The way pastor Dwight McKissic sees it, there isn’t a candidate in this year’s presidential race who really represents evangelical Christian views on abortion or sexuality.

McKissic certainly feels strongly about both issues: He once suggested Hurricane Katrina may have been a form of divine judgment for gay pride parades and abortion centers in New Orleans, among other practices like voodoo and “devil worship.”

Republican candidates in the past have shared his opposition to gay marriage and abortion. But as McKissic weighs this year’s presidential race, he has a different calculus in mind — and a great deal of cynicism about the party that once promised to represent his values.

“I’m no longer naive enough to believe voting GOP will protect traditional marriage or life in the womb. For 40 years I’ve given my vote to Republicans behind this ruse,” he wrote on Wednesday. “Won’t be fooled this time.”

Instead, this Texas pastor is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I have concluded that the better person and best-qualified person in this election between the two major party nominees is by far Madame Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said on an “Evangelicals for Harris” organizing call Wednesday night.

McKissic is in the minority among evangelical voters, who still mostly support Republicans. But he isn’t the only one.

On Wednesday’s call, he was joined by more than 3,000 attendees, according to organizers, who met to pray, rally and, at times, break into hymns ahead of the November election.

“We have seen one candidate incite an insurrection, indicted and convicted for 34 felony crimes and engaged in name-calling and insults as a campaign strategy,” McKissic told the group. “America, we can do better than this.”

Donald Trump hasn’t given McKissic much reason to reconsider that stance, especially on those issues evangelicals have long seen as paramount. The former president has tried to minimize abortion as an issue, arguing it should be left to the states. He’s said he wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban if reelected. Even if he were willing to enact a national abortion ban, Republican lawmakers have largely rejected the idea of passing such a bill if they win unified control of Congress.

“I don’t see any moral superiority of one party over the other,” McKissic said.

Evangelicals for Harris, the group that hosted Wednesday night’s call, hopes to win over more voters like him. This group isn’t officially affiliated with the Harris team — and the campaign hasn’t publicly cheered on the effort. A spokesperson for Harris didn’t respond to a request for comment about the call.

But their work could make a difference in fiercely contested battleground states. In its first video advertisement against Trump this week, the group paired a clip of the famous evangelist Billy Graham calling sinners to repent with a clip of Trump suggesting in an interview that he doesn’t feel the need to ask God for forgiveness.

(Graham’s son, Franklin Graham, responded that his father supported “the conservative values and policies” of Trump in 2016 and said, “If he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed.”)

Evangelicals for Harris formerly existed as Evangelicals for Biden and launched ahead of the 2020 election. Back then, it had a budget of roughly $100,000, according to its founder, the Rev. Jim Ball.

In an interview, Ball declined to name major donors, though he told NOTUS the funding has come from a “mix” of Christians and others, including people he connected with as he advocated for environmental policies in the past.

“We have more money than we did in 2020, thankfully,” he said this week. The group will push online advertising, emails and social media messages, focusing on key states as it did during the 2020 election. But Ball said he also hopes to go further, aiming to run $1 million in video advertisements on streaming platforms in the coming months with microtargeting tools.

Ball isn’t making quite the same case as McKissic. He’s genuinely excited to vote for Harris and sees her views as aligning with Jesus Christ’s teachings to help the poor and marginalized. He points to the expanded Child Tax Credit, passed in a pandemic relief bill in 2021 and supported by the Biden administration, as one example.

“We do feel they represent our values as we understand them,” Ball said. In the Bible, “there is just a tremendous message — a tremendous, consistent message — first of all that God loves everyone, and because God loves everyone, God has a special concern for those who are being treated unjustly, those who are vulnerable.”

“As Christians, we have a responsibility to use this gift of citizenship and our ability to elect our leaders to elect leaders who reflect what Jesus calls us to — to love our neighbor as ourselves, to protect the vulnerable, to love even our enemies,” he added.

Ball’s group has gotten plenty of pushback from conservative Christians, who argue there can be no such thing as an “evangelical for Harris” unless the people involved have a very different definition of evangelicalism. Because of Harris’ abortion policies, said Daily Wire writer Megan Basham — who recently published a book criticizing certain Christians who she sees as too liberal — speakers on Wednesday night’s call were “championing the cause of death.”

This is “the most pro-abortion presidential ticket in history,” Basham told NOTUS. “I can certainly understand Christians who feel they need to vote third-party or sit out the election, but there is no moral justification for this.”

