P6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020
“I just want the best for America. I want it
to be in the hands of a good person who
can lead the country, that can get us what
we need.”
Byron Jackson,20, North Charleston, S.C.
“We need equality. That’s the thing over
all. Everybody bickers. It’s you, it’s us, it’s
them. They’re doing this, they’re doing
that. Everybody needs to take responsi-
bility for their actions.”
Laura Vasquez,31, Houston“My hope is that we find our humanity
again, that we find a way to be kind to
one another, and have empathy in gen-
eral. I’m in a hopeless place right now in
terms of what’s happened to this country,
and that’s a lot coming from a Black per-
son. I’ve never seen this total lack of re-
spect for differences.”
Kristin Haynes,44, Atlanta“My hope for the country is freedom
for faith, peace and good will to all
men. My hope is that abortion is
abolished in the future.”
Malinda Hood,71, Westerville, OhioCAMERON POLLACK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES LYNSEY WEATHERSPOON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAs Election Ends, Voters Look to the Future FROM PRECEDING PAGE
Election
Trump would have been unimag-
inable to evangelicals 40 years
ago, when they emerged as a pow-
erful faction behind the victory of
Ronald Reagan, said R. Albert
Mohler, Jr., president of the South-
ern Baptist Theological Seminary
in Louisville, Ky.
Today, “they feel the wind fac-
ing them,” he said, “with a clear
sense that the culture is becoming
reordered in a hostile and increas-
ingly secular manner. Evangeli-
cals are voting with the same val-
ues, but with a different set of pri-
orities.”
Mr. Mohler did not vote for Mr.
Trump in 2016. But this year, he
spoke publicly about his plans to
vote for the president despite his
continuing reservations, calling
the alternative to a Trump victory
“increasingly unthinkable.”
Like the president, a number of
evangelical leaders refused to ac-
cept an outcome in which Mr.
Trump had lost. Moments after
most major news networks calcu-When President Trump won the
White House four years ago in a
surprise victory, conservative
Christians could not believe their
good fortune.
At every turn of his presidency,
he gave them everything they
wanted: Two hundred federal
judges appointed for life. An em-
bassy in Jerusalem. Anti-abortion
policies. Two Supreme Court Jus-
tices, and then in the final hours, a
third. He was their bulwark, their
defender, at a time when the coun-
try as they knew it, and their place
in it, was changing. And he
brought their movement to a pin-
nacle of political maturity.
Now the election of Joseph R.
Biden Jr. marks a new chapter for
conservative Christian power,
which reached a peak under Mr.
Trump. As Republican evangeli-
cals around the country processed
the week’s events, they reflected
on how much they had gained in
the last four years and on their
fears over what could happen un-
der a Biden administration. They
also wondered when and how they
would regain power.
In Sheldon, Iowa, where about
eight out of 10 voters supported
Mr. Trump, Leah Schoonhoven
journaled her concerns about a Bi-
den presidency over three single-
spaced pages. She worried that
the election results were cor-
rupted, and that Mr. Biden would
reverse Mr. Trump’s priorities,
from building the border wall to el-
evating conservative evangelical
ideals on religious freedom.
“He doesn’t stand for Christian-
ity at all; maybe he will prove me
wrong,” she said of Mr. Biden, who
is Catholic. “It scares me. He’s not
going to do everything that Trump
did.”
“I don’t think our world will
ever get back, when you have a
country that is this divided,” she
said.
Donna Rigney, a pastor whose
church meets in the lodge of an
R.V. park in Salt Springs, Fla., had
supported the president since
2016, when she received what she
saw as a direct message from God
supporting his candidacy.
After this election, she sent an
email to the people in her prayer
circles urging them not to give up.
“We have to drag Donald Trump
over the finish line with prayers of
faith, worship, fasting and staying
in the place of loving and forgiving
our enemies,” she wrote.
But she said Friday that if this
did turn out to be the end of the
Trump era, she was grateful for
what he had done for the country,
and comforted that he would suf-
fer fewer attacks. “He will be fine,
he has God’s hand on him,” she
said. “He’ll be better off not being
the president and not being at-
tacked daily. But I really feel this
will be terrible for the nation.”
