"The left is godless": Why a MAGA spokeswoman's attack makes no sense

"Living without God, I just wouldn't wish it on anyone," said Caroline Sunshine about many of her own party's voters

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During an interview on FOX at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, Trump campaign Deputy Director of Communications Caroline Sunshine claimed that Democrats were all “godless,” implying that they were incapable of expressing sympathy in the wake of an assassination attempt against the former president.

FOX HOST HARRIS FAULKNER: People are praying for him. People have tapped into that. How does the left come against that?… What are they gonna do?

SUNSHINE: I think the left is godless, and I don't feel like it's harsh to say that. I actually don't say that from a place of malice. I say that as a… woman of deep faith myself, I know how having God at the center of my own life, especially in moments like the one that we all just lived through, has an impact.

Living without God, I just wouldn't wish it on anyone.

But this movement, the MAGA movement, is full people who love our country but love God. Look: What President Trump survived, as I said, divine intervention… We were speaking that the bullet pierced President Trump at 6:11 PM. Ephesians 6:11 tells us, “Put on the full armor of God, take your stand against the devil and his schemes.”

I also think it's important to remember—maybe I'm just feeling a little old-fashioned today, but