated by identity groups.
Pro-Harris activists have organized a series of identity-based Zoom calls, featuring White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, and White Women for Harris. “Black queer men, South Asian women, Latinas, Native women,” will also hold gatherings, reported a Time piece, which celebrated this “admirable attempt to be inclusive.”
These calls are part of an effort to boost Harris’s candidacy for online audiences by leaning into the theories of identity politics: look at all the different groups of people who support her!
Ironically, the sheer number of identity group rallies for Harris, while the nation remains split roughly 50-50 (or perhaps 45-45) between her and Trump, accidentally demonstrates that no identity group is monolithic. No one must vote a certain way simply because they belong to a certain arbitrary group. Even evangelicals have some political diversity; not everyone who repents and believes in Jesus Christ makes the same logical connections between Scripture and politics.
- The Evangelicals for Harris rally featured a mix of speakers, not all of whom were evangelical.
The Evangelicals for Harris event featured 18 speakers plus a moderator, with significant diversity among the participants.
Moderator Ekemini Uwan set the overall tone. At a Christian conference in 2019, Uwan declared, “Whiteness is wicked. It is wicked. It’s rooted in violence. It’s rooted in theft. It’s rooted in plunder. It’s rooted in power, in privilege.” She has called for defunding the police, reparations, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and an end to the Electoral College, according to Fox News.
When asked about these past comments, Uwan responded that she “told the truth about the wickedness of whiteness.” She explained, “I preached the gospel and told them there is grace and that the blood covers. I am an anti-racist Public Theologian. I hold up a mirror, make people face the racist reflection staring back at them, and give them hope found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Other speakers are known for previous progressive activism within evangelical churches. Among many, Burk highlights Bishop Claude Alexander, chairman of the board of directors at Christianity Today, Rev. Dwight McKissic, “a well-known activist for women pastors within the Southern Baptist Convention,” and Jemar Tisby, an anti-racist author and former assistant director at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research.
Some speakers appear to focus their political engagement on fighting anti-Asian racism. This includes Russell Jeung, Soong-Chan Rah, and Raymond Chang.
Other speakers are not in pastoral ministry, such as Billy Graham’s granddaughter, Jerushah Duford, an “LGBTQ+ friendly” therapist. Another speaker was Christian rapper Derek Minor, whose up-and-down faith journey “doesn’t fit the mold anymore.”
Some speakers did not even seem to fit the standard definition of evangelical. Matt Tebbe is a priest in the Episcopal Church — by definition a mainline denomination, as distinct from an evangelical one. Lee Scott, of the Coalition for Christian Outreach is ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., another mainline denomination.
The hodgepodge of speakers provides an answer to readers who may be wondering how an “Evangelicals for Harris” group could even form in the first place. How could Bible-believing Christians, who submit their lives to the word of God, support one of the most pro-abortion, pro-LGBT politicians of our time? The answer is that there isn’t one answer, but many.
The reasons some evangelicals have for supporting Harris aren’t necessarily good ones — and a majority of evangelicals seem to disagree with their reasoning — but differences of thinking will always result where there is genuine freedom of thought. In an era when governments increasingly seek to crack down on “misinformation” and other thought crimes, the existence of a minority position like “Evangelicals for Harris” is proof that freedom of thought is still alive in American churches.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
