NEW YORK—Earlier this summer, Deborah Fikes, a former executive advisor of the World Evangelical Alliance which represents some 600 million evangelical Christians in 129 countries, decided she needed to take a stand in the presidential race. Long before the hot-mic tape that would reveal Donald Trump’s propensity for groping women, Fikes determined the real estate mogul simply was unsuitable for the presidency. But the brief essay she wrote in the New York Times didn’t decry Trump’s extremely casual acquaintance with the Bible, his history of marital infidelity and his generally un-Christlike desire to always punch back twice as hard. She made a case that was almost unique among her fellow evangelicals: Hillary Clinton, she argued, was not the lesser of two evils but in actuality the more Christian candidate and therefore far more deserving of their support.
"Many well-intentioned evangelicals have been drawn to the Republican Party platform with the hope of making an impact on culture and voting their values," she wrote. But, “for the first time in my life, I feel compelled to reject my community’s unquestioned political alignment with the G.O.P. and challenge my fellow evangelicals to reconsider.”
Around the world, evangelicals reject the ideologically rigid positions that have become the norm for American conservatives. In other countries, she wrote, evangelicals view capital punishment as barbaric, accept the reality of climate change, reject torture by their government, endorse nuclear arms control and can’t understand why anyone would oppose gun reforms. “All of these stances are viewed as being pro-life and pro-family,” Fikes wrote.
And then she took it a step further. Those same evangelicals, she said, “consider Hillary Clinton a ‘sister in Christ’ and someone who lives out the Golden Rule in all the good she has done for women and children. Many affectionately call her ‘Sister Hillary.’”
The response to Fikes’s endorsement of Clinton has been mixed, to say the least. Among the many evangelicals for whom opposition to abortion is the single standard by which they assess a candidate, support for Clinton, who has been consistently pro-choice, amounted to apostasy. “Your organization doesn’t represent me or other Christians,” wrote a woman on Facebook. But Fikes said her public statement elicited a wave of private applause. “I’ve had many more evangelicals than you would realize email me and tell me and text me and say, ‘You are doing the right thing. I’m proud of you. I wish I could do it.”
During an election in which the evangelical right has bitterly split over its support for the Republican nominee, revealing to many both inside and outside the Christian conservative community a preference for political expedience over moral authority, Fikes’s campaign to peel away evangelicals looks less crazy than it might normally seem. Trump’s waffling views on abortion have made many conservatives wonder where his views really lie and the parade of women who have emerged to accuse him of sexual misconduct has clearly appalled others, including students at Liberty University who signed an open letter rebuking their president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for his comtinued support of Trump after his “Access Hollywood” outing. Trump, the students argued, had boasted about behavior that would get faculty and staff at his university fired.
Trump’s success with the Republican Party’s Evangelical base is mediocre at best. Though more than 70 percent of the Christian conservative electorate have supported the last three Republican candidates. But an October poll released by LifeWay research, a Christian polling group, showed that Trump wasn’t even getting half of the Evangelical vote, while Hillary Clinton was getting a third. The Evangelical problem with Trump was most visible among non-White evangelicals, now up to a quarter of that demographic, among whom he trailed Clinton by nearly 50 points, though he did maintain an unbreachable lead with white Evangelicals.
Yet despite this opening, Clinton, a committed Methodist, rarely talks about her faith on the campaign trail in a way that might appeal to evangelical voters. A campaign spokesperson told POLITICO that Trump’s inability to mobilize Evangelicals has given the campaign an opening to this traditionally Republican demographic, and that the campaign has reached out to Evangelicals as part of a broader faith-based outreach effort. But it’s an opening that the Clinton campaign has not fully exploited. Clinton met with some evangelical leaders this summer to discuss issues of common ground, like refugees and international assistance. That outreach, for the most part, has come from individual advocates like Fikes, instead of a focused campaign effort.
Without a defined role in the Clinton campaign or even a formal mandate to act as a surrogate for the former secretary of state, Fikes remains focused on the long-term rebranding effort that she believes should ultimately align evangelicals with views that are considered more classically liberal, but which, she argues, are simply true to Christian precepts.
The Republican Party sometimes pretends like “Jesus Christ is on their calling cards,” she says, but their views on immigration, economic issues, gun control, environmental issues, disarmament and others don’t always bear that out, Fikes says. “When we love like Jesus taught us to love, when we serve the poor, that to me is the good news being proclaimed in very empowered ways,” she says. “The walk of sharing the good news is so powerful, compared to when people just speak and say, ‘This is what you need to do.’”
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Fikes, 58, shares roots in Midland, Texas with former President George W. Bush. It was under his administration, in fact, that Fikes’s international career began. As a member of a First Baptist congregation she began organizing Midland churches around international human rights concerns. She would reach out to people on behalf of her coalition, and to her surprise, they called back. Fikes began meeting with leaders at home and abroad. Then she went back to school to learn law from a teacher’s perspective, so she could better explain concepts to the activists she encountered in other countries. She even studied international law at Oxford.
