Courtney McGrailAmong the many depressing pieces published in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s US Presidential election was one at ncregister.com entitled ‘Trump’s Triumph powered by religious voters’.
“The next days will allow for careful study of the numbers, but the exit polls found initially that Trump may have carried the largest evangelical vote in history and a majority of the Catholic vote,” according to Matthew Bunson, a senior contributor to the National Catholic Register and its parent company the Catholic media group ETWN.
The figures indeed suggest that Mr Trump received 52% of the Catholic vote, against 45% for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps more importantly, these figures break down on ethnic lines, with 67% of Latinos voting for Hillary Clinton while 60% of white Catholics opted for Trump.
Elsewhere on ncregister.com, Mark Gray of Georgetown’s Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate sensibly observes “what we don’t know yet is why Catholics voted as a majority for Donald Trump”.
Attempting to explain this, Bunson recalls Mr Trump’s message to Catholics, in which he promises to protect religious liberty and the dignity of all human beings. He observes that when Mr Trump sought to target Catholics, he did so especially by making “a direct appeal to pro-life voters”, and, wondering whether pro-life voters decided the election, he says they certainly played their part in getting Mr Trump over the line.
Others have suggested that Catholics and pro-lifers may yet regret their part in the rise of Mr Trump. In an especially powerful piece at cruxnow.com entitled ‘Trump’s election was a monstrous defeat for the pro-life movement’, Charles Camosy questions the President-elect’s pro-life claims and credentials, and calls on pro-lifers to consider what it means to have Mr Trump as – in effect – their movement’s leader and public face.
Justice reform
Noting that the billionaire is “particularly loathed by millennials, women and people of colour – and with good reason, for Trump’s positions on issues like immigration, criminal justice reform, health care and climate change are completely alienating to huge majorities in these demographics”, he says the president-elect’s “racist and sexist rhetoric and behaviour – linked to sexual violence – are even more repulsive to these sections of the population”.
In short, he suggests, any gains made by the pro-life movement under Mr Trump will be temporary and tainted, betraying decades of work to build an authentic pro-life culture.
“The pro-life movement has over the years painstakingly put itself in a position where it can authentically resist the attempts of our opponents to marginalise us as led by old, white, privileged, racist, misogynist men who want to use and control women’s bodies,” he observes, “but with the election of Trump – who could not fit better into that category – all of our work now risks being undermined.”
Mark Barnes, writing at catholicherald.co.uk, echoes Camosy’s call for Catholics to distance themselves from Mr Trump, pointing out that claims by some that the president-elect would be ‘the lesser of two evils’ ring hollow in the face of celebrations suggesting that “conservative Catholics who so argued are wedded to conservatism; flirting with Catholicism”.
Barnes concedes that there may be gains for Catholics in a Trump presidency – “a reduction of abortions, an increased protection of religious liberty, and the return of several moral issues (gay marriage especially) to the decision-making capacities of the state”, but ventures that such gains would be made at economic and social costs Catholics should find unacceptable.
Hypocritical
In this he perhaps does not go far enough, because aside from the likelihood that any gains might be shortlived, it seems hypocritical to paint the looming presidency as a golden age of religious freedom when Mr Trump has expressed the intention to create a register of Muslims in the US and his website calls for Muslims to be banned from entering the country.
It seems that those who voted for Mr Trump in the name of religious freedom were interested only in their freedom, not that of their neighbours.