How Is Religion Influencing Voters in the Upcoming Election?
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In late October, GRAMMY Award winning gospel artist Jonathan McReynolds took to the streets of Durham, North Carolina to help rally students of color and Black community members to the polls for early voting. He was mobilizing in partnership with WokeVote, a grassroots organization helping increase Black voter turnout to vote for progressive policies and candidates. McReynolds said he was committed to vote to “make sure that [elected officials] keep my street, my block, my city, my community in mind when you’re making those policies because I’m going to be part of the people that get you into office.”
McReynolds isn’t the only gospel artist who’s pushing people to the polls. Philadelphia-based singer AJ Evans, a Stellar Award-nominated artist, wrote an entire song about the election, “Get Up, Go Vote.”
“I look back to a time where we couldn’t vote and where our voices weren’t heard. Having the right to vote now and still having to push through and break barriers makes me want to put out something that will allow people to get hype about voting,” Evans told CBS News.
Several other gospel artists, faith leaders, clergy members, and Christian influencers are doing all they can to persuade people to vote ahead of the 2024 Presidential election and both presidential candidates are leaning heavily into faith-based communities to rally support for their campaigns.
But how will faith influence voters once they get to the polls?
According to the Pew Research Center, party alignment among Christians is closely divided, with just over 50 percent of Catholics and Protestants leaning toward Republican candidates. Former president Donald Trump has campaigned along that religious divide since first running for office in 2016, galvanizing a base of evangelical Christians and White Christian Nationalists who believe that America was founded on strictly Christian principles and that laws should be modeled in order to spread those ideals to non-Christians, non-whites, and immigrants. Trump’s current platform supports such laws that would access to abortion and LGBTQ rights and his slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has become a rallying cry for those who commit acts of violence and discrimination against those who don’t hold their same beliefs. Trump himself has rarely exhibit any outward expressions of faith, though he often says his favorite book is the Bible.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris has also leaned into her Christian base, making visits to Black churches in the last days of the campaign season to rally support of Black voters. She was born to a mother Hindu mother from India and a Christian father from Jamaica, and her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a Jewish man. Harris grew up going to both church and temple and throughout the election season, she has rarely made her faith a central part of her campaign, instead choosing to focus on specific issues and social causes.
“I was raised to believe in a loving God, to believe that your faith is a verb,” Harris said at a CNN Town Hall. “Your life’s work should be to think about how you can serve in a way that is uplifting other people, that is about caring for other people.”
Harris has garnered significant support Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics specifically. She also has a large percentage of potential votes from non-Christian religious communities and those with no religious affiliation at all. According to the Pew Research Center, agnostic and atheist voters are more likely to vote Democratic candidates in the upcoming election. Jewish and Muslim communities are also leaning toward the left.
There are issues affecting all faith communities in the run up to the election. Immigrants of various religious backgrounds have been attacked, mischaracterized, and demonized in Trump’s campaign. Within the first year of Trump’s presidency, he attempted to enact a ban on Muslims entering the country. Muslims faith leaders have been removed from Harris’ rallies and, notably, a Palestinian speaker from the Uncommitted Delegation was denied time on stage at the Democratic National Convention where Harris accepted the nomination, leading the group Muslim Women for Kamala Harris to withdraw their support. The Biden administration where Harris currently serves as Vice President has failed to broker the release of Jewish hostages following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. And neither candidate has presented a clear path toward a ceasefire in Israel’s ongoing assault against Palestinians and other majority Muslim nations, despite protests here at home.
Despite the proposed separation of church and state, religion has been linked to American politics since the country’s inception. The intersection of faith and politics is a tricky road for most voters to navigate and contentious issues on the ballot like abortion access, LGBTQ rights, immigration, education, and foreign policy isn’t making the choice between candidates any easier as voters head to the polls.
Regardless of belief systems and who voters choose, all who cast a ballot must have faith that the candidate that’s chosen will do their best for the country and the community regardless of the higher power their constituents believe in. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a pastor and activist whose faith greatly influenced his politics, said in his sermon published in Strength to Love, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
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How Is Religion Influencing Voters in the Upcoming Election? was originally published on elev8.com
