Paula White, televangelist and Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office, offers an entirely unorthodox form of Christianity. Yet she represents much of President Donald Trump’s religious voter base. With the right family policies, this would not be too hard to fix.
Trends in religion usually help color Republican election success, and this past year was no exception. Partisanship between regular and irregular religious attendees has been deepening for years. By now, Trump’s election results map is nearly identical to a map of U.S. religious attendance from political scientist Ryan Burge.
Marriage and parenting tend to turn people a bit more conservative and religious — for some reason beyond mere selection into the institutions. Those families end up moving to already dark-red states as part of an observed “blue state exodus,” put off partly by liberal politics and partly by family-incompatible city planning. As a result, the seemingly more educated and less religious regions remain blue, while the more religious and less educated ones get redder.
Trump appointed White an adviser in the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative late in his first term, so it was no great shock when he reappointed her at the start of his second. Still, the choice saw strong pushback. Rejected by most Christian leaders, White is a fraudulent “pastor” who preaches the prosperity gospel over orthodoxy to her mass of followers. Most recently, she explained that there are “seven supernatural blessings” to be gained from a $1,000 donation made before Easter Sunday.
Charitably, White is not your average Christian. But her followers might be: They do not have to be as committed to the skit as she is to be willing to identify with it and still have enough options to shop around all the while. Many Christians settle for a subpar representative of the Church, and many still are deceived. Even so, humans reaching for a higher good means that most find a sense of fervor and belonging anyway. These make up the broad stroke of voters to whom Trump appeals.
In the same post that details overall religious attendance, Burge reveals a positive correlation between frequency of religious attendance and education level, as well as between parenting status and frequent religious attendance. More strongly than either, being a highly educated parent indicates weekly religious attendance: “Among folks who have a bachelor’s degree who are parents, about 30% of them are weekly attenders — that’s three times higher than those who do not have children.” The percentage-point differences between parent- and non-parent religious attendees generally decrease in magnitude as education level decreases.
And yet, the most educated regions of the country — Massachusetts and Washington D.C., notably — are the deepest blue. Of course, education without Christian influence trends toward the secular enlightenment mode we see in those areas. But it doesn’t have to be so determinate.
TRUMP SET TO FREEZE PLANNED PARENTHOOD FAMILY PLANNING FUNDS PENDING DEI REVIEW
Anti-family urban planning is noticeable to the parents who live in these cities. Parents are there, and some plan to stay. Many other couples in these cities are discouraged from having families. If there is something in parenting that spurs religious attendance — and there is — the Republican Party would do well to put its best efforts into making these same blue cities more family-friendly. A pro-family housing agenda is one place to start.
Instead, we have someone such as Paula White as faith adviser, keeping American voting demographics as divided as typical stereotypes would have one assume. Blue cities are open game for encouraging families and generating religiosity, but they require policy and orthodoxy, not fraud and invention.