“Jerry Falwell’s dream president is poor people’s nightmare! The people that Jesus blessed – the poor, merciful, the meek – are the very people being damned by this administration. Welcoming immigrants is not a burden, it’s a sacrament!”
This article titled “‘I’m not anti-Trump, I’m just pro-Jesus’: the evangelicals stumping for the Democrats” was written by Bryan Mealer, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 31st October 2018 10.00 UTCDoug Pagitt and his band of Jesus freaks pull their big orange bus into a North Dallas church and step out into the gloom. It’s been raining on them since Pennsylvania, and today is no different. Was God telling them something? Pagitt, a pastor from Minneapolis, lets out a sigh. “I won’t take this as a sign,” he says.
For two weeks this group of musicians, poets and pastors from both sides of the political divide has been driving across the country proclaiming the good news – or, to most Americans these days, what is simply news news: that to be Christian, you don’t have to vote Republican.
That you can love gay people and the flag at the same time, support Black Lives Matter along with the troops, and that God is perfectly fine with that. Most of all, the group wants liberal and conservative Christians to join forces and reclaim the gospel from the likes of Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr, who told Fox News that evangelicals had found their “dream president” in Donald Trump. Come 6 November, they’re asking people of faith to set aside cultural differences and vote for the common good, and, by doing so, flip Congress.
The Vote Common Good tour – the name is emblazoned across the tour bus and RV that follows behind – is a rolling revival-cum-hootenanny performed in churches, city parks, pubs and parking lots, replete with klieg lights, backdrop banners and a portable stage pulled from a pickup truck. A list of who’s who in progressive Christianity participate or pop in: activist Shane Claiborne, writer and theologian Diana Butler Bass, hip-hop artist Genesis Be.
And at each stop, local congressional candidates – mainly Democrats – are invited to give a short stump speech. In San Antonio, it’s rumored Beto O’Rourke will appear.
The tour, funded by nearly m in private donations, started in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on 2 October, and will conclude in Los Angeles just before the midterm elections.
The common good is a way of both living and governing as dictated by scripture: loving your neighbor as yourself, not serving money over God and others, and looking out for the poor. “The Common Good teaches us to seek what’s best for everyone,” says the group’s website, “beginning with the last, the least, the lost, the most vulnerable, and the most forgotten.” Or, as Christianity Today once described it, “insisting that persons are of infinite worth – worth more than any system, any institution, or any cause.”
“There has to be a counter to the religious right in civic life,” says Pagitt, who is 52 years old, tall and lean. He sits in the tour bus that houses nine or 10 people at any given time, cluttered with phone chargers, crumbled potato chips, and bags of beef jerky.
After the 2016 election, he and other clergy were shocked by the overwhelming support Trump received from white evangelicals – over 80%, according to polls – and felt they couldn’t sit idle. “We felt we had to do something, but what?” he says.
Pagitt, who identifies as evangelical and is well-known in progressive Christian circles, started making phone calls and soon hatched a plan: a proper barnstorming that would sweep the country like the old-time tent revivals. “What we’re doing is inviting people into the good news by literally showing up, meeting them in their own place, and making it personal. That is truly the heart of the Christian story.”
But in such polarized times, does he think conservatives who hear this message – however morally conflicted – will actually vote for a Democrat? “I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “But if you stay comfortable, things are just gonna stay as they are.”
Having just performed in Oklahoma City, the group is excited about Texas – especially Dallas, widely known as the capital of white evangelicalism. Dallas is home to sprawling megachurches, one of the biggest pastored by Robert Jeffress, a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board and White House Faith Initiative.
One of Trump’s biggest defenders, he once asserted Islam promoted pedophilia, Jews and Hillary Clinton supporters were going to hell, and President Barack Obama was ushering in the antichrist. “I’m so ready,” Pagitt says. “I lay awake last night just thinking about Texas.”
Home tonight is Northaven United Methodist church, a progressive congregation in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood, Preston Hollow. Rainbow flags are visible. A faux street sign in the lobby tells us we’ve arrived at the intersection of Faith Avenue and Justice Lane. About 50 people are seated in the audience when the renowned Brooklyn “dirty gospel” singer Vince Anderson rips into a version of When I Lay My Burden Down. The crowd of mostly older white men and women bob to the beat, then Pagitt appears.
‘“You have heard it said: America First!” he shouts. “But we’re here to be reminded to seek first the Kingdom of God and care for all those on this planet … You have heard it said: stack the courts! But we’re here to be reminded that you can gain the whole world and lose your very soul.”
Robb Ryerse, a pastor from Arkansas, then tells us how he awoke the day after the 2016 election and felt like an alien, estranged not only from his evangelical brethren, but also from the Republican party, to which he’s belonged his entire life. Feeling he needed to do something, he ran for Arkansas’s third House district last May in the Republican primary against Congressman Steve Womack. “I ran as a progressive Republican,” he says, drawing laughs. “People were skeptical. But I’ll tell you there’s at least one, and I’m here.”
