Will Democrats become the party of faith?
The GOP's debasement presents an opportunity.
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Until recently, it seemed Donald Trump would cement the GOP’s status as the political home of “faith”-driven voters that it took on decades ago.
But since returning to power, Trump and his celebrations of corruption and debasement have begun tearing away at that foundation. It presents Democrats with an opportunity to seize the mantle of the party of faith-based morality, or at least share it with Republicans in a previously unanticipated way.
To understand how the GOP became the political party for white Christians, we have to go back to the Reagan administration. The first evangelical Christian president was on the ballot during 1980 — Jimmy Carter. Yet it was Reagan who would cement the Republican Party’s hold over not only white evangelicals, but a large swath of white Catholic voters too. The alliance was both transactional and performative.
While Reagan was a Hollywood actor who rarely set foot in a church and signed legislation liberalizing California’s abortion restrictions, as a child of rural Illinois, he knew how to appear devout on TV. He managed to come across to many voters as the true embodiment of Midwest “Christian” values, despite running against a deeply committed born again Christian.
Reagan’s appeal was politically calculated.
In the wake of the Roe v. Wade ruling less than a decade earlier, a growing cohort of anti-reproductive rights activists had become the fulcrum for a nascent conservative Christian movement. For the first time, suburban Midwestern Catholics became allies with right-wing Southern Evangelicals who, not so many years earlier, would have been deriding them as “Papists.” Reagan’s calls from the Oval Office to “March for Life” rallies in DC during the 1980s marked the beginning of the merger of the Republican Party with what not long before had seemed to be a marginal crew of religious extremists.
While women gaining control over their own bodies was the initial catalyst for the movement, it reflected the rise of a broader and deeply reactionary “cultural” political conservatism — one deeply opposed to growing diversity. The movement is grounded on the claim that the United States needs to reclaim its purportedly foundational “Christianity,” often serving as a code word for the “threat” posed by women and Black Americans receiving civil rights (just this week, the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly voted to reiterate its opposition to women pastors).
Republicans’ effectiveness over the ensuing years in convincing many observant evangelical and Catholic voters that the Democratic Party was a threat to their religious institutions and values goes a long way toward explaining how they could be so successful defining Democrats — even those who were devoted people of faith, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden — as avatars of moral decay.
A merger of convenience reaches its apotheosis
After the 2024 election, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency marked a new era in the GOP’s identification as the party of faith. Trump, despite his own ostentatious irreligiousness and amorality, was far better even than Reagan in tapping into the apocalyptic fear of moral decay that powers many right-wing Christian movements.
For a time, Trump’s increasingly hyperbolic adoption of culture war tropes, particularly his portrayal of children under assault by “Democrats” intent on changing their genders, seemed remarkably effective. In 2024, he managed to add a material number of Hispanic and even Black voters to his base of white evangelical and Catholics despite a candidacy grounded in racism and xenophobia.
But as soon as he retook office, Trump began gratuitously testing the limits of the tolerance of key parts of his “Christian” coalition.
Trump’s full-bore assault on the nation’s immigrants, including targeting family members and neighbors of many Hispanic Americans who voted for him, almost instantaneously destroyed any hope that his presidency heralded the addition of substantial numbers of observant Hispanics to the GOP’s “faith” coalition, particularly from the growing cohort of Hispanic evangelicals.
Then, perhaps inevitably, Trump’s moral obtuseness and pathological egoism took him further. He started taking increasing umbrage at those faith leaders who had the temerity to challenge some of his avidly sadistic actions — not the least among them being the pope.
While conservative Catholics have had their own tensions with the last two popes, seeing the president of the United States lobbing juvenile insults at the pontiff was a bridge too far for many of them. And recent Catholic convert Vice President JD Vance’s attempts to lecture the pope on theology seemed to come off even worse.
Yet an increasingly unhinged Trump went on to further test the limits of the core of his evangelical base by posting a picture of himself as a risen Jesus Christ. Trump’s suggestion that he is a secular messiah was not new and indeed is the thesis of the Qanon movement he increasingly embraced over the years. But Trump’s move into overt apostasy was a measure of how far he was willing to go in pushing boundaries with even the evangelical Christians who had been key to his own political resurrection.
