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    Whose Version of Christian Nationalism Will Win in 2024?

    Last week the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist roadshow co-founded by the former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, rolled up to the Trump National Doral Miami resort. Two speakers who’d appeared at other stops on the tour, the online streamers Scott McKay and Charlie Ward, were jettisoned at the last moment because of bad publicity over their praise of Hitler. (“Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today,” said McKay, not inaccurately.) But as of this writing, the tour’s website still includes McKay and Ward, along with Eric Trump, as featured speakers at an upcoming extravaganza in Las Vegas.ReAwaken America’s association with anti-Semites did not stop Donald Trump from calling into the rally to offer his support. “It’s a wonderful hotel, but you’re there for an even more important purpose,” he told a shrieking crowd, before promising to bring Flynn back in for a second Trump term. Flynn is exactly the sort of figure we can expect to serve in a future Trump administration — a MAGA die-hard uninterested in restraining Trump. So it’s worth paying attention to how he has changed since he was last on the national stage.Flynn has long been a paranoid Islamophobe, and toward the end of Trump’s presidency, he emerged as a full-fledged authoritarian, calling on Trump to invoke martial law after the 2020 election. Now he’s become, in addition to an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and QAnon adherent, one of the country’s most prominent Christian nationalists. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” he said at a 2021 ReAwaken America event. “One nation under God and one religion under God, right?”A major question for Republicans in 2024 is whether this militant version of Christian nationalism — one often rooted in Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on prophecy and revelation — can overcome the qualms of more mainstream evangelicals. The issue isn’t whether the next Republican presidential candidate is going to be a Christian nationalist, meaning someone who rejects the separation of church and state and treats Christianity as the foundation of American identity and law. That’s a foregone conclusion in a party whose state lawmakers are falling over themselves to pass book bans, abortion prohibitions, anti-trans laws, and, in Texas, bills authorizing school prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.What’s not yet clear, though, is what sort of Christian nationalism will prevail: the elite, doctrinaire variety of candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or the violently messianic version embodied by Flynn and Trump.ReAwaken America’s Miami stop had just concluded when Trump ran afoul of some more traditional evangelical leaders in his effort to set himself apart from DeSantis. In a Monday interview with The Messenger, he criticized the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed in Florida, even as he would not say whether he’d sign a similar one himself. “He signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh,” said Trump.Of course, lots of people believe that the Florida law is too harsh, but they’re not generally members of the anti-abortion movement, where Trump’s statement was poorly received. Rebuking Trump, Bob Vander Plaats, probably the most influential evangelical leader in Iowa, tweeted, “The #IowaCaucus door just flung wide open.” The right-wing Iowa talk show host Steve Deace tweeted that he was “potentially throwing away the Iowa Caucuses on the pro-life issue.”There is an obvious opening for DeSantis here. He is fluent in the language of the religious right, and strives to check all its policy boxes. “Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes,” he said at the Christian Hillsdale College last year, substituting the “left’s schemes” for the “devil’s schemes” of Ephesians 6:11. In addition to the abortion ban and his war on “woke” education, he will almost certainly sign a recently passed bill intended to keep trans people from using their preferred bathrooms in government buildings, including schools.But it remains to be seen whether rank-and-file religious conservatives care more about consistency or charisma. For the religious following that Trump has nurtured, he’s less a person who will put in place a specific Christian nationalist agenda than he is the incarnation of that agenda. Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the organizer of Christians against Christian Nationalism, attended the ReAwaken America event at Trump Doral. She described a type of Christian nationalist fervor that was “very much tied to the political future of Donald Trump and nothing else.”Tyler didn’t hear any of the ReAwaken speakers talk about abortion. Instead, she said, they spoke about “spiritual warfare.” There was also “a lot of talking about guns, about this sense that you’re put here for this time and this place.”If DeSantis treats Christianity as a moral code he’d like to impose on the rest of us, Trump treats it as an elevated status that should come with special perks. That’s how he can slam DeSantis for being “sanctimonious” even as he wraps his own campaign in biblical raiment. If a Republican wins in 2024, the victor will preside over a Christian nationalist administration. The question is whether that person will champion an orthodoxy or a cult.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    DeSantis Attempts to Woo Young Evangelicals at Liberty University

    The Florida governor pitched himself as a defender of traditional values to students at Liberty University, an important stage for Republican presidential hopefuls.The morning after signing one of the nation’s most stringent abortion bills into law, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida pitched himself to thousands of evangelical college students as a defender of truth, common sense and morality in the public square.“Yes, the truth will set you free,” Mr. DeSantis said, invoking the words of Christ. “Because woke represents a war on truth, we must wage a war on woke.”Mr. DeSantis spoke to about 10,000 students at Liberty University’s twice-weekly convocation service, which the school bills as “the world’s largest gathering of Christian students.”He was introduced by pastor Jonathan Falwell, recently named the school’s chancellor, who drew sustained applause when he mentioned Mr. DeSantis’s signing of the abortion law on Thursday night. The law prohibits the procedure past six weeks.Mr. DeSantis did not explicitly mention the abortion law. He opened his speech on a personal note, thanking the audience for their prayers after his wife’s cancer diagnosis in 2021.“The prayers have been answered,” he said. He went on to tout his record in Florida on an array of issues including new restrictions on gender-affirming medical treatments.“We chose facts over fear, we chose education over indoctrination, we chose law and order over rioting and disorder,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We did not back down.”Students listened to a band playing Christian worship music before Mr. DeSantis’s speech. Eze Amos for The New York TimesThe visit was part of Mr. DeSantis’s national tour of centers of conservative influence as he builds momentum for his widely anticipated entry into the 2024 presidential campaign. More than that, it was a crucial opportunity to gauge, and perhaps advance, his relationship status with evangelical Christians — a voting bloc that helped vault Donald J. Trump to the presidency and appears to be open to new presidential suitors.Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., has long been an important stop for Republican politicians and conservative celebrities eager to reach the campus’s undergraduates.It is the stage where Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced his candidacy in 2015. It is also where Mr. Trump introduced himself to a wider evangelical audience, pitching himself as the defender of a Christianity under attack — and famously referred to “Two Corinthians” in a fumbled attempt to speak the same language as his listeners.Ultimately, Mr. Trump did not need to “speak evangelical” to win them over. He won an even higher share of the white evangelical vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Though some evangelical leaders have signaled they would consider supporting another Republican candidate, many remain loyal to Mr. Trump and have so far shown few signs of abandoning him en masse over his recent indictment.For Mr. DeSantis, the question is whether he can loosen that extraordinary bond.Jesse Hughes, a junior at Liberty, had been hoping to hear Mr. DeSantis offer a more intimate account of how his faith influenced his approach to governing and helped him navigate challenges like his wife’s cancer diagnosis. Instead, he said he mostly heard material he recognized from Mr. DeSantis’s other speeches.Still, he is impressed with Mr. DeSantis’s record in Florida, including his approach to abortion legislation, education, and “how he’s willing to take bold stances and not cave to media pressure.” Under Mr. DeSantis, the state has banned discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades. Mr. Hughes read Mr. DeSantis’s recent memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” but said he found little to help him understand the governor’s personal spiritual life. “There are references to his faith, but he doesn’t go into much detail on anything,” he said.Jesse Hughes, a student at Liberty University, is impressed with Mr. DeSantis’s record but said he was hoping to hear the governor talk about how his faith helped him navigate challenges.Eze Amos for The New York Times Mr. Hughes brushed off the indictment against Mr. Trump as “political persecution.” But he also said that many of his fellow students are ready to move past Mr. Trump.Mr. Hughes, 21, is the president of the campus’s College Republicans club, which is conducting a small informal poll of student preferences in the primary. Hours before the poll closed on Friday, Mr. DeSantis had 53 percent of the vote to Mr. Trump’s 31 percent, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley at 13 percent.“What I’m seeing is definite interest in DeSantis, but not a rejection of Trump” among white evangelicals, said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at evangelical Calvin University in Michigan and the author of “Jesus and John Wayne.”Ms. Du Mez sees Mr. DeSantis making a similar appeal to conservative evangelicals as Mr. Trump did, positioning himself as a combative culture warrior who is “protecting the vulnerable Christians.” He may appeal to voters who are drawn to Mr. Trump but exhausted by the chaos that follows him, or doubtful of his chances to win in a general election, she said.But there is a trade-off. “What you gain in terms of stability in turning to DeSantis,” Ms. Du Mez said, “you lose in terms of charisma.”She said that most conservative evangelicals at this early stage seem genuinely open to either of the leading candidates. Among voters, at least, “it’s a friendly competition.”Mr. DeSantis spoke to about 10,000 students at Liberty University’s twice-weekly convocation service. Eze Amos for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis was raised in a Catholic family in Florida. “Growing up as a kid, it was nonnegotiable that I would have my rear end in church every Sunday morning,” he wrote in his memoir. He has an aunt who is a nun and an uncle who is a priest, both in Ohio. (Both declined to comment on their nephew’s religious upbringing.)Until now, he has deployed mentions of his personal faith fairly cautiously, while positioning himself as a defender of “God-fearing” people. In speeches, he often refers to putting on “the full armor of God” — a biblical reference and an evangelical touchstone — telling audiences to “stand firm against the left’s schemes.”He closed his speech at Liberty with another scripture reference, telling the crowd that “I will fight the good fight, I will finish the race, and I will keep the faith,” paraphrasing the apostle Paul in the book of 2 Timothy.Liberty University has long been an important stop for Republican presidential hopefuls.Eze Amos for The New York TimesDaniel Hostetter, the student body president, said his initial impression of Mr. DeSantis’s address was that it felt less personal than what he had heard from other politicians on Liberty’s stage, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia.“I feel like I just don’t know as much about DeSantis as I’d like,” he said. In a candidate, he is looking for someone “who looks like Christ” — someone who is kind and “full of mercy” but will stand by his convictions.He noted that one of the biggest applause lines of the morning did not even come from Mr. DeSantis, but from Mr. Falwell, when he mentioned Florida’s new six-week abortion ban. He speculated that Mr. DeSantis may be waiting to see how the ban is received nationally.Abortion has become a thorny issue for Republicans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. A portion of its base will settle for nothing less than the strongest restrictions, putting them out of step with the electorate as a whole and raising concerns about how any candidate who could win the Republican primary on the issue could then go on to win the general election. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases, according to a poll this year from the Public Religion Research Institute.Daniel Griffith, a graduate student who leads a youth ministry at Liberty, said he was disappointed by some of Mr. DeSantis’s more aggressive rhetoric. He noted that the governor’s lines about “wokeness” got more applause than his recitation of his economic achievements in Florida. “I have friends who he would probably consider woke,” he said. “It gets the cheers, it gets the noise, which kind of stinks.”Mr. Griffith said he is leaning toward supporting Mr. DeSantis over Mr. Trump.“We chose facts over fear, we chose education over indoctrination, we chose law and order over rioting and disorder,” Mr. DeSantis said in his speech, referring to his record in Florida.Eze Amos for The New York Times“People are sick of the controversies and sick of the scandal,” he said. “Even at Liberty, we’ve had our own mess and we’re sick of that,” he added, comparing Mr. Trump’s outbursts and legal entanglements with the problems of a former president of the school, Jerry Falwell Jr.Mr. Falwell, a former president of Liberty, was one of Mr. Trump’s first prominent evangelical supporters. He endorsed Mr. Trump in January of 2016, about a week after the candidate spoke at Liberty’s convocation, and became one of his most vocal allies.Mr. Falwell resigned as president in 2020 in a haze of tawdry controversies and is currently suing the school over his retirement payments. The school named a new president in March, Dondi Costin, a former Air Force chaplain who was most recently the president of Charleston Southern University.Out of power and without a platform, Mr. Falwell is an observer in this election cycle, not an influencer. Reached at home on Wednesday, he said he no longer has Mr. Trump’s phone number.But his political instincts have not changed.“I’ve got nothing against DeSantis at all, I just don’t think he’s ready for prime time yet,” Mr. Falwell said, remarking that the governor “looks like a little boy.”He added, “I’m still 100 percent a Trump man.” More

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    Two Evangelical Leaders, Jim Wallis and Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, on ‘Radical Faith,’ Climate Change and More

    For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.When Kyle Meyaard-Schaap was in high school, a quote from the Rev. Jim Wallis was emblazoned on the wall of his English classroom: “God is not a Republican or a Democrat.” Today, the two men are leaders in the movement to expand the political imaginations of American evangelicals. Though evangelicals are known for their strong support of former President Donald J. Trump — most polls showed around 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2020 — and an array of conservative causes, a vocal cohort includes many who find their faith directing them elsewhere.Mr. Wallis, now 74, was raised in what he described as a “very evangelical” family in Detroit, where his parents were lay leaders in a Plymouth Brethren church. He attended an evangelical seminary outside Chicago but was drawn to the radical student politics of his era, and quickly became one of the leading figures in an energetic politically progressive wing of American evangelicalism. That movement — anchored by Sojourners, the organization he founded and led for 50 years, before leaving in 2021 — enjoyed a heady decade until the rise of the Moral Majority and the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, when evangelicals became a reliably conservative voting bloc, which they remain today.That forced Mr. Wallis into the role of opposition leader, a perch from which he has tried to turn the American church’s attention to issues including racism, poverty and, more recently, voting rights. He has written 12 books, has been arrested 25 times for civil disobedience, and was one of a small group of pastors President Barack Obama turned to for prayer and counsel in the early years of his presidency.Mr. Meyaard-Schaap, 33, was ordained as a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church in North America and serves as the vice president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, a ministry that seeks to mobilize evangelicals around environmental issues. He was previously the national organizer and spokesman for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, another group devoted to mobilizing young evangelicals on climate issues. His book, “Following Jesus in a Warming World: A Christian Call to Climate Action,” will be published by the evangelical InterVarsity Press this month.The two leaders came together for a conversation, conducted in November over a video call, about collaborating with secular leaders, talking to Christians about climate change and capitalizing on being, as Mr. Wallis put it, a “critical minority.”Mr. Wallis was speaking from his office in Washington, D.C., where he is the founding director of the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, where he is also the chair of faith and justice at the McCourt School of Public Policy. Mr. Meyaard-Schaap joined the call from Grand Rapids, Mich., where lives with his wife and two young sons.This conversation has been condensed and edited.Rachelle BakerHow did you settle on the issues you’ve devoted your careers to?JIM WALLIS For years I was a student activist but not a religious person. We organized, marched in Washington, marched to the Capitol there in Lansing and then were attacked by right-wing groups and all of that. I guess I never quite got shed of Jesus, even though I left the church and they left me. I was studying — like everybody else those days — Marxism, anarchism. My conversion text was the 25th chapter of Matthew, called the “It Was Me” text. “It was me,” Jesus says. “I was hungry, it was me. I was thirsty, I was naked, a stranger, sick, in prison. How you treat them, the least of these, is how you treat me.”That was more radical than Karl Marx and Che Guevara. And so I signed up.KYLE MEYAARD-SCHAAP I grew up in a pretty conservative Christian home. I never really remember calling ourselves evangelicals. But I do remember this overwhelming assumption of ideological and political sameness. When I was in the fifth grade, it was during the 2000 election between Bush and Gore, and we did a mock election at the school where everybody wrote down their choice for president. All day, none of us could pay attention to any of the lessons. The vote came out to like 96, 97 percent Bush, 3 percent Gore. And everybody said, Who the heck voted for Al Gore? It was just inconceivable that a Christian could vote for Al Gore.RUTH GRAHAM Was it you?MEYAARD-SCHAAP No, it certainly wasn’t!You know, we recycled. But if the truck didn’t pick it up at the curb, I don’t know if we would have done that either. I don’t remember derision, necessarily, around climate change or environmentalism. Growing up, what I mostly remember was silence.Key Insights From ‘Taking the Lead’Card 1 of 7Conversations about leadership. More

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    Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less

    Affective polarization — “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — has prompted an explosion of research as the threat to democratic norms and procedures mount.Intensely felt divisions over race, ethnicity and culture have become more deeply entrenched in the American political system, reflected in part in the election denialism found in roughly a third of the electorate and in state legislative initiatives giving politicians the power to overturn election results.Many researchers have begun to focus on this question: Is there a causal relationship between the intensification of hostility between Democrats and Republicans and the deterioration of support for democratic standards?“Growing affective polarization and negative partisanship,” Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, political scientists at Georgia State University and Koç University-Istanbul, write in a 2019 essay, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies,”contribute to a perception among citizens that the opposing party and their policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power.What is affective polarization? In 2016, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote that when a voter’s “partisan social identity” merges with his or her racial, religious, sexual and cultural identities, “these various identities work together to drive an emotional type of polarization that cannot be explained by parties or issues alone.”Mason argues that “threats to a party’s status tend to drive anger, while reassurances drive enthusiasm” so thata party loss generates very negative, particularly angry, emotional reactions. This anger is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.One optimistic proposal to reduce partisan animosity is to focus public attention on the commonality of Democratic and Republican voters in their shared identity as Americans. Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on this subject, including in his 2018 paper “Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?” and in his soon-to-be-published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide.”“I show,” Levendusky contends in his 2018 paper, “that when subjects’ sense of American national identity is heightened, they come to see members of the opposing party as fellow Americans rather than rival partisans. As a result, they like the opposing party more, thereby reducing affective polarization.”There are serious problems, however, with a depolarization strategy based on American identity, problems that go to the heart of the relentless power of issues of race, ethnicity and immigration­ to splinter the electorate.In their December 2022 paper, “ ‘American’ Is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans,” Ryan Dawkins and Abigail Hanson write thatWhite Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump era, largely because of Democrats adopting a more racially inclusive conception of American identity. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party matches their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.Dawkins and Hanson acknowledge that “national identity is perhaps the only superordinate identity that holds the promise of uniting partisans and closing the social distance between White Democrats and White Republicans,” but, they continue,If conceptions of national identity itself become the subject of the very sorting process that is driving affective polarization, then it can no longer serve as a unifying identity that binds the entire country together. In fact, frames that highlight the association of American identity to historic norms of whiteness can ultimately divide the country further, especially as the United States transitions into a majority-minority country. Indeed, continued demographic change will likely make the schism between White Democrats and White Republicans wider before things have any hope to improve.I asked Levendusky about the Dawkins-Hanson paper. He replied by email that he was now “convinced that there is no simple path from animosity (or affective polarization) to far downstream outcomes (albeit important ones)” — adding that “there’s a long way from ‘I dislike members of the other party’ to ‘I will vote for a candidate who broke democratic norms rather than a candidate from the other party’ and the process is likely complex and subtle.”In an August 2022 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” David E. Broockman, a political scientist at Berkeley, Joshua L. Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, and Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, pointedly reject the claim made by a number of scholars “that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions. A large, influential literature speculates as such.”Instead, Broockman, Kalla and Westwood contend, their own studies “find no evidence that these changes in affective polarization influence a broad range of political behaviors — only interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about the widespread assumption that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.”Broockman and his co-authors measured the effect of reducing affective polarization on five domains: “electoral accountability, adopting one’s party’s policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perceptions of objective conditions.”“Our results,” they write, “run contrary to the literature’s widespread speculation: in these political domains, our estimates of the causal effects of reducing affective polarization are consistently null.”In an email, Westwood argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”Westwood’s point is well-taken. In a country marked by battles over sex, race, religion, gender, regional disparities in economic growth, traditionalist-vs-postmaterialist values and, broadly, inequality, it is difficult to see how relatively short, survey based experiments could produce a significant, long-term dent in partisan hostility.Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight of his colleagues, report similar results in their October 2022 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Anti-democratic Attitudes.” “Scholars and practitioners alike,” they write, “have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments toward outpartisans.”Why?Because much prior work has focused on treating affective polarization itself, and assumed that these interventions would in turn improve downstream outcomes that pose consequential threats to democracy. Although this assumption may seem reasonable, there is little evidence evaluating its implications for the benefits of depolarization interventions.In “Megastudy Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes,” a separate analysis of 32,059 American voters “testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” however, Voelkel and many of his co-authors, Michael N. Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph S. Mernyk, Chrystal Redekopp, Matthew Cashman, James N. Druckman, David G. Rand and Robb Willer significantly amended their earlier findings.In an email, Willer explained what was going on:One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions, such as not acknowledging the results of a lost election or removing polling stations from areas that benefit the rival party.Voelkel and his co-authors found that two interventions were the most effective.The first is known as the “Braley intervention” for Alia Braley, a political scientist at Berkeley and the lead author of “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” In the Braley intervention, participants are “asked what people from the other party believe when it comes to actions that undermine how democracy works (e.g., using violence to block laws, reducing the number of polling stations to help the other party, or not accepting the results of elections if they lose).” They are then given “the correct answer” and “the answers make clear the other party does not support actions that undermine democracy.”The second “top-performing intervention” was to give participants “a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”“To our knowledge,” Willer wrote in his email, “this is the first evidence that the same stimuli could both reduce affective polarization and improve some aspect of Americans’ democratic attitudes, and it suggests these two factors may be causally linked, more than prior work — including our own — would suggest.”Kalla disputed the conclusions Willer drew from the megastudy:The most successful interventions in the megastudy for reducing anti-democratic views were interventions that directly targeted those anti-democratic views. For example, Braley et al.’s successful intervention was able to reduce anti-democratic views by correcting misperceptions about the other party’s willingness to subvert democracy.This intervention, Kalla continued,was not about affective polarization. What this suggests is that for practitioners interested in reducing anti-democratic attitudes, they should use interventions that directly speak to and target those anti-democratic views. As our work finds and Voelkel et al. replicates, obliquely attempting to reduce anti-democratic views through the causal pathway of affective polarization does not appear to be a successful strategy.I sent Kalla’s critique to Willer, who replied:I agree with Josh’s point that the most effective interventions for reducing support for undemocratic practices and candidates were interventions that were pretty clearly crafted with the primary goal in mind of targeting democratic attitudes. And while we find some relationships here that suggest there is a path to reducing support for undemocratic candidates via reducing affective polarization, the larger point that most interventions reducing affective polarization do not affect anti-democratic attitudes still stands, and our evidence continues to contradict the widespread popular assumption that affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes are closely linked. We continue to find evidence in this newest study against that idea.One scholar, Herbert P. Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended that too much of the debate over affective polarization and democratic backsliding has been restricted to the analysis of competing psychological pressures, when in fact the scope in much larger. “The United States,” Kitschelt wrote in an email,has experienced a “black swan” confluence, interaction and mutual reinforcement of general factors that affect all advanced knowledge societies with specific historical and institutional factors unique to the U.S. that have created a poisonous concoction threatening U.S. democracy more so than that of any other Western society. Taken together, these conditions have created the scenario in which affective polarization thrives.Like most of the developed world, the United States is undergoing three disruptive transformations compounded by three additional historical factors specific to the United States, Kitschelt suggests. These transformations, he wrote, are:“The postindustrial change of the occupational structure expanding higher education and the income and status educational dividend, together with a transformation of gender and family relations, dismantling the paternalist family and improving the bargaining power of women, making less educated people — and especially males — the more likely socio-economic and cultural losers of the process.”“The expansion of education goes together with a secularization of society that has undercut the ideological foundations of paternalism, but created fierce resistance in certain quarters.”“The sociocultural and economic divisions furthermore correlate with residential patterns in which the growing higher educated, younger, secular and more gender-egalitarian share of the population lives in metropolitan and suburban areas, while the declining, less educated, older, more religious and more paternalists share of the population lives in exurbia or the countryside.”The three factors unique to this country, in his view, are:“The legacy of enslavement and racial oppression in the United States in which — following W.E.B. DuBois — the white lower class of less skilled laborers derived a ‘quasi-wage’ satisfaction from racist subordination of the minority, the satisfaction of enjoying a higher rank in society than African Americans.”“The vibrancy of evangelical ‘born again’ Christianity, sharply separated from the old European moderate, cerebral mainline Protestantism. The former attracts support over-proportionally among less educated people, and strictly segregates churches by race, thereby making it possible to convert white Evangelical churches into platforms of white racism. They have become political transmission belts of right-wing populism in the United States, with 80 percent of those whites who consider themselves ‘born again’ voting for the Trump presidential candidacy.”“The institutional particularities of the U.S. voting system that tends to divide populations into two rival parties, the first-past-the-post electoral system for the U.S. legislature and the directly elected presidency. While received wisdom has claimed that it moderates divisions, under conditions of mutually reinforcing economic, social, and cultural divides, it is likely to have the opposite effect. The most important additional upshot of this system is the overrepresentation of the countryside (i.e. the areas where the social, economic, and cultural losers of knowledge society tend to be located) in the legislative process and presidential elections/Electoral College.”Kitschelt argues that in order to understand affective polarization it is necessary to go “beyond the myopic and US-centric narrow vision field of American political psychologists.” The incentives “for politicians to prime this polarization and stoke the divides, including fanning the flames of affective polarization, can be understood only against the backdrop of these underlying socio-economic and cultural legacies and processes.”Kitschelt is not alone in this view. He pointed to a 2020 book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” by Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, political scientists at Harvard, the University of California-Davis and Georgia State University, in which they make a case thatAmericans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly than in most other Western publics. We show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high, when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions.Writing just before the 2020 election, Gidron, Adams and Horne point out that theissue of cultural disagreements appears highly pertinent in light of the ongoing nationwide protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement which has sparked a wider cultural debate over questions relating to race, police funding and broader questions over interpretations of America’s history. In a July 4th speech delivered at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump starkly framed these types of “culture war” debates as a defining political and social divide in America, asserting “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”The study of affective polarization sheds light on how vicious American politics has become, and on how this viciousness has enabled Trump and those Republicans who have followed his lead, while hurting Democrats whose policy and legislative initiatives have been obstructed as much as they have succeeded.Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., addressed this point when he delivered the following remarks from his paper “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West” in 2021 at a legal colloquium in New York:There is little question that recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of government, whether measured in the number of important bills Congress is able to enact, the proportion of all issues people identity as most important that Congress manages to address, or the number of enacted bills that update old policies enacted many decades earlier. Social scientists now write books with titles like Can America Govern Itself? Longitudinal data confirm the obvious, which is the more polarized Congress is, the less it enacts significant legislation; in the ten most polarized congressional terms, a bit more than 10.6 significant laws were enacted, while in the ten least polarized terms, that number goes up 60 percent, to around 16 significant enactments per term. The inability of democratic governments to deliver on the issues their populations care most about poses serious risks.What are the chances of reversing this trend?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Hispanic Evangelical Leaders Ask: Trump or DeSantis?

