My Christian Faith Won’t Let Me Vote for Donald Trump or His Disciples

When I step into the voting booth next week, I will participate in making my voice heard on local, state, and federal issues that range from a local transit tax, all the way to who will represent me in the U.S. House, Senate, and ultimately who will be our next President. Like millions of Americans of faith, my religious beliefs will be the central factor in my decision-making process.

This might be an uncomfortable statement for some, particularly those who find belief in any sort of deity to be an outdated relic of a bygone era. Who could blame them for their unease? Organized religion has a checkered past, to put it mildly.

But as a Christian, the bigger threat in the U.S. now seems to be Evangelical idolatry—this tendency of many Christians to turn a political candidate into an idol, particularly one who has proven himself so thoroughly unfit as Donald Trump.

At a recent campaign event in Concord, N.C., supporters of former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump erupted into chants of “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” The crowd’s chants came in response to Trump claiming that his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, recently “mocked” and “ridiculed” Christians at her own rally, when they had shouted “Jesus is Lord.”

As with many of Trump’s assertions, this was a lie. In fact, Harris was responding to a small group of anti-abortion protesters at her rally in La Crosse, Wis. In a matter of seconds, the small group was yelling multiple slogans in Harris’s direction, including “Jesus is Lord,” “Lies!” and “abortion is a sacrament of Satan.” It is unclear, as multiple witnesses and video footage of the event attest, which phrase, if any in particular, Harris was responding to in the chaos of the moment. Harris, who had been interrupted by the group while she was speaking about abortion rights, suggested that these protesters were at the “wrong rally” and belonged at the smaller one down the road, apparently referencing a Trump rally. Far from ridiculing or mocking the Christian faith, Harris was clearly attempting to quiet the protestors, who had interrupted her speech.

Despite the lack of veracity in Trump’s retelling, his version of the story had already spread across conservative corners of social media and was amplified by rightwing news outlets. This anecdote has now become one of the many ways the Trump campaign has attempted to brand Harris as a threat to Christianity in America.

I find this notion of Christians in the U.S. being an embattled group to be absurd. This lie is an old and often used rallying cry for rightwing Christians, insistent on stoking the flames of a culture war. Christians represent a large and powerful majority of the U.S. population, making any claims that Christians are being persecuted in this country laughable.

When I think of the name Jesus being shouted over and over at a political rally, in response to a politician’s lie, I am angered at both the politician, as well as the response of the crowd of people, who seem to have transfigured a race-baiting, serial sexual assaulting, lie-pedaling politician into a messianic figure.

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Evangelical figureheads like Rob Jeffress, of First Baptist Church Dallas and Franklin Graham, who was on the stage at the Trump rally that night in N.C., have long done their parts, along with many other Evangelical power brokers, to stoke unfounded Christian fears of persecution and to cast Trump as the God-ordained figure to stand against the “dark forces,” as Graham framed the situation in his prayer from the stage at the rally.

In Trump, Evangelicals have found a candidate who allows them, encourages them even, to baptize their prejudices against immigrants, against the LGBTQ+ communities, fomenting a movement of hatefulness, all in the name of God.

I wish that as I cast my vote next week, I would be confronted with difficult choices over who to choose as my state representative, U.S. House member, Senator, and President. But Trumpism in all its ugliness has now so overwhelmingly become the orthodoxy of the Republican party that even the down ballot Republican candidates overwhelmingly represent the cruelty and thoughtlessness we see in Trump.

Where I live in Tennessee, a state with the highest per capita rate of hospital closure in the nation and among the worst outcomes for maternal and infant healthcare, our statehouse’s Republican supermajority continues to reject federal funding for Medicaid expansion, a decision that has resulted in hundreds of premature deaths and billions of dollars lost to the state since 2014.

The Republican candidate for my U.S. House District is the incumbent Rep. Andy Ogles. In a state where firearm-related events are the leading cause of death for children, Ogles is the Congressman who famously posed with his family, four of the five members, including Ogles himself, armed with assault rifles for their Christmas Card. Since the Covenant School shooting in March 2023, Rep. Ogles’s response to the Covenant families has been largely silence, as in the months after, he reportedly never met with representatives from Covenant School families, nor did he address the deadly issues confronting our state’s children. The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate is Sen. Marsha Blackburn, an incumbent, who echoes Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, all the while opposing the bipartisan border security legislation brought before the Senate earlier this year. While both Ogles and Blackburn wear their religious identities loudly, theirs is not a version of our shared faith that I see expressed in the Christian gospels.

In my own imperfect attempts to understand and practice my faith, I’ve come to believe that the beauty and healing power of the Christian story is that we believe in a God who draws near to the hurting, the suffering, the immigrant, and the marginalized. When I consider a leader who mocks those he perceives as weak, who lies almost as often as he breathes, who race-baits both documented and undocumented migrants, and who seeks to divide neighbor from neighbor, I can’t in good conscience vote for a Republican candidate for President, nor can I vote for the down ballot Republicans who parrot this hatefulness and divisiveness and demonstrate a callous indifference for the welfare of their constituents.

This doesn’t mean that I like having my vote default to Democratic candidates. Democrats’ sometimes clumsy performative “wokeness” is genuinely deserving of ridicule, as with the image of Senators Pelosi, Schumer, and others kneeling while wearing kente cloth stoles in the aftermath of the George Floyd’s death. And yet despite the cringe factor, there is a largely sincere attempt in Democratic circles at reckoning with our nation’s racist history and seeking to correct our historical racism through legislation.

While there is, on the farther left wing of the progressive spectrum, a lack of tolerance for questioning their own orthodoxies, at heart, these are attempts at inclusion and understanding, at bringing us towards a more empathetic society. Democratic policies overall seek to integrate migrants into our society and to extend healthcare rights to those in poverty and to enshrine in law the rights of women’s autonomy over healthcare decisions that affect their bodies.

When I hear Trump talk despairingly of documented and undocumented migrants, I think of the story from the Christian gospels, of Jesus’ parents sneaking him out of their home country, for fear of his life, into Egypt, the holy family poor migrants in a foreign land. When I think of the ways that Trump sought in his first administration to destroy the Affordable Care Act, when I think of the ways his Supreme Court nominees have curtailed women’s healthcare rights in a country where we lag far behind every one of our peer nations in maternal mortality, I think of Jesus the Healer, who tended not merely to the spiritual needs of the people he encountered but often, to their bodies, to the blind, to the woman who’d been sick for years. When I hear the ways that Trump castigates and threatens his political opponents, as he seeks to divide the nation, I think of Jesus’ admonition to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

A friend recently brought to mind again a quote from the poet Maxine Kumin, who said, “It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.” As I step into the booth next week to cast my vote, I intend to bear witness to my faith as a Christian. I will enact what little witness has been given to me to bear here in Tennessee.

I intend to bear witness against hate, against divisive and unnecessary fear, against race-baiting and division. I intend to bear witness for the hope that we can do better as a nation, that we can move forward to acknowledge the deep wounds of the violence of our past, to reckon with our ghosts, and to choose together a better path forward.

When we act as if our bearing witness matters, it does.