The election is over and so is Brandi Miller’s religious affiliation.
On Nov. 8, white evangelical Christianity and I called it quits,” she wrote in a message posted on Facebook. Ms. Miller, a campus minister at the University of Oregon, says that exit polls showing that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump revealed a divide over race that she, as a biracial woman, can’t condone.
“Evangelicals have decided who and with what they will associate,” wrote Ms. Miller, 26 years old, in an online magazine and on Facebook. “It’s not me.”
Church is often the place where people seek comfort and community in unsettling times, but the contentiousness of this election has filtered into the pews. In a sign of lingering partisanship, some people have looked for another place to worship, having split with their pastor over politics. Others are staying but feel estranged, wondering how a person a pew away backed a pro-choice candidate, for instance, or supported someone who demeaned immigrants.
“We have a lot of fingers pointed at each other saying ‘You are not Christian,’ ” says Megan Sutker, who was ordained in the Unite
d Church of Christ, works as an interfaith minister and belongs to the Episcopal Church. She worries the split will exacerbate disillusionment with organized religion, at a time when mainstream churches are already experiencing declines. Even messages from the pulpit urging unity can be loaded, with some people feeling it diminishes their concerns.
Nate Pyle, pastor of the small Christ’s Community Church in suburban Indianapolis, is aiming to bring both sides “to the same table to break bread.” He is planning small-group discussions in the church about books such as “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir about growing up in a poor white Appalachian town, and “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” an exploration of race and religion. “The church is just as divided as the rest of society and we need to have a conversation about that,” he says.
In the presidential election, most religious groups voted as they have in the recent past. There is no single evangelical church, with the National Association of Evangelicals representing nearly 40 different denominations. But people who identified as white evangelical Christians, as well as white Catholics, supported Republican candidates. Groups that traditionally back Democratic candidates, including religious “nones,” or those without a religious affiliation, Hispanic Catholics and Jews, voted for Hillary Clinton. But within those groups, there are plenty of differences.
Carolyn Kramer, a 57-year-old retired public school-bus driver and lifelong Methodist, says she cringed when she entered her Mentor, Ohio, church parking lot on Sundays before the election and saw Clinton or Obama bumper stickers. “How could they claim they are good religious people,” she says of her fellow churchgoers, in backing pro-choice politicians.
Ms. Kramer, who volunteers once a week at a local Right To Life office, asked her Methodist pastors to take a stand. “They say they are against abortion, yet they don’t talk about it,” says Ms. Kramer.
“It makes me think this religion is not for me,” she says. Her 23-year-old daughter is in the process of becoming Catholic, and Ms. Kramer thinks she might eventually follow.
The Cruz-Uribe family changed parishes over politics. A few weeks before the election, 19-year-old Francisco Cruz-Uribe was sitting with his family in the front of his church in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when the priest delivered a homily centered on abortion and said those who voted for Democrats were committing a sin. He got up and walked out. “I would have walked out even if he said don’t vote for Trump,” says the sophomore at University of Alabama. “I don’t come to church in order to be told who to vote for.”
The homilies’ conservative tone had been building for months, says Francisco’s father, David Cruz-Uribe. He consulted a priest friend in Connecticut, where they had lived for 19 years, and they decided with some regret to attend another nearby Catholic parish. The family had been active in the choir and other organizations. “We have only belonged to the parish for about 14 months, but we were finally getting settled in,” he says. “We were slowly starting to make church friends.”
Ms. Miller, who was raised in a rural white community in Oregon, intended to major in music at Willamette University and become a recording arts engineer, but she felt drawn to ministry. She began working for a nonprofit evangelical Christian campus-ministry group. She leads small-group Bible studies with students at the University of Oregon and talks about ways to follow Jesus. Her ministry work and her paycheck depend largely on donors, many of them white evangelicals.
But as the election season heated up, and with it, inflammatory rhetoric about race and ethnicity, she became more concerned about white evangelicals’ embrace of Mr. Trump, who she didn’t feel was inclusive.
On Nov. 16, she posted what she called a “Dear John” letter, saying that she could no longer identify herself as evangelical because she felt the term had become politicized and linked to support of the president-elect. “It was hard to write,” she says. “I have loved my experience as an evangelical.” She remembers growing up, her family poor, and the Baptist congregation making sure they had food and buying her a bicycle so she could ride it to church.
Her letter drew immediate response on Facebook. One woman replied “FEEL you! Made the same decision as well.”
Another said, “I go to church because I believe what it teaches to be true so no matter what the sinful people [myself included] do, I’m not leaving.”
In the days following her letter, she lost one donor to her ministry, who accused her of creating division in the church. Another donor offered more.
She plans to keep attending services at the church she joined a few months ago, New Hope Eugene, a community that has been open and apolitical. “It’s good for me and the health of my own soul,” she says. She also continues her work as a campus minister. She now describes herself as simply a Christian.