    In Florida, where Hispanic evangelicals carry outsize influence, many of their pastors view the budding 2024 rivalry as a sign of the potency of their unabashedly politicized Christianity.MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t announced he’s running for president yet. But among the right-leaning voting blocs that are pulling for him to enter the 2024 primary field are some of his biggest fans: Hispanic evangelical Christians.It’s not that they’re opposed to the one Republican who has already declared himself a candidate, former President Donald J. Trump. But a showdown between the two titans of the right wing could turn Latino evangelicals into a decisive swing vote in Florida — supercharging their influence and focusing enormous national attention on their churches, their politics and their values.“If there is a primary, there’s no doubt there will be fragmentation in the conservative movement, and there’s total certainty that will be true of Hispanic evangelicals as well,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor in Sacramento, Calif., and the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We know the values we keep and the policies we want. The question that arises is, who will really reflect those?”Mr. Rodriguez’s group held a gathering last month in Tampa, Fla., with hundreds of pastors from across the country, where attendees said the hallways buzzed between sessions with more chatter about politics than about Scripture.Much of it, they said, came down to a choice: Trump or DeSantis?Few have settled on an answer yet, not surprisingly given that the first votes of the 2024 campaign are over a year away. But the talk of 2024 — of Mr. Trump, who spent years courting evangelicals, and of Mr. DeSantis, who has leaned into the cultural battles that appeal to many conservative Christians — showed both the heightened expectations among Hispanic evangelical leaders in Florida and their desire to demonstrate the potency of their now unabashedly politicized Christianity.“It is about morals, and there is one party right now that reflects our morals,” said Dionny Báez, a Miami pastor who leads a network of churches. “We cannot be afraid to remind people that we have values that the Republicans are willing to fight for. I have a responsibility to make clear what we believe. We can no longer make that taboo.”Hispanic evangelicals have long had outsize influence in Florida, where Latinos make up roughly 27 percent of the population and 21 percent of eligible voters. Though they are outnumbered among Hispanics by Roman Catholics, evangelicals are far more likely to vote for Republicans. Overall, Hispanic voters in the state favored Republicans for the first time in decades in the midterm elections in November.Mr. DeSantis has courted Hispanic evangelicals assiduously as his national profile has risen.When he signed a law last year banning abortions after 15 weeks, he did so at Nación de Fe, a Hispanic evangelical megachurch in Osceola County. He declared Nov. 7, the day before the midterm election, as “Victims of Communism Day,” appealing not just to Cubans in the state, but also immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua, who have helped swell the pews of evangelical churches in Florida. His campaign aides frequently spoke with Hispanic pastors, cultivating support that many expect Mr. DeSantis to try to capitalize on in a presidential campaign.Of course, Mr. Trump, too, can call upon loyalists: Mr. Rodriguez spoke at his inauguration in 2017, and other Hispanic evangelical leaders endorsed him.Latino supporters of Mr. Trump at a rally in Miami in November. Since the former president’s political ascent in 2016, Republicans have made gains among Latino voters in Florida.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesBut Mr. DeSantis could complicate the equation in a potential 2024 Republican primary because of Hispanic evangelicals’ concentration and considerable sway in Florida. Many view Mr. DeSantis as a hero of the pandemic, praising him for not requiring churches to shut down or instituting vaccine mandates.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 4Donald J. Trump is running for president again, while also being investigated by a special counsel. And his taxes are an issue again as well. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Tax returns. More

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    The Empty Gestures of Disillusioned Evangelicals

    There have been encouraging signs lately of influential evangelicals inching away from Donald Trump.The Washington Post last month quoted a self-pitying essay by Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, who wrote: “He used us to win the White House. We had to close our mouths and eyes when he said things that horrified us.” Religion News Service reported that David Lane, the leader of a group devoted to getting conservative Christian pastors into office, recently sent out an email criticizing Trump for subordinating his MAGA vision “to personal grievances and self-importance.” On Monday, Semafor quoted Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Christian conservative activist in Iowa, saying that evangelicals weren’t sure that Trump could win.Even Robert Jeffress, a Dallas televangelist whom Texas Monthly once described as “Trump’s Apostle,” is holding off on endorsing him again, telling Newsweek that he doesn’t want to be part of a Republican civil war.Because I see the ex-president as a uniquely catastrophic figure — more likely to lose in 2024 than the current elite Republican favorite Ron DeSantis, but also more likely to destroy the country if he prevails — I’ve eagerly followed the fracturing of his evangelical support. But Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, told me he doesn’t yet take evangelical distancing from Trump seriously. After all, he pointed out, we’ve been in a similar place before.At the start of Trump’s first campaign for president, few important evangelical figures backed him. “What changed was an increase in the number of grass-roots evangelical voters who started to support Donald Trump,” Moore said. “It’s not that the leaders embrace a candidate and therefore their followers do. It’s really the reverse.”Moore is the rare evangelical leader who has consistently opposed Trump, a stance that nearly cost him his former job as president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. (He left the Convention in 2021 over its handling of sexual abuse and white nationalism in the church.) Moore suspects that if the base of the Christian right, which over the last six years has forged a quasi-mystical connection with the profane ex-president, decides to stick with Trump, the qualms of their would-be leaders will evaporate. “I just don’t read a lot into reluctance anymore, because I’ve seen reluctance that immediately bounces back, after ‘Access Hollywood,’ for instance, or after Jan. 6,” said Moore.What matters, then, are the sentiments of ordinary evangelicals. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found right-leaning white evangelical voters closely divided in their Republican primary preferences: 49 percent want Trump to be the nominee, while 50 percent want someone else. But Moore thinks most rank-and-file evangelicals aren’t focused on presidential politics yet, so it’s too soon to know which direction they’ll go.The last six years, said Moore, has changed the character of conservative evangelicalism, making it at once more militant and more apocalyptic — in other words, more Trump-like. For some people, Trump may even be the impetus for their faith: a Pew survey found that 16 percent of white Trump supporters who didn’t identify as born-again or evangelical in 2016 had adopted those designations by 2020.“I see much more dismissal of Sermon on the Mount characteristics among some Christians than we would have seen before,” Moore said, referring to Jesus’ exhortation to turn the other cheek and love your enemies. There is instead, Moore said, “an idea of kindness as weakness.” Pastors have spoken to Moore about getting blowback from their congregants for preaching biblical ideas about mercy, with people saying, “That doesn’t work anymore, in a culture as hostile as this.”Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today, says he doesn’t yet take evangelical distancing from Donald Trump seriously.Melissa Golden/ReduxMeanwhile, said Moore, some of those inspired by Jesus’ radical compassion are leaving the church. There have always been evangelicals who become disillusioned, said Moore, often because they “didn’t believe in the supernatural anymore, or couldn’t accept moral teachings of the church anymore.” But now, he said, “I find more and more young evangelicals who think the church itself is immoral.” Speaking of the new, pro-Trump recruits to evangelicalism, Moore said, “If the trade-off is getting more of them and losing some of the really best of our young people because they’re associating Jesus with this, that’s not a good trade.”The trade, of course, is much like the one the Republican Party made in choosing to subordinate itself to Trump. Contrary to Evans’s lament, no one had to close his mouth and eyes. The Republicans chose to because they wanted power, and their critique now is largely about power lost.I spoke to Moore before Trump called for the “termination” of the Constitution but after he’d dined with two of America’s most virulent antisemites. I asked if that meeting had been a turning point for any Christian Trump supporters. It’s landing, he said, only with “people who already had concerns about Trump.” The born-again Trump critics are mostly just worried about whether he can get elected, which is one reason he still can.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Black, Christian and Transcending the Political Binary

    Justin Giboney is a lawyer and political strategist in Atlanta who grew up in the Black church. He says his theological foundation came from his grandfather, who was a bishop in a Black Pentecostal denomination. Giboney is also the president and a co-founder of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization meant to represent people of faith who do not fit neatly into either political party.I’ve written before about how I’m intrigued by people and movements that defy our prescribed ideological categories. The AND Campaign, which is based in Atlanta and has 15 chapters across the United States, is one of those. Led almost entirely by young professionals, artists, pastors and community leaders of color, the group advocates voting rights and police reform, leads what it calls a “whole life project” dedicated to reducing abortion and supporting mothers, endorses a “livable wage” and champions other issues that break left and right, in turn.As we approach the midterms, Giboney graciously agreed to speak with me about the state of our politics from the perspective of a person of faith who is also a person of color — what it’s like to embrace traditional Christian theology while also opposing the political stances of many white evangelicals, and what it’s like to be committed to social justice in ways that differ from those of many secular progressives. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.How do voices of faith that are also voices of color fit into the American political conversation now? Do you feel represented?I don’t feel fully represented. In part, that’s because the culture war has set a framework in which progressivism and conservatism, as defined in white majority spaces, are billed as the only two legitimate options. That framework has been so effective that a lot of people can’t even discuss politics outside of this “progressive versus conservative” framework.But that’s not, historically speaking, how many Black Christians have engaged. Our view of social justice is often different than the secular progressive view. It’s not about individual expression. It’s about liberation through civil rights, equity, full citizenship and making sure that we have an impartial system. That’s not to say there’s no overlap. But, on the whole, the roots of the secular progressive view are in your 1970s counterculture movement, whereas ours come from an Exodus motif of liberation.There’s no better example than Georgia’s senatorial race.You have Herschel Walker, who I think is completely missing the social justice component found in the Black church.And then Raphael Warnock, who has endorsed the secular progressive kind-of -donor-class view of social issues. These values deal primarily with expressive individualism, such as far-left positions regarding gender identity, abortion and pushback on parental consent. Jonathan Haidt has described them as WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) values. He says, “they hold that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs and preferences” that should be supported unless they directly hurt others. These cultures largely focus on an ethic of autonomy. This is counter to an ethic of community.In my opinion, Warnock is far more qualified than Walker. But neither of them truly represents the constituency in the way we would hope.When I was running campaigns, it became very clear to me that there was this false dichotomy in politics. If you cared about social justice, you went all the way to the left. And if you were a Christian, that meant you left some of your convictions aside.If you cared about what we would say is “moral order,” then you would go all the way to the right. And we know that when you look at the Moral Majority and things like that, compassion just was not there.Looking at the Black church historically, it touched on both those things, but very differently. Why are social justice and moral order separate? Why is our conception of love and truth completely separate? Because when I look in the Gospels, they’re not separate. They’re interdependent. They’re not mutually exclusive.As parties become more polarized, are we leaving behind voices of color?I think voices of color are being left behind. The two extremes on both sides — devoted conservatives and progressive activists — are like 6 percent and 8 percent of the population, but they’re both white and wealthy. And they control the dialogue.On the Democratic side, you could say, “We have all these conversations about inclusion and representation,” but Democrats don’t just welcome all Black people with open arms. You have to be