The Christians Preaching the Case for Kamala: ‘Trump Undermines the Work of Jesus’

O n a recent Sunday in Canton, Georgia, a group of American Christians found themselves on a mission. It was a very specific mission, though like many missions these days, it had merch. It had live music. It had signage spread out across the front yard of a former one-room schoolhouse such that when cars meandered down the two-lane street passing through this quiet patch of Cherokee County, drivers might take notice and — should the spirit strike — feel themselves moved to pull over and hearken to see what in the heck was going on. 

“That was a good honk” said Pastor Robb Ryerse, as a car drove past, the driver laying on the horn merrily. Ryerse raised his hand in greeting. ”We can tell the good honks from the bad honks. That’s a good honk.”

The small crowd on the lawn tittered knowingly. At the moment, Ryerse stood in front of a tour bus emblazoned with “Faith, Hope & Love,” a phrase that any good Christian would know is from 1 Corinthians 13:13 (that’s first Corinthians, not one Corinthians, by the way). It could be assumed that such messaging would play well in Cherokee County, one of the most politically conservative areas around Atlanta, and a place where evangelical faith is practically the default setting. But the bus also happened to say “Supporting Democracy for ALL,” messaging that might not play so well in a state that’s home to S.B. 202, one of the most sweeping voter-suppression laws in the nation. More than that, the lawn was scattered with “Harris Walz 2024” and rainbow-colored “Love Thy Neighbor — No Exceptions” signage. In other words, the whole affair was a bit of a head-scratcher for those who have come to assume that “conservative Republican” and “evangelical Christian” are synonymous terms.

For Vote Common Good, the group that organized the rally, combating that blithe association was precisely the point. A few minutes earlier, Doug Pagitt, a Minnesota-based pastor and the organization’s executive director, had stood before the assembled in maroon pants and a blue fedora and announced as much: “Now, you’d be surprised when you drive around this country with a bus that says ‘faith, hope, and love’ on it, and then you put up a candidate who’s running for office as a Democrat, how many people feel confused. Happens all the time. Because a lot of people in this country have been told over and over that if you’re truly a Christian, then you can only vote for a Republican.” Pagitt gesticulated with the conviction of a tent-revival preacher. “We’re here to remind you: That has never been true. It’s not true today, and it’s not gonna be true tomorrow.”

Editor’s picks

In fact, Pagitt and Vote Common Good are part of a growing movement of evangelical Christians committed to spreading the good news of that exact message. Along with Vote Common Good, there’s Faith Forward, Christian Democrats of America, and Faithful America, which bills itself as being “sick of sitting by quietly while Jesus’ message of good news is hijacked by the religious right to serve a hateful political agenda.” A Christians for Kamala event in August was streamed live by close to 100,000 viewers and featured comments by Cory Booker, John Fugelsang, and Tyler Merritt (“The VP doesn’t sell Bibles with her name on them because she’s actually read the Bible,” the group’s co-founder, John Pavlovitz, told me). 

Another organization, Evangelicals for Harris, has rallied their 30 million X followers to participate in service projects with faith voters across the country, and has spent more than $1 million on digital ads that boost Vice President Kamala Harris and pit Donald Trump’s words, deeds, and policies against the teachings of Scripture. One such ad features video of the late Rev. Billy Graham calling on Christians to love thy neighbor, alongside clips of Trump claiming that immigrants are “poisoning” and “destroying” the blood of our country. (Last month, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association sent Evangelicals for Harris a letter threatening to sue on the basis of copyright infringement.)

Related

In both messaging and mission, these groups are working to help the Democratic Party connect with faith voters broadly the way the party historically has with Black faith voters. They are also making the case that disaffected evangelical Republicans could provide Harris’ path to victory. After poring over polling and demographic data, Pagitt and others believe that nine counties in just five swing states were instrumental in delivering Joe Biden the presidency, by either flipping for him, or narrowing the Trump margin substantially, and that such a change would not — in fact could not — have happened in those specific areas without something shifting in the evangelical vote. “In West Michigan, we know that Ottawa County and Kent County are the only two counties where the vote between 2016 and 2020 actually flipped,” Pagitt had explained earlier that morning as the Vote Common Good bus barreled past the scrub pine lining Interstate 75, making its way from a church service at St. Philip A.M.E. Church in Decatur (sermon title: “The Walls Must Come Down!”) to the rally in Canton. “It’s the first time in 30 years that a Democrat won Kent County. That doesn’t happen in those counties without that being Evangelical people. There’s just too many of them there.”

