Religion, Politics, and the 2024 U.S. Elections:

What Happened and What Comes Next?

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

6:00 - 7:30 PM

Jack Morton Auditorium

805 21st St NW

Washington DC 20052

This symposium is hosted by The Illiberalism Studies Program and the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University and by the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University.

This event is on-the-record and open to the public and media.

This plenary panel will take up three core questions: 1. What do we know about the conservative Christian vote in the 2024 election? 2. What do we see emerging from the Christian nationalist networks that were involved in the 2020 election denialism and even in the January 6th Insurrection? 3. How do various strands of Christian nationalism relate and perhaps overlap? 

The 2020 AP VoteCast survey found that 81% of White evangelical Protestant voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump, compared with 18% who voted for Joe Biden. Trump can reasonably expect the same high levels of support from conservative religious voters in 2024. Yet there are at this writing signs that conservative Christian voters are having second thoughts about Trump, despite his fulfilled promise to deliver a conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade. With the strong public backlash after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, a backlash that was intensified by the 2024 Alabama Supreme Court decision that said that embryos held in a cryopreservation tank were legally equivalent to living children, the Trump campaign and Trump himself backpedaled and equivocated on abortion restrictions, leaving many Christians feeling abandoned by Trump, even if he has been “anointed by God.” Of course, some Christian conservatives expressed the same belief in 2016. What do we know about the voting patterns of Evangelicals in the 2024 elections? With the assistance of an early assessment of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) polling data, our panel will evaluate what happened on election night 2024.

Our second set of questions concerns Christian nationalists, or what one of our panelists has described as white Christian nationalists. In 2020, Christian nationalists, often associated with what some refer to as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and aligned neo-Charismatics non-denominational churches and ministry networks, took an active and even leadership role in the January 6th events, as the numerous flags and other symbols attest. With what is looking to be a close election in 2024, we can reasonably anticipate something similar happening after this election, if not another insurrection, at least similar revival fury as seen in the leadup to the 2020 election and January vote certification.  

A third set of questions concerns the boundaries between far-right Christian nationalists and more mainstream Evangelicals, on the one hand, and the boundaries between Christian nationalists and other “post-liberal” proponents and the organizations that support them. We might point to Turning Point Faith, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, just to name a few examples. How do Christian nationalists such as Lance Wallnau fit with post-liberal intellectuals such as Notre Dame University’s Patrick Deneen, Harvard University’s Adrian Vermeule, and the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton and John Eastman? Perhaps these are entirely different strains of ethno-religious political thought that happen to share a common aspiration of “returning” the United States to a once-Christian past. If we were to draw a Venn Diagram, how would these and other possible bodies of thought align?

This event will be introduced by Alyssa Ayres, Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, and moderated by Michel Martin, host of Morning Edition on NPR. Its distinguished panelists are Samuel Perry, E.J. Dionne, Robert P. Jones, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jim Wallis, and Andrew Thompson.

Speakers

Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book is The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. Jones writes regularly on politics, culture, and religion for The Atlantic, TIME, Religion News Service, and other outlets. He is frequently featured in major national media, such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. He is also the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity and The End of White Christian America. Jones writes weekly at www.whitetoolong.net, a newsletter focused on religion, racial justice, and politics.

Samuel L. Perry is the Sam K. Vierson Presidential Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. An award-winning scholar and teacher, Dr. Perry is among the nation's leading experts on conservative Christianity in American politics, race, families, and sexual behavior. In addition to over a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles, Dr. Perry is also the author or co-author of five books, including the award-winning Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (with Andrew Whitehead) and The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (with Philip Gorski). His most recent book is Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion. 

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, and university professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University. A nationally known and respected commentator on politics, Dionne appears weekly on National Public Radio and regularly on MSNBC. He has also appeared on News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other PBS programs. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books and volumes.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. 

Jim Wallis is the inaugural holder of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and the Director of its new Center on Faith and Justice. He served on President Obama’s first White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and is the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including his latest book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy, which was released on April 2nd, 2024 and is available wherever you buy books. In 2022 and 2023, Washingtonian magazine named Wallis one of the 500 most influential people shaping policy in DC. Wallis is also the founder of Sojourners.

Andrew Thompson is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is in American politics, political behavior, and experimental methods. Substantively, his recent work focuses on the causal role of racial threat in democratic erosion within the mass American public. His book manuscript (under review at Oxford University Press) and a series of recent articles articulate the logic behind how the public’s perceptions on racial demographic changes consistently shift their views of democracy and support for political violence. Thompson’s research has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Political Behavior, and other outlets.

Moderator

Michel Martin is host of Morning Edition on NPR. She has spent more than 25 years as a journalist—first in print with major newspapers and then in television. Martin has been honored by numerous organizations including The National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Radio and Television Correspondents' Association, and the American Bar Association. In 2019, Martin was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in journalism. She is the 2021 recipient of PMJA's Leo C. Lee Award. Martin graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College at Harvard University in 1980 and earned a Master of Arts from the Wesley Theological Seminary in 2016.

Chair

Alyssa Ayres was appointed dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs and professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University effective February 1, 2021. She is the first woman to serve in the role of permanent dean at the school. Ayres is a foreign policy practitioner and award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. From 2013 to 2021, she was senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she remains an adjunct senior fellow. Her full bio is available here.