Democrats hoping to push President Donald Trump out of the White House are turning to the religious left in an effort to recruit evangelical voters ahead of the 2020 election.
National Public Radio (NPR) noted in its report that exit polls in the 2016 presidential election indicated only one of six white evangelical voters supported Hillary Clinton.
“She never asked for their votes,” Michael Wear, who directed religious outreach efforts for Barack Obama in 2012, said in the NPR report.
At least two Democrat candidates, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, are hiring “faith advisors,” and the Democratic National Committee has hired Rev. Derrick Harkins, an anti-Trump pastor who left his longtime post at Nineteenth Street Baptist Church to take a job at a controversial college in New York.
“The DNC hired former Washington, D.C. anti-Trump pastor, Rev. Derrick Harkins,” Fox News reported last month, saying he “held a similar position in 2012 and has been the senior vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which recently celebrated ‘rejoicing in the queerness of God.’”
“Within the Democratic Party, there is a huge spectrum of deeply faithful people,” Serene Jones, president of the college, told Fox News.
She continued:
For too long, when we look at religion in America, we have associated with just politics and the religious communities that have been associated with the Republican Party and conservative politics…and there is a strong progressive Christian voice that is being spoken and lifted up and demanding to be heard.
“Aside from the pro-abortion platforms, the Democrats have also alienated religious voters by working so tirelessly to remove God from daily political activities,” Clarion News reported. “For instance, the phrase ‘so help me God’ was removed from U.S. House Committee oaths earlier this year at the insistence of Democrats.”
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, delegates voted to removed the word “God” from the party platform before putting it back in again, the New York Post reported.
“We’re having these conversations in the summer of 2019 as opposed to the fall of 2020 because it helps faith leaders understand that we’re serious about this,” Harkins said in the NPR report. “We’re not scrambling at the last minute to try to cultivate relationships that will get us over the finish line.”
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