Evangelicals for Harris organizers have come to the same conclusion. By their count, the net change in the white evangelical vote in Michigan between 2016 and 2020 was 26 percent, or 350,000 votes; Biden won by 154,000 there. In Georgia, the margin was even smaller, but just as definitive: a net change of 245,000 evangelical ballots in a state where Biden won by just 12,670. “Republicans knew this right out of the chute, which is why they started organizing the 2024 campaign around religious voters,” says Pagitt. “Democrats don’t think about voters under a religious tab. They don’t sort by religion. For Republicans, it’s the first sort.”

Which is why these groups are hoping to pick up the slack, and help Harris chip at the margins enough that she can re-create Biden’s 2020 performance, particularly among people who might have internalized the message that the Republican Party was the party of God but who have nonetheless grown increasingly uncomfortable with Trump’s profound lack of Christian virtue. “We’re not electing a pastor, and America is not a theocracy,” concedes Zack Hunt, a former pastor and bestselling author of Godbreathed, who spoke on the Christians for Kamala livestream. “But the problem for Christians is not that Trump fails to live up to the Christian principles he claims to defend. The problem is he actively and aggressively works to undermine the way of Jesus with everything he says and does and with every policy he wants to enact. Jesus loved his neighbor; Trump accuses them of eating their pets. Jesus welcomed the stranger; Trump wants to deport them. Jesus lifted up the poor; Trump only helps the rich. Jesus empowered women; Trump treats them as sexual objects to control. Jesus proclaimed the truth; Trump is a pathological liar. Jesus humbled himself; Trump exalts himself as the chosen one.” 

James Talarico, a seminary student and Texas state representative, says there’s “very little scriptural basis” for the right-wing politics espoused by Trump and other Christian nationalist politicians in America. “When it comes to religious extremism hurting our neighbors, my Bible nerds will understand when I say, to me, this reads like the Pharisees’ political agenda,” he adds. “This is what Jesus was resisting throughout the New Testament. When I open my Bible, I don’t see any verses about abortion, but I see more than 2000 verses about economic justice. I don’t see any verses about gay marriage, but I see hundreds of verses about welcoming the stranger and feeding the hungry and healing the sick and freeing the oppressed.”

The biblical truth of that message notwithstanding, groups like Evangelicals for Harris know that it’s not one that the bulk of conservative Christians will be able to hear. But in the context of this election, they are not trying to save the conservative church from itself; they are trying to elect Kamala Harris. “When people hear about what we do, they think that we are in the persuasion business, that we’re going around trying to argue Trumpers into a different political opinion,” says Ryerse. “That’s a misunderstanding of what we’re trying to do.” Instead, the group recognizes that there have been “inflection points” — kids in cages, maybe, or Jan. 6, or Trump’s felony conviction, or former Vice President Mike Pence’s disavowal — that have caused Christians who have always voted Republican to “begin to undergo some kind of political identity crisis,” as Ryerse puts it. “What we’re trying to do is not persuade the 85 to 95 percent that are not flippable. What we’re trying to do is make it easy for the 5 to 15 percent that are already in the midst of that political identity crisis, to say, ‘Hey, you’re not alone. There’s an on-ramp for a different way of engaging.’”

NONE OF THIS IS ENTIRELY NEW to the political stage: Religious missions have been part of the American project since the Puritans planned their voyage. In fact, for much of the country’s history, white evangelicals (as opposed to white fundamentalists) were one of its liberalizing forces, adhering to a social gospel that fought against slavery, poverty, child labor, income inequality, and war, while advocating for women’s suffrage, racial justice, and the humane treatment of the mentally ill. But while evangelical Christians have always been focused on issues — seeing their social and political engagement as a form of Christian witness — their participation in partisan politics is a relatively recent development, and, in the voting booth, they have tended to be a fickle bunch. In 1976, around half of evangelicals voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter — who ran while serving as a Southern Baptist deacon and helped popularize the term “born again” — while about half voted for his opponent, Republican Gerald Ford. By 1980, however, more than 60 percent of evangelicals cast their ballot for Ronald Reagan, a swing to the right that has only tended to get more pronounced over subsequent election cycles.

This, of course, is by design. By the time the Moral Majority (which, by the way, was neither “moral” nor a “majority”) was founded in 1979 — using fundamentalist pastor Jerry Falwell’s mailing list and Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich’s political playbook to consolidate Christian voters into a reliable Republican voting bloc — political operatives had begun to see how issues like abortion, religious liberty, and LGBTQ rights could get Christian voters to forget about that pesky, little social gospel in favor of a supposedly fiscally conservative, trickle-down agenda that was more focused on demonizing so-called welfare queens than feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, or loving thy neighbor, whomever thy neighbor might be. While Carter was out publicly supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and denouncing discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, evangelicals were teaming up with Republican lobbyists to argue for “traditional family values,” a return to prayer in schools, and the banning of books by “anti-white” writers like James Baldwin. And it’s worked: By the time 81 percent of white evangelical voters cast their ballot for Trump in 2016, the group had been transformed from one of Christianity’s most progressive factions into possibly its most conservative.

