Reaching Evangelicals and Catholics: An Interview with Doug Pagitt of Vote Common Good

Doug Pagitt, a Midwestern Evangelical Pastor and founder of Vote Common Good, describes that in the 2020 election, there was a 5 to 10 percent shift in Evangelical voters away from Republicans. He is confident that an additional 5 to 10 percent are looking for an “exit ramp” from supporting Republicans involved with “policies of division, racism, selfishness, cruelty, and exclusion.  

As part of a series of articles for ROOM about bridging divides in the United States, I interviewed him about his work with politicians, as well as Evangelical and Catholic voters, and asked for advice for people on the left who are interested in building inclusive coalitions. 

 

Could you tell me about the work you’re doing with politicians?

Our fundamental work is to help Democratic politicians feel comfortable saying that they want the vote of Evangelicals and Catholics. You would think that’s not a thing you would have to do: Why is that a problem? It’s an amazingly high-cost thing to do. There is so much pressure on Democratic politicians to not cater to the right. 

We work with Katie Porter in California: she goes to Evangelical churches all the time. She goes to meet the pastors and hangs out in the lobby and says, “I  feel like our groups never get to know each other.”  The message comes across: “I see you, and I know this church is in my district.”  

But people need help getting there. Toward the end of a speech at one of our events, a candidate described getting to “add something into my speech that I normally don’t say:  Growing up, my mom was our pastor.”  The crowd warmed up, and she went on and on. Afterward she said, “I’ve been door-knocking through the district here, and I keep meeting all these people at the door that say, ‘I’m a Christian. So I vote for Republicans.’ I haven’t understood that maybe we can change that.” I understand it: “You’ve been an elected representative, and you’ve never told anybody that you grew up with a pastor as a mom.” She wouldn’t have done that if her dad had been a labor organizer or if her mom had been in the Marines. But she had an intuition in Wisconsin that it’s a political liability, as a Democrat, to tell people that your parent was a pastor.

What we have found is even when people are not religious at all—“I never grew up in it, and I’ve watched religion really do some harm”—that’s the thing they can share. Say to people, “Hey, look, I’ve seen that religion can be really harmful, though I’ve also seen the beautiful things it does.” And you know, you’ll have a bunch of Catholics and Evangelicals nodding their heads and going, “Yeah, we know, like, thanks for that. That’s the world we’re living in all the time.”

Our fundamental argument is that Evangelicals, like every other group, don’t need their president to be like them. But they do want their president to like them. If you can give off the attitude that you like them and you respect them, even if you don’t always agree with them, that’s important.

Can you describe the work you do with Catholic and Evangelical voters?

We travel the country, provide resources, and host online communities, but it’s all really in one effort, and that is to help Evangelicals and Catholics who have shaped their understanding of themselves due to their political and religious identity. These are really not religious and theological categories. They’re sociocultural categories: when you meet someone, and they say, “Hey, I’m a Catholic,” you don’t often say to them, “Let’s chat a little about your theology of the Mother Mary,” right? They’re like, “Nah, I don’t actually think about that stuff at all.” Or if you even say, “Well, what parish are you involved in?” they might say, “Oh, I haven’t gone to church for years. But I’m Catholic.”  Jewish communities understand this—Muslim communities as well. That’s what’s confusing to a lot of people about Evangelicals particularly. They think it’s religion. I’m not saying these people are not religious—they certainly are. There’s definitely a religious component. But it’s fundamentally a world view or a sociocultural category—a frame of reference to their lives. And we help people detach their political identity from the rest of this cultural shaping. 

For a lot of people, being good is an important piece of this. We’re trying to contrast their best goodness with “Why are you doing things where you feel like you’re plugging your nose to still vote for Donald Trump or a Republican person, or where you feel you’re violating your sense of goodness somewhere?”  

Another piece is understanding yourself in the milieu of all the changes in culture and society. Where do you find your sense of community?  

The third element is that many of these people don’t see themselves fundamentally as political. When you start talking about politics, they’re like, “Hey, man, I’m not political,” and then you drill down a little deeper, and they definitely are, but by their own definition: being a good person who’s in a community is that you put your values higher than just a political identity.

In 2019, we did a series of interviews with Evangelicals, especially white Evangelicals, who voted for Trump in 2016 but were not going to vote for Trump in 2020, primarily because of their faith. One of the pattern pieces was “I’m not political.” And we’d ask them, “Have you ever voted for someone who’s not a Republican?” “No, I’ve never not voted for a Republican, but I’m not political, in that same way.” There’s something where there’s a way to narrate your story, that you’re a good person, you’re doing the heroic thing inside your community, and you’re not being bossed around by the political forces. When someone comes to the realization that any one of those is not actually the heroic piece  —

 

What do you mean by the heroic piece?

