Both can be Nazis...

‘Frankenstein coalition’: Can Trump win Barstool and Bible-study Republicans?

Young men are now more religious than their female counterparts for the first time in American history.

By Adam Wren

Former President Donald Trump is turning not just to football games, WWE and the Barstool Sports crowd as he scrambles to get men to the polls.

He’s also looking to the pews.

For years, white evangelicals have been one of Trump’s most reliable constituencies. But when he took the stage at his “Believers and Ballots” town hall in Zebulon, Georgia, he acknowledged the problem he could have this year.

“Christians are not tremendous voters in terms of percentage,” Trump said, fielding a question from a young man about the latest survey from the evangelical pollster George Barna that suggested 32 million regular churchgoers may stay home on Election Day — a doomsday scenario for the former president.

“If they were, we’d never lose an election,” Trump said.

But as the election draws to a close, Trump is attempting to tap into a shift in church membership that could factor heavily on Election Day. Young men are now more religious than their female counterparts for the first time in American history.

“While these latter, libertarian and libertine voters are reliably anti-progressive and align closely with Donald Trump’s policies in 2024, they’re a far cry from the religious right of yesteryear,” said John Shelton, policy director for Advancing American Freedom, the group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. “It remains to be seen whether this Frankenstein coalition will usher Trump into the White House or simply turn off more traditional Republican voters than it pulls in.”

Trump is finding help for his effort in the church, with some white evangelical pastors leaning heavily into politics in recent months — calling Harris a “Jezebel spirit,” a reference to the Bible’s archetypal wicked woman — and espousing machismo from the pulpit and online. Mark Driscoll, the celebrity Scottsdale, Arizona, pastor, recently told his online followers that there “is something fundamentally broken and effeminate in a man who wants his government to provide for him.

Rather than proselytizing to the cultural elite — as the late Tim Keller, once considered the next Billy Graham, pursued young professionals in Manhattan — they are espousing a “negative world missiology,” leaning heavily on some voters’ misgivings about transgenderism and gay marriage.

The effort, as Josh Howerton, the Dallas-based pastor of Lakepointe Church, put it, is to transition the church from “kinda feminine vibes to ‘get the men and build the families.’”

There is a risk in this strategy. Each time Trump talks about Arnold Palmer’s penis or waffles on abortion to cater to the Barstool crowd, he exposes himself to some possible defection among the faithful — or at least voters staying home.

Barna, in his own survey, noted that if regular churchgoers stay home, turned off by Trump’s equivocations on abortion, Jan. 6 and his felony conviction, “the impact bodes more poorly for President Trump’s prospects for reelection than for Mrs. Harris’s effort to succeed Joe Biden.”

In most past election cycles, keeping such a coalition together would be unworkable. And it might still be for Trump, too.

“Trump needs to win at least 78 percent of white evangelicals or his path to victory becomes quite narrow,” said Michael Wear, Barack Obama’s former faith outreach adviser and the founder, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life. “This strategy of trying to align those attracted by his vulgar appeals with down-home, bless your heart evangelicals, the risk is that he turns off more than he can afford to turn off.”

But if there is any politician who can fuse the coalitions, it may be Trump. Evangelicals were deeply skeptical of him before he became the presidential nominee in 2016. Today, the latest Pew Research Center data shows Trump polling at 82 percent with white Evangelicals.

“He can multitask,” said Ralph Reed, the Faith and Freedom Coalition chair, when asked whether Trump faced a risk in trying to align the two coalitions.

And that is in part because Trump already has remade politics in the pews more than the church has reshaped him.

Graham died in 2018, and Keller died in 2023 — both at the time of a widespread fracturing of the white evangelical movement. And Trump filled something of a vacuum. From 2008 to 2022, Republicans picked up double-digit margins of support among white voters of all levels of religious attendance, from those who attend weekly (an increase of 15 percent) to those who never attend (21 percent), according to Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, drawing on data from the Cooperative Election Study.

“They were looking for someone to unify them around something,” Burge said. “And Trumpism was the thing that unified them, because they did not have any other spokesman to stand up and guide the flock. And so he became the cultural glue that holds all these disparate parts of the evangelical ecosystem together.”

Now, Trump is relying on it holding on Election Day — and bringing even more young men with it.

“I think what we’re seeing in young people is really the canary in the coal mine right now for the way politics is now shaping religion and in the future,” said Samuel Perry, the Sam K. Viersen Presidential Professor at the University of Oklahoma. “And religion can be reacting back on politics, because I think in those spaces, you’re absolutely going to get more, if not direct, endorsements of Trump, it’s going to be tacit or implicit endorsements of the kind of leadership and masculinity that Trump represents.”

Back at the Believers and Ballots Faith Town Hall event, Trump continued to answer the question about whether Christian voters would show up.

“I think we’ve really energized a lot of people this time, because they’ve seen how bad it is these last four years: it’s been a horror show,” Trump said. “An absolute horror show. And I think we’re going to see those numbers go way up.”

Trump said, “I’m almost sure of it.”