Last Friday, the leading Republican candidates for president (sans Trump) showed up in Des Moines, Iowa, to campaign among approximately 2,000 overwhelmingly white evangelicals.
The forum was sponsored by an evangelical organization called the Family Leader, an organization with a mission to “strengthen families by inspiring Christ-like leadership in the home, the church and the government.” It claims it engages in this work “not from a policy-first perspective, and never from a partisan angle, but by coming alongside the church in its gospel-first mission to transform lives and transform culture.”
The host they chose to embody this vision and interview each of the candidates was disgraced, recently fired former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. I’ll look forward to their hosting a forum for President Biden.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signs a new law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy before speaking at the Family Leadership Summit, Friday, July 14, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds also chose the event as the venue for signing a six-week abortion ban into law. The new law was immediately challenged in court by the ACLU and Iowa abortion providers and on Monday was temporarily blocked from going into effect by an Iowa judge.
After the injunction became public, Reynolds vowed to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lamented “the abortion industry’s attempt to thwart the will of Iowans and the voices of their elected representatives continues today.”
But does a six-week abortion ban, which outlaws abortions before many people even know they are pregnant, actually reflect the will of Iowans, or even of religious people?
Joy Reid and Robert P. Jones
Friday night, I was invited to join Joy Reid on MSNBC to talk about what recent polling tells us about just how out of touch these claims, and these leaders, are with the actual views not only with Iowans and Americans overall but even with Christians and other religious groups today.
As always, there wasn’t enough time to get to all the numbers on air. But here’s the clear testimony of recent polling in Iowa and the U.S. on what people today actually think about the legality of abortion.
First, despite being thought of as heartland and conservative, Iowans don’t look that different than Americans overall in their attitudes on abortion (64% of Americans today say abortion should be legal in all or most cases). They favor the legality of abortion by a margin of nearly two to one.
- A March Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of Iowans found 61% of Iowans and 70% of Iowa women, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
- PRRI’s 2022 American Values Atlas found identical numbers of support (61% of Iowans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, vs. only 34% who said it should be illegal in all or most cases).
- Only 5% of Iowans favor a complete ban on abortion. In fact, there is not a single state in the entire country in which more than 14% of residents say abortion should be illegal in all cases.
“Far from representing the mainstream, white evangelical Protestants are extreme outliers in their views on abortion.”
Far from representing the mainstream, white evangelical Protestants are extreme outliers in their views on abortion. As the country overall has become more supportive of the legality of abortion, especially over the last year since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, white evangelicals are increasingly out of step with other Americans, and even with other Christians and people of faith.
- Only about one in four (27%) white evangelical Protestants say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to seven in 10 (71%) who say it should be illegal in all or most cases.
- Nearly all other major religious groups — non-evangelical/mainline white Protestants, Catholics (both white and Hispanic Catholics), Black Protestants, Jews and Muslims — have majorities who favor the legality of abortion.
Moreover, even in a heartland state like Iowa, white evangelicals are nowhere near a majority of the population.
- In Iowa, white evangelicals comprise only about one-third of the electorate and only about one-fifth of the general population. (Because of the skewed, monolithic composition of the Republican Party, they comprise about two-thirds of Republican caucus-goers and primary voters).
- To put this into perspective, even in Iowa, there are twice as many other types of Christians — white non-evangelical/mainline Protestants (25%) and Catholics (20%) — as there are white evangelical Protestants. And religiously unaffiliated Iowans, who strongly support the legality of abortion, outnumber white evangelical Protestants by 10 percentage points (29%).
Rather than upholding “the will of Iowans,” by conducting state business in her official role as governor at a sectarian interest-group event representing barely one-fifth of her state, Gov. Reynolds is demonstrably and flagrantly ignoring the will of the vast majority of her constituents.
“White evangelicals, and their views on sexuality and reproduction, are far outside the mainstream.”
These empirical data are solid reminders that white evangelicals, and their views on sexuality and reproduction, are far outside the mainstream, even among their fellow Christians in America’s heartland. And no amount of wishful thinking on their parts, or repeated invocation of words like “family” and “faith,” are going to change that reality.
Robert P. Jones is CEO and founder of PRRI and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.
This column originally appeared on Robert P. Jones’s substack #WhiteTooLong.
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