Evangelicals and the Vanishing Moral Consensus on PEPFAR
How political identity reshaped support for America’s most successful global health program
Peter Wehner has a follow-up article in The Atlantic on why so many American Evangelicals remain silent on the freeze and later reduction of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Since President Trump’s Executive Order last January freezing all PEPFAR programming and services, the aid program faces a precarious future. The 120-day freeze of PEPFAR programming last spring has already cost lives, especially among mothers and infants in Sub-Saharan Africa. As Wehner reports:
More than 75,000 adults and children are now estimated to have died because of the effective shutdown of PEPFAR that began less than six months ago. Another adult life is being lost every three minutes; a child dies every 31 minutes. Ending PEPFAR could result in as many as 11 million additional new HIV infections and nearly 3 million additional AIDS-related deaths by the end of the decade.
Given Evangelicals’ support for PEPFAR when it was introduced by President George W. Bush in 2003, Wehner then asks:
Why have so many evangelicals remained silent? Is it mostly explained by ignorance or indifference? Compassion fatigue? Or perhaps fealty to Trump? Is the silence among ministers explained by fear of upsetting congregants? A desire to keep their ministry separate from politics? Other ministry commitments?
Wehner uses the remainder of the article to share interviews with two dozen Evangelical leaders and congregants to illustrate a few potential answers. Most Americans are blissfully unaware PEPFAR, even among the subset of the voting-public who closely follow politics. Even among the smaller subset of the public who follow foreign policy issues, security and economic stories dominant more niche issues like foreign aid.
For me, the bigger puzzle isn’t the lack of a public reaction to PEPFAR, but the fact that many of the President’s Evangelical supporters double-down on opposition to PEPFAR, even when they are presented with some basic facts about the program’s impact on the deficit, or its effectiveness in the field. Rather, there is a lack of moral outrage over the death of innocents that’s more common for policies like abortion or violence against crisis pregnancy centers.
Many of Wehner’s interviewees discuss the possibility of “compassion fatigue,” media distraction, and the lingering stigma surrounding HIV treatment as a response to sexual promiscuity or homosexuality. Geographic and ethnic/racial distance also most certainly plays a role.
While all relevant variables, affective polarization at the group level and motivated reasoning at the individual level are more likely to be driving the differences we observe.
Affective Polarization: the degree to which individuals view members of an opposing political party (either elites or ordinary members) with suspicion, contempt, or disgust. Affective polarization gets supercharged when in-group elites leverage fear to cue group members into who or what presents an acute threat.
Motivated Reasoning: when presented with contradicting evidence that risks generating cognitive dissonance, most people revise their religious beliefs to accord with their social identity (e.g., political party identification), rather than the other way around.
The interaction of affective polarization motivated reasoning explains why conservative Evangelicals would support PEPFAR in 2003 but come to oppose it in 2025. It also goes a long way in explaining the double-down effect that individuals are confronted with worldview inconsistencies. The bigger challenge, for now, is how to leverage persuasion to build consensus around issues like foreign aid, as opposed to settling scores or driving further polarization.