S6, Ep. 04: Election Day 2024: What happened and where do we go from here

Now that Election Day 2024 is in the rearview mirror, what did we learn? Amanda Tyler and Holly Hollman look at the results and what they might mean for our country and the protection of faith freedom for all. They discuss where we saw religion used on the campaign trail, what we might expect to see in the next four years under a second Trump administration, and ways all of us can make a significant difference in local communities.

SHOW NOTES
Segment 1 (starting at 00:37): Did Americans vote for authoritarianism when they voted for Trump?

Holly mentioned being in Georgia after the elections for BJC’s Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State. You can learn more about the presentations from Dr. John Compton during that event, focused on the politics of secularization, on our website at BJConline.org/ShurdenLectures.

Amanda mentioned her current book tour for How to End Christian Nationalism. Her last stop in 2024 will be in Richmond, Va., this weekend, but she will be back on the road in 2025. Visit EndChristianNationalism.com for details and ways to order the book.

 

Segment 2 (starting at 13:42): Where did we see religion and Christian nationalism in the closing days of the campaign and its aftermath? 

Click this link to watch remarks from President-elect Donald Trump on election night, and click this link to watch Vice President Kamala Harris’ concession speech on election night, both via C-SPAN.

For more on the January 6 attack on the Capitol, read the report itiled “Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021, Insurrection,” created by BJC and the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Amanda sent an email to the BJC community after the election. You can read it on Baptist News Global: This is the time for our movement to meet the moment

If you want to receive emails from BJC, you can sign up on our website: BJConline.org/subscribe

Amanda mentioned being in Austin, Texas, on Monday to testify against the troubling Bible-infused curriculum proposed for Texas public schools. For the latest, read this article by Troy Closson for The New York Times: Texas Education Board Backs Curriculum With Lessons Drawn From Bible. Amanada and Holly discussed the issues with this curriculum in episode 2 of season 6: Oklahoma and Texas try to force Bible teaching in public schools. 

We want to hear from you! If you want to connect us with an organization doing good work in your community, contact Joy Pettigrew, BJC’s community partnership manager, at [email protected]. An organization does not need to be devoted to countering Christian nationalism, even if that might be the outcome of the work they are doing. 

If you are in North Texas and want to get involved in the North Texas Organizing Project, contact Lisa Jacob at [email protected]. 

 

Segment 3 (starting 32:51): Good news about school voucher initiatives

Don Byrd wrote an article for BJC’s website about the rejection of school vouchers in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado: Voters soundly reject school voucher initiatives in multiple states

For more discussion on the problems with school vouchers, listen to episode 8 and episode 9 of season 5.

Respecting Religion is made possible by BJC’s generous donors. You can support these conversations with a gift to BJC.

Transcript: Season 6, Episode 04:  Election Day 2024: What happened and where do we go from here? (some parts of this transcript have been edited for clarity)      

 

AMANDA: Get your news in a digest in some way, because if you —
HOLLY: Because you can’t handle it. You can’t handle it. No one can handle it.
AMANDA: You cannot. And that is a tactic, Holly. That is a tactic of trying to overwhelm us.

 

Segment 1: Did Americans vote for authoritarianism when they voted for Trump? (starting at 00:37)

AMANDA: Welcome to Respecting Religion, a BJC podcast series where we look at religion, the law, and what’s at stake for faith freedom today. I’m Amanda Tyler, executive director of BJC.

HOLLY: And I’m general counsel Holly Hollman. Well, Amanda, it’s good to be with you. I haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks, although we’ve talked briefly. How are you doing?

AMANDA: You know, I am hanging in there. And it has been a very full couple of weeks. We are having our conversation today, Holly, on Tuesday, November 19, so two weeks after Election Day, and that is going to be our main topic today. So how are you doing, and how have you been over the last couple of weeks?

