It was a
Sunday, shortly after Donald Trump had locked up the Republican nomination for
President. We bumped into some good friends at a local restaurant. We’d known
them from church and our local community for almost 25 years, and they were
both well attuned to local politics.
What do we
do, we asked? Whom can we vote for? Both major parties were putting forward
problematic candidates. And the minor parties – the guy in favor of legalizing
marijuana and the Green candidate somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders –
offered no alternatives.
Our
friends didn’t immediately offer advice. What they said was this: “You may to
think about what you know you can expect versus what you simply don’t know.”
As it
turns out, we weren’t the only people of our generation and faith having
serious problems with all of the presidential candidates. In The
Day Christians Changed America, George Barna points out that people who
fit our demographic were having the same reactions to the candidates. It wasn’t
the “evangelical” group that the news media is so fond of referring to. It was
a group identified after extensive research.
Barna
calls this group “SAGEcons” – spiritually active, governance engaged
conservatives. They’re partially a subset of “evangelicals,” but they’re also a
subset of Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and other faith traditions. They
tend to live largely but not exclusively in the South and Midwest, and they
tend to be of the Baby Boom generation and older. They tend to have been married
to the same spouse for decades. They have grandchildren. They generally tend
not to participate in opinion polls. And what they believed was happening was the
collapse of American culture (in fact, they likely still believe this is
happening).
Historically,
says Barna, this group largely voted for Republican presidential candidates,
even though they’re weren’t completely thrilled with either John McCain or Mitt
Romney in the 2008 and 2012 elections. They are tens of millions strong, but
(again) they are not all what the media consider as “the evangelicals.” Barna
says that a Republican presidential candidate can’t win with them alone, but
also can’t win without them. And Trump had to get their votes.
This
SAGEcon group ended up voting for Donald Trump in the national election, but it
did not vote for Trump in the primaries. The primary preferences were
candidates like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, and especially Ben Carson.
Trump was not an option.
Until he
was the Republican choice. Barna describes in detail what happened to
eventually bring the SAGEcon Christians into support for Trump. One event was a
meeting at the Marriott Marquis on Times Square, when Trump spoke with more
than 1,000 Christian leaders. Another was the selection of Mike Pence as his
running mate. And there were others. What was critical was this group’s
understanding of what happened during the eight years of the Obama
Administration, and what was likely to happen with his designated successor,
Hillary Clinton.
 |
| George Barna |
A vast
majority of the SAGEcons voted for Trump, but not all of them did. A fraction
voted for Clinton. Others didn’t vote. But most went for Trump, fully
understanding that he was a seriously flawed candidate.
Barna was
founder of the Barna Research Group in 1984 and focused its work on the intersection
of faith and culture. He’s also been a pollster in three presidential
campaigns. He currently is the executive director of the American Culture and
Faith Institute, a division of United in Purpose, and president of
Metaformation, a faith development organization. Barna is also the author of
numerous books on faith, culture, and politics. He graduated summa cum laude
from Boston College, received two master’s degrees from Rutgers University, and
a Ph.D. degree from Dallas Baptist University. He and his family live in
California.
The Day Christians Changed America is based on Barna’s own extensive
research and experience in American politics. It’s not the traditional news
media understanding of politics, but then this was one election when the news
media and the opinion polls were consistently wrong. The book is written especially
for the SAGEcon group it talks about; Barna uses the language of faith that
this group will understand immediately but others might not.
But it is
an important contribution to understanding what happened in the 2016 election.
Top photograph by Elliott Stallion
via Unsplash. Used with
permission.
