CPOY

CPOY 76 Documentary Silver: A Strange Combination of the Secular and the Sacred

In January 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a promise. "I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don't want to talk about it," Trump said. If he were to be elected president, he vowed that "Christianity would have power." Evangelical Christians have long supported Republican presidents. It began with Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority, and in 2020, 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Trump. This support, often summarized as support against abortion rights, has also been tied to the evangelical belief that the world will continually worsen until the Second Coming of Christ — a philosophy sometimes called a "theology of despair." In American politics, Catholicism is a more nuanced story. President Biden is the second-ever Catholic president, and Catholics were divided almost evenly in the 2020 election. However, pre-election polling found that Biden's Catholic support came from non-practicing Catholics. Practicing Catholics favored Trump by 40%. This project is a reconciliation with Christianity for the photographer, who grew up in a rural community and was raised in the Southern Baptist church. In 2016, he saw those in his church throw their support behind Trump, and he left organized Christianity. Today, his relationship with God is complex, as he explores the relationship between sacred beliefs and secular politics.

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Slide 6 of 12
November 3, 2020
James Imhoff prays the rosary on Nov. 3, 2020, at St. Peter & Paul Catholic Church in Boonville, Mo. He, along with a handful of other parishioners, prayed the church’s “Election Day rosary” in the hopes that the outcome of the 2020 election would advance the anti-abortion movement. While Catholics as a whole leaned Democratic in 2016, a majority of white Catholics support Donald Trump. This, according to NPR, was a key factor in his 2016 win, when Trump “won traditionally Democratic Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all states in which Catholics outnumber evangelicals by significant margins.”
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