HOLLY: Well, I am in our offices in D.C. now, had a slow commute coming in with all the people who work on Capitol Hill. There’s a certain tension in the air. It is reflected in conversations all around me, as well as an increase in headlines in my email. I think there’s a real sense of something dramatic has happened. I mean, elections are always a big deal, but this feels particularly dramatic.

So I guess I would probably want to start the conversation today with our general reactions on the election. I think what people often will ask us — and I know have been asking you — is, you know, How does BJC see religion playing a role in this election? Did religion have a major impact? Was the Christian nationalism idea that we’ve heard throughout the campaign significant?

AMANDA: And, I guess, just to zoom out just a little — I mean, I think anyone listening to this podcast knows the results of the November 5 presidential election, but, of course, Donald J. Trump was reelected to the presidency. Something happened that hadn’t happened in over a hundred years: that someone has nonconsecutive presidential terms. And what all the pundits thought was that this was going to be a razor-thin election, that it was a complete toss-up. I had been listening to probably way too many other podcasts, Holly, in the weeks leading up to it, and  really, that’s what everyone said.

HOLLY: That’s right.

AMANDA: They said, Get off the poller-coaster. You know, like stop looking at the polls; no one knows.

And then what happened was it wasn’t a very close election, that Trump won every swing state and not even in particularly close fashion, with more of a margin certainly than we saw in 2020 or 2016. And I think I, like a lot of other people, was not as surprised — I thought it was a distinct possibility that Trump would win, but I was surprised with how convincing it was.

And I was discouraged, frankly, Holly, by how convincing it was, because of how clear Trump had been — well, for many reasons. One, you know, that he had been convicted of crimes and had all of these pending federal indictments, but also because he had been so clear about his authoritarian intentions and the rhetoric that he was using about the “enemy within” and his intentions to use the Justice Department and maybe even the military to pursue political opponents and enemies. These are really, I think, incredibly concerning for our democracy, and so it was disheartening to see him win in such a convincing way.

HOLLY: I’m glad you took us back a little bit to just be clear about that reaction. And it does make people sort of stunned. And I think there’s — along with all the different feelings, that surprise is part of the reaction.

Likewise, I was seeing so many reports that it was going to be so close, that we wouldn’t know. Even in planning — actually, I went with other members of the BJC team to Georgia. We had a trip planned for our Shurden Lectures the week after the election, and I remember thinking, wait a minute; I wonder if the election will even be decided then.

So we really had this idea that it was going to be so close. But when I was watching results the night of the election, I did have a very similar sense that I had in 2016, that things were not going as quickly in one direction — in the direction of Harris — that I thought they would, and that just told me that we didn’t know, and so that it was likely to come out the other way, which we definitely knew was a possibility.

And for me, he was a different candidate than before, given the legal trials that he’d been through that obviously could have had an effect on voters. But what I also saw — and maybe this is particularly something you see inside Washington where you’re watching really closely — is the difference in how the candidates appeared and presented themselves in the last weeks of the campaign.

There really was a very positive coming together feeling in the Harris rallies that appeared like, wow, maybe she’s going to do this, even though, you know, what a crazy election it was with her coming in so late and all the things that had happened.

And on the other hand, we saw increasingly bizarre behavior from the Trump rallies with strange dancing or long periods of silence. The things that we saw in the media about the two campaigns late looked like things were moving toward Harris. And yet it came out very clearly the other way.

AMANDA: Yeah. And I would just add to that the rally at Madison Square Garden. I was actually in New York City that day, doing events for the book tour, and I did not go to Madison Square Garden, but it was kind of in the neighborhood. And just the feeling of, you know, all of the streets being closed down and just kind of a feeling of threat, honestly, because of the vile language that was used — in that — that was so openly racist language, dehumanizing language.

HOLLY: Particularly late in the campaign. Right?

AMANDA: Right. I mean, this was what everyone called the closing argument. Right? So if this is the closing argument — and I do think there started to be, at least in the punditry, a feeling that this went too far and that people would reject this kind of rhetoric.

