On the second day of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, party officials realized they had a God problem.
They weren’t in trouble so much with God as with Republicans. Someone, somewhere, noticed that the Democrats had removed the only explicit use of the word God from their party platform, excising the phrase “God-given” that appeared in the draft from 2008. Conservatives pounced: Mitt Romney told FOX News that the change was evidence that the Democratic Party was “veering further and further away into an extreme wing that Americans don’t recognize.”1 His vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, called the omission peculiar and “not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision.”2 The outrage was enough to make one believe the DNC—convened that September in Charlotte, North Carolina—was rife with antireligious sentiment, evoking images of secret backroom meetings dedicated to re-creating America in secularism’s image.
Such a conclusion would be difficult to draw, however, if you attended the convention, where you would have to somehow disregard that each day began with prayer sessions and devotionals led by Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, and Muslims. Never mind the plethora of faith-related panels and forums scattered throughout the schedule, including events dedicated to “loving our neighbor,” “caring for the poor and those in need,” and “being our brother’s and sister’s keeper.” Ignore that a cadre of liberal activists at the convention who happened to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quietly launched a new group for Mormon Democrats.3 Pay no attention to the DNC staffer paid to help orchestrate religious activities.
“We had more faith-related programming in Charlotte than at any previous Democratic convention,” said then director of faith outreach Rev. Derrick Harkins.4 A former pastor at a heavily African American congregation, Harkins added that he believed the omission of God from the platform was unintentional. “We could even point quantitatively to how many of the speakers on the platform spoke about their own faith.”
Faith and God were, in fact, mentioned numerous times on the convention stage throughout the event. AME Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie opened one session with a prayer and implored the crowd to squeeze the hand of their neighbor and say amen—twice.5 Julián Castro—then mayor of San Antonio, Texas—called upon the Almighty in the event’s keynote address, invoking his grandmother’s faith-fueled benediction in Spanish and English (“Que Dios los bendiga,” or “May God bless you”).6
But the most memorable God talk at the convention proved to be a blockbuster speech by a white-coated Sister Simone Campbell, who capitalized on her fame with the Nuns on the Bus tour to chastise Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.7 Her address was unusual for many reasons, but especially because Campbell—who vigorously criticized Romney and Ryan during her speech—did not officially endorse Barack Obama. Campbell had insisted on a nonendorsement when convention organizers first approached her, primarily because she was (and is) a religious activist, not an elected official or DNC employee. She assumed that the party would push back, but organizers readily agreed, seemingly unconcerned with her preconditions.8
The crowd didn’t care either. Applause repeatedly interrupted the beaming Campbell during her speech, and she eventually received a deafening standing ovation.
The outrage over the omission of the word God—a term that applies only to some monotheistic religious traditions and ignores the various polytheistic faiths claimed by many Americans—missed this entirely, primarily because it misunderstood how party leaders had come to engage with religion. Even if Democrats had omitted the word (they added it back after Obama personally intervened), party officials had already dedicated an entire section of the 2012 platform to faith.9 The document spilled more ink on the subject than on middle-class tax cuts, voting rights, or the freedom to marry, and it described faith as not only “a central part of the American story” but also “a driving force of progress and justice throughout our history”—in other words, as an important source of liberal activism.
Indeed, the controversy highlights a different kind of God gap—not between Democrats and faith, but between competing visions for how progressives should engage with faith. Despite Obama’s band of accomplished outreach experts, his second term—while hardly divorced from faith—saw a rupture crack open between grassroots Religious Left activists and Washington insiders. Fracturing also occurred within Washington’s once tight-knit progressive faith community, with leaders disagreeing over what proper faith outreach should look like for liberals, or even which religious populations to court.
The result was an uneven mix of successes and half starts for progressive political faith engagement that rippled into the 2016 election season and—with the possible exception of outreach to Mormons in Utah—helped Donald Trump clinch the presidency. The lessons from that era spell out just how much the religious landscape has changed since Obama first ran for president and offer more than a few hardearned lessons for 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls.
THE OBAMA ERA
Most campaign workers who cut their teeth in Barack Obama’s 2008 Religious Affairs team landed jobs in the administration. They were good jobs, too, not the “spoils of war” assistant-to-the-assistant métiers typically handed off to lower-tier staffers.
