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      Trump Highlights Abortion Supreme Court Decision at Faith and Freedom Conference

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      Former President Donald J. Trump told an evangelical gathering that no president had done more for Christians than he did.One year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, former President Donald J. Trump reminded a gathering of evangelical activists in the nation’s capital how he had shaped the court’s conservative supermajority that ended nearly 50 years of constitutional protections for abortion.Appearing at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gala in Washington on Saturday night, he cited his appointment of three of the six justices who voted to strike down the law as a capstone of his presidency. And he cast himself as an unflinching crusader for the Christian right in a meandering speech that lasted nearly 90 minutes.“No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” he said, adding, “I got it done, and nobody thought it was even a possibility.”It was the eighth appearance by Mr. Trump in front of the group, whose support he is seeking to consolidate in a crowded G.OP. competition for the 2024 nomination, though he is the front-runner in the field. He said that Republican voters were skeptical of claims by some of his rivals that they were stronger opponents of abortion, and suggested that the skepticism had arisen on the campaign trail.“A woman stood up and said, ‘This guy ended Roe v. Wade. How the hell can you go against him?’” Mr. Trump said.A few thousand activists gave Mr. Trump an ovation when he mentioned the ruling, which he said gave conservatives leverage in the ongoing battle over abortion rights. Several hundred more filled an overflow room.“You have power for the first time,” he said.Former Vice President Mike Pence called for the 2024 Republican field to back a 15-week federal abortion ban — an abortion policy more extreme than what Mr. Trump has supported.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesVirtually all of Mr. Trump’s rivals in the crowded G.O.P. field appeared during the group’s three-day Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton. The lineup included Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief rival, and former Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s onetime running mate.At a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial earlier on Saturday commemorating the court’s ruling, Mr. Pence urged anti-abortion activists to continue fighting to place further restrictions on the procedure at the state level.“Save the babies, and we will save America,” he said, adding, “As the old book says, that many more are with us than are with them.”In a speech at the gathering a day earlier, Mr. Pence called on the entire 2024 Republican presidential field to pledge support for a national abortion ban at 15 weeks — a ban more extreme than what Mr. Trump has backed so far.David Porter, 64, a Republican from Newport News, Va., who wore a “Walk With Jesus” hat to the rally, commended Mr. Trump for his imprint on the judiciary.“He’s my guy right now,” he said.Several times in his speech on Saturday night, Mr. Trump sought to align himself with the faith community and said that it was under attack, much like he was.“Together, we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, globalists and the Marxists,” he said.Each indictment, he added, was a “great badge of courage.”“I’m being indicted for you,” he said.Mr. Trump’s alliance with the Christian right is a study in political opportunism, one that has yielded prodigious dividends for both.In 2016, evangelical voters helped propel Mr. Trump to successive Republican primary victories in South Carolina and other key states, giving him a pathway to the nomination and ultimately the presidency.The influential electoral bloc demonstrated its willingness to look beyond the impieties of the twice-divorced Mr. Trump, whose extramarital affairs had long been tabloid fodder and who came with a history of supporting abortion rights in the 1990s. Evangelical voters bought into Mr. Trump’s populist narrative, as well as his pledges to carry out a hard-line reset of the nation’s immigration and trade policies and to appoint “pro-life” justices.The group collected its returns during Mr. Trump’s presidency when he cemented a supermajority on the Supreme Court.Mr. Trump has heralded his remake of the nation’s highest court as he once again seeks the support of evangelical voters, this time beset by a cascade of indictments, including one in a hush-money case involving a porn star.But even as Mr. Trump has highlighted his role in the right’s fight to end abortion rights, he has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Republicans managed to steer one through the divided Congress.Mr. Porter, the anti-abortion activist from Virginia, said Mr. Trump’s evasiveness was concerning.Mr. Trump has suggested that a six-week abortion ban signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was “too harsh,” causing some of his rivals to see an opening on the right of Mr. Trump on the issue.Pete Marovich for The New York Times“Either you stand for what you believe in or you don’t,” he said.Mr. DeSantis, who spoke on Friday at the evangelical conclave, has sought to stake out the right flank against Mr. Trump on abortion policy. He criticized the former president for suggesting that a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida was “too harsh.”Susan Migliore, an anti-abortion activist from Falls Church, Va., who said she was religious but not evangelical, said at the Lincoln Memorial rally that she was grateful for Mr. Trump’s court picks, but had not decided which candidate she will support in 2024. More