Fikes joined the board of the National Association of Evangelicals and rose to serve as executive advisor to the World Evangelical Alliance. Though she has been registered as a Republican in the past, she quietly voted for Obama in 2008. Mitt Romney appealed to her heading into the 2012 election, but she couldn’t warm up to what his party stood for. “By that time, I was so disgusted with the Republican Party platform and how it was evolving on immigration and gun control and nuclear proliferation,” she says. “I actually believe that as a follower of Christ, I am required, commanded, to give up some things that are rights.”
Eventually, her work took her to the Sudan, where she first crossed paths with then-Secretary of State Clinton. “She writes about [the incident] in her book,” Fikes excitedly says, referring to Hard Choices. Over the years, that initial encounter has stayed with Fikes as she’s seen Clinton work on other issues, and enter the campaign trail again. Her first interactions with Clinton were on human rights issues abroad—the conflict in the Sudan and house churches in China, which were suppressed by the Chinese government. Fikes cites Clinton’s vast foreign policy experience as a comfort, knowing she will be able to seamlessly lead on international affairs.
As luck would have it, the 2016 Presidential race already posed a unique challenge to evangelicals, with traditional rallying points like same-sex marriage resolved by shifting popular opinion and Supreme Court rulings. But it presented entirely new fronts that directly involved some of Fikes’s most important issues—the treatment of refugees and tolerance of religious and racial minorities, not to mention the degradation of women. Trump’s positions on those issues made opposition easy for Fikes, but he managed to win a slew of endorsements from prominent evangelicals on the strength of his professed change of heart on abortion and his vow to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. It didn’t hurt that he argued for a ban on Muslims.
Fikes, though she lacks a pulpit (she is not an ordained minister), has continued to make her case in the largest forums possible. In mid-September she wrote in The Christian Post: “In those who oppose Hillary, how much love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness is seen in Christians who are insisting on ‘American First’? What I have seen has been better defined as strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, arrogance, hate and a lack of mercy that are condemned by Jesus.” Later that month she followed up in an essay on Christianity Today that “the toxic tone and atmosphere that surrounds Mr. Trump and is fueled among his supporters has done irreparable damage to not only our country and the future of the GOP but also to the public witness of evangelicals in America who are seen as some of his biggest supporters.”
Trump has managed to retain some prominent evangelical backers, but his campaign rhetoric has also unleashed a flood of prominent evangelical criticism. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared that “the life issue can not flourish in a culture of misogyny and sexual degradation.” The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Albert Mohler likewise said that he cannot, for moral issues, vote for the Republican candidate. Some are even tepidly throwing their backing behind Hillary Clinton: Anacostia pastor Thabiti Anyabwile threw his support behind the Democrat this spring, after deciding that Trump’s lack of commitment on important social issues made his rhetoric on race unbearable. But Anyabwile still called Clinton "an enemy of millions of lives in the womb." A group of Latino evangelical churches backed her in October. (Another affirmative and early, but not at all unexpected endorsement of Clinton came from Tony Campolo, an Evangelical pastor who once was a spiritual advisor to her husband, Bill.)
Fikes recognizes how paramount the issue of abortion is for many of her fellow evangelicals; many have called her un-Christian for her support of Clinton. But to Fikes, Clinton’s stance on abortion is morally nuanced and open to restrictions with exceptions. Fikes herself has taken the time to meet with the other side. “People do not have any idea what some of the volunteers for Planned Parenthood have been through, and how they believe, ‘I am helping women escape [bad situations],’” she says. “I think that Jesus would want to hang out with a lot of these people.”
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Fikes says she appreciates that the Clinton campaign has embraced her, and “not in a token, patronizing way.” She worked with them at a meeting of evangelical leaders in July, where the campaign highlighted many of Fikes’s passions. A campaign spokesperson also touted Fikes’s involvement to POLITICO, saying that she has been instrumental in reaching out to leaders in battleground states.
But all of her work on behalf of the Clinton campaign has been informal and self-driven; Fikes says she’s never been tapped as a surrogate to fellow evangelicals. So three weeks out from the general election, as polls in multiple swing states are beginning to tighten, Fikes finds herself at her favored Loews Regency Hotel on the Upper East Side, not exactly the conservative heartland. Fikes is in town for the same kind of international human rights work she’s been doing for years, continuing her efforts with her own network of connections now that she’s no longer affiliated with her evangelical organizations. She stops at the hotel bar, where she knows the waiters by name, for dinner and a drink on the night of the final presidential debate.
That night, it seems, Clinton is channeling what Fikes wants her to do. “Thank you, thank you!” Fikes exclaims, a pisco sour in hand, as Clinton delivers an impassioned answer about the difficult choices posed by late-term abortions. It was the exact type of answer that Fikes says will appeal to a portion of the evangelical base: that late-term abortions happen when there are no good options. It was the type of answer Fikes wished Clinton had been pushing throughout the campaign.
Down the bar from her, the first Trump supporter who speaks up catches Fikes off-guard. Her mouth opens in surprise and her brow forrows. When the next, a well-coiffed woman and her date, pull up chairs next to her, Fikes can’t resist a chance to do a little advocacy. She leans in to tell them that she’s no die-hard Democrat (she speaks fondly of George W. Bush), but Trump poses a danger as America’s next leader. But moral argument doesn’t make much headway with the New York couple who say they know Trump “as a businessman.” They’re not the type to be swayed by the gospel of Deborah Fikes.