The lion’s share stuck with faith. Rev. E. Terri LaVelle and Mark Linton ran the religion-related operations at the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, respectively. Others went to work directly with the president at the White House’s faith affairs office, which was headed by Joshua DuBois. Despite having worked outside the campaign, Mara Vanderslice Kelly became close with DuBois and was eventually anointed as his number two. Over the course of her time in the administration, Kelly would serve in the faith office of the Department of Health and Human Services and as senior policy adviser to the White House operation. Michael Wear, a former intern, was brought on board to work with DuBois.
Other alumni blazed a different path: Max Temkin, who is listed as an intern on the Religious Affairs campaign team, went on to create the popular party game Cards Against Humanity.
For some, success came with a tinge of bitterness. Washington’s progressive faith community had atomized during the 2008 election, with some working for Obama and others working for Clinton. When the dust settled, bad blood remained.
“The movement got split a little bit,” Kelly said. “That was hard. . . . There were some really hard feelings from all that stuff.” She recalled deep divisions that lasted years, adding “people didn’t trust each other.”10
Obama’s God squad plowed forward all the same, making manifest a vision he first articulated during a July 2008 campaign speech in Zanesville, Ohio. In the speech, which many viewed as a play for conservative votes, Obama proposed expanding the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, created under George W. Bush, though Obama later renamed it the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He pledged $500 million a year in federal funds to religious groups and programs that aid the poor and disadvantaged.11
Some liberals expressed concerns about the implications of outreligioning the Bush administration. But Obama made good on his promise to embrace faith groups, which he hoped would enhance interactions between his administration and the communities it served.
According to DuBois, the expansion came with a heavy dose of bureaucracy building. Church-state boundaries that were “assumed” under the Bush administration, he said, were made concrete under Obama, and the White House faith office embarked on a rigorous process to clarify what it could and could not do.
“We strengthened the legal and constitutional underpinnings of this office,” he said. “We ran a rule-making process. We pulled together an advisory council of faith leaders and community leaders for the first time that informed and produced hard regulations and rules that brought greater clarity to the inherent legal issues.”12
The advisory council included some conservative and evangelical voices, including National Association of Evangelicals head Leith Anderson and Richard E. Stearns, president of World Vision US. But many who filled out the board over the course of Obama’s two terms were well-known figures in progressive-leaning faith circles, including Rev. Traci Blackmon; Rev. Jennifer Butler; Rev. Jim Wallis; pastor Michael McBride; progressive Christian author Rachel Held Evans; Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Harry Knox, head of the Human Rights Campaign’s Religion and Faith Program and later CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice; and Rami Nashashibi, director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.13
But while Obama’s religion experts rapidly expanded his administration’s clout with progressive religious groups, his reelection faith outreach apparatus got considerably less attention. The biggest shift was in leadership: it was Wear, not DuBois, who ended up leaving the administration to run faith outreach for Obama’s campaign in 2012, while DuBois stayed behind at the White House.
Wear faced different challenges from his predecessor. For starters, he was only twenty-three when he got the job, older than many bright-eyed Obama field organizers but still young enough—despite his years of service—to raise concerns that he did not have enough experience for a national position. As author and journalist Amy Sullivan told The Washington Post, “Republicans would put somebody senior with years and years of experience and a big Rolodex in that position . . . I guess that tells you something about how Democrats still view faith outreach and its importance.”14
What’s more, reelection campaigns usually differ greatly from a candidate’s initial outing and often generate less enthusiasm. This was especially true for Obama’s 2012 bid, which was less about “hope and change” and more about “hold the line.” It didn’t help that a series of religion-related conflicts erupted between Obama and religious conservatives. The administration continued to battle multiple lawsuits lobbed at the Affordable Care Act by religious conservatives who opposed its contraception mandate, and Obama’s 2012 announcement in support of same-sex marriage brought backlash from some.
