Despite their competing egos and ideologies, the candidates had time to mention God 19 times in the first GOP presidential debate of the 2016 cycle. This number is nearly four times higher than its counterpart from the first GOP presidential debate of the 2012 race, in which God featured into the conversation only five times. In fact, God had the last word in the early August debate debate when moderator Megyn Kelly asked on behalf of a Facebook user, “I want to know if any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first.”
The candidates jumped at the opportunity to out-God each other at Kelly’s behest. Many candidates did so, at least, except for Donald Trump. In fact, Kelly conspicuously skipped over Trump when soliciting answers to this question. This could have been an act of mercy towards Trump. A few weeks earlier, he had ruffled the feathers of many religious Americans by calling the Eucharist wafer (representing the transubstantiated body of Christ) his “little cracker.” In the same conversation, Trump said that he did not “think” he had ever asked God for forgiveness: an answer that would leave the heads of most religious Americans shaking in disapproval. Kelly’s decision not to ask the party’s frontrunner the last question of the night was a significant one, as it seemed to reflect the perception that Trump was not the Republicans’ religious darling-candidate. Despite his recent statement that the Bible is his favorite book — above even his beloved The Art of the Deal — Trump does not immediately come to mind as the religious candidate in a field crowded with the likes of Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee
This is not a failure on Trump’s part, however. Instead, it represents an incredible success. Despite the Donald’s meteoric rise and subsequent domination of the media, one of his most notable political feats has gone unremarked. Trump has co-opted the culture wars, long led by the GOP’s coalition of conservative Christians brought together by the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell, by talking about social issues in non-religious terms. In other words, Trump has taken up the spirit behind the religious right’s battles —American exceptionalism, the family, nativism — and secularized its rhetoric.
Over 22 percent of self-identifying white evangelical Republican voters rank Trump as their top choice: five points higher than the next most popular candidate, Jeb Bush. This particular demographic, brought to the Republican Party by the efforts of Jerry Falwell in the ‘80s, has come to represent the nexus of the religious right for the GOP. As a result, since the Reagan Revolution, Republican candidates have had to prove their religious chops if they want to win this voting bloc. In early voting states like Iowa and South Carolina, the religious right has played an outsize role in setting the agenda of Republican presidential candidates. According to a Pew Research Center poll, nearly 57 percent of Republicans who vote in the Iowa caucuses identify as evangelical Christians. Just four years ago, it would have been unfathomable for the leading GOP candidate to openly flaunt his poor understanding of a sacrament essential to the practice of millions of Christians. It may have even been blasphemous. But Trump has fired God, and the GOP is celebrating.
Trump’s appeal to white evangelicals can be found in his approach to immigration. Attitudes regarding the issue are changing within the white evangelical bloc: a fact on which Trump is capitalizing. For a long while, conservative Christians aligned with the majority of the Republican Party in opposing serious immigration reform. Only recently has this changed. Like the rest of the country, certain evangelicals have realized that nativist attitudes offend Hispanics who might otherwise fill their pews. Since then, some evangelical leaders like Ralph Reed have actually been pushing Republican leaders and other white evangelicals to change their attitude towards immigration. This has left evangelicals — a bloc used to defining issues in terms of right and wrong — divided over immigration. In a 2013 Pew poll, six in ten white evangelicals said that undocumented immigrants should be able to stay legally in the United States. The rest had mixed views.
Unlike marriage equality and abortion, which remain steadfast issues for the religious right, immigration has divided the bloc between those who still see it in black and white terms and those who are beginning to see it in shades of gray. In previous elections, Republicans spoke about immigration in stark terms, easily counting on the support of most evangelicals when it came to immigration policy. In 2012, for example, the Tea Party made immigration one of its chief rallying cries and enjoyed large swaths of support from white evangelical voters with whom rhetoric about small government and the travails of federally-sanctioned liberalism resonated. However, most of the Republican Party has come to terms with the fact that it can no longer speak about immigration in absolutes if it hopes to compete for an increasingly important Hispanic vote. This election cycle, many GOP candidates hoping to remain competitive with Hispanics are speaking about immigration in much more nuanced terms: a move that threatens their standing with those remaining holdouts in the evangelical bloc who still view the issue in absolutes.
Cue Donald Trump.
Immigration has allowed Trump to capture the attention of the evangelical bloc, despite his lack of appeal on the religious front. In early August, CNN visited a gathering of evangelicals in Nashville called the Send North America Conference to discuss Donald Trump. One organizer of the event told CNN that some evangelicals take issue with Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants, saying “Mexican immigrants are more likely to be Bible-believing Christians than criminals.” But others, like the conservative Christian journalist David Brody, however, believe that Trump appeals to the white evangelical voter’s mindset. Brody, who wrote on the reason for Trump’s popularity within the white evangelical voting bloc, said: “Think of conservative evangelicals. In their quest to champion biblical values, their mindset is much the same. It is a world of absolutes.” Whether the evangelical community is completely united in their view on Trump’s immigration policy is beyond the point. Trump appeals to those the rest of the GOP may be leaving behind who do not see immigration as a multifaceted issue.
Trump has hit a nerve in the culture wars in secularized terms — one that laments, among other issues, a brown America — and white evangelicals are paying attention. Trump’s position resonates with those who remain opposed to the changing tides. In demonizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “criminals,” Trump has blown the dog whistle that was once in the hands of those culture warriors who found themselves in a pulpit and in front of a Tea Party political rally on the same day. The difference, of course, is that Trump can skip the pulpit without consequence. This, at least, is the image he has presented to the Republican voter. Mike Huckabee, once the poster boy for the fusion of Tea Party populism and white evangelical fervor, has said regarding Trump, “I say some things very differently. I say every night, I get on my knees and thank God I’m in a country people are trying to break into, rather than one they’re trying to break out of.”
The image that Huckabee paints, in many ways, is the one irking those who fail to understand how Trump, a man who seems to stand on shaky ground apropos of abortion and gay marriage, is finding so much success with the white evangelical voter. What Huckabee and his ilk have not figured out is that, as David Brody implied above, Trump has found an incredibly weak spot in the evangelical coalition — where they stand divided on immigration — and exploited it. By returning to the black and white rhetoric that has long appealed to the ethos of the evangelical bloc, Trump has outperformed even the likes of Mike Huckabee. It is here where Trump has forced the former darlings of the evangelical movement to come to terms with an increasingly urgent political problem. Evangelical politicians have complicated an issue with great political import – immigration – and Trump is there to remind them of the immense political costs. God, Trump has decided, need not enter the picture.