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      ‘You Can’t Protect Some Life and Not Others’

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      Matija MedvedWith over a year to go until the presidential election, I am already dreading what this next political season will feel like — the polarity, the vitriol, the exhaustion, the online fighting, the misinformation, the possibility of another Trump nomination. I already know that I won’t feel represented by the platforms of either party. I know I’ll feel politically estranged and frustrated.People like me, who hold to what the Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Bernadin called a “consistent ethic of life,” and what the Catholic activist Eileen Egan referred to as “the seamless garment” of life, don’t have a clear political home. A “whole life” ethic entails a commitment to life “from womb to tomb,” as Bernardin said, and it also champions policies that aid those who are vulnerable or economically disadvantaged. Bernadin, who died in 1996, argued that a consistent ethic demands equal advocacy for the “right to life of the weakest among us” and “the quality of life of the powerless among us.” Because of this, it combines issues that we often pry apart in American politics.The whole life movement, for instance, rejects the notion that a party can embrace family values while leaving asylum-seeking children on our Southern border in grave danger. Or that one can extend compassion to those children, while withholding it from the unwanted child in the womb. A whole life ethic is often antiwar, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-euthanasia and pro-gun control. It sees a thread connecting issues that the major party platforms often silo.For example, in his encyclical “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis blamed “throwaway culture” for both environmental degradation and widespread elective abortions. These are not divergent political ideas to him; they share the same root impulse. Throwaway culture “affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish.”Of course, not all Christians, and indeed not all Roman Catholics, share this view. It is however a common idea expressed in Catholic social teaching. Similar views have also been championed by many progressive evangelicals, mainline Protestants and leaders in the Black church. Yet no major political party embodies this consistent ethic of life. I find it strange that a view that is respected by so many religious bodies and individuals is virtually absent from our political discourse and voting options.But if those of us who hold this view actually live out a consistent ethic of human life and persistently articulate it as the rationale for our political engagement, it has the capacity to help depolarize our political system.We, as a nation, are seemingly at an impasse, split on abortion, immigration, guns and many other issues, with no clear way forward. Maybe the only way out of this stalemate is a remix. Maybe there needs to be a new moral vision that offers consistency in ways that might pull from both progressive and conservative camps. To embrace and articulate a consistent ethic of life, even while inhabiting the existing political parties, helps create the space necessary to expand the moral imagination of both parties.There’s nothing set in stone about how we divvy up and sort political issues and alliances. In decades past, it was entirely possible to be a pro-life Democrat or an anti-gun Republican. Roman Catholic leaders could support both traditional sexual ethics and radical economic justice for laborers and those in poverty. Theologically conservative evangelical leaders could declare, as they did in the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern in 1973, that we, as a nation, must “attack the materialism of our culture” and call for a just redistribution of the “nation’s wealth and services.”The most polarizing issues of our day are divisive precisely because they are moral in nature. They derive not from different ideas about the size of government or wonkish policy debates but are rooted in incommensurable moral arguments. To move forward, we have to rebundle disparate political issues, re-sort political alliances and shake up the categories, so that those who now disagree on some things may find common cause on others, and so that people committed to a consistent ethic of life might actually feel as if they have at least a modicum of — a possibility of — representation.I don’t expect this shake-up to happen any time soon. Change happens slowly and those of us who feel that we don’t fit neatly into any major party platform must consistently call for change. In particular, those committed to a consistent ethic of life must continue to uphold that ethic and not surrender to the rhetoric of either party.In the conservative churches I grew up in, single-issue “pro-life” voters became part of the Republican coalition, and eventually they came to embrace the party platform as a whole, regardless of how well it cohered with an overall commitment to life outside of the womb. But as Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles reminded us a few years ago, “there are no ‘single-issue’ saints.” Part of the task before those of us who want to consistently champion life is to participate in the political process while still stubbornly refusing to conform our views or loyalties to the current options offered — to steadfastly not fit in, to recalcitrantly and vocally insist that, as Egan reportedly said, “You can’t protect some life and not others.”The political scientist Morris Fiorina writes in “Unstable Majorities” that the common perception that the American people are more polarized than ever is an illusion. What is true, however, is that the Republican and Democratic Party platforms have become more polarized and, in Fiorina’s words, more “sorted” than they have been historically. The most devoted members of the base of each party maintain that polarization, but they don’t reflect the majority of voters, or even a majority of those who identify with the dominant parties. This party polarization and intensive sorting have created an artificial bundling of platform positions that does not necessarily reflect the moral vision of most voters.This artificial bundling is, however, constantly reified, Fiorina says, by the strident discourse of party leaders, elected officials and the most vocal members of the base, which creates what he calls a “spiral of silence.”“People who believe they are in the minority in their group often refrain from expressing their disagreement for fear of being shunned or otherwise sanctioned by the group,” Fiorina writes. “Left unchecked, this dynamic leads the majority to believe that there are no dissidents, whereas members of the dissident minority believe that they are alone in their views. As a result, both majority and minority members of a group come to believe — erroneously — that the group is politically homogeneous.”Those of us who articulate a whole life ethic make it possible for others to give voice to their own alienation and dissent from the dissatisfying nature of our present political discourse.As the saying goes, “If nothing changes, nothing changes.” There is no reason that the current bundling of political issues must continue interminably. Those of us who feel morally alienated from both parties must speak up and offer hope for a different sort of politics in America.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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      Mike Pence Is ‘a Rebuke of Trump’s Presidency’: Our Columnists and Writers Weigh In on His Candidacy

