Is There Room for a Religious Left?

President Joe Biden's private audience with Pope Francis on Friday at the Vatican was a moment to reconsider the role that faith plays in American politics -- and whether it can be depolarized going forward. For decades, faith has been used to divide people along partisan lines. Since the 1980s, White evangelicals have overwhelmingly backed Republicans as a badge of identity, often in opposition to abortion and LGBT rights, with Donald Trump winning a higher percentage of their votes in 2016. It was even more than George W. Bush, an actual evangelical whose faith was central to his identity, got in his two presidential elections.