And they did not. A majority of Americans in a free and fair election elected Trump. And one of the pieces that I’ve really been reflecting on — and we will get to religion, Holly, I promise. But one of the questions that I’ve been reflecting on is: Did a majority of Americans really vote for authoritarianism when they voted for Trump?

And I think the answer is no. I think that, you know, perhaps for some segment of Trump voters, that they liked what they heard about the strong man and the promises of mass deportation and pursuing political enemies and all of these pieces that are really anti-democratic and frankly, anti-American. They, I think, do endorse that. But I do not think a majority of Americans do.

And I think what we have learned is that for many Trump voters, they were voting on a sense of that the economy was just not working for them, you know, whether it be inflation or high housing costs or a sense that they just weren’t able to be successful financially, that that was the motivating factor for many voters.

And I think we have some evidence, Holly, for this on other ballot initiatives that were on the same ballot because we have, for instance, in a number of states, there were initiatives to protect abortion rights and to reject abortion bans. And a majority of voters in every state where abortion was on the ballot, a majority of voters affirmed abortion rights. And so that is not in line with this overall trend of authoritarianism and taking rights away.

And so I think we can see in those results that even where Trump won, voters actually voted to extend abortion rights or restore abortion rights, that there’s some evidence that the majority of Americans are not actually voting for authoritarianism. Now, whether that means that’s what we receive in another Trump administration is a very different question.

HOLLY: I think that’s right. I think that example of the difference in those ballot initiatives on abortion rights is one of many different issues that we can look at to try to dissect and say, What does this election mean? I think it would be wrong to assume that this election means that all of the wild and sweeping statements that Donald Trump makes and has made during the campaign were endorsed by all the voters who voted for him.

And I think that’s true in our experience. We know in conversations that we have, in addition to polling data and conversations we read about, that people vote for a lot of different reasons. Right now I think people are struggling with the fact that he won so handily, even after that really harsh closing argument that was so demeaning to so many different groups of people.

AMANDA: Yeah. And I think that’s true, too, about the way that the language of Christian nationalism was leveraged at different points in the campaign. Right? That was, I think, a very intentional campaign strategy, to try to shore up a particular piece of a voting bloc and to motivate a particular segment of Trump voters. And by all accounts, that was successful.

Again, I think that his support, for instance — and, again, it’s not a total overlap between Christian nationalism and the white evangelical vote. Christian nationalism and groups that endorse it are much larger than white evangelicals, and not every white evangelical embraces Christian nationalism, so they’re not the same thing. But much has been made that that level of about 80 percent support from white evangelicals has remained remarkably consistent across the three times that Trump has now run for the presidency.

But we saw language of Christian nationalism being used throughout the campaign, and it reached a real height over the summer, right when the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, which came on the eve of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

And so we saw this language that had been pretty constant throughout the campaign, that Trump was God’s chosen candidate, that all Christians must vote for Trump because Trump was going to carry out God’s will for this country, even language that good Christians could not vote for Harris or vote for Biden or vote for anyone but Trump, that language just intensified when Trump survived the assassination attempt, because people started claiming that God actually saved Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, and that he was called to a higher purpose.

HOLLY: Well, and, of course, that’s the focus of our work is in standing up for a tradition of religious freedom that can actually serve all people in a country in fighting against this ideology of Christian nationalism.

But as a candidate, we know that Donald Trump talks that way, in that authoritarian way in general. All Christians should vote for him, because he’s the only one that can help Christians. All Jewish people should vote for him, because he’s done more for them than anybody else. All women should vote for him, because he will protect them, whether they like it or not.

And so I think those kinds of statements are really troubling to those of us who are very worried that he will follow through with his authoritarian ideas, that some people like that. But I think it is wrong to assume that that is what people were voting for when they voted for Trump.