Because your religion gives you a narrative of how you’re a good person, then your job is to act in ways that are good when other people are acting in ways that aren’t. So very
often—and this was particular to voting for Donald Trump, but I think it’s broader than that—they would say things like “Look, I didn’t want to vote for Donald Trump. But I couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.” Like she had become this image of something so diabolical that they had to do the heroic thing in voting for Donald Trump. The story they had in their heads wasn’t “I did a bad thing voting for Trump.” It was “I did the heroic thing in 2016, because I couldn’t vote for her. But now I’ve realized that really wasn’t the choice I should have made. Now I’m going to do the next heroic thing and not vote for him again.”

People saw themselves as acting heroically on what they knew was good inside a community that gave them meaning. But they broke a community norm. And then they had to navigate. You start looking around at your church or the people in your town or the people at your coffee shop, and you’re like, “Who am I going to talk to? Who do I know?”

We are trying to help people see a community that’s still your people but just voting a different way.

 

What about abortion?

This has been made into a political issue. It’s a stand-in.

I’ve talked to hundreds of people who say that abortion is the single issue they base their vote on. And I know people who are single-issue voters truly, and abortion is the issue. But they are so rare. 

In 2019 to 2020, I asked hundreds of people: “Do a thought experiment with me. If you turn on your radio tomorrow and hear that Joe Biden came out and said, ‘Look, I had an epiphany overnight. The Mother Mary herself visited me, and I’ve changed my view on abortion. I now am a pro-life candidate.” Would you consider voting for him?” To a person they all said no.

 

In his 2020 sequel to What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank says that it’s “a tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly.”  What do you think about that? Do you think people feel condescended to?

That is the fuel that drives the engine, no doubt about it. It’s the biggest thing. And the advice we give to people in other professions is: Do the best you can to help people not compare one side’s best against the other side’s worst. 

Speak of your own limitations and that there are some things the other side gets right.  

This piece was condensed from a longer interview. Watch the full conversation, below.

 

Speaking with White Catholics and Evangelicals: An Interview with Doug Pagitt of Vote Common Good

Elizabeth Cutter Evert

 

Elizabeth Cutter Evert: It’s great to see you. In 2022, you spoke with ROOM about the work you were doing then with Catholic and Evangelical voters, encouraging them to vote their conscience, and to vote based on the values that are in their faith traditions.   

I thought I’d start with asking you how things have been going.  How are people feeling?

Doug Pagitt: I’ve felt a personal, deep sense of sadness to the point of depression about all of this. There was something that made it easier in 2016 when I could say there were all these excuses for why people did it. 

The group I know well are the religious voters in this country. One of the things that happened in 2020 was that Joe Biden received an increase in the number of religious voters who voted for him, self-identified religious voters. Especially white religious voters. 

In 2024, Donald Trump lost white religious voters. The problem was, he picked up with other voters that filled in the gap.  

Religious support for Donald Trump and for the Republican party has been on the decline [even though] 78% or 80% of evangelicals who voted chose Donald Trump. But that is different than saying that 80% of all evangelicals voted that way. If someone sits out voting, you can have a shrinking number of overall people from a particular demographic group, but still have the percentage of that group who voted be really high.  

***

What many Democrats don’t know is that of those who vote[d] for the president in 2016, in 2020, in 2024, somewhere between 55 and 58% of the people who voted for the Democrat [candidate] were white Christians. 65% to 68% are Christians overall. And just above 70% are religious people. It’s literally the base of the Democratic Party.  

But the Democratic Party does not talk about that. They don’t organize in any way to reach religious voters. The VAN, which is the Voter Access Network file that tells you what door should you knock on, or what phone [number] should you call, doesn’t have a category to sort voters by religious identity. They dropped it in 1992. In 2024, in the Democratic Official Platform, nearly every religion you can think of in America was named as included in the Democratic Party. Except Christianity.

Why did 60% of evangelicals vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980? And 16% vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016? Democrats stopped asking for religious voters, and began to not respond to the claim from Republicans that they’ve been making about Democrats for 100 years that [Democrats] are the godless party.

And in that period of time, Republicans have said, that’s among our top priorities of what we care about with you. Democrats have said essentially, like, hey, we’re glad to have everybody, just don’t talk too much about it.