All of this weighed on Wear, who demurred when asked about direct comparisons between himself and DuBois. (He noted only that “the president wasn’t inviting me over for drinks—I was not an ‘inside circle’ kind of guy.”) Instead, he told me that the scope of faith operations in 2012 often hinged on whether state directors viewed them as advantageous, and many did not. The campaign also lacked the impressive slate of faith-specific outreach directors that it had in 2008. Wear’s team was reduced to himself and two interns, a downsizing offset partly by the fact that elements of campaign faith outreach (especially to Catholics) were added to the portfolio of Obama’s senior advisor, Broderick Johnson. In addition, the reelection campaign benefited from the work of the DNC’s Derrick Harkins, whose faith outreach position did not exist in 2008, when Wear said the party relied more on consultants.
Despite all these obstacles, Wear was able to bootstrap a faith outreach operation that outshined anything assembled by Al Gore or John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, respectively. The campaign website once again had a page dedicated to people of faith, and it included an Obama video message to religious voters, penned by Wear in collaboration with David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest advisers. Faith lit also returned, this time with a direct-mail piece sent to Catholics in Ohio and Iowa that featured Sister Simone Campbell alongside a message about Catholic values and economic fairness.
Still, Wear grew frustrated with what he saw as the campaign’s apparent disregard for the sensibilities of theological conservatives. In Reclaiming Hope, Wear recounted an instance when a faith leader expressed his dismay that the campaign had sent out a mass email with the word damn in the subject line. When Wear complained to a fellow staffer about what he thought was a “crass decision,” the staffer explained that emails with profanity got better open rates.
“Data-driven politics is incompatible with aspirational politics,” Wear wrote. He likened the tactics to those used by such groups as the National Rifle Association, arguing that the strategy is “willing to sacrifice a broader coalition for a few bucks, a dozen hours of free airtime, and an angrier base.”15
Obama won in 2012 anyway, profanity-laced emails and all, routing GOP opponent Mitt Romney by a slightly smaller margin than the Democrat’s 2008 victory. But Wear’s discontent continued to simmer, stoked by a run-in with the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party around the time of Obama’s second inauguration.
The inaugural committee initially selected Louie Giglio, the evangelical pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, Georgia, to deliver a prayer at the formal ceremonies. But reporters at ThinkProgress unearthed an old sermon in which Giglio condemned homosexuality and argued that it is possible for gay people to change through “the healing power of Jesus.”16 The news sparked outrage among many liberals, and Giglio withdrew the next day. Writing of the incident, Wear commented, “Liberals were the sharks who smelled blood in the water.”17
The consternation of Wear, a proud evangelical Christian, hastened a debate over how religious outreach should work within a progressive context. For Wear and others, reaching out to religious moderates and conservatives—people like Giglio—was crucial.
But for secular liberals and other religious progressives, removing Giglio was a triumph because there were alternatives such as Rev. Luis León, whom the White House chose to deliver the prayer instead. León, an Episcopal priest, served at St. John’s Church, across the street from the White House. Sometimes called the “president’s church,” St. John’s had openly gay, noncelibate priests and expressed a willingness to bless same-sex partnerships and ordain transgender clerics.18 It was evidence that progressives no longer had to play it safe around religious conservatives when it came to issues such as LGBTQ rights, and it hinted at the emergence of a new breed of doggedly progressive religious activists who would change the future of how Democrats engaged with faith.
Faith outreach was no longer just about courting African American churchgoers or reaching across theological and political aisles to tempt conservative Christians to vote blue. It could now curry favor with newly activated parts of the Democratic Party’s shifting progressive base, including non-Christians and those sometimes classified as the hard Left.
Meanwhile, members of the Obama-era progressive Grassmere group continued to go their separate ways. DuBois left the White House in 2013,19 eventually wrangling Wear to help him lead Values Partnership, a consulting firm working “at the intersection of race, politics, entertainment, faith, and culture.” That same year, Harkins left the DNC to work at Enroll America, a group run by 2008 Obama campaign staffers tasked with helping people sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act. (Harkins would eventually end up at Union Theological Seminary in New York.) Kelly waited until 2014 to leave the faith office at Health and Human Services to jump ship for United Way.