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Mike Pence, the former vice president.Candidate strength averagesRon DeSantis: 6.1Tim Scott: 4.6Nikki Haley: 3.5Mike Pence: 3.0Asa Hutchinson: 2.3How seriously should we take Mike Pence’s candidacy?Frank Bruni At least a bit more seriously than the fly that colonized his coiffure during his 2020 debate with Kamala Harris did. He is polling well enough to be part of the Republican primary debates. Let’s hope that Chris Licht at CNN has an entomologist at the ready for the post-debate panel.Jane Coaston Not very.Michelle Cottle As seriously as the wet dishrag he impersonated for most of his term as V.P.Ross Douthat On paper, a former vice president known for his evangelical faith sounds like a plausible Republican candidate for president. But in practice, because of Pence’s role on Jan. 6 and his break with Donald Trump thereafter, to vote for Trump’s vice president is to actively repudiate Trump himself. So until there’s evidence the G.O.P. voters are ready for such an overt repudiation (as opposed to just moving on to another candidate), there isn’t good reason to take Pence’s chances seriously.David French Nothing signals G.O.P. loyalty to Trump more than G.O.P. anger at Mike Pence. And what sin has he committed in Republican eyes? After years of faithful service to Trump, he refused to violate the law and risk the unity of the Republic by wrongly overturning an American election. We can’t take Pence seriously until Republicans stop taking Trump seriously.Michelle Goldberg One clue to Mike Pence’s standing among Republican base voters is that many of them have made heroes out of a mob chanting “hang Mike Pence.”Nicole Hemmer On the one hand, he’s the former vice president, which has to count for something. On the other hand, a mob whipped up by the former president wanted to hang him in front of Congress, so his candidacy is a high-risk proposition.Katherine Mangu-Ward Mike Pence is a serious person. He is seriously not going to be president.Daniel McCarthy As things stand, his candidacy isn’t very serious. If calamity befalls Donald Trump, however, the former vice president could gain favor as the G.O.P. old guard’s alternative to Ron DeSantis.What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Bruni He was Trump’s No. 2, so the fact of his candidacy is a rebuke of Trump’s presidency. He has a warm history with evangelical voters, whom he will assiduously court. And if squaring off against Trump somehow prods Pence to be more candid about what he saw at the fair, his words could theoretically wound.Coaston It is a candidacy no one wants.Cottle He’s a uniter: Everyone dislikes him.Douthat As long as he’s polling in the single digits, he matters only as a condensed symbol of the Republican electorate’s resilient loyalty to Trump. What could matter, come the debates, is that he’s the Republican with the strongest incentive to attack his former boss on character and fitness rather than just on issues — because his history with Trump sets him apart from the other non-Trump candidates, and his only possible path to the nomination involves persuading primary voters that he was right on Jan. 6 and Trump was wrong. If he sees it this way, his clashes with Trump could be interesting theater, and they might even help someone beat the former president; that someone, however, is still unlikely to be Pence himself.French Pence’s stand on Jan. 6 is defining him. In a healthy party, his integrity at that moment would be an asset. In the modern G.O.P., it’s a crippling liability.Goldberg It’s notable that Trump’s former vice president, the man chosen, in part, to reassure the Christian right, is now running against him. If Pence were willing to call out the treachery and mayhem he saw up close, it would be a useful intervention into our politics. But so far, he still seems cowed by his former boss.Hemmer In a rational world, he’d be a plausible candidate because of his strong connection to white evangelicals and time as V.P. But in this world, he’s the scapegoat for Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 election.Mangu-Ward Pence is an old-school Republican. The likely failure of his campaign will demonstrate how dead that version of the party really is. There was lots to hate about that party — including the punitive social conservatism demonstrated in his positions on abortion and gay rights — but I will confess to some nostalgia for the rhetoric of limited government and fiscal conservatism that still sometimes crosses Pence’s lips, seemingly in earnest.McCarthy His experience and calm demeanor give him a gravitas most rivals lack. He puts Governor DeSantis at risk of seeming too young to be president, even as the 44-year-old governor suggests Trump is too old.