To the extent Trump engages in political calculation these days, he — probably correctly — calculates that Christian extremist leaders have nowhere else to go at this point. They certainly are not about to break with Trump at this time, when they anticipate relying on him to add as many as two like-minded justices to the Supreme Court, or as Pete Hegseth seeks to infuse the military with a debased form of “Christian” nationalism many of the most extreme among Trump’s evangelical supporters champion.
But Trump’s nose-thumbing at many of his own supporters, along with the descent of his presidency into an increasingly overt celebration of cruelty toward the poor and vulnerable, has clearly started to take a toll on the GOP. His championing of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas exemplifies the problem.
Trump embraced Paxton over the the far more politically rational choice of incumbent John Cornyn because Paxton has modeled his career on Trump’s most repugnant attributes, including his ostentatious marital infidelities and the history of allegations of misconduct that led to his impeachment. Through his patronage of Paxton, Trump is betting that a majority of Texas voters will embrace the proud debasement they share, regardless of how entirely it may contradict their stated moral principles.
Can there be a new party of faith?
Paxton’s Democratic opponent is James Talarico, a state legislator and seminarian who has chosen to make faith a centerpiece of his campaign. This is a relatively unusual strategy for a Democratic candidate — but one that could well prove to be a harbinger of what’s to come for the party during the run up to 2028.
While a raft of self-described progressives are presenting themselves as challengers to the “establishment” in primaries, there is actually remarkably little in the way of major policy disagreement within the Democratic Party. (In fact, there is a growing consensus on the need for structural change to increase economic fairness and reclaim and preserve democratic institutions.) Most every successful Democratic politician advocates taxing the rich, protecting the environment, expanding health care in the face of GOP assaults, and so forth.
But some progressive politicians may distinguish themselves in other ways, including by bringing appeals to faith into Democratic politics.
Like Talarico, some prospective Democratic presidential candidates are signaling they intend to run campaigns based on messages of curing the moral rot that Trumpism has wrought upon the nation, albeit with different approaches — some more openly rooted in religion than others.
Sen. Chris Murphy — a longtime progressive opponent of Trump — has released a pre-campaign book titled “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.” Murphy argues the Trump era has left much of the nation not only materially weakened, but also spiritually broken. (Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky also has a book about his faith coming out later this year.)
Pete Buttigieg discusses his Christian faith in conjunction with his commitment to public life, stating that “God does not belong to an American political party. But moral frameworks are essential for fashioning a conscience that can stand up against injustice.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, an observant Jew, has long drawn a connection between his faith and his politics — to remarkable success, somewhat surprisingly, given that he does not belong to the religion of most Pennsylvanians. As he begins to formulate a nascent campaign message, Shapiro argues that Trump has failed a “morality test” by repeatedly seeking to divide Americans. While emphasizing pragmatism, Shapiro also contends there must be a moral repair of the nation in the post-Trump era, a cure Shapiro suggests could be inspired by the faith of believers of different religions.
As those examples demonstrate, while the next Democratic standard bearer may appeal to religious faith in a way Democratic leaders have often shied away from in the past, that appeal will almost certainly be quite different from that of Reagan — and certainly from that of Trump.
For over 45 years, Republicans have effectively focused their appeals to “Christian” Americans on sectarianism, and melded them with messages designed to enhance fears of demographic and social change. In the process, as some emerging Democratic leaders contend, they have left Americans with a society that is morally, spiritually, and materially broken.
It is just possible that Trump — whose appeals to a certain cohort of the religiously observant have morphed into an almost gleeful celebration of amorality — may have, entirely unintentionally, opened the door to a new kind of faith-inspired politics. Time will tell.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the PN Pod (featuring co-cost Paul Waldman), and then tomorrow with a special Saturday edition of the newsletter.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
It goes deeper. Democrats have been committed to science since the New Deal, a rational way to solve the crisis at hand. For the last hundred years, voters have supported reason over emotion in times of distress: war, financial emergency, etc. When the storm has passed, we go back to feeling our way. The next calamity (financial, environmental, military) will force another return to reason.
The common thread is essentially classic virtues: tolerance, humility, loving kindness, compassion, prudence, generosity.
Not coincidentally, the Founders incorporated the virtues as underlying the principles of the Constitution.