The team that replaced them was more expressive of Obama’s aggressively right-brained approach to governance. Melissa Rogers, a lawyer and legal scholar who in 2008 published a paper on a vision for the White House faith office, took over for DuBois in 2013, thus becoming one of the few academics in history to implement her own ideas about better governance.
“In certain sectors of the legal field, there’s skepticism about this kind of work,” Rogers told me, referring to partnerships between the government and religious organizations to serve people in need. “So what I’ve tried to say is, ‘This work can be done in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution.’”20
But as the new guard of lawyers and academics made their moves, the campaign and party infrastructure for faith-conscience advocates began to atrophy. The DNC did not replace Harkins for the 2016 campaign after he left his post, and while the party did religion-related work around Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to the US, much of it was done as volunteer work by John McCarthy, a young, Catholic twenty-something largely unknown to the faith-and-politics power players that surrounded Obama.
They would know him soon enough.
DO ALL THE GOOD YOU CAN
Criticizing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign is something of a newfound pastime among Washington Democrats. Most failed attempts to win the White House endure postmortem scrutiny, but the razor-thin margins of Clinton’s loss to Trump—combined with the sheer shock that it happened at all—turned how-Clinton-could-have-won theories into a cottage industry. From podcasts to op-eds to cable news segments, armchair analysts and seasoned political operatives alike repeatedly trumpeted the same theory: the former secretary of state could have turned it all around if she and her team had done just one thing differently.
The critics may all be right in their own way. But for faith outreach veterans, that one thing is Clinton’s targeting of religious voters—or presumed lack thereof. Almost every operative I spoke with for this book had harsh words for the 2016 campaign (many of them unsolicited), but few were as critical as Wear, who didn’t hesitate to blast the campaign publicly.
“What kind of data-mined campaign looks at a country that identifies itself as 70 percent Christian and says, ‘We’re going to run the first post-Christian campaign?’” Wear asked during a 2018 panel at Georgetown University, before answering his own question. “A losing one, that’s the kind.”21
E. J. Dionne—who Wear cited as having heard the “post-Christian” remark from a Clinton campaign official—later clarified to me that Wear had misunderstood him. He said he may have asked campaign staff about the line, but he never personally heard anyone say it. Prominent writers repeated the quote anyway, advancing the general perception that the Clinton campaign functionally abandoned faith outreach in 2016.22
The reality of Clinton’s faith operation is a bit more complicated, and, as with many Clinton campaign postmortems, not all of the ire aimed at her failed presidential bid is fair. Organizers did wait until June 2016 to hire a formal faith outreach director, but Obama’s reelection campaign brought on Wear in a similar capacity only a month earlier by comparison—in May 2012. Clinton’s efforts were smaller than Obama’s 2008 operation, but not significantly smaller than his reelection faith efforts, and Clinton had more institutional faith support than anything Kerry had in 2004. The Clinton campaign mostly stuck to more traditional forms of faith outreach, but it did explore the option of bringing in someone from the outside; the campaign even took meetings with staunch progressives such as Religious Left advocate Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons.23
(Full disclosure: I know a bit about Clinton’s job search because—in a bewildering and unexpected turn of events for any journalist—the Clinton campaign also contacted me to discuss taking the position. It never resulted in any sort of job offer, however, and my none-too-subtle attempt to steer those conversations into an on-the-record interview with Clinton for ThinkProgress proved laughably unsuccessful.)
The man Clinton ultimately hired for the position was John McCarthy, who was a spritely twenty-four-year-old at the time. But he was far from a neophyte in the small world of liberal religion-and-politics operatives. In addition to his work around the pope’s 2015 visit, McCarthy had assisted with Catholic outreach for Obama’s 2012 campaign. He was volunteering for the Clinton campaign when they elevated him to a full-time position, helping facilitate conference calls with faith leaders. (He noted that John Podesta’s role as chairman of Clinton’s campaign “brought in a lot of institutional Catholic voices.”)
McCarthy’s work differed from that of his predecessors in significant ways, however. He wasn’t exclusively focused on religious voters. Instead, he split his time between faith outreach and various forms of heritage outreach, which covered everything from broad-based groups (Irish Americans for Hillary) to smaller, more targeted populations (Macedonians for Hillary). He produced two internal briefing books a day—one for faith outreach, another for his other programs. It was a regular reminder that he was essentially working two full-time campaign jobs at once.
