When President Trump and Joe Biden on Thursday dueled over the sincerity of the former vice president’s faith, they implicitly acknowledged the outsize role religion is playing in the 2020 election.
Trump started the feud, remarking at an Ohio event that Biden is “against God” and would “hurt God” if elected president. Trump’s words were a crude distillation of weeks of messaging from his campaign — that Biden’s stances on abortion and religious freedom make him a bad fit for religious voters — and they provoked a strongly worded response from Biden.
“We’re in the battle for the soul of our nation, and President Trump’s decision today to profane God and to smear my faith in a political attack is a stark reminder of what the stakes of this fight truly are,” Biden said in a Thursday night statement.
Political operators in both the Trump and Biden camps agree that when it comes to faith, and particularly Biden’s Catholicism, the stakes are high. Both are working to capture crucial votes in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump won in 2016 by only a few thousand votes. These states are disproportionately Catholic, a demographic that went for Trump — and Republicans and Democrats alike are scrambling to show off their candidates’ religious bona fides.
Patrick Carolan, director of Catholic outreach at the Vote Common Good, an organization driving voters toward Biden, said that, in his mind, 2020 will “absolutely” come down to Catholic voters in Upper Midwest swing states. Carolan, who has rallied supporters at Biden campaign events, said that the best strategy Democrats can pursue is to peel as many Catholics away from Trump as possible.
“It’s not likely we’re going to convert everybody,” he said. “But we only need about 7 to 10% of those Catholics that voted for Donald Trump to not vote for him this time — and it’s really going to come down to that.”
Of course, there are many obstacles to convincing Catholic voters to change their minds. Foremost among these are Biden’s position on the Hyde Amendment, which bars federally funding of abortions in most cases, and his stance against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order that in July emerged victorious from nearly a decade of litigation before the Supreme Court over an Obama-era contraception mandate.
The former vice president is against both the Hyde Amendment and the Little Sisters decision and has said that he would reimpose the contraception mandate if elected. These positions in recent weeks have drawn increased criticism from many Trump surrogates, including Vice President Mike Pence, who often acts as the president’s top ambassador to religious people.
On top of those two issues, the Trump campaign is pushing the narrative that Biden’s anti-religious animus is even broader than his political positions on abortion and religious liberty protections. When protesters in June began toppling statues of historic figures, as well as of Catholic saints and depictions of Jesus, the campaign claimed that these acts of vandalism could be linked to Biden.
“This is all part of the culture of life,” Trump spokeswoman Mercedes Schlapp told anti-abortion supporters in July. “We want to protect life. We don’t want to tear it down. I think those are the two areas that are a big contrast point with Joe Biden.”
Organizers at the Wisconsin-based organization CatholicVote.org, which is also focusing its efforts on the Upper Midwest, on Thursday pushed Schlapp’s argument further, arguing that Biden made himself complicit in a “climate of hate against Catholics” by not condemning members of his party who have criticized members of the faith.
President Brian Burch in a list cited recent examples: an August incident where New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez implied that a statue of Saint Damien of Molokai was “racist,” California Sen. Kamala Harris’s 2019 criticism of a Trump judicial nominee who is a Knight of Columbus, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s remark that Amy Coney Barrett, a nominee for a federal judgeship, could not serve impartially as a judge because Catholic teaching “lives loudly” within her.
“These attacks on the Church raise serious questions about the commitment of Joe Biden, a self-professed Catholic, to stand up to the rising climate of anti-Catholicism across the country,” Burch said.
But for those in the Biden camp, many argue similar criticisms could be applied to Trump, citing the president’s stances on immigration, his child separation policy, and his handling of the protests after the May death of George Floyd in police custody. At the “Believers for Biden” launch event last week, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons compared the former vice president to a pastor who will bring about “reconciliation” after the Trump era.
Carolan extended that comparison, saying that, when looking at the candidates with clear eyes, Catholics should think about Biden as the one who is truly “pro-life.” Carolan argued that the best pitch to Catholics on the fence is that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a stake in ending abortion — making its abolition a nonfactor in the actual policies of either Trump or Biden.
“What does it really mean to be pro-life?” Carolan said. “Pro-life is not just about abortion. You have to look at the whole series of issues combined and look at who the best candidate is. Donald Trump’s policies are clearly not keeping in Catholic tradition and Catholic social justice teaching.”
Biden’s policies, especially on the climate and immigration, Carolan contended, are. Traditionalist Catholic supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the spring made a similar argument about their candidate, arguing that since Trump will not be able to outlaw abortion, he’s no better on that issue for religious voters than any other candidate.
Trump partisans are not convinced that that argument will win over issue-driven Catholics, many of whom have voted chiefly on abortion for decades. And, even if it did, the religious liberty issue still remains. Frank Pavone, a priest and anti-abortion activist, who, until recently, served in the Trump campaign’s outreach arm to Catholics, said that Biden’s position on the Little Sisters may prove to be his undoing.
“We’ve just been through nearly a decade of battles, and Joe Biden wants to start that up all over again,” he said. “How are Catholics supposed to take that?”