 

 

Segment 2: Where did we see religion and Christian nationalism in the closing days of the campaign and its aftermath? (starting at 13:42)

HOLLY: And, Amanda, the idea that he was chosen, he came back to it the night of the election. I was interested in looking at both of the candidates and thinking, you know, how do they present themselves with regard to our country as a whole and seeing the results of the election, and will we hear anything about religion or God? And we heard very different things from President-elect Trump and from Kamala Harris.

First, on election night, I think it was a pretty short statement early on when it appeared that Trump had won, he started a speech on a stage with a crowd, saying, “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason.” And the watch party crowd was cheering. You know, I saw this; I heard it; and I was like, please stop there.

But he didn’t. The crowd was cheering, and he was making broad statements about his victory. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the video of this. But he continued with that theme to say that the reason that he had been saved, his life had been spared, he said, “was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we’re going to fulfill that mission together. The task before us will not be easy, but I will bring every ounce of energy, spirit and fight that I have in my soul to the job you’ve entrusted to me.”

And I just heard that and looked at that language. I thought it was, again, an awkward sprinkling of religious words in a political speech, just enough to keep that theme going, that he perhaps is chosen for this work in a way that would give him a blank check to move forward. And I think that’s exactly the intent of that kind of language.

I don’t think I’m being too harsh. We know that politicians, government officials often use broad religious language to try to inspire people, to bring together, to look for common values. But from this particular elected official, we know that it goes right along with attacks on our fundamental commitment to religious freedom for all, to equal citizenship without regard to religion.

AMANDA: Yeah. And I think also it’s fundamentally anti-democratic to suggest that God has picked the winner of an election. Voters pick winners of elections. And I think we also cannot forget that part of the reason all of the groundwork was laid to suggest that the election had already been decided — and that was included in, you know, prophecies that different people would say that God had spoken to them and that God had said that Trump would win — that all of that was laying the groundwork in case he did not win — right? — because we knew and because throughout both he and his running mate, JD Vance, now Vice-President-elect JD Vance, both had said — they refused to say they would accept the results of the election if Harris won.

And so we know what would have happened if he had not won the vote. They would have challenged it, and they would have done so, in part, by having convinced a particular part of the voting bloc that any result that did not end in Trump’s election was illegitimate in part because it was against God’s will.

HOLLY: That’s right. And we might be especially attuned to that, Amanda, having been here in Washington on January 6, 2021. It is fresh in our minds. We do not have the luxury, I guess it is, that some people have in other parts of the country who get their news in different places that could somehow avoid it or spin that it was something else. We knew that that was a very real and serious threat and danger.

And so I think the counterpoint of that that we should talk about now is how Kamala Harris spoke and also how we want to have this conversation, Amanda, recognizing that he was elected in a free and fair election. That’s what we do. That’s what democracies do. They go to the voting booth, and they vote for their candidate of choice. And it’s up to the people to work hard to bring people together, to elect those that they want to lead.

And so I thought it was really important that we say that and that we take a little time to appreciate that about our democracy, appreciate that. All the work that people did across the country to make sure that elections were free and fair, I think, was significant and something that we can accept and that in our best moments can appreciate about our democracy and how we want our democracy to be, is to be able to hold free and fair elections and to accept the results and to get to work.

Kamala Harris, in her concession speech at Howard University, made that point early on. She said, “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it.”

She goes on to say that, “We owe loyalty, not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States and to our conscience and to our God.” I thought that was interesting, a very different way of thinking about who we are as Americans and where we owe our loyalties, distinguishing our role as citizens in a democracy from whatever affiliation or beliefs we have as individuals, religious or not.

AMANDA: Yeah. I appreciate you pointing that out, Holly, because honestly, I listened to the speech, but I had not zeroed in on that. But I think she is really pointing out the separation of religion and government — right? — the difference between the loyalties that we owe to the Constitution and the loyalties that we owe to conscience and to religion, if that is something that is important to us. Right? Not all Americans are religious, and those that are religious have many different faiths and religious identities, but that both of those are important.

