What You Said about the 2024 Election

by

Nov. 19, 2024

My blog, Doubter’s Parish, is not a political website. Its purpose is to help thinking people navigate faith in the twenty-first century. However, since politics and faith often intersect, politics cannot be ignored on this site. Therefore, given the magnitude of the recent election, I asked readers to share their post-election perspectives.

I heard from large numbers of readers. Only three expressed positive or neutral feelings. One of them said:

“I am satisfied with the outcome of the election. Neither candidate gave me much reason to be excited to vote. But the metrics and demographics of the voters show interesting and hopeful trends.”

However, that tone represents only a tiny fraction of the responses. Everyone else shared deep concerns, as you will see below. Given the robust response, I cannot begin to share all the results. Instead, I’ve chosen a few representative examples, followed by some of my own reflections.

Many of You Feel Devastated

  • “I am devastated by the election of Trump as president. A great nation does not elect a person of his character to the presidency. I have lost faith in the ‘goodness’ of the American people.”
  • “I am devastated. I wonder where God is. We now have a convicted felon, liar, racist, vengeful, insane person soon to be in the White House. Why did the people vote for him? Suddenly Christianity is no longer real to me.”
  • “It seems we’ve entered a place where “it is always winter, but never Christmas” (C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). I am grieving, angry, and fearful.”
  • “I’m devastated. Shocked. Disillusioned. Depressed. I’ve always been a very positive and optimistic person, always believing in the best of humanity, and that love would always prevail. Those beliefs took a huge hit the morning after the election when I learned of the results. I cried a lot for several days.”
  • “I am still praying. But is it OK to ask God what in the world he is thinking about, and if he is going to let an absolute idiot and his helpers destroy the country?”
  • “I’m stunned. My feelings are rage, anger, shock, pain, despair, terror, anxiety, turmoil, disbelief, dismay, all verging on feelings of near hopelessness.”
  • “I am in despair and have every reason to believe life and nation as we have known them are ending and a dark future beginning.”

Many of You Are Deeply Disappointed with the Church

  • “So many Christians voted for a man who is the complete opposite of what Jesus taught. I no longer want anything to do with Christianity, and I’m not alone.”
  • “What bothers me most is seeing my ‘Christian’ friends and acquaintances overlooking Trump’s radical, ungodly behavior, and saying how good he will be for our country. How they can reconcile their (and his) behavior with Jesus’s teaching is beyond me.”
  • “So many who identify as Christian have abandoned the Way of Jesus. It breaks my heart.”
  • “I don’t know anyone who is less Christlike than Trump. Instead, he models the behavior of an antichrist. Seeing him supported by people who claim to be Christians heightens my sense of rampant hypocrisy in the church.”
  • “The idolatry of Trump by Christians is just more than I can bear. I feel like Christians, especially evangelicals, have sacrificed the call to help the poor, the immigrant, those suffering, and the marginalized. They truly only care about outlawing abortion and further suppressing the LGBTQ+ community. So many Christians I know are excited, even gleeful, about the proposed mass deportations. I have lost so much respect for folks. It’s heartbreaking. If they are to know us by our love for both God and our neighbor, I can see how no one will know us at all now.”
  • “After this election, I can no longer identify as a Christian. Instead, I identify as a follower of Jesus. The fact that most churchgoing Christians voted for a man who is completely antithetical to the example and teachings of Jesus makes it impossible for me to call myself a Christian anymore.”
  • “The majority of American ‘Christians’ support Donald Trump. I believe Trump is an antichrist. Therefore, I’m done with organized religion.”