When asked about that kind of criticism, Ball declined to share his personal views on abortion. But the organization’s stance, he told NOTUS, is this: “If we want to know what our priorities should be based on Jesus’ lordship, that means we look to Jesus’ words and the Bible to help guide us and say whatever Jesus’ priorities were, those need to be our priorities.”

“And when you look at some of these hot-button cultural issues, Jesus never talked about abortion or these gender issues. He never talked about them,” Ball continued. “These issues were around during the time of Jesus, and yet he never talked about them. What he did do is identify with the vulnerable.”

“We are on the side of the vulnerable, those in need, those whose lives are in danger,” he told NOTUS, raising concerns about women who haven’t been able to get miscarriage treatment in states with abortion restrictions. “So we care very much about what’s happening to these women in terms of being denied health care they need at a time of distress.”

But his rhetoric raises an obvious question from anti-abortion Christians: Does a fetus also qualify as the vulnerable? “Our view is that these should be private, family matters,” Ball said.

Ball doesn’t seem to think other parts of scripture speak definitively to the issue of personhood either. “The interpretation of those things in light of this political situation we find ourselves in is something, again, that folks need to discuss and decide on their own,” he said of Bible verses often cited by anti-abortion advocates.

Christian author Latasha Morrison tried to strike a balance during Wednesday’s organizing call.

“I am a person who is pro-life,” she said. “I am a person that believes in life from the cradle to the grave. But I’ve seen this weaponized. I’ve seen this criminalized. I’ve seen women who have died, and because of that, I can no longer be a one-issue voter.”

Ball has been in activism for a while, but he has more often focused on environmental policy than electoral politics. He told NOTUS he is registered as an independent and has voted for both Republicans and Democrats in the past. But he was so alarmed by Trump’s behavior during the former president’s first couple years in office that he felt the need to get involved.

“The sheer weight of the threat really finally came home, and I was like — I just can’t be on the sidelines anymore,” he recalled of his decision to launch Evangelicals for Biden in 2019.

Ball grew up going to a Southern Baptist church. He said he attends a Cooperative Baptist church in Virginia now and affirms historic Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ.

The Evangelicals for Harris website mentions that the vice president also identifies as a Christian and notes that she attended church as a child. But Ball told NOTUS he would support Harris even if she weren’t a sister in the faith. (The Harris campaign didn’t answer more detailed questions about her faith, like whether she affirms the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed, and believes in Jesus Christ’s literal resurrection.)

That isn’t troubling to Ball. He said the question is whether Harris’ policies and character “align with our values.”

Of course, some evangelicals are voting for Harris even though her policies may not always align with their values.

David French, a former colleague and a conservative Christian columnist, said over the weekend that he’ll be voting for Harris because he sees Trump as a unique threat to democracy and conservatism itself.

His opinion piece, even as it outlined anti-abortion views and other ideals held by people on the political right, has its own share of detractors, some of whom are less civil than others.

One such critic sent an online message to French’s wife after the column came out, saying he “DESERVES DEATH,” according to a screenshot French shared with NOTUS.

The subject line? French “DESERVES TO HAVE HIS EYELIDS CUT OFF AND BATTERY ACID POURED INTO HIS EYEBALLS.”

The message included gay and antisemitic slurs and even more vivid threats of violence.

There’s no telling what religious affiliation that person claims. But French is used to it, having received messages like this many times since 2016.

He’s also written about being confronted by people at his old church, even at the communion table, for being critical of Trump. After seeing that kind of division within the church, some Christians say they have learned a clear lesson from the evangelical community’s devotion to Republicans. They don’t want to offer full-throated support to any political candidate, lest they be tempted to compromise their beliefs in defending flawed politicians.

For that reason, the Evangelicals for Harris call made some Christians uncomfortable.

One theologian, Joash Thomas of the nonprofit International Justice Mission, wrote beforehand that because of his past experience working in GOP political consulting and his later repudiation of “political idolatry,” he has vowed to never “attach the public witness of my beautiful faith to imperfect earthly rulers.”

“Political leaders are ultimately always going to be servants of Empire, not Jesus,” he said.

Ball understands concerns like those, but he rejects any accusation of partisanship.

“It’s Jesus’ lordship that is guiding me here,” he told NOTUS. “Not a political ideology.”

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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.