Conservative Christians no longer agree on how to vote their collective conscience in America.

To liberals, this group has acted for 40 years with incredible political discipline so often, and with such force, that it seems like a single unit moving in lockstep. But in populous, rural southern Louisiana, a decidedly various body of believers representative of much of American Christendom argues about how to proceed. As the ghost of Ronald Reagan loosens its grip on the party, a vital segment is directionless. Many are solidly opposed to Hillary Clinton; many more are disgusted with Donald Trump.

Today, Henry Beck and Frank Fury, who graduated from the same high school in 1960, are arguing about politics with an agility that comes from regular practice. At the Faith Presbyterian men’s luncheon at Morton’s Boiled Seafood and Bar, a restaurant on the bank of of the Tchefuncte river in Covington, Louisiana, their pastor, Jason Wood, 32, watches quietly.



It’s a warm Thursday in May; a sign outside reads “HOT BOILED SEAFOOD WHEN ARROW IS FLASHING”, which it is.

Fury is short, enthusiastic and turns a memorable phrase: the south, he contends, gets a bum rap. “This is the place of Walker Percy, the great intellect,” Fury reminds me.

Beck, tall, deep-voiced and clad in suspenders, is unmoved: “There’s a lotta rednecks here, Frank.”

“That writer from Mississippi – Faulkner! And the little girl who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird! She’s from Alabama.”

The men are polite, but nervous about talking politics to a reporter. As Van Wilson, the only attendee over 90 years old, says grace over the meal, he asks that God would show me “that we southerners are no different from anyone else, and that we love the Lord”.

This isn’t meant to sting, but it does. Though I live in New York now, I grew up in a town of 600 people in the Blue Ridge mountains and went to college in Birmingham, Alabama, where Wood was my roommate. I go to church every week and I love the Lord, too.

I also recognize the impulse: No one likes to be stereotyped, and blue-state liberals often sneer at rural conservatives who vote against abortion access and gay rights on principle. And those liberals tend to be vindictive when they see those same people’s home cities and states suffer in large part because politicians paying lip service to conservative religious ideology have used their positions to vampirize the standard of living through corporate tax giveaways, union-busting, old-fashioned graft, or – as is too often the case in Louisiana – all three.

Many understand that they’ve been exploited to further the deregulation of trade and labor; they’re just not sure what to do about it.

Hot boiled seafood when arrow is flashing

Faith Presbyterian church in Covington. Photograph: Sean Gardner/The Guardian

At lunch, the topic is the problem of populism, and the specific subject is Trump, a figure who divides politically and theologically conservative Christians as sharply as he does any group in the nation.

The Barna Group, a polling organization that specializes in Christian belief, found in May that while 81% of evangelicals – a term the group carefully defines – have a negative opinion of Clinton, 67% dislike Trump just as much.

Few of them – including his supporters – can look at Trump and see anything but a philandering, amoral grifter. He also doesn’t have a credible religious leader trying to field the concerns of Christians for him; those who have gotten close, such as Joel Osteen (whose “prosperity gospel” theology is more popular with notional believers than with regular churchgoers) or James Dobson, have been ridiculed.

The cult of personality is a familiar sight to Fury. “We didn’t like Huey Long,” he says pointedly. “We didn’t like him for the same reasons we don’t like Donald Trump. Or Mussolini or Adolf Hitler.”

Beck, who objects to the term “evangelical” (“It used to mean being like Billy Graham,” he sighs fondly) won’t say that he likes Trump, but he is excited about the candidacy. “He has no political baggage at all,” Beck says. In his youth a passionate liberal, Beck, a navy veteran, now relishes the position more conservative voices have found outside the mainstream. It’s hard to argue with a rural Louisianan that entrenched bad actors in the government aren’t at least part of the problem. Along these lines, Beck describes Fury as a “a big socialist”, probably to get his goat, but Fury simply nods his assent.

“I don’t like government, but boy, I’ve got to have government,” Fury says. “If I don’t have somebody to protect me, what do I do?”

Some tell me they aren’t sure they want to vote at all.

Linda Arendt, another Faith Presbyterian parishioner, says she’s not convinced she wants to vote for anyone in the race – she saw a meme (she says même – we’re not far from New Orleans) of “a little boy having the most awful tantrum, saying, ‘Please don’t make me vote for any of these people. I don’t like any of these people.’” For her, that sums it up.

Frank Fury, Jason Wood, Sam Thielman and Henry Beck outside Morton’s Boiled Seafood & Bar. Photograph: Sean Gardner/The Guardian

‘At least he’s my dog in the hunt’

Many associate conservative Christianity with slick beltway creatures like Ralph Reed or grassroots lobbyists like Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Family Research Council. But those are the symptoms of a discontent built on the back of Roe v Wade in 1973 – the ruling that made abortion legal – and codified in Ronald Reagan’s 1976 address to the Republican National Convention.



“There is no substitute for victory,” Reagan told the gathering in what was ostensibly a concession speech. Ford, a more moderate candidate, had already bowed to pressure from the conservative wing of the party and dropped his vice-presidential choice, Nelson Rockefeller, from the ticket in favor of Bob Dole. When Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s words seemed prophetic and they helped usher in an era of uncompromising opposition to socially liberal politics by any means necessary.