Ryerse lost, garnering only 16% of the vote, but soon found Pagitt and a group of like-minded Christians and joined the tour. “Now I’m a Republican who goes around the country campaigning for Democrats,” he says.
Ryerse is the tour’s political director in charge of scheduling candidates. One of the things he’s noticed since Pennsylvania is how many Democrats have a hard time talking about God and faith. “Some are more comfortable than others, but it’s definitely not something they’re used to doing,” he says.
Or, as Samir Selmanovic, a pastor and Vote Common Good’s co-chair, later tells a crowd, “Democrats are just completely disoriented by religion, they have no idea what they’re talking about. They’re just weird.” Selmanovic and Ryerse have been coaching candidates on how to open up about faith and appeal to Christian voters.
The candidate stumping tonight is Lorie Burch, a local attorney and business leader who’s openly gay. Burch is running for Congress in District 3, firmly held by Republicans. The crowd greets her with warm applause; Northaven is her home church. A lifelong Methodist, she speaks of needing to champion “the common good” and adds that, “We don’t talk about politics and religion because we’ve refused to talk about politics and religion.” But that’s where it ends, nothing too risky or overtly Jesus-y.
After the event, a woman named Suzie Armstrong, a member of Northaven, says the event was encouraging, but understands the reluctance of “coming out” as a liberal person of faith. “I don’t say I’m a Christian because I don’t want to be categorized as one of them – a crazy person,” she says.
It’s clear that this reticence of witness lies at the core of the faith divide. Since the 1980s, conservative white evangelicals have essentially controlled the conversation on God and morality, and their extremist views on issues such as gay rights have led to an exodus among young people. That grip is becoming tenuous with their support of a twice-divorced New Yorker who brags of sexual harassment, yet few are rushing to fill the vacuum. “Other religions have been silent,” Pagitt tells me. “They have ceded the microphone.”
That reluctance to speak up has haunted the tour since it started. Many churches have flat-out refused to host them because of their political bent – including a liberal Unitarian church in liberal southern California, Pagitt says. City leaders in Holland, Michigan, didn’t want them using their park. The Mall of America refused them, and Goodwill in Sioux City, Iowa, kicked them out of their lot.
A hard rain greets them the following night in Austin. It’s Friday, and the church that’s hosting them is on the far north side of town, a tedious commute in a city already plagued by traffic. About 15 people show. The evil weather then follows them to Beaumont, where not a single soul appears. They end up performing for the candidates and their staff.
In San Antonio, the rumor about Beto O’Rourke turns out to be just that – a rumor. More rain drives them out of a downtown park and there’s talk of cancelling. But at the last minute, a church across the street agrees to take them in. Madison Square Presbyterian not only accepts them but mobilizes its congregation to action. A full Mexican dinner is soon laid out in the community hall and church members start filling the seats, along with many others.
“It was an immediate yes when Doug contacted us,” pastor Bart Roush announces. “It’s important [that we] tell people that yes, we are religious, and we are Christians, and that we follow the fruit of the Spirit. If that is the evidence of who we are than we need to see it, and we’re not seeing it from this administration.”
Singer Meah Pace belts out a rendition of Amazing Grace so full of hope and longing that several in the crowd are moved to tears. Congressional candidate Joseph Kopser, a 20-year army veteran with two tours in Iraq, speaks freely about his faith and the role of government. “You measure success of any group by how well it takes care of the least among us,” he says. “And the United States, the greatest nation in the world, should be doing a better job.”
But the barnburner comes from Shane Claiborne. The pastor, author and activist from Tennessee is one of the most outspoken critics of the religious right. A graduate of Jerry Falwell Jr’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, he staged a well-publicized prayer rally last April outside the campus to protest against Falwell’s support of Trump. The university threatened to arrest him.
“The same people who led me to Jesus have led us to Donald Trump,” he shouts. “I’m not anti-Trump, I’m just pro-Jesus, and everything Trump seems to be doing is anti-Jesus!”
He works the crowd like a Pentecostal preacher throwing fire.
“Jerry Falwell’s dream president is poor people’s nightmare! The people that Jesus blessed – the poor, merciful, the meek – are the very people being damned by this administration. Welcoming immigrants is not a burden, it’s a sacrament!”
The crowd is on their feet, energized and emboldened. Just minutes earlier in the evening, Selmanovic – an immigrant from Croatia – described a promised land for progressive Christians who have been wandering in the wilderness.
“We are entering a place where we find ourselves homeless,” he says. “One way of Christianity is ending to the point of no return … a new Christianity is coming. It is night right now, and there is a river we will cross tonight. The water will open, and we will walk through into this new space. A new day is coming.”
The audience begins to chant “We will vote!” as Anderson and Pace lead them through one last song. When everything is done, they file out through the big double doors, back out into the rain.
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