Despite the workload, McCarthy argued his strength derived from his existing ties within the Democratic Party. “I think a lot of the folks who’ve done faith outreach in the past came at it from an outsider angle—coming in to advise the campaign,” McCarthy said. “I was a Democratic operative who happened to also do faith.”24
He added: “I was an operative more than I was from the faith world—in that I wasn’t a pastor or theologian—so I could make the argument that this was electorally beneficial to the party more than I think some of my predecessors were able to.”
There were also people tasked with reaching religious voters while working under other programs. McCarthy said campaign staffers who worked in outreach to African Americans—“AfAm” for short—and Hispanic/Latinx populations incorporated faith into their work, as did those who targeted the Arab American vote.
Even so, outsiders expressed disappointment with the Clinton campaign’s engagement with faith, primarily because they saw the former secretary of state as a natural fit for a dedicated, aggressive push for religious voters. A proud member of the United Methodist Church (UMC) who has spoken several times at UMC events, Clinton often invokes Methodist thinkers and sayings in her public addresses—just as she did during her 2016 Super Tuesday victory speech. “Like many of you, I find strength and purpose in the values I learned from my family and my faith,” she said, sparking cheers. “They gave me simple words to live by, an old Methodist saying. ‘Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, for as long as you can.’”25
The fact that Clinton described the line as an “old Methodist saying” rather than repeat the common misconception that it was penned by Methodism founder John Wesley, hints at her deft grasp of matters divine. She was also effusive about her faith during a campaign town hall when a woman stood up and voiced frustration with how she had to defend herself to friends who saw progressivism and Christianity as inherently incongruous. When the woman asked Clinton how the candidate grappled with the issue, Clinton launched into a lengthy, nuanced articulation of faith that, when fully transcribed, runs to about six hundred words.
“I am a person of faith. I am a Christian. I am a Methodist,” Clinton said. “My study of the Bible . . . has led me to believe the most important commandment is to love the Lord with all your might and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that is what I think we are commanded by Christ to do. And there is so much more in the Bible about taking care of the poor, visiting the prisoners, taking in the stranger, creating opportunities for others to be lifted up . . . I think there are many different ways of exercising your faith.”26
Clinton said similar things when she spoke in 2016 at the conferences of majority-black denominations, such as the National Baptist Convention27 and the African Methodist Episcopal general conference.28 Both visits earned her media attention, as had her 2015 visit to Rev. Traci Blackmon’s church near Ferguson, Missouri (broadcast live on C-SPAN) in the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting.29
Still, glad-handing with religious leaders isn’t the same as targeted ads and on-the-ground faith outreach, which were rarer occurrences in 2016. McCarthy said his operation worked similarly to Wear’s for Obama in 2012 in that both had to shape their programs largely around the whims of the state directors. And like Wear, McCarthy discovered that many were less than keen on religious campaigning—except, he said, for Utah.
THE MORMON EXCEPTION (THAT PROVED THE RULE)
The room—a drab, dull-colored rectangular office space—was packed to capacity. The mass of chattering bodies were pressed together so tightly that simply lifting my camera above my head to take a photo felt as if I was committing multiple personal space violations. The air crackled with electricity, a kind of anticipatory, I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening energy usually reserved for a secret show in Brooklyn or a backstage encounter with a celebrity.
But the person who bounded onto the makeshift stage at the front of the room wasn’t an indie musician or a famous actress. It was a staffer for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, announcing the opening of a new office just outside of Salt Lake City.
In response, the crowd—most of whom wore blue stickers with slogans like “I’m With Her” and “Utah Together”—went berserk.30
August is a bit late for a campaign office opening, but the context was unusual. As election day drew nearer, campaign leaders (and more than a few voters) became convinced that Clinton would not only win but also have a rare opportunity to expand the electoral map for Democrats by seizing states long held by Republicans. Nowhere were their goals more ambitious than in Utah, where political analysts were surprised to discover simmering discontent about Donald Trump among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Looking back, the Salt Lake City office opening, which I chronicled for ThinkProgress, was a glimpse at Clinton’s ad hoc approach to faith outreach as well as the complex, symbiotic relationship between grassroots progressive faith movements—yes, even Mormons—and presidential campaigns.