willing to fit into this secular, progressive mold.While people like to use civil rights and Black church symbolism and rhetoric, they don’t want the faith and the precepts that are attached to it. So I think it’s up to us to kind of step up and say: “No, here we are. We are a force to be reckoned with.”What would it look like for parties to do a better job of including people of faith who are people of color? What would you say to white conservatives and white liberals?On the right, you have to stop harboring and pandering to racists. I think there’s a group in the Republican Party — you saw this in the Trump campaign, you saw this with what Senator Tuberville recently said — who feel like they need these votes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like the Southern strategy has ever completely died.You cannot continue to use race to motivate people who are bigoted. And when you don’t speak up against that, racism will remain in your party.On the left, I think it’s about not demanding ideological purity. As long as everyone has to fit these donor class values, then you’re not going to let in people who have nuanced views. You’re only going to allow people to rise up to high office and party leadership that already fit what you want. Which kind of makes the representation and inclusion rhetoric disingenuous, right? True pluralism and true inclusion are more than just accepting different flavors of progressivism.When you really appreciate Black people, that means you don’t just tolerate the Black people who say exactly what you would have them say on social issues or on any other issue. You can use identity politics to say, “Here, that’s your representation.” But that’s not my representation if that person had to jump through your hoops and contort herself to fit a framework that doesn’t fit her community.Do you feel like Black people of faith are politically homeless today?I absolutely do. I mean, you look at somebody like Fannie Lou Hamer or William Augustus Jones. These are activists who fought hard, but because of their beliefs on some social issues, they wouldn’t be accepted into leadership or given exposure within the Democratic Party today. Fannie Lou Hamer was pro-life and William Augustus Jones promoted a Christian sexual ethic and family values in general. These are civil rights legends who in today’s iteration of the party would not be accepted based on their more moderate or traditional values on social issues.Do you understand yourself to be a moderate?We’re not trying to find some squishy middle. We’re just not going to say we’re always with progressives or always with conservatives. If that makes me a moderate, because I’m not always on one side, then so be it. But I’m going to evaluate issues based on my own framework and beliefs.The conservative and progressive approaches are not the only way to approach politics. Everything that doesn’t fit isn’t illegitimate. Once we realize those aren’t the only two approaches, then we open up space for people of color, people of faith and others who are politically homeless to really have a voice and help heal something that’s been broken and won’t be fixed by either of those two sides.What is your hope for politics?My biggest hope is that people of faith who want to engage in politics faithfully would find the AND Campaign to be a place where they can find resources to do that and have on-ramps to getting engaged in that way. And that we would — even though we’re coming from this Black church context — be able to bring the church together, to work together and put partisanship aside.And lastly, that we would be able to promote a sort of civic pluralism. To say: “Hey, it’s not just about Christians winning. It’s about human flourishing in general.” How can we work with others while maintaining our convictions? How can we work with others to do democracy better?Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.” More

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    Evangelicals Find a Way Forward With Herschel Walker

    The time had come for the Christian supporters of Herschel Walker to make a way where there seemed to be no way.It was the morning after the Republican senate candidate’s ex-girlfriend came forward to say he had paid for her to have an abortion, though he supports banning the procedure without exception. Dozens of people gathered in a fluorescent hall of First Baptist Atlanta, a prominent Southern Baptist church. Pastor Anthony George sat on a platform, with Mr. Walker at his right hand. The pastor recalled God’s protection of King David, the ancient Israelite king, and claimed similar promise for Mr. Walker. The candidate shared a testimony of how Jesus changed his life. The pastor invited people to the front to pray for him.They surrounded him and extended their hands toward the former football star. “This is the fight of his life, holy God,” the pastor prayed. “And we call forth your ministering angels to be his defenders.” The people clapped and gave shouts of amen.The scene, a private event revealed in videos shared on social media, reflected the evangelical language of sin and salvation, persecution and deliverance. It was a ritual of sanctification, the washing away of sin and declaration of a higher call.The Senate race in Georgia has become an explicit matchup of two increasingly divergent versions of American Christianity. Mr. Walker reflects the way conservative Christianity continues to be defined by its fusion with right-wing politics and tolerance for candidates who, whatever their personal failings or flaws, advance its power and cause. Mr. Walker has wielded his Christianity as an ultimate defense, at once denying the abortion allegations are true while also pointing to the mercy and forgiveness in Jesus as a divine backstop.Former President Donald J. Trump is backing Herschel Walker’s bid for U.S. Senate in Georgia.Audra Melton for The New York TimesSenator Raphael Warnock, his Democratic opponent, is a lifelong minister who leads the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church, home to the Christian social activism embodied in the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He has inherited the legacy of the Black civil rights tradition in the South, where faith focuses on not just individual salvation, but on communal efforts to challenge injustices like segregation.“We are witnessing two dimensions of Christian faith, both the justice dimension and the mercy dimension,” said the Rev. Dr. Robert M. Franklin Jr., professor in moral leadership at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.The loyalty to Mr. Walker reflects an approach conservative Christians successfully honed during the Trump era, overlooking the personal morality of candidates in exchange for political power to further their policy objectives. After some hesitation in 2016, white evangelicals supported Mr. Trump in high numbers after reports about his history of unwanted advances toward women and vulgar comments about them. They stood by Roy Moore, who ran a failed campaign for Senate in Alabama, after he was accused of sexual misconduct and assault by multiple women.Understand the Herschel Walker Abortion AllegationsCard 1 of 6The Daily Beast articles. More