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Bruni I’m unsettled by how strongly Pence has always let his deeply conservative version of Christianity inform his policy positions. I respect people of faith, very much, but in a country with no official church and enormous diversity, he makes inadequate distinction between personal theology and public governance.Coaston He might be the most uninspiring candidate currently running.Cottle He wants to ram his conservative religious views down the nation’s throat.Douthat To the extent that Pence has a distinctive vision, it overlaps with both Nikki Haley’s and Tim Scott’s, albeit with a bit more piety worked in. Like them, he’s selling an upbeat Reaganism that seems out of step with both the concerns of G.O.P. voters and the challenges of the moment. The fact that Pence wants to revive George W. Bush’s push for private Social Security accounts is neither inspiring nor unsettling; it’s just quixotic, which so far feels like the spirit of his entire presidential run.French It’s plain that Pence wants to turn from Trumpism in both tone and in key elements of substance. He’s far more of a Reagan conservative than Trump ever was. Yet his accommodations to Trump remain unsettling even after Jan. 6. One can appreciate his stand for the Constitution while also recognizing that it’s a bit like applauding an arsonist for putting out a fire he helped start.Goldberg Pence would like to impose his religious absolutism on the entire country. As he said last year, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, “We must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land.”Hemmer Pence doesn’t stir up culture wars to win elections — he earnestly believes in a strictly patriarchal, overtly Christian version of the United States. (He was bashing Disney for suggesting women could serve in combat back when DeSantis was still in college.)Mangu-Ward Pence’s vision for America includes the peaceful transfer of power. He was willing to say these words: “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” This shouldn’t be inspiring; it should be the bare minimum for a viable political career. But here we are.McCarthy What’s unsettling about Pence’s vision is how similar it is to George W. Bush’s. It’s a vision that substitutes moralism for realism in foreign policy and is too deferential to the Chamber of Commerce at home — to the detriment of religious liberty as well as working-class families.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Pence candidacy?Bruni He was loyal to Trump until that would have been disloyal to democracy. No porn stars or hush money here. He has presidential hair. Even flies think so.Coaston The former governor of Indiana has some thoughts he’d like to share.Cottle He has high name recognition — and great hair.Douthat There are lots of Republicans who claimed they liked Trump’s conservative policies but didn’t like all the feuds, tweets and drama. Well, a vote for Pence is a vote for his administration’s second term, but this time drama-free.French G.O.P. voters, if you’re proud of the Trump administration’s accomplishments yet tired of Trump’s drama, Pence is your man.Goldberg Honestly, it’s not easy to come up with one, but I guess he’s qualified and he looks the part.Hemmer No one is better prepared to face down the woke mob than the candidate who survived an actual mob two years ago.Mangu-Ward Mike Pence: If he loses, he’ll admit that he lost!McCarthy Mike Pence means no drama and no disruption — a return to business as usual. Doesn’t that sound good right now?Ross Douthat, David French and Michelle Goldberg are Times columnists.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer.Michelle Cottle (@mcottle) is a member of The Times’s editorial board.Jane Coaston is a Times Opinion writer.Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) is an associate professor of history and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review.”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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      Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism as We Know It?