Ironically, Trump was the kick in the pants that progressive Christians needed to get into the partisan political fray. Some of the motivations behind their mission this year are so obvious they barely bear mentioning: The election contest is between a thrice-divorced, belligerent, racist, philandering, narcissistic, greedy, vengeful, vain, transactional, belittling, and cruel sexual predator and felon, and a woman whose entire adult life has been devoted to public service, who has spoken openly about how her Christian faith — and the parable of the Good Samaritan — lifts her up and motivates her work, and whose first call, after hearing from Biden that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, was to her Baptist pastor so that they could pray over the news together. 

But for Vote Common Good and its ilk, it’s not just about a return to character and kindness in the highest office in the land; it’s also about policies. “I would consider myself traditionally orthodox when it comes to human sexuality. I would consider myself to be pro-life and anti-abortion. But in this election, there is no traditionally pro-life candidate,” says Rev. Lee Scott, a registered Republican, Presbyterian pastor, and member of the board of directors for Evangelicals for Harris. “I don’t believe Trump is pro-life,” Scott continues. “I don’t believe he’s pro-choice. I believe Trump is multiple-choice. It depends significantly upon the audience that he is speaking to. So my next step is to ask, ‘Who is the pro-family candidate?’ I very much believe that the Democratic platform this year is the pro-family platform.”

The Rev. Jim Ball, founder of Evangelicals for Harris, agrees, pointing to policy proposals that are “pro-life” as opposed to just “pro-birth”: the reestablishment of the expanded Child Tax Credit; the expansion of paid family leave; subsidized and affordable child care, health care, and elder care; and measures to protect children from gun violence, pollutants, and the climate change that threatens their future. Ball is concerned not just with the damage that an alliance with a man like Trump has done to evangelicals’ public witness, or with how it’s caused crises of faith for so many who grew up taking Jesus’ red-letter words to heart; he’s also concerned with what another Trump presidency would mean when it comes to the social-justice work around climate change that has been his life’s mission. “I grew up Southern Baptist, and the doorway into peace and justice work was the issue of hunger,” he tells me. “When I saw that [climate change] was going to be creating famines, going to destroy people’s ability to grow their own food, I immediately saw that I had to be engaged on this issue because of my love for Jesus and for the poor.” Until Trump came along, this meant assiduously trying to work with both parties. “I never wanted to engage in electoral politics,” Ball continues. “But I came to see that democracy and the rule of law were threatened. If those things are threatened, then my ability to do my nonpartisan climate work is also threatened.”

 Of all these groups, Vote Common Good may be the most theologically renegade — ”hippie Christians,” as Pagitt puts it — but also possibly the group that most approximates the historical Jesus’ vibe. Some are members of the emergent “church,” which is less a denomination than a diffuse movement with a healthy skepticism of indoctrination and institutional authority. Many are, quite literally, evangelical outcasts, having been fired from ministry positions for their outspoken disapproval of Trump. In the same way Jesus rabble-roused and called on fishermen to join him on his iconoclast mission, Pagitt implores rally attendees to get on the bus and join them for a leg of the trip (“We didn’t want to just come here and faith-hope-and-love you and then leave you!”) — or, at the very least, to “get in the tank” (“There’s four things that get us around this country: faith, hope, love, and … diesel”). Riding from state to state the last few days of September, he led a motley crew: In addition to Ryerse, the former pastor of Arkansas church Vintage Fellowship and the political director of Vote Common Good, there was Tim Gilman, a Pentecostal member of the organization’s founding team; Michael Waters, a Dallas A.M.E. pastor and social-rights activist; Nick Brock, who’d been deployed in Afghanistan and sported a ZZ Top beard and a tattoo of a Colt .45 on each forearm; Daniel Deitrich, whose song “Hymn for the 81%” had not just gotten him fired from a ministry but had made him a Fox News bugbear; and former Southern Baptist preacher Joel Michael Herbert, who, while I was shadowing the group, spent an entire day walking around barefoot. 

