A Big Word Was Conspicuously Absent From the GOP Debate

During the Republican debate Wednesday night, the first question about abortion didn’t arrive until there were just 15 minutes left in the two-hour event. Fox News’ Dana Perino, one of the moderators, turned to Ron DeSantis and asked: “How are you going to win over independent pro-choice voters in Arizona?”

DeSantis used the opportunity to attack Donald Trump’s comments about abortion. “I want him to look into the eyes and tell people who have been fighting this fight for a long time,” he said. Later in his answer, he added: “I think we should hold the Democrats accountable for their extremism, supporting abortion all the way up until the moment of birth. That is infanticide and that is wrong.”

Chris Christie used the moment to boast about vetoing Planned Parenthood funding. “But what you need is a leader who could talk to people and make them understand that if you’re pro-life, you have to be pro-life for the entire life, not just the nine months in the womb,” he said.

And that was it.

After years of elevating abortion as the preeminent social issue among Republicans, abortion barely came up during the second GOP debate. The late timing of the question was  the network’s decision and not the candidates’, but the limited airplay certainly suggested how little Republican figures are prioritizing the issue—as did the other candidates’ decision not to dwell on it or bring it up on their own. Roe v. Wade was struck down, yes, but abortion remains an unsettled political issue. The debate over abortion hasn’t been resolved; Republicans have simply figured out that, in this particular moment, railing against abortion isn’t a winning political strategy.

And that wasn’t the only culture war issue that was underplayed at the debate. Candidates spent more time discussing border security and government spending than LGBTQ+ rights and race. And it was noticeable that the conversations that did come up omitted one particular word: God.

The religious right has long been behind some of the biggest culture war debates in this country—white evangelicals stirred up anxiety over gender roles as part of the earliest culture wars—and yet none of the candidates spoke of their religious conviction behind their policy positions. School choice and “parental rights”—key terms in the debates over “critical race theory” and LGBTQ+ acceptance in schools—came up during the debate, but not alongside arguments about parents’ religious rights. Instead, there was an almost scientific note to the discussion.

“Transgenderism, especially in kids, is a mental health disorder,” Vivek Ramaswamy incorrectly asserted. He also made the case (again, baselessly) that schools keeping parents ignorant of their child’s sexual orientation and gender identity increased the risk of the child’s suicide.

Mike Pence, one of the two more explicitly religious-right candidates on the stage, vowed to “pass a federal ban on transgender chemical or surgical surgery anywhere in the country.”

It was all consistently secular. No one expects the candidates to give sermons, but all candidates likely know that they need support from white evangelicals if they stand a chance at nabbing the GOP nomination: White evangelicals make up more than a quarter of all voters, and they vote overwhelmingly Republican. So why not use the major televised moment to make an explicitly religious case for your candidacy?

It may be that these candidates have come to one conclusion: The religious right is losing some control of their party.

The explicitly Christian nationalist candidates, such as Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, were walloped in the most recent midterm elections, their losses ultimately helping to shrink the GOP’s hold on the House to an embarrassingly thin margin. That poor showing served as a wake-up call for Donald Trump, who went on to distance himself from the more extreme abortion bills that state and local Republicans have pushed. As Ron DeSantis hoped to argue Wednesday night, that could have been seen as a betrayal to the religious right.

And yet, it’s unlikely that Trump’s turn on abortion will hurt him. No matter how much Trump acts counter to evangelical ideals, or fumbles when quoting the Bible, or fails to even really mention religion, Republicans believe him to be a man of God. New polling from the Deseret News found that some 53 percent of Republicans believe Trump is a man of faith—a higher percentage than Mike Pence received. The deeply religious Tim Scott garnered only 31 percent in this poll. The religiously evasive DeSantis beat Scott with 47 percent. It seems almost as if the perception of the candidate’s religiosity has more to do with their popularity and name recognition than anything else.

And some scholars have been arguing this for some time. In 2021, Pew Research Center put out a poll that validated what some had already been noticing anecdotally: During Trump’s presidency, the number of white people who identified as “evangelical” increased.

Ryan Burge, a political science assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University, explained what he saw going on in an analysis in the New York Times:

To be a Republican culture warrior is to be an “evangelical,” as these new “cultural evangelicals” see it—and what matters is the cultural victory, not the theology behind the politics.

So as Trump supporters have said again and again over the years, he is a “fighter” for their cause. It doesn’t matter how much of a believer he actually is. But ironically, the swell in the evangelical ranks may have loosened some of the rhetorical power of the religious right, simply by diluting their actual religious intensity. If “cultural evangelicals” care more about having a “fighter” than a spiritual leader, the culture war issues can become more secularly political while still working as a political tool. And then Republican candidates, standing on a debate stage, don’t need to say “God.”