It all started with some nuns on a bus.
Now, with midterm elections coming up next month, more faith-based organisations are hitting the road to energise religious voters.
They include Vote Common Good, which is reaching out to progressive evangelicals, and the Family Research Council’s Values Bus, reaching out to conservative evangelicals.
Attendees sign the Values Bus in support of the conservative voter turnout campaign during a tour stop. Both conservative and progressive teams are on bus tours ahead of the midterm elections. PICTURE: Courtesy of FRC Action
Both are after a key voting bloc – the evangelical Christians who have been among President Trump’s most reliable supporters.
For Vote Common Good co-chair and executive director Doug Pagitt, a bus tour is as much inspired by modern political campaigns as it is by the tent revivals made popular by evangelists such as Billy Graham and, before him, Billy Sunday.
“We’re not doing this like a revival – it literally is a revival,” Pagitt said.
Bus tours like the ones leading up to midterms this year combine political activism with moral convictions, said Quardricos Driskell, who teaches religion and politics at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.
“Bus tours lend themselves to grassroots advocacy and grassroots efforts in getting out the vote,” said Driskell. “I think, if anything, religious groups have now taken the model that campaigns traditionally have used on these bus tours.”
Driskell also pointed back to the civil rights movement, when the religious left organised Freedom Rides into the South to challenge segregation. That religious left is seeing a resurgence today, he said.
For evangelicals on both the right and the left, Driskell said, “What really hangs in balance is the moral character of the country.”
Nuns on the Bus
The Nuns on the Bus got their start during the 2012 presidential campaign.
“We started a trend. Isn’t it cool?” said Sister Simone Campbell of the Sisters of Social Service.
Campbell helped the progressive Catholic group Network launch that first Nuns on the Bus tour to challenge US Representative Paul Ryan’s proposed budget and to highlight faith-based charities that could be harmed by the cuts it proposed.
All told, the Nuns on the Bus have gone out on six tours, advocating for issues including immigration reform, voter turnout and closing the wealth gap.
This week, about 30 Catholic nuns hit the roadfor the Nuns on the Bus Tax Justice Truth Tour, which started Monday in Santa Monica, California, and will end on 2nd November with a “Fiesta for the Common Good” outside Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida golf resort.
“The power of a bus trip is we get into local communities and hear the stories of local people and find out what their struggles are,” said Campbell.
The nuns’ appeal and message reach beyond Catholics. And their activism has made a difference.
Even before they boarded the bus, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, Network nuns’ support “made all the difference in the world” to passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Vote Common Good
Last week, Vote Common Good also set out on the highway.
The group of progressive evangelical Christians, headed by Pagitt, describes itself as nonpartisan but opposed to Trump’s agenda.
It aims to encourage evangelical Christians – who traditionally have been associated with the Republican Party, and perhaps never more so than now, given white evangelical support for Trump – to “vote their values rather than their longtime party”.
Pagitt argued that Republican candidates support Trump administration policies on taxes, immigration and the environment that are “contrary to the teaching of Jesus”. Flipping Congress for the Democratic Party in November would be more in line with Christian values, he said.
The tour grew out of discussions over the past few years by Pagitt, John Pavlovitz, Frank Schaeffer and others who came out of the evangelical tradition about what the religious response to Trump should be, according to Pagitt.
“Sometimes you just have to get out on the road and meet people where they are and go to their place,” he said. “You just can’t hashtag your way into social change.”
This year’s midterms are so important because the Trump administration is so different from past administrations, Padgitt said
Vote Common Good left on 2nd October from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and plans to visit more than 30 congressional districts where a Democratic challenger hopes to unseat a Republican incumbent. The group planned its route with help from Representative Ted Lieu of the 33rd District of California, vice chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. James Carville also is advising the group.
Along the way, the tour will feature progressive Christian speakers, including Rev Nadia Bolz Weber, Rev Jacqui Lewis, Brian McLaren and Shane Claiborne. It also will reach out to Democratic candidates to help them better understand evangelicals and their concerns.
Values Bus
The conservative Christian Family Research Council Action rolled out its Values Bus late last month at its Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC. The bus is scheduled to stop in a dozen states before Election Day on 6th November. FRC Action Director Brent Keilen said the organization has had the bus at least four years and tours every two years ahead of elections.
This tour will culminate in The Event on 4th November at Charis Bible College in Woodland Park, Colorado, with conservative Christian voters called on to pledge to “pray, to vote, to stand” during a simulcast on its website.
“There’s just so much at stake, and our hope is to really draw attention to that and to point out the importance of those races,” Keilen said.
The tour is aimed at reaching “SAGE Cons” – “Spiritually Active, Governance Engaged Conservatives” – a demographic identified by evangelical researcher George Barna, said Keilen. There are 20 million to 30 million of them in the US, said Keilen, and he said more than 90 per cent voted in the 2016 election.
“With groups like that, if we can get the message out and they hear what’s going on, what’s at stake, they will turn out,” he said.
A YouTube video promoting The Event encourages those conservative evangelicals to be hopeful.
“Hey,” it says, “look on the bright side: Things are moving in the right direction.”
The video points to issues and actions taken by the Trump administration that are important to Family Research Council’s conservative evangelical supporters: tax cuts, religious freedom, abortion, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and appointing conservative justices to the Supreme Court.
“Values voters can determine whether this country stays on the path of greatness,” said a written statement from FRC President Tony Perkins, who has been a vocal Trump supporter.
