A look at one effort to persuade people of faith not to pick Donald Trump.
ON THE SIXTH DAY OF CREATION, the ad says, “God made all of us. God said we need leaders who can unite rather than divide, who stand on morals and values, and who don’t idolize dictators and bullies.” God, a rather talkative fellow, goes on to say: “I need someone to protect consumers and farmers from corporate greed, workers from wage theft, students from crushing debt, homeowners from discriminatory lending, seniors from overpriced medicine, and loved ones from gun violence.” It must be someone “willing to give their whole life in service.”
Happily, the ad continues,
President Biden answered the call. God made us all. Together, we make our democracy strong. Thank God we chose a faithful president who doesn’t worship himself nor undermine the Constitution he swore to uphold. For such a time as this, we pray to God what is true in our hearts: Four more years.
This digital ad is the first salvo in a new campaign launched by a group called Faith Forward, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to sway religious voters in swing states. But unlike many groups that make political appeals on the basis of religious faith, this one aims to explicitly point people away from Donald Trump and toward Joe Biden. Their “God Made All of Us” video is both a parody of and a counterpoint to the “God Made Trump” video that raised eyebrows when the former president shared it on Truth Social in January. That video begins:
And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned Paradise, and said, I need a caretaker. So God gave us Trump. God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state. So God made Trump.1
Rev. Jennifer Butler, Faith Forward’s executive director, explains in an interview that the tone of her group’s response ad, with its underlying suggestion that God is taking an active interest in the 2024 election, is meant to be tongue-in-cheek—a spoof intended to “undo the theology” of the Trump video. But, she says, the Faith Forward ad is also intended as a sincere affirmation of the belief many religious people hold that “voting [is] a moral choice” and that, through God, they are “given a certain mission in life” to help bring about a better world.
1 The Trump ad was itself apparently inspired by a Ron DeSantis ad, which in turn borrowed from a 1978 Paul Harvey speech that took on new life in a 2013 Super Bowl ad.
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