For Pagitt’s organization, heartfelt disruption is often the point. Participants have been arrested for sit-ins and direct actions, for blocking entrances to federal offices, obstructing highways, and unfurling a “Stop Executions!” banner across the Supreme Court steps. When the Army of God trucker convoy headed to the border to confront the “migrant invasion,” Vote Common Good headed south to confront the Army of God. When Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, led his “God Loves You” tour along the border and Michael Flynn hosted “ReAwaken America,” Vote Common Gooders plopped themselves in the parking lots, primed for counter messaging. And when two college students, removed from a Harris rally for their heckling, went on Fox News in October to claim that Harris “told us to leave her rally just for talking about our faith and saying, ‘Christ is king, Jesus is Lord,’” Pagitt called them on their sanctimonious posturing. “I’ve listened time and again to it, and the people yelling were just being disruptive,” he tells me. “They were not proclaiming their faith. As someone who does public demonstrations driven by my faith, you have to be willing to take the consequences of your disruption. When we disrupted the National Rifle Association prayer breakfast in Houston, we were escorted out, but it wasn’t because of [the] things we were saying; it’s because of the disruption we were causing. For [the students] to start yelling other things while they’re being escorted out of the building — and to recast the reason they were being removed — is ultimately taking the Lord‘s name in vain, [using] the Lord‘s name [as] your proxy to give you cover for your disruptive activity.”

By contrast, Vote Common Good seeks no cover. It gladly owns the disruption it causes; it wants that to run deep. Its focus is far down the ballot, and far more concerned with supporting candidates with a commitment to policies that promote the common good than candidates with a commitment to Christ. “What I often say is we’re not trying to take America back for liberal Jesus, you know?” explained Ryerse. “We’re not trying to win some purity contest. We’re trying to win an election. We are agnostic about the faith of the candidates we work with.”

That agnosticism certainly applied to Georgia state senate candidate J.D. Jordan, whom Vote Common Good was supporting at the rally in Canton. “When J.D. Vance first declared, we had all these fun ideas, like “Get to Know Your J.D.!” Jordan had joked before the rally: “Oh, we’ve both written books, and we’ve both worked in tech, but I’m not going to imprison you for having an abortion, and I know how to order a fucking doughnut!” He might well have added his view of “family values” to the list of divergences: As the father of two trans kids, Jordan had decided to enter the race to try to unseat Republican John Albers, the seven-term-incumbent sponsor of Senate Bill 140, Georgia’s recent anti-trans health care bill. “I just want to do right by my kids,” Jordan told me, adding that when Vote Common Good first reached out to him, he wasn’t convinced that he wanted the support of a religious organization and was clear that, as an atheist, he didn’t want to misrepresent himself. But after talking with Ryerse, he had gladly signed onto Vote Common Good’s “Love-in-Politics Pledge,” in which candidates “​​pledge to comport themselves in their public and political lives in ways of love consistent with 1 Corinthians 13.” Says Pagitt, “We don’t technically endorse candidates; they endorse the common good.” 

Danielle Bell, a young mom and social worker running for the state house of representatives in Georgia, also took the pledge. “I’ve been a Catholic my whole life,” Bell said before speaking at the rally. “And the place that I’ve had the least amount of reception or the most friction [about my candidacy] is in my Catholic community. It’s really hard to go across that steep message of ‘You have to vote Republican to be a Christian.’ So, yes, I want to represent, but also, I’m here to learn, ‘How can I do a better job at going against that message?’”

THE GOOD FORCE II, as Vote Common Good’s rented bus is nicknamed, is 45-feet long and outfitted with two beige “lounges,” a fridge full of beer and Coke zero, and 12 sleeping bunks stacked three-high to the ceiling, each exactly six feet, six inches long. Pagitt happens to be six-foot-seven and rangy, and has mostly been on the road since January (“It’s certainly not a pleasure cruise,” he tells me of the Good Force II’s accommodations). At 16, he answered an altar call at a Jesus People church in downtown Minneapolis; within a year, he was involved in a federal lawsuit to sue his local school board for violating his religious liberty. Now, at 58, his down-home Midwestern affect only nominally obscures a wry sense of humor and a fairly contrarian strain. He is a man who gives the impression of suffering no fools and yet has chosen a line of work in which he often has to suffer many. 

Since Vote Common Good was founded in 2018, organizers tell me, its bus has been run off the highway, its workers have been screamed at and threatened, and its signage has been stolen and vandalized. Once, in 2020, Vote Common Good had a run-in with the far-right Proud Boys, who somehow confused them with Black Lives Matter and became convinced that rather than hosting an event on Florida’s Marco Island, VCG was instead trying to take it over entirely. Pagitt talked their leader out of barricading the bridge to the island and then, when a thunderstorm hit, suggested they all decamp to the Crazy Flamingo, the Proud Boys’ local bar, to have a sit-down conversation. “Doug is not scared of anybody,” Ryerse commented, leaning back in one of the upholstered bench seats at the front of the Good Force II as this story was being recounted. “The most enlightening thing, honestly, for them was how ActBlue works,” Pagitt said, bemused, of his conversation with the insurrectionist group. “They thought that everything that went into ActBlue from anyone went to Black Lives Matter. I was just like, ‘It’s like PayPal. It just processes money. It’s just the processing arm.’”

