The Trump campaign, facing wilting support, is increasingly pitching the president as a defender of religious freedom, while portraying former Vice President Joe Biden as an ally of left-wing animosity toward the free practice of religion.
The campaign in July organized a series of prayer calls, tailored for individual faith communities, and honed its religious messaging, especially in the wake of widespread closure of churches in the spring, a disappointing term at the Supreme Court, and most recently, a violent resurgence of anti-Catholicism.
In a Thursday video to supporters, Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of Trump’s top fundraisers, painted the reelection of President Trump as the driving force behind preserving religious liberty. Guilfoyle, who was raised Catholic, said that all Christians should be concerned about the defacement of statues of Jesus and Mary as well as “assaults on our Christian faith” during the coronavirus pandemic.
“President Trump, through his four years in office, has been a fierce defender of Christianity and our right to practice openly around the world,” Guilfoyle said. “The Democrats who claim to be staunch defenders of human rights around the world feel comfortable denying you this most sacred right we have as Americans.”
Guilfoyle’s words echoed those of Trump campaign spokeswoman Mercedes Schlapp, who, during an event in early July, advised campaigners to broaden the culture war beyond anti-abortion rhetoric, which Trump made a critical campaign issue in 2016. Instead, Schlapp said, in 2020, the emphasis on social issues should include a defense of statues, monuments, and American history, in addition to pushing against abortion.
“This is all part of the culture of life,” she said. “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.”
The campaign has also been eager to contrast itself with Biden on a long-running Supreme Court battle involving the Little Sisters of the Poor, which the Catholic group of nuns won this spring. The Trump administration claimed the victory as its own — and blamed Biden, via his position in the Obama administration, for initiating the battle in the first place.
The Biden campaign, in response, leaned into the Trump administration’s portrait of his position, announcing after the Supreme Court’s decision, which approved a Trump-instituted exception to a contraception mandate for the Little Sisters, that he would reverse the exception. Biden, up to that point, had been unclear on whether or not he would support an exception for the group.
The former vice president’s stance against the Little Sisters gave the Trump campaign and boosters ammo to attack him as an enemy of religious people. In a Wednesday letter to supporters, Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, a pro-Trump group seeking to win religious votes in the Upper Midwest swing states, criticized Biden for “putting the pursuit of power and his ego ahead of what’s good and true.”
“Joe Biden is your typical ‘Catholic’ politician who makes sure he’s seen with ashes on his forehead during Lent, but then backstabs the Church whenever it is convenient,” Burch wrote. “He’s flipped on nearly every issue that matters.”
Burch concluded that to protect religious imagery and liberty, religious voters must “stop” Biden in November.
While the Trump campaign has been aggressive in courting various religious backgrounds, conservative Catholics and evangelicals chief among them, Biden has been making a more muted play for religious voters. The former vice president’s campaign does not hold prayer calls like the Trump campaign, but Biden does appear at churches — notably making one of his first public appearances in months at a black church in Delaware after the death of George Floyd.
And while he disavows the religious liberty causes that Trump champions, especially protections from anti-discrimination laws for faith-based institutions, Biden pushes his support for environmental activism and immigration reform as rooted in religion.
Despite outside concerns about this approach, Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s former rival for the Democratic nomination, told the Associated Press in July that he believes Biden’s embrace of faith on a purely personal level will “resonate with Americans a lot more than usual.”