So we did this poll, ad we specifically [polled] self-identified white Christians. 

It’s not because we want the country to be more white and Christian, we’re just recognizing that it predominantly still is. There’s roughly 70 million self-identified adult evangelicals in America. It’s a huge number. There’s roughly 50 or 60 million white Catholics in America. So you’re talking 120, 130, maybe 140 million Americans that are in those two categories.  [155,201,157 people voted in the 2024 presidential election ] 

So we asked: Have you ever voted for a Democrat?  

Those who had never voted for a Democrat, we asked them: Would you consider voting for a Democrat?

 87% said they would consider voting for a Democrat.

So, then we started asking: What would it take? 

We thought it [would be] abortion. As it turns out, it’s not abortion. Now, there’s 50% of those who said, no, if a candidate differs with me on abortion, I wouldn’t vote for him. We don’t know of that 50% where their view on abortion is. What we do know from actual voting from religious people is that they [tend to] vote to allow people to have access to abortion, so that’s a little confusing. 

The other 50% of those people who said, I would consider voting for a Democrat, it wasn’t about abortion. It was about: would the Democratic Party welcome me?

In our overall poll, 20–23% of people who were Democrats felt welcomed in the Democratic Party.

We [Democrats] need to find a way to convincingly say: I like you. And we need you. It’s hard to convince people that it’s true. But starting with believing that you should offer that is crucial.

ECE: What’s been particularly effective in helping the politicians to make this bridge?

DP: The number one thing that 47 or 48% [of religious people] told us would get them to consider voting for a Democrat was if a candidate would be willing to meet with their pastor. Only 20% said they would have to agree with their pastor. 

Talk to these people. Who you talk to and when you talk to them really matters.

And then name them as a part of your community. We say to candidates, when you’re going to talk about homelessness you can say: Over at First Baptist Church, they run a food shelf. Find out what they’re actually doing, because they’re actually doing a lot around these issues.

Notice and name and say to people, We see you’re here, you’re an important part of our community, and we want you with us.

And if you can’t be with us, that’s okay, we will still be there with you. 

And then we tell them, as a candidate, don’’t have to be like religious people to get them to vote for you.  But you do have to say you like religious people.

At some points we say: Just do for all the religious communities what you do for Black churches.  

***

ECE: I know you have been very active on questions of the border, immigration, and the camps.  You have some initiatives you’re starting there. Among these people that you’re working with,  how are they feeling about how all of that’s rolling out? 

DP: We care a lot about immigration for many reasons.

The personal impact on people. Also the role the United States plays as the largest and most complex immigration-receiving country in the world is important. We think it’s a part of our strength as a country.

Religiously, we think it’s super important to pay attention to an issue that, in the Jewish and Christian texts, they’re very clear about: immigrants and displaced people being sojourners and trying to find a new land. It also is an issue on which many religious people who vote for Republicans disagree with the Republican Party on.

Because they know that their own church communities, their own faith, their own lived experience is not what Republicans are telling them. They tell us in surveys, and they tell us privately, and they say it all the time.

One of the things that’s happening is there’s a bunch of people who are quiet-quitting Donald Trump, meaning they’re not coming out and saying it, they’re not writing it on social media, they’re not telling their family, they’ve just stopped listening, they’re just done. This is how we actually deal with things where our own culpability starts to show up. 

We’re doing a lot of work. We have a sign-on letter to the organizers of the White House Office of Faith, Paula White and crowd, to demand that they join the rest of the religious communities and condemn these internment centers. And then we’re gonna do some actions at the internment centers that are currently open, and some in Washington, D.C. 

 The Trump administration just hits this country with so many crises at the same time. You don’t negotiate with people like this. You resist what they’re doing. You keep hope, and you keep faith, and you pursue love, and you resist this stuff.

***

ECE: Do you have anything you want to say about Christian nationalism that might be useful? Resources that people could turn to, to understand that better?

DP: We operate a website called Confronting Christian Nationalism. Christian nationalism is a strange phrase that a lot of people don’t know what it means. We like to say it’s the belief that a nation derives its authority from and should grant extra privilege to a particular religion. People say things like Well, you know, this is a Christian nation, and I’ve had Jewish friends of mine say, Hey, we get it, this is a Christian nation. I’m like: It’s not. It’s a nation where the predominant religion is Christianity, but we have said in this country that the authority comes not from the gods, and not from the kings. The power comes from “We the people.”