Immigration: The Other Reason That Evangelicals Won't Abandon Trump

White evangelical Christians will overwhelmingly vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020 despite the recent dust-up with Christianity Today magazine and their editorial last week calling for the President's impeachment and removal from office. They broadly support Trump's appointment of conservative judges to the federal courts and hope that his appointees will reverse the judiciary's secular tilt toward LGBT and abortion rights.

However, there is a second, and equally important, reason that evangelicals won't abandon Trump and that is immigration. Professor Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University recently examined the results from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study which collected information from about 60,000 participants on a range of issues including their attitudes on immigration. In examining the five questions in the survey having to do with both legal and illegal immigration, he found that white evangelicals were by far the most conservative and least supportive of liberal immigration policies. And, it appears that they are substantially outside of the mainstream on the issue.

Professor Ryan Burge: "The gap between white evangelicals and the average American is humongous. In fact, on four of the five issue areas the total distance between the two groups is at least twenty percentage points."

Professor Burge's findings are not all that surprising, as we have reported before. Other research has shown that white evangelicals are especially apprehensive about America's growing racial diversity which many attribute to recent immigration trends.

Religious News Service: "As a group, white evangelicals were also the least likely to view America’s changing racial demographic makeup positively. Fifty-two percent of white evangelicals said they felt negatively about the prospect that nonwhites would become the majority of the population by 2043. That fits with white evangelicals’ approach to immigration, their distrust of Muslims and support for a border wall with Mexico. By comparison, all other religious groups in the survey viewed the changing demographics in mostly positive terms."

So, expect that President Trump will return to immigration policy themes in 2020 as the election draws near. It's his signature issue and he will need to energize evangelical voters if he stands any chance of winning the election.

#2020election #immigration #politics #evangelicals

By: Don Lam & Curated Content