And when I’m out talking to people, especially to religious audiences, I impress on them that our loyalties to God are higher than our loyalties to the country, and that sometimes our convictions are going to come into conflict, and we will have a choice of conscience to decide if we are going to go along with the policies of the country, or if we are going to speak truth to power and sometimes act in ways that reflect our conscience, our religious views, even when they come into conflict with the policies of the country in which we live.

HOLLY: That’s a good word in Christian communities where people struggle to uphold the teachings of Jesus, struggles in all religious communities probably to follow their faith in ways that demand more of them, in care for their neighbors and how they conduct themselves than what we see in the political realm.

And so there will be a lot of important work ahead and choices ahead, and it’ll be important that people come together from religious and other perspectives, to speak out against these potential abuses by the government.

And Harris went on in her concession speech to say an encouraging word to the crowd. You know the crowd there was extremely emotional. It was not the speech they wanted to hear, but she really put a positive, proactive foot forward when she said, “You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world, and so to everyone who’s watching, do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves. This is a time to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.”

And I think that’s similar to what we would say as we talk to individuals in faith communities and anyone who talks to us about what they should do, is you have to stay engaged. You know, we have a lot to learn and to do and to interpret in this changing environment, and it’s so rapidly evolving.

And we don’t know what’s ahead, but we know there’s going to be a lot of chaos, and we know some things because he has made them very clear and he’s acted on them before. We’re going to have to work hard together, and like she said, we need to stay engaged for the sake of freedom.

AMANDA: Yeah. I watched that speech, Holly, on an airplane, which is where I’ve spent most of my days over the past month. She was speaking to a crowd where many of them were in tears. Right? And it was a very emotional, largely quiet and somber, subdued crowd.

And I point that out, because I have been on this national tour, introducing people to my new book, How to End Christian Nationalism. The tour started a couple of weeks before the election and is continuing now, and so I have a real-time kind of — my own sense of how the mood has shifted among people who are coming to the events.

And I think, as you mentioned earlier, I think many of us were very concerned about potential violence in the wake of the election, and so I think in the crowds that were coming to the events early, that’s mostly what people were focused on.

And in the events after the election, there’s been a real sense of, on the one hand, despair, which is exactly what she talked about in her speech, a sense of defeatism, a sense of, We’ve done all this work to try to push back against Christian nationalism or to show our concerns about some of the policies that would be coming, and it didn’t matter. Right? What do we do now, and a sense that it’s over.

And so in my communications, both to the BJC community — I sent an email and would love to put that in show notes so that people can see what I wrote to our community — but also in my public comments that I’ve made to groups since then, I have said, You’re right to be concerned, but this is the time that it is really going to take all of us, working across all different kinds of lines of difference, to do something in our communities.

And one of the ways that I really encourage people to do that is not to focus too much on the national picture. We need to know, you know — get your news, but don’t get your news 24/7. Right? Get your news in a digest in some way, because if you don’t —

HOLLY: Because you can’t handle it. You can’t handle it. No one can handle it.

AMANDA: You cannot. And that is a tactic, Holly. That is a tactic of trying to overwhelm us, just even with the speed of the announcements of who Trump will nominate to hold some of these cabinet positions, which are, you know, really ludicrous and just breaking every norm of Washington that we can imagine, completely shocking.

HOLLY: When we didn’t think we could be shocked. Yes.

AMANDA: And then what’s coming out now about mass deportation policies and the latest news, even within the last 24 hours, is Trump confirming that he will use the U.S. military to conduct raids and try to find people who are living here without proper documentation to deport them.

This is all incredibly overwhelming, and we need to know what is happening, but then we need to not be so overwhelmed by that information that we get into a state of paralysis or defeatism. This is the time for us to resolve to get more involved in our local communities.

