There has been much commentary recently about the potentially disastrous implications of the Trump candidacy on the evangelical vote in America and the ability of the GOP to rely on evangelicals as a voting bloc. Despite debates within evangelism itself, including a grassroots movement of students and faculty at Liberty University to distance the Baptist college from its president’s endorsement of and campaigning for Trump, there appears to be little doubt that the GOP candidate will do better than his rival with evangelical voters.
More interesting are the ramifications of Trump’s candidacy on Republican voting blocs in upcoming elections when the billionaire is (presumably) not the party’s nominee. How has Trump impacted issues that evangelicals care about within the Republican Party? In terms of gay marriage, an central social issue in just twelve years ago, Trump’s campaign seems to offer evangelicals remarkably little.
Consider the case of Kim Davis, the unlikely face of conservative opposition to gay marriage for a brief moment in September 2015. At the time, a number of Republican candidates for president, men with much stronger ties to the evangelical community, came out in support of Davis. Governor Mike Huckabee went so far as to say that officials should lock him up in jail instead of Davis, for reasons that remain unclear. For his part, Trump was not overwhelmingly supportive of Davis. He told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, “It was too bad she had to be put in jail. I’m a very very strong believer in Christianity and religion, but I will say that this was not the right job for her. Because we had a ruling from the Supreme Court, and we are country of laws…you have to go along with the Supreme Court.” His statement echoed sentiments expressed a few days before on MSNBC: “I hate to see her being put in jail, I understand what they’re doing, it would be certainly nice if she didn’t do it but if other people in her office did it, but from what I understand she won’t allow people in her office to do it.”
Trump’s position can hardly be described as courting the evangelical vote on gay marriage. Of course, the Republican Party would go on to adopt a platform in 2016 that was far to the right of many of Mr Trump’s stated positions, including on the issue of gay marriage. But as a politician, Trump made it clear in the primaries that this was not an issue where he and evangelicals shared much common ground.
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