Members of the LDS Church, often called Mormons, represent around 47 percent of Utah’s population as of 2018,31 and statistically are the most reliably Republican major religious group in the country.32 Yet Utah was one of the few states in which Trump fared particularly poorly during the primary season: Ted Cruz clinched the Utah caucus with 69 percent of the vote; Trump placed a distant third with an underwhelming 14 percent.
Trump’s rhetoric failed to capture the imagination of the Beehive State—which he would describe as a “tremendous problem” midway through the campaign33—for several of reasons.34 Trump’s infamously brash demeanor and remarks about sexual assault, for instance, didn’t mix with the traditionally genteel culture embraced by many Latter-day Saints. But the disconnect ran deeper and older: the businessman’s December 2015 proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country triggered a rare public response by the leadership of the LDS Church, a religion that was itself almost banned from the US in 1879 by then secretary of state William M. Evarts.35
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is neutral in regard to party politics and election campaigns,” the response to Trump read in part. “However, it is not neutral in relation to religious freedom.”36
A newly emboldened population of LDS progressives in the state added to the Mormon frustration with Trump. Members of the so-called Latter-day Left are a statistical minority among their religious peers, but they have been around for decades, claiming prominent Democrats such as Sen. Harry Reid among their number. The group didn’t find its organizational footing until 2012, when it launched Mormon Democrats (later rebranded LDS Dems) during that year’s Democratic National Convention. Reid was one of several Mormon Democrats who spoke at the inaugural gathering, which took place in a Holiday Inn conference room. Crystal Young-Otterstrom, then chairwoman of the group, described the event to NPR as “like a missionary effort.”37
By 2016, Young-Otterstrom and LDS Dems had developed their own website and a impressive social media presence, and they saw the faith-fueled backlash to Trump in Utah as an opportunity—one that didn’t even require a victory to be successful. Former CIA officer and LDS member Evan McMullin, an independent presidential candidate, was accruing significant support in the state as a protest against Trump. All Clinton had to do was split the vote enough to cost Trump the state and its six electoral votes.
It was the first time a Democrat had made a major play in Utah in decades, and it was coupled with a surprising investment in Utah religious voters by Clinton’s team.38 In addition to a campaign presence, Clinton published an op-ed in the Deseret News (which is owned by the LDS church), in which she mentioned the near ban on Mormon immigration in 1879. She also gushed about heroes of the faith such as Sister Rosemary M. Wixom, a prominent modern female leader in the tradition, and Joseph Smith, founder of the religion.
“Generations of LDS leaders, from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to Gordon Hinckley and Thomas Monson, have noted the infinite blessings we have received from the Constitution of the United States,” Clinton wrote. “The next president will swear an oath to preserve, protect, and defend that document for successive generations. And if you give me the honor to serve as your president, I will fight every day to carry out that sacred responsibility.”
The effort was capped off with a bona fide campaign video, “We Are Mormons for Hillary,” released roughly a month before Election Day. The ad featured a bipartisan group of Mormons—including both former GOP state representatives and a Democratic candidate for Utah state senate—reading a passage from Clinton’s autobiography, It Takes a Village. They provided the voice-over for slow-motion footage of children frolicking across a picturesque Utahan landscape, laughing and rolling in the grass as the Wasatch Mountains towered in the distance.
“We are Mormons for Hillary,” the video concludes. “Join your friends and family and vote on November 8.”
Annette Harris, an LDS member who was working as a policy fellow in the Utah for Clinton campaign at the time, said the ad was the result of prodding from the campaign’s state director, who “really advocated for more help in Utah.” Harris found the Clinton campaign’s interest in Utah’s religious voters “really validating,” because it meant that “finally someone was seeing that this is important and worth investing in.”39
But Eric Biggart, the current LDS Dems chair, noted the outreach was geared not necessarily toward Mormon Democrats but rather toward “moderate Republicans and Never Trumpers” to “convert some moderates to realize that our gospel views line up with [Democratic] party views a lot closer than they line up with Republican Party views.”