Many of You Vow to Fight for Christian and Democratic Values

  • “As followers of the Way of Jesus, our call is to pick up and care for the pieces wherever they fall. Stand with the marginalized, care for the sick, feed the hungry, house the homeless, love the unloved. The mission never changes when our core identity is tied to the life and teachings of Jesus instead of to a political movement.”
  • “We must keep hope alive. This road will not be easy, but we can and will survive. Together we will continue to believe as Sam Gamgee in Lord of the Rings said: ‘There is some good in this world and it’s worth fighting for.’ Let’s pick ourselves up, take a deep breath, dust ourselves off, and start over again.”
  • “I’m still at the point of not knowing what I should do, except to allow the time to grieve. But then I will be a part of the resistance.”
  • “I am hurting but will continue to believe in and fight for democracy.”
  • “I feel like we who value justice, truth, equity, decency, and democracy itself will likely endure much darkness before the light comes back on in America. But the light will return. We can’t give up.”
  • “I am not giving up and plan to fight injustice wherever I see it.”
  • “The battle for decency, morality, and truth lays heavy before us. How we go forward will impact our children, our grandchildren, and succeeding generations for decades to come. We cannot let them down.”

My Take on the Election

Sadly, I concur with many of the above responses. It’s been a difficult couple of weeks. A few days after the election, a discouraged friend asked me, “Who do you blame for this election disaster, and what can be done about it?” I’ll briefly respond to his two questions.

“Who Do You Blame?”

As I mulled over his first question, a long list of possible responses came to mind. For example, I blame GOP leaders who know Donald Trump is corrupt and dangerous but, for political expediency, bow down to him anyway. I blame the Supreme Court for allowing Trump to delay accountability for his criminal actions until after the election and then giving him almost unlimited immunity. I blame billionaires like Elon Musk for spending hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to sway the election to their selfish advantage. I blame right-wing media for shoveling out massive amounts of disinformation and lies, like immigrants eating pets. And I blame Joe Biden for not pulling out sooner, depriving the Democrats a primary election that might have given them a stronger chance at victory. And the list goes on, including major missteps by the Democratic Party. There’s plenty of blame to go around, including myself. I’m sure I could have done more to help.

But in the end, I said to my friend, “I mostly blame white, churchgoing Christians.” Why? Because white people who go to church regularly are the voters who gave us Donald Trump. Agnostics, atheists, “nones,” Jews, other non-Christian religions, and black Christians didn’t elect Trump. White Christians who attend church on a regular basis did. Twice.

And I’m not just talking about evangelicals. Yes, over 80 percent of them support Trump and have from the beginning. But it goes far beyond evangelicals. Pew Research discovered that 71 percent of white people (evangelical, Catholic, and mainline) who regularly attend church services (once per month or more) voted for Trump in 2020. Given Trump’s increase in votes in the 2024 election (compared to 2020), that percentage likely increased.

So, who is mostly responsible for electing Trump? White, churchgoing Americans—in spite of the fact that Trump violates literally everything Jesus stood for. A strong case can be made that Donald Trump is the most anti-Jesus president ever. Given that reality, I have no doubt that white Christian support for Donald Trump will go down as one of the greatest failures in American church history. Which is another reason, several years after my retirement from vocational ministry, I’m still on “sabbatical” from institutional religion (although I’m part of a retired clergy group who function as a sort of house church). I’ll have more to say about this ecclesiastical failure in a future post.

“What Can Be Done?”

Although playing the election blame game is understandable, the bigger question is, What should followers of Jesus do now? As my friend asked in his second question, “What can be done?” No easy answer exists for this crucial question. But in these depressing days after the election, I’ve been thinking about an old story involving Jimmy Carter, who I voted for at age nineteen in my first presidential election. I voted for Carter because I believed (then and now) that he tried his best to be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.

Years ago, when Jimmy Carter worked as a peanut farmer, every white businessperson in his community—other than Carter—held membership in the White Citizens Council (which was basically the KKK without white sheets). One day several leaders of the Council made a menacing visit to Carter. They informed him that he was the only white business owner in town who was not a member of their organization. They pressured him to pay twenty dollars for his membership dues or “there would be serious repercussions.” Jimmy Carter took a twenty dollar bill out of his wallet and said, “I’ll flush this down the toilet before I give it to the White Citizens Council.”

I believe that spirit is the best response right now for followers of Jesus. Regardless of the consequences, we must resist (in a Christian manner) anti-Jesus policies and actions, wherever we find them. So my plan is to grieve this loss and then do everything I can to promote the values of Jesus in my community and beyond. I hope you will join me in that effort.