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      Ron DeSantis’s botched, awkward entry into the G.O.P. presidential primary highlights that there are two important internecine Republican conflicts unfolding at once. First, there is the obvious argument about Donald Trump’s suitability for the presidency. But there’s a second, less obvious question that is closely related to the first and often mistaken for it: What is the nature of contemporary conservatism? Or to put it another way, if Trump loses, what will take his place? And when viewed through that prism, DeSantis is particularly significant. More than anyone else in the race, he has the potential both to defeat Trump and to end conservatism as we have known it.But first, let’s define terms. What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day. Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “three-legged stool” of the Republican Party.Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity. That’s certainly how I perceived it before Trump, and it’s why I mistakenly believed it would reject him as a standard-bearer. Though he pledged to be socially conservative as president, he was a thrice-married libertine who kept a framed photo of himself on the cover of Playboy in his office. His economic program was more populist than libertarian, and his foreign policy was far more isolationist than those of previous G.O.P. presidents and presidential nominees.In other words, I looked at him and thought, “He’s not a real Republican.” Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for. While Trump’s vision of Trumpism was primarily an extension of his personal ambition, the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.By contrast, the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).” In an excellent 2022 piece, Philip Klein, the editor of National Review Online, called this “fight club” conservatism and raised the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse, to wield the same power to punish you and to reward your opponents. The legal instruments you create to combat your foes can just as easily be turned to attack you.Which brings me back to DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.That does not mean that Trump and DeSantis are the same. There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice. He is equally content attacking Democrats and any Republicans who get in his way.DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.Trump, fighting for himself, relentlessly attacks DeSantis, including with gross and unsubstantiated rumors. DeSantis, hoping to fight the left and not Trump, largely ignores his competitor and instead doubles down on attacking his progressive enemies, including “woke” universities and “woke” companies such as Disney.But whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.Thus, DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms. DeSantis likewise attempts to regulate social media moderation, intruding on private corporations’ decisions about who to platform and what kinds of speech to moderate. He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations. He’s banned even private employers from imposing a Covid vaccine mandate.When you view DeSantis as more anti-left than conservative in the classic sense, then other aspects of his rhetoric begin to make sense. Once a Covid vaccine advocate, he has since asked the Florida Supreme Court to convene a grand jury “to investigate crimes and wrongs in Florida related to the Covid-19 vaccines.” A strong supporter of lethal aid to Ukraine during the Obama administration, he recently and notoriously referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”For conservatives like me who want both to defeat Trump and to begin a restoration of the fusionist principles that once defined the G.O.P., DeSantis presents a dilemma. As I’ve written before, I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives. My colleague Ezra Klein has done outstanding work, for example, demonstrating how in California many of the best-intentioned progressive government programs are simply not working well.Here it’s worth repeating the pragmatic concerns about wielding government power. Any government strong enough to suppress my opponents’ speech is also strong enough to suppress mine, and any G.O.P. effort to erode American liberty will hand the same powers to the party’s political opponents. Republicans could live to rue the day when they rejected economic freedom and scorned free speech. This is particularly