It was a gutsy ploy to snare a constituency long written off by Democrats as hopelessly conservative, but Election Day results revealed the extent of Mormon distrust of Trump. According to the Utah Colleges Exit Poll, Trump won less than 45 percent of Mormon voters, or roughly half of what Romney secured in 2012 and 30 points below what John McCain garnered in 2008.40 Trump’s share of the overall state vote was roughly the same: he won 45.5 percent of the popular vote in Utah, far worse than McCain, who won 62.3 percent in 2008, and miles behind Romney, who garnered a staggering 72.8 percent in 2012.41 McMullin made an impressive showing for an independent, picking up 21.5 percent of the vote behind Clinton’s 27.5 percent.42
Trump actually performed better in Utah than most preelection polls in the state predicted, just as he did elsewhere. But there was a significant disparity between Utah and the rest of the country, where Trump won 61 percent of the overall Mormon vote.43
For Crystal Young-Otterstrom, the results spoke for themselves.
“The final numbers really did justify that investment,” she said. “We came in much higher than a Democratic presidential candidate usually does in Utah. Our efforts really did pay off.”
And yet for all that work, Clinton failed to secure Utah’s electoral votes, raising questions as to whether faith outreach resources could have been better spent targeting the Democratic base elsewhere. Turnout among black voters in 2016, for instance, was the lowest since at least 2004.44 Granted, religious messaging can’t erase voter ID laws, which in states like Wisconsin are shown to disproportionately disenfranchise people of color. Still, religious outreach may have urged more progressives to the polls—be they black, white, Hispanic, or otherwise.
But according to McCarthy, the urgency for faith outreach simply doesn’t resonate with many Democratic operatives.
“The culture of this is still just off,” he told me, shaking his head in frustration. “If you ask a lot of the political operative folks that I work with, they would say, ‘That’s just not part of our coalition anymore.’”
Worse, the tiny tribe of liberal faith operatives was rocked by scandal. In 2018, it was revealed that Burns Strider—a longtime faith adviser to the Clintons and a regular at Grassmere gatherings—had been accused of sexual harassment on the campaign in 2008, but Hillary Clinton declined to fire him.45 Burns went on to run an independent super PAC that supported her 2016 candidacy, where he also allegedly harassed multiple women.46
And even if an entirely new group of people take over faith outreach, McCarthy stressed, the Democrats will still be forced into an awkward choice between divergent opinions about which votes they should target.
“Are we going to be the party of just Catholic Midwestern voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania, or are we going to be just Union Seminary? I think those are two very different things—we can be both.”
Indeed, solving the new God gap may require less either-or and more both-and. Election night 2016 was a bleak moment for many Democrats, but there was a notable highlight on an otherwise catastrophic night, a glimmer of hope amidst the darkness. In North Carolina, a state Hillary Clinton lost by nearly four points, a Democrat narrowly unseated the incumbent Republican governor. Pundits credited the electoral shift to Moral Mondays as lead by Rev. William Barber—a grassroots faith activist, not a Washington insider—who assembled a coalition with the goal of putting a Democrat in office in the Tar Heel State. Barber, the head of the longstanding protest, had even delivered a fiery address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.47
As discussed in previous chapters, the 2016 convention surprised many political writers for its unusually religious flair, and Clinton’s team had been in regular contact with Barber.48 The pastor even stopped by the campaign’s New York City headquarters one day in September to “fire people up.” It was a mostly impromptu rah-rah session (technically not an endorsement, as Barber, like Campbell in 2012, never endorsed any candidate); Barber happened to be in town that day for an event at Union Seminary to condemn Trump’s rhetoric. But McCarthy wasn’t surprised by the visit, since “at that point I was talking to [Barber] pretty regularly.”
In the Trump era, the best indicator of the progressive faith community’s power likely won’t be found at a political convention, or even by looking at the size of a candidate’s faith outreach team. It likely won’t be found in Washington at all, but rather at the far-flung rallies and spiritual gatherings headlined by Barber and others, ones that assemble disparate and unusual religious groups—some of which are only just now beginning to wade into political waters.