Mr. Trump’s presidency repeat-
edly revealed the deep divide be-
tween white conservative Chris-
tians and other people of faith, or
of no faith at all. Mr. Biden’s nar-
row margin of victory in several
battleground states revealed that
the cultural clash between these
groups is far from over. About
eight in 10 white evangelical vot-
ers supported Mr. Trump in the
2020 election, according to AP
VoteCast, just as they did in 2016.
Mr. Biden’s coalition included
many Black Protestants, Hispanic
Catholics, and religiously unaffili-
ated Americans.
Mr. Trump did win a larger
share of support from Latino vot-
ers overall, though, compared
with four years ago. And for Rev.
Samuel Rodriguez, a Sacramento
pastor who prayed at Mr. Trump’s
2017 inauguration, the lesson from
the 2020 election was that Latinos
had become what he called “the
quintessential swing vote.”
Mr. Rodriguez saw one legacy
of the Trump era redefining Amer-
ican evangelicals’ former ap-
proach to the question of poli-
ticians’ character. Their loyalty to
Mr. Trump, which had required
overlooking language and behav-
ior they found abhorrent, proved
that personal character isn’t ev-
erything to them, given how many
tangible goals were achieved.
“The policies are absolutely re-
markable,” he said.
Voting for a person like Mr.lated that Mr. Biden had won the
race, Franklin Graham, the evan-
gelist, cautioned that the results
were not “official.”
And Mr. Graham warned that
under a Biden administration,
Christian businesses would be
soon be targeted for things like not
selling a cake for a gay wedding,
as he said happened during Mr.
Obama’s presidency.
“America is in such moral de-
cline,” he said. “We are becoming
a much more violent country. I am
afraid for our country.”
In Texas, Robert Jeffress, pas-
tor of First Baptist Dallas, re-
served billboards across the city
to advertise his upcoming sermon
on how Christians should respond
to a Biden presidency.
“There are going to be millions
of Christians who are disap-
pointed in these results,” he said.
“A Joe Biden win cannot erase
all the positive accomplishments
that can be attributed to President
Trump,” he said. “I don’t thinkthere is any way to calculate all
the good things he has accom-
plished.”
Some social conservative politi-
cal groups were already pivoting
to other political fights, such as
protecting Republican control of
the Senate, which could be de-
cided by two runoff elections in
Georgia in January. Continued Re-
publican control of the Senate
could buffer their accomplish-
ments under Mr. Trump, and
make it harder for Democrats to
do things like fund Planned Par-
enthood or increase the size of the
Supreme Court, several organ-
izers said.
“To plan for the Biden adminis-
tration, we’ve got to have a back-
stop; otherwise it is the Armaged-
don we feared in the beginning,”
said Marjorie Dannenfelser, presi-
dent of the Susan B. Anthony List.
“That’s why Georgia is so vital.
The other side knows that, too.”
On Saturday, as the Biden cam-
paign declared victory, the Faithand Freedom Coalition began
knocking on doors across the
state, and prepared to distribute
one million voter guides to 4,000
churches.
Social conservatives also cele-
brated the election to the House of
at least 15 new women who op-
pose abortion rights, more than
doubling their numbers in the pre-
vious Congress. About half of the
15 flipped seats that had been in
Democratic hands.
And social conservatives had
another reason to stay positive:
Even though Mr. Trump had lost,
they believed that the conserva-
tive control of the judiciary that he
enabled would have a lasting im-
pact.
“When Amy Coney Barrett
writes the majority decision pro-
tecting Christian foster care and
adoption agencies, I’m going to
celebrate,” Penny Nance, presi-
dent of Concerned Women for
America, said. “We put some
points on the board.”T.J. KIRKPATRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES OLIVER CONTRERAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS
After 4 Years of Gains, Fears of What May Be Lost in Trump Defeat
A President Who Delivered Evangelicals
Most Everything That They Had Wanted
By ELIZABETH DIAS
and RUTH GRAHAMISRAELThe United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem, a decision evangelicals praised because of the city’s religious significance.
RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS