As the 2024 election inches closer, conservatives are making a serious push to persuade Black Protestants to support former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Historically, Pew Research Center polling finds only two U.S. religious groups believe churches should actively express political views: white evangelicals and historically Black denominations. In 2019, they were the only two groups where the majority of survey respondents told Pew that houses of worship should “express their views on day-to-day social and political questions.”
Historically, the political viewpoints of the groups differ greatly.
White evangelicals, according to Pew, overwhelmingly see Trump as a champion for their beliefs despite acknowledging that he isn’t very religious. Black Protestants have been a historic voting bloc in Democratic politics since the Civil Rights Movement, and 84 percent support the Democratic Party. Armed with the message that Americans have become too morally liberal and strayed too far from God’s light, a few Black conservative Christians, like Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, are trying to upend the historic support of Black Protestants for the Democratic Party.
Sewell is the senior pastor at 180 Church in Detroit. A lifelong Republican voter, Sewell hasn’t always been so politically active. However, last year, inspired by outreach from the Trump campaign, which Sewell described as more willing to engage with Detroit’s Black Christian community than his local Democratic leaders, Sewell encouraged his congregants and fellow pastors to embrace the Republican Party.
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Sewell credited Black Americans’ “reverence for God” with acceleration in Black civil rights and thriving in the history of the U.S. And in his view, God's priorities are outlined clearly in scripture.
“What I typically say to Black Christians is, ‘Let's look at the Bible,’” Sewell said. “There are three things I see in the Word of God: God is pro-Israel, God is pro-church, and God is pro-life. And I just ask anyone what party leans that way?”
A shift in ideology
According to Jason E. Shelton, the director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, the rightward shift of Black Christians like Sewell is not unprecedented.
In his book The Contemporary Black Church: The New Dynamics of African American Religion, Shelton found that views within the historic Black church have shifted away from working-class values and have been trending since the ’90s toward white American ideologies, with nondenominational Protestants leading the way. In one of his findings, between the late 1990s and today, the percentage of nondenominational Black Protestants who felt close to other Black people fell 20 points. Support for the Republican Party trended in the opposite direction, with nondenominational Protestants once again leading among Black Christians embracing Republicans.
Shelton attributes this to a shift in socioeconomic status among these groups of Christians, who in recent years have outpaced Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal Black Christians in wealth.
“They’re seeing more payoff in the American dream, and so as a result, the distance between them and white America is not as wide as it would be for some other Black folks and other traditions,” he told Sojourners.
Shelton’s analyses also pointed to similar drops in Black Christians who believe racism is the cause for racial inequality. As conservative-leaning Christians worry less about racism, other perceived cultural ills appear to be taking its place. Shelton found Black Christian politics are trending rightward.
These culture war issues align with the Trump’s messaging — and his surrogates are more than happy to spread the message to more Christians. Charlie Kirk, who founded and leads Turning Point USA, is leading the charge to bridge the gap between young people and the Trump campaign’s extremist ideologies. In recent years, the secular group has simultaneously leaned into Christian nationalist rhetoric and outreach to Black voters. In 2023, TPUSA merged with Candace Owens’ “Blexit,” a conservative organization aimed at moving Black people away from the Democratic Party.
“For the last six decades, we’ve been bowing down to the Democratic Party, worshiping at the altar of their policies,” said Sewell, who has spoken at Blexit events in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida. “And now we find ourselves in a situation where our babies are being murdered in the womb. Our kids can’t read or write and do math, and violence is normal. And it’s funny how Black folks want to blame a white man for that. How can you?”
For both Sewell and Owens, claims that the Republican Party is racist ring hollow against the prospect of alleviating “moral decay.”
On Owens’ eponymously named show, the co-founder of TPUSA’s Blexit Foundation said, “Now, suddenly the music is so dark, it is so demonic that it has led me to believe that Hollywood is, in fact, being controlled by some sort of a demonic cult with an intention to corrupt our souls … the worst filth that you can corrupt a soul with is reserved for Black people.”
Owens has also said the “entire LGBTQ movement brought with it a sexual plague on our society” and made several antisemitic statements over the years. Though the organization has recently tried to clarify that “Candace is not a TPUSA employee,” they still oversee the Owens-led Blexit initiatives.
Trump has promised to be the champion Christians like Sewell and Owens are looking for. Chief in the appeal is the former president’s appointment of Supreme Court justices who overturned federal abortion rights — though in his 2024 campaign, Trump has been inconsistent on whether he would continue fighting to outlaw abortion. A true believer in Trump’s ability to reverse moral degradation, Sewell was inspired to rally his mostly Black congregation for a community roundtable with the former president in June after the campaign reached out to him.
Targeting racial inclusion and Black history
Despite Trump’s record as a businessperson and president, including being sued for racial discrimination by the Justice Department in the 1970s and selecting presidential appointees who had a history of making racist remarks, Sewell believes Trump is sincere and not using him and other Black Christians. He pointed to his personal experiences with Trump as proof that the former president earnestly desires to foster meaningful racial inclusion.
But Trump and his conservative allies, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 transition plan, continue to target racial justice efforts like diversity, equity, and inclusion work. State-level examples include Florida, where anti-inclusive legislation is already putting a strain on Black and brown people.
In 2022, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Stop WOKE Act into legislation to restrict race-related conversations in schools. DeSantis, a Trump-ally and one-time rival in the Republican primary, has led the way legislatively and rhetorically for conservative efforts to cut down racial justice efforts. In 2023, he signed a law banning the state’s public colleges and universities from spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The newer law also states that general education courses can’t teach “identity politics” or “critical race theory.”
In response to the statewide attacks on race-inclusive education, about 300 Florida churches stepped in and taught their own Black history lessons. Faith in Florida, a faith-based nonprofit, led churches in the efforts to push back against what they call the Republican-led government’s “policing Black existence.”
LaVon Bracy, the director of democracy at Faith in Florida, doesn’t see conservative policies like anti-DEI initiatives as beneficial for Black Christians.
“We had to really work hard to change the environment of Florida. As I look at 2024, some of the same things that we fought for almost 60 years ago, we are still fighting for them now,” said Bracy, a native Floridian who was a part of integration efforts in 1964.
To her, rolling back the clock on progress is neither Christ-like nor beneficial to people of color. Despite her deep involvement in Florida’s Black communities, Christian communities, and electoral spaces, Bracy said she has yet to see anyone convinced by efforts like Sewell’s or Blexit.
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