true if — as many advocates of DeSantis-like measures attest — liberalism is otherwise dominant in American culture.I’m reminded of a memorable scene in the 1990 movie “The Hunt for Red October.” A Soviet submarine captain, in his eagerness to sink a defecting Soviet submarine, recklessly launches the very torpedo that sinks his own ship. His executive officer’s final words hang in the air. Condemning his superior for his arrogance, he tells him, “You’ve killed us.”Speaking of exceptional colleagues, I want to close with a brief note about Ross Douthat’s latest column. He expertly outlines the competing arguments of pro-Trump and Never-Trump Christians:When religious conservatism made its peace with Donald Trump in 2016, the fundamental calculation was that the benefits of political power — or, alternatively, of keeping cultural liberalism out of full political power — outweighed the costs to Christian credibility inherent in accepting a heathen figure as a political champion and leader.The contrary calculation, made by the Christian wing of Never Trump, was that accepting Trump required moral compromises that American Christianity would ultimately suffer for, whatever Supreme Court seats or policy victories religious conservatives might gain.Ross is right, but there’s something else worth considering. Christian credibility is important, but not as important as Christian character. I opposed Trump for many reasons, certainly including concern over what such overt moral compromise would do to the witness of the church. I also opposed Trump because of what loyalty to Trump would do to Christians.To put it another way, after years of engagement with Trump, has Trump influenced the church more than the church has influenced Trump?The verdict is in. I see it with my own eyes. Trump has influenced the church. You see it in casual Christian cruelty online. You see it in the conspiracy-addled ReAwaken America rallies that are packing churches from coast to coast. You see it when genuine Christian candidates such as Mike Pence and Tim Scott struggle to gain traction even though they purportedly share the faith and values of tens of millions of American evangelicals, while Donald Trump self-evidently does not.Trump’s influence should not be surprising. After all, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Trump has been bad company for evangelicals since the day he rode down the escalator. And he has corrupted the morality of all too many American Christians. More

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      Is the Surge to the Left Among Young Voters a Trump Blip or the Real Deal?

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      There is a lot about the American electorate that we are only now beginning to see. These developments have profound implications for the future of both the Republican and the Democratic coalitions.Two key Democratic constituencies — the young and the religiously unobservant — have substantially increased as a share of the electorate.This shift is striking.In 2012, for example, white evangelicals — a hard-core Republican constituency — made up the same proportion of the electorate as the religiously unaffiliated: agnostics, atheists and the nonreligious. Both groups stood at roughly 19 percent of the population.By 2022, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (better known as P.R.R.I.), the percentage of white evangelicals had fallen to 13.6 percent, while those with little or no interest in religion and more progressive inclinations had surged to 26.8 percent of the population.Defying the adage among practitioners and scholars of politics that voters become more conservative as they age — millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (those born in 1997 and afterward) have in fact become decidedly more Democratic over time, according to data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study.The graphic below, which is derived from the study, shows a significant increase in voting for House Democratic candidates among Millennials and Gen Z. More

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      Whose Version of Christian Nationalism Will Win in 2024?

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      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

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      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

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      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