The Biden campaign on Thursday launched Believers for Biden, a campaign coalition targeting religious voters, in an event headlined by Delaware Sen. Chris Coons.
Coons, a longtime Biden ally and ordained minister, presented the former vice president as “a servant leader who sees, understands, and welcomes the breadth and diversity of the American experience.” Coons added that, unlike President Trump, Joe Biden is “personally engaged in pastoring, caring, witnessing to the possibility of reconciliation in our nation.”
Josh Dickson, an evangelical whom the campaign hired in mid-July to start outreach to faith-based voters, framed Biden’s appeal to religious voters in more blunt terms.
“This election is about two visions for this country that are diametrically opposed,” he said. “And we believe that Joe’s vision is rooted in that idea of redemption and restoration.”
Dickson, who left the Republican Party in 2012 to work on then-President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, called the narrative of “redemption” the key to understanding how the Biden campaign can reach a wide-ranging array of people of faith. He added that “leaning into the idea of human flourishing” and creating a “more redemptive, just, restorative society” are ways in which the campaign hopes to present ideas of racial and economic justice to religious voters.
And like the Trump campaign, which has multiple faith coalitions, the Biden campaign plans to start hosting public weekly prayer calls, as well as other faith-oriented events. Many of these will reinforce the idea of the “fight against injustice” and the “love of mercy,” Dickson said.
Biden, who is a vocal Catholic, has often faced criticism from religious voters for taking political positions that do not align with his church’s teaching. The most prominent of these are his opinions on abortion and gay marriage, which led to him being denied communion last year at a South Carolina church.
Biden also stirred discontent in July when he spoke out against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns that the Supreme Court this year relieved of a long-running dispute over an Obama-era contraception mandate.
