With Election Day looming, Harris ramps up engagement with Black church

(RNS) — When a Detroit pastor asked Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday (Oct. 15) about her alleged “lack of engagement” with Black church leaders, the Democratic presidential contender looked visibly taken aback. Harris rejected the accusation, calling it “misinformation” that originated with former President Donald Trump’s campaign. But the moment, coming during a town hall in Detroit organized by radio host Charlamagne tha God, showed her perceived vulnerability with Black voters. 

“They are trying to disconnect me from the people I have worked with — that I am from,” said Harris, who has a connection to Hinduism through her mother but was also raised in the Black church and is a member of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. She has “been actively engaged” with Black church leaders “throughout my career and as vice president,” including, she said pointedly, “recently.”

Indeed, Harris, who called her pastor, the Rev. Amos Brown, shortly before announcing her presidential campaign in July, made a blitz of campaign appearances meant to shore up support among Black churchgoers. It’s a familiar strategy for Democratic politicians, who have long visited Black churches near Election Day, hoping to maximize turnout among a critical segment of the party’s base.

But experts say Harris’ recent appearances in faith settings don’t measure the full scope of her outreach to Black Christians. While some analysts have raised concerns about lagging support for the vice president among Black men especially, others told RNS she has been quietly courting African American support in multiple ways for some time.

Harris recently launched a “Souls to the Polls” initiative to magnify the voter participation efforts Black churches have organized for decades, and her campaign has established a faith advisory board that features Brown and nine other faith leaders tasked with connecting with Black churches in swing states.

Her appearance with Charlamagne tha God came on the heels of a visit Sunday to Koinonia Christian Center, a church in Greenville, North Carolina, where a packed congregation clapped and shouted boisterously throughout her address. Harris told the congregation that she learned at an early age to think of faith as “a verb” and that believers “show up in action and in service.” While lamenting the damage wrought across the state last month by Hurricane Helene, the vice president repeatedly referred to Scripture.

Citing the New Testament’s Epistle to the Galatians, Harris said the Apostle Paul “reminded them and us, that God calls us not to become weary of doing good. Because we each have the power, God tells us this, the power, each one of us, to make a difference.”

She concluded by quoting from the Book of Psalms: “Let us always remember that while weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.”

Anthea Butler, a historian of African American and American religion at the University of Pennsylvania, said Harris has touched Black Christians in less obvious ways, pointing to Harris’ decision not to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in July. The move, Butler argued, likely resonated with Black church leaders who have been vocally critical of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip.

Equally as telling, Butler said, was the event Harris chose to attend instead of the Netanyahu speech: An event for the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, one of the “Divine 9” Black sororities and fraternities that are seen as cultural powerhouses in the African American community.

“It’s always been the case that Black churches have had some kind of engagement with other Black organizations, be that sororities, fraternities, cultural and civic organizations, and others,” said Butler. “So when you look at a Black church, you can’t just say, ‘This is just Black church.’ There are all these other tentacles that come out of the Black church that are intertwined within the Black community.”

The overlap was evident for the Rev. Jay Augustine, general chaplain of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, one of the “Divine 9.” Augustine is spearheading a “Souls to the Polls” event on Sunday (Oct. 20) at his African Methodist Episcopal Church in North Carolina in concert with other Black civic groups, including sororities. He recently co-hosted a webinar to encourage houses of worship and members of the fraternities and sororities across the country to take similar get-out-the-vote efforts on Alpha’s “Souls to the Polls Day,” where people leave the pews after worship and march and caravan to the voting centers where early voting is available.

“One of the fundamental tenets of our fraternity, one of our mottos, if you will, is a voteless people is a hopeless people,” said Augustine, pastor of St. Joseph AME Church in Durham, which Harris visited in 2019, and who considers Harris a friend. “Voting is something that we put front and center.”

Still, polls have shown Harris struggling to gain traction with Black men: A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters found that 70% of Black men back Harris, while 20% said they would vote for Donald Trump — a 15-point drop from 2020, when 85% of Black men likely to vote said they planned to vote for President Joe Biden. Black churches’ traditional efforts, meanwhile, may not reach Black men as they have in the past: According to a 2021 Pew poll, Black men are more likely than Black women to be religiously unaffiliated, with a full 26% claiming no religious tradition compared to 18% of women.

But Butler expressed confidence that Black men would ultimately side with Harris and voiced concern that Democrats may blame Black men if Harris loses. “Why isn’t anybody asking why white people keep voting for Trump?” Butler said.

Augustine, too, said he remains optimistic about Harris’ chances. Given his fraternity’s close alignment with its sister sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, to which Harris belongs, he predicted most voters in his fraternity’s membership will cast a ballot for the vice president.

“The Black community is not a monolith,” he said. “Alpha Phi Alpha is not a monolith. So I’m not saying that 100% of Alphas are voting for her. I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but casting a broad net, which I think is accurately cast, I would say the vast, vast majority of members of our fraternity will be supporting her.”

Harris seemed equally confident about her support among Black Christians, based less on ties to the Black community than on a contrast she made between her beliefs and those of her opponent, who recently made headlines for endorsing a $60 “God Bless the USA Bible.” In her interview with Charlamagne tha God, Harris said Trump and many of his supporters “suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down,” a spirit which is “absolutely contrary to the church I know.

“My church is about saying true leadership (is) based on who you lift up,” Harris said. “Then he’s selling $60 Bibles or tennis shoes and trying to play people, as though that makes him more understanding of the Black community? Come on.”