That is largely why Jay Avance, pastor of First Baptist church in Baker, has no problem being designated evangelical, and sees a vote for Trump as pure realpolitik.

“Trump has said he’s Presbyterian – of course, when you say ‘Two Corinthians’ as opposed to ‘Second Corinthians’, he’s probably not a very good one,” Avance laughs. “But I think the fact is [First Baptist’s congregants] are looking for somebody that’s gonna defend their way of life.” Avance cites the openings on the supreme court as a point of concern – he admires the staunchly anti-abortion Antonin Scalia, who died in February – and says this isn’t his first rodeo, at least as far as supporting a distasteful politician goes.

“In the election that we just had here in Louisiana, of course they voted in a Democrat governor, which I do not like, and it’ll be better when he’s gone,” Avance says. “But the fact of the matter is the guy he was running against had been mired in controversy for having extramarital affairs and this kind of business.” The Republican David Vitter, the state’s senior senator, was pilloried throughout his campaign for his full-throated condemnation of same-sex unions – he tended to blame Hollywood – which he said violated the sanctity of marriage before and after his own prostitution bust.

Avance doesn’t care. “Everybody kept saying, ‘How can you support him? He’s a dog,’” Avance says. “And I said, ‘Let me tell you this story I heard from a hunter: he said, “Out there in my yard, I have a dog that’s my hunting dog. Now, he’s a dog, but he’s my dog. He runs the squirrels I want him to run. So he might be a dog, but at least he’s my dog in the hunt.”’”

‘They have a passion against Donald Trump’

Alfred N Young Jr poses for a photo at Covenant church. Photograph: Sean Gardner/The Guardian

Not everyone wants a dog. Alfred Young Jr has been a pastor in southern Louisiana for decades. Young, who is black, describes himself as “a product of the Ninth Ward”, the historically impoverished New Orleans neighborhood that was crushed into sticks by hurricane Katrina.

Like Avance, he is socially conservative and somewhat cynical about politics, but for different reasons.

“Republicans constantly say to black Americans that [their] values are more aligned with – if you’re Christian – the biblical values that we have,” Young says. “That’s very true.” But it isn’t enough, Young says: compassion is a Christian virtue, too, and his black parishioners don’t see enough of it from the right. “The message that black evangelicals pick up from Republicans is: ‘We’re right, but we don’t care.’”

Indeed, black conservative Christians have rarely rallied to Republicans – and conservative politicians have gone to great lengths to alienate them, from Reagan’s own “human predator” speech in New Orleans to the tragic lack of proportional response to need in the wake of Katrina.

Young’s mission is racial reconciliation; he leads an integrating small-majority white church in Covington, which, given congregational demographics in the south, where tiny towns often have one grocery store and two churches, is in itself strong evidence for the supernatural.

“I hear people telling me all the time that since President Obama was elected, they feel like racial relations have gotten worse and they feel like they should have gotten better,” Young says.

Young says many realized tensions weren’t going to ease when the South Carolina representative Joe Wilson stood up and screamed “You lie!” during Barack Obama’s first State of the Union speech. It was, in Young’s words, “the most disrespectful thing that could ever be, and there was not any major outcry”.

“I had forgotten that,” I say.

Young chuckles. “Black folk haven’t.”

Young maintains close relationships across race and class lines among rural Louisianans – he used to pastor another, poorer, majority-black church – and he says polls woefully underestimate the very poor, who don’t keep phone numbers for long and rarely answer an unlisted caller for fear of a bill collector. For those people, Trump has become an avatar of that disrespect. Young admits that poor black people can be induced to vote only “if they have a passion”, but they will show up in November, he says, because they have a one now: “They have a passion against Donald Trump.”

When Ronald Reagan came to Covington

Frank Fury and Jason Wood discuss politics and religion with members of the Faith Presbyterian church men’s club. Photograph: Sean Gardner/The Guardian

The day before his parishioners fight about politics over seafood, Wood offers to show me the town. He is much younger than everyone else interviewed here, and he’s a comparative newcomer to Covington, where he says his job and his family’s living situation fell into alignment so evenly and quickly that he could credit nothing but providence.

The sights in Covington, seat of St. Tammany Parish, which is home to nearly a quarter of a million people, include a town square with a refurbished train station that serves as a community center. At the center of the square is a strikingly inappropriate statue of Ronald Reagan, in many ways the architect of the now crumbling alliance between evangelicals and conservative politicians.

“Have you heard the story of when Ronald Reagan came to Covington?” Wood asks me as his truck pulls around the corner, revealing a saluting Reagan in his glory.

“No,” I say.

“That’s because he never did.”

The statue reaches at least 15ft off the ground on a pedestal that comes with a good story, told by Harvey Marsolan, the owner of the hardware store across the street.

Marsolan delightedly tells me the pedestal was installed upside down. “‘It’s supposed to be narrow at the top!’” the deliverers of the statue told the installers of the pedestal, according to Harvey. But the city decided it was fine the way it was, or at least not worth the trouble to fix, and so the Gipper presides over Covington with his base installed wrong.

Not everyone in town cares for the statue, erected by a wealthy local man named Patrick Taylor in 2008.

“There was a lot of people wondering why, but there it is,” Marsolan said.

“It’s gonna be like this election. A lot of people aren’t gonna like it, but there it is.”