Election divides evangelical women, says Christian leader

The influential Christian leader Penny Nance says the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has divided evangelical women.

In an opinion piece published Tuesday on CNN’s website, Nance tries to explain why so many evangelical women are supporting Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, despite being revolted by much of what he says and does. 

{mosads}“This election has created division within evangelical circles and the church writ large,” writes Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America. 

“In about a week this will all end, and we will have a new president,” she adds. “Next we must begin to mend and unify even as women within the church.”

Nance wanted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to be president. When it became clear, however, that the race would be a choice between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Trump, Nance chose Trump. 

She made it clear in her public statements that she questioned Trump’s commitments to constitutional principles and conservative values. But she felt the Supreme Court, and potentially a generation of socially conservative policies, were too important to risk on a third-party candidate.

Nance is trying, now, to explain the difficult choices evangelical voters are confronting in this election. She says many liberals and media elites are “confused” by evangelical women’s decision-making and don’t give them enough credit for their nuanced and pragmatic support for the GOP nominee.

“They might be surprised to learn that evangelical women ‘do’ nuance more than they give us credit for,” she writes in the CNN piece.

When it comes to Trump, Nance says the evangelical women she talks to fall into three camps. 

“There are those in the camp of respected author Beth Moore, who have had enough and simply refuse to vote for Trump,” she writes, citing a tweet from Moore, the founder of Living Proof Ministries in Texas. 

“I’m one among many women sexually abused, misused, stared down, heckled, talked naughty to,” Moore tweeted earlier this month. “Like we liked it. We didn’t. We’re tired of it.”

Other evangelical women joined Moore in breaking with Trump after a leaked 2005 video revealed him boasting to former “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush about groping women without their consent. 

Nance says many evangelical women on “Team Moore” will still vote for Republicans in down-ballot races to put a check on Clinton.

Nance calls the second group of evangelical women the “Burke Mom’s Group,” which she names after a “home school” mom she met in Burke, Va., “who helpfully suggested the Trump campaign hand out ‘barf bags’ for people to use after casting their votes.”

These women, writes Nance, “find the election of Clinton so distasteful they are willing to support a less than noble leader.”

Nance says the final group comprises the “die-hard Trump supporters.” 

“These are women who have long been disgusted with the Washington establishment and feel that no matter who they support, nothing ever changes,” she writes. “They are looking to blow the system up with a disrupter.”

“These women, incidentally, don’t think Trump is one of them, but they don’t seem to care,” she adds. 

“They don’t want him as a pastor or a husband or even a friend. They want him to swim the moat with a knife in his teeth. They don’t believe the polls and expect to win.”