If you’re in a house of worship, start getting more engaged in that house of worship, in your community group, in your civic organization, in your PTA, in whatever groups that you can come together with people in your communities.

Part of what we’re doing on the book tour is trying to connect people who are interested in taking on this task of ending Christian nationalism, for them to actually meet their neighbors in person at an event and have an immediate call to action for something that they can do as a community to make a difference for their neighbors.

And so I think that is what we are all going to be called on to do in ways that for many of us, we may never have been, in our lifetimes, quite this engaged in the civic life of our democracy. But that, I believe, is what is going to be required of each of us to push back against authoritarianism that seems to be on the horizon for us.

But it’s only — this is what I tell people. As long as we have the legal protections that we have in this country, including with the U.S. Constitution, including with state constitutions across this country, as long as we have that, we have to use everything in our toolbox.

We will only have authoritarianism if we act like we live in an authoritarian regime. This is the time that we really need to live into the constitutional values and ask our country to live up to those foundational ideals, if this constitutional democracy is going to survive.

HOLLY: That’s because we know that by connecting with others and working toward positive change in communities actually makes people feel more a part of this country and motivates them to do good work and to stand up against harmful policies.

At BJC, we have a vision of religious freedom that can do that, that has done that. We are Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, with a mission that stands up for faith freedom for all, not to prefer Christians, not to use government to advance any particular religious agenda, but to recognize that we are a country where people come together across their differences.

And so often people come to that understanding of what that looks like when they interact with people in their community that are of different faiths. They may find that they think differently about political issues or theological issues, but they all need strong public schools. They all want safe streets. They all want clean water.

I think that these concerns really go together: understanding each other, listening to each other and figuring out how connection can actually prevent the authoritarian rise that we’re concerned about.

AMANDA: And I’m really fortunate, Holly, to be a part of our local organizing coalition here in North Texas, and so I’ve seen the power of this. I’ve seen our ability over the last several months to really organize a coalition of people who care about these foundational promises of faith freedom for all, who come at this work from a variety of different perspectives, within the Christian faith and from other faith traditions as well, who are united in our resolve to being involved in the life of our community and making our state a place that is a flourishing place for everyone.

And, you know, I think this is fresh of mind for me today, because I’m just off the bus. We took a bus of people down to Austin just yesterday to testify again against this troubling curriculum that’s being proposed for elementary schools that would infuse the teaching of the Bible in ways that are not age-appropriate or subject matter-appropriate and are not the way to protect religious freedom.

And to be able to be so directly involved in something — again, we all care about a good public education for Texans. That’s what’s bringing us together, and we are able to do that in a way that really is a form of being involved in our representative democracy here in Texas and making our views known to our elected representatives on the State Board of Education.

And so if you’re living in North Texas, definitely get involved in our North Texas coalition, but if you’re living somewhere else, we also have a way for you to get engaged, and we have a new team member at BJC, Joy Pettigrew, who’s our community partnership manager, and she wants to connect with people who know of other groups who are interested in doing this kind of work in their local communities.

So we’ll put some information in show notes, and we just really encourage and invite people who are listening to find ways to get engaged at their state and local level, because there is going to be so much that we are going to be called on and need to do. And this is work that is both important but also gratifying.

And we will have wins and losses along the way, but the big win is the communities and the relationships that we’re forming as we do this work together. That’s what I think it means to live into the promises of a multiracial, multifaith democracy that we’re all about trying to do right now.

 

 

Segment 3: Good news about school voucher initiatives (starting at 32:51)

HOLLY: I’m glad you talked about that specific example in North Texas. Many of our listeners know, because we’ve talked about it a lot, but they also know from following the news, you know, Christian nationalism is explicit in the news in Texas often, that you have so many who are boldly declaring an agenda of Christian nationalism.

And so the work there looks a certain way, but the idea that you’re working in public schools is something that really can be done anywhere, because our public schools bring us together across all kinds of differences. And it is a place where BJC has long worked to stand up for faith freedom for all, particularly because of that idea that the schools are paid for by the public and they should serve the public.