Over the years, Pagitt has grown keen at knowing when a conversation is worth having and weary of defending himself against those who are merely virtue signaling with their Republican vote and who — often on the basis of the party’s stance on abortion — feel they have a right to question Pagitt’s own virtue. If he knows for sure the conversation won’t be productive, he’ll sometimes let himself go “full contact,” asking, “If I were to check your calendar or your bank account, would I see any indication that you’re working on pro-life issues?” And then, if the person looks sheepish, he’ll bring it home, letting them know that he’s worked in orphanages, fostered children, and adopted two. “I think you believe that our different views on abortion make you more moral than me,” he’ll say. “But you tell me that this is a genocide, and your response to a genocide is ‘I won’t vote for a Democrat’?” That is immoral.”

For the conversations that aren’t lost causes, however, Pagitt treads far more lightly. He has come to understand the delicate psychology of a Trump voter who has lost or is in the process of losing the (political) faith. He knows that it can be a lonely and alienating experience, that people would often rather be wrong and in community than right and by themselves. He’s talked to people who’ve driven out of state to attend Vote Common Good’s rallies in secret because they own the local hardware store and don’t want to be driven out of business, or because they pastor a church and don’t want to alienate their parishioners in states so red that their votes won’t matter anyway. He understands the entrenchment that can happen when someone who thinks they’re doing the right thing is told by the larger culture that it’s horribly wrong, and he’s careful not to “beat up on Trump too much” for that very reason. “We know the social costs that people are paying and how they internally feel,” Pagitt says. “In their experience, they’re going from, ‘I was the hero when I did this behavior. Now I’m going to do the opposite behavior. How am I still the hero?’ You have to help people get there.”

Mainly, Vote Common Good does that by telling them that they are still heroes, that their heroism remains intact. “Part of our theory of change is that behavioral change happens before identity change,” explains Ryerse. “We’re not out here trying to make more Democrats. We’re trying to get people to behave differently, i.e., to vote differently. The permission structure is, ‘Listen, I’m not asking you to be a Democrat. I’m asking you not to vote for Donald Trump in this election.’ What it does is [say], you can preserve your identity and change your behavior.” 

Once behavior changes, of course, there’s the possibility of changing identity as well. At a Confronting Christian Nationalism training hosted at Fairview Community Church in Costa Mesa, California, in early October, Pagitt addressed a group that seemed generally convinced that Trump was not on the side of the angels and — having arrived there — generally open to discussing some very specific reasons to disconnect one’s faith identity from one’s voting identity. 

Standing in front of a drum kit and an altar, Pagitt explained that, contrary to popular opinion, Christian nationalism was not about religious freedom — whether or not individuals have the right to practice their religion publicly, to make or not make a cake — but rather about the “government advocating for, deriving its authority from, or giving special privilege to the Christian faith.” It was about conservative Christians thinking that their government should grant them that privilege so that they could receive favor in the eyes of God. It was about adherence to an end-times theology in which Jesus’ Second Coming was not dependent on the goodness or evilness of humans but rather on America fulfilling certain political goals and having “true believers seize control of all institutions of the United States government.” Pagitt hardly needed to mention that this was not only politically problematic, but that it also wasn’t even biblical: Strangely, Jesus never mentioned America once.

Trending

Finally, before dividing the attendees into discussion groups (which seemed to also function as de facto support groups), Pagitt explained the difference between a problem, which has a solution, and a predicament, which does not. Christian nationalism, he posited, is a predicament that has been around since before the founders penned the First Amendment disallowing a national religion, one that you can respond to thoughtfully and appropriately but cannot expect to ever go away. By that logic, Trump himself — if not the conditions that created him — is not a predicament. Trump is a problem, one that could potentially be solved on Nov. 5., though not with thoughts and prayers alone. Solving the problem of Trump takes action. 

With that goal in mind, it was soon time for Vote Common Good to board the Good Force II and hit the open road. There was a rally with Rep. Katie Porter to attend that evening. There was a meeting with California teachers and school-board members the day after that. By Wednesday, they’d be headed to an event in Goodyear, Arizona. Come Thursday, they’d be Omaha-bound. The mission was upon them, by God: There was action to take, an election to win. There were hearts and minds and souls to encounter. There was faith, hope, and love yet to spread.