Trump and the evangelicals

“Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.”

So tweeted Donald Trump in June 2016. Yet on Friday, he spoke at the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of Christian conservatives where conference goody bags included a promotion for a book entitled “The Health Hazards of Homosexuality.”

Promising to refute “the born-gay myth”, the writers state that “the mainstreaming and normalization of homosexuality” is responsible for an epidemic of physical and mental illness—and there, honouring the group dispersing such literature, was the President.

Trump’s presence at the Summit is only an open acknowledgment of an ongoing relationship between the White House and the conservative Evangelical wing of America’s Christian population, a group known for their opposition to LGBT rights, equal marriage and abortion rights.

Evangelical voters overwhelmingly supported Trump; exit polling from the Pew Research Centre found that 81 per cent of white, born-again or Evangelical Christians voted for him. Now his voting core await their returns.

The Values Voter Summit has been held annually since 2006, though Trump’s presence is the first time a president has spoken there. It is organised by the Family Research Council, a conservative religious non-profit which lobbies against LGBT rights, divorce, abortion, and other social policy areas. After Tony Perkins, the sitting president, compared homosexuality and paedophilia in 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Centre classified them as a hate group.

Now the Family Research Council, alongside various other Evangelical groups, are climbing further inside the White House. Though three White advisory panels—two business councils and an infrastructure panel—were disbanded in the wake of the Charlottesville protests and Trump’s response, the Evangelical advisory board, a collection of church leaders, influencers and televangelists, remains strong. Its members include Tea Party activist and ex-congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, and psychologist James Dobson, founder of the ultra-conservative organisation Focus on the Family and an advocate for abstinence-only sex education and the teaching of creationism in schools.

Other evangelical figures find they don’t need to be on the panel to get Trump’s attention. “I’ve been to the White House I don’t know how many more times in the first six months this year than I was during the entire Bush administration,” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins told the New York Times in August.

His visits had a purpose: to press the President to make a statement on banning transgender people from serving in the military. And in a series of tweets in July, Trump delivered. While the Values Voter Summit may be a rare public display of Trump’s relationship with evangelical leaders, behind closed doors their influence is far more marked.

But while evangelicals may have the President’s ear, that same relationship is costing them public sympathy. Their adherence to Biblical literalism on issues such as women in leadership, creationism, sexuality and abortion is deeply unpopular (Gallup polling finds a majority of Americans believe in evolution, are pro-choice and in favour of equal marriage). Another rebellion is approaching from the burgeoning Hispanic evangelical community, where churchgoers fear the deportation of their church leaders and congregants. White evangelical support for Trump may literally cost neighbouring churches their leadership.

Perhaps the best demonstration of the increasing pressure came in August, when a broad group of evangelical leaders and pastors released the Nashville Statement. Purportedly a statement of biblical attitudes to gender and sexuality, it represents an escalation in religious homophobia from a group buoyant from their growing political influence. Not only rejecting equal marriage and homosexual relationships, it goes so far as to condemn people for identifying as LGBT, a targeted attack on LGBT Christians. Even those who “approve of homosexuality or transgenderism” are deemed sinners by the signatories, who now number 17,000.

The statement received unprecedented levels of criticism from politicians, including the Mayor of Nashville, from Christian pastors and even other evangelicals.

Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted, “Jesus didn’t say the #NashvilleStatement. Instead he said the greatest commandment is to love God, and the second greatest to love your neighbour.”

Compare this with the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, which covered broadly similar ground yet was barely remarked upon; indeed, it took an entire year for Apple to remove the app version from the iTunes store. For a long time, evangelicals have relied on an ability to reach their base without attracting too much public attention. That ability is decreasing every day Trump is in the Oval Office.

This is hardly surprising. For a group who trade in claims of moral and Biblical authority, aligning themselves with a sexual predator unable to name a favourite Bible verse is not just a risk, but an act of self-sabotage. Anyone associated with or supportive of Trump justly faces scrutiny. For a group rife with homophobia, misogyny and abuse scandals, that scrutiny may well prove destructive.

For now, evangelicals continue to court the President both in public and behind Washington’s closed doors. Tony Suarez, another pastor on the evangelical council, told the Atlantic: “If there was ever a time that we need to give counsel and advice, it’s right now.” In return for this unyielding loyalty, Trump will attend their summits and lend political legitimacy to their religious homophobia. Only time will tell whether America’s most conservative Christian groups have sacrificed their popularity on the altar of White House influence.