And we all care about an educated electorate, that we want people to be educated, informed about our country’s history, bad and good, and to step up and perfect this union. We have a long way to go, but by investing in the public schools, we know that people can make a difference. And we’re glad to see that on the religious freedom front, particularly the religion and public schools front, there was some good news on Election Day.

AMANDA: Yeah. So we talked earlier about the abortion measures being on ballots. In three states, there were also measures for voters to approve or disapprove of the use of school vouchers in their states.

And I will say that school vouchers went 0 for 3 at the ballot box on November 5, which was really a win, both for public schools and for religious freedom, because private school vouchers both take public funding away from public schools — which in many states are already underfunded — but they also would redirect public money to religious schools that, of course, incorporate the teaching of religion into the curriculum and to have public money supporting religion in ways that are directly at odds with our constitutional tradition of religious freedom for all.

So we’re going to link in show notes to a post by Don Byrd titled, “Voters soundly reject school voucher initiatives in multiple states.” And Don covers what happened in Kentucky, in Nebraska, and in Colorado. The voters in Kentucky defeated a proposed state constitutional amendment by a margin of 65 to 35, so these are not close votes.

And I think it really sends an important message at an important time that school vouchers remain deeply unpopular in most places. People like their public schools. People do not want to see funding diverted away from their public schools. And state legislative sessions are just around the corner. We know we will see bills filed to try to expand the use of vouchers in states around the country, and so I think this is an important reminder for people everywhere to take heart in the fact that the majority of people and voters in these particular states rejected private school vouchers.

HOLLY: Those results show that people are concerned with what happens in their communities, and that is where we know the work needs to be done. Public schools offer a great arena for people to be involved in their communities.

And even where vouchers would be held constitutional because the choice program fits with federal constitutional standards or state standards, it is often the wrong choice for communities to take care of all the children and make sure that they all have an education and that they have that without regard to their religion.

And so we’ll continue to do our work, to talk about the problems with voucher programs, and we know that people in communities will continue to as well. And that will be important, particularly because, at the federal level, President-elect Trump has said that he would like to do away with the Department of Education and instead enact some general, federal-wide school choice program. Well, I think the results of these ballot initiatives show that that is not what people want and that’s not what communities will choose to do.

AMANDA: Well, Holly, it has been good to be back with you today to debrief. If these last two weeks are any indication, we all have more than our work cut out for us over the coming months and four years.

So I am so glad to be in this struggle with you, Holly. I am glad to be in this struggle for freedom with all of you listening. This is the time for us to come together across all kinds of lines of difference, including political and partisan differences, because what we’re about here for religious freedom for all people and for the foundations of a constitutional democracy transcend political party.

So thank you. I hope that you have a beautiful Thanksgiving. I hope that we have time to be with loved ones to reflect on all that we do have to be grateful for and to rest well for the days ahead.

HOLLY: Well said. Thank you, Amanda.

That brings us to the close of this episode of Respecting Religion. Thanks for joining us. For more information on what we discussed, visit our website at RespectingReligion.org for show notes and a transcript of this program.

AMANDA: Respecting Religion is produced and edited by Cherilyn Guy.

HOLLY: You can learn more about our work at BJC defending faith freedom for all by visiting our website at BJConline.org.

AMANDA: We would love to hear from you. You can send both of us an email by writing to [email protected]. We’re also on social media @BJContheHill, and you can follow me on X and also now on Bluesky @AmandaTylerBJC.

HOLLY: And if you enjoyed this show, share it with others, and take a moment to leave us a review or a five-star rating to help other people find us.

AMANDA: We also want to thank you for supporting this podcast. You can donate to these conversations by visiting the link in our show notes.

HOLLY: We’ll be back in December, so join us on Thursdays for new conversations Respecting Religion.