By Chrissy Stroop
Here we are, a week and a half after Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden became the mathematically inevitable president-elect, and yet Donald Trump’s base continues to push false narratives that Trump “really” won because of non-existent “voter fraud,” or that he will somehow yet prevail. Trump himself, of course, constantly spreads this disinformation and stokes his authoritarian base, which predominantly consists of white Christians, and white evangelicals above all. On Sunday, November 8, Senior Pastor of Eagle Mountain International Church Terri Pearsons thanked God for “giving our administration legal strategies” and exposing “the enemy,” begging, “And Lord, if it be your will and if it be necessary, another election, another voting day.”
Among those on the losing side of the 2020 presidential election, will cooler heads prevail once the dust settles? Despite a handful of visible Republican leaders like former Ohio Governor John Kasich and Senator Mitt Romney recognizing President-elect Biden, and despite the evangelical groups that formed to support Biden before the election, author and expert on the Christian Right Katherine Stewart is right to warn us that Trump’s Christian nationalist supporters are not simply going to quietly accept these election results, and that the political obstruction they engage in so effectively will continue until a president they recognize as “legitimate” rises to power.
Of course, within the bounds of American democratic rules, norms, and procedures, Biden won the presidency fair and square, in spite of the disproportionate power granted to Republicans through the undemocratic Electoral College, GOP voter suppression and gerrymandering, and equal representation of all states in the Senate regardless of population. There is no doubt that Biden is the legitimate president-elect, except to those who, for ideological reasons, rule out the very possibility of a Democratic president being legitimate.
I know something about those people. A 1980 baby, I remember how upset my evangelical community was when President Bill Clinton won the 1992 election. People immediately started suggesting that he was or might be the Antichrist, and making “jokes” about his death. The punchline to one of them was “President Gore,” as if the supposed horror captured in that phrase was one reason—presumably the only reason—not to wish for Clinton’s death.
Although both Bill and Hillary Clinton are practicing Christians, most people around me uncritically accepted every baseless conspiracy theory they came across about them. And in 2008 I, now very much an ex-evangelical, watched them do it all again with President Barack Obama, adding “secret Muslim” to the list of wild accusations that once again included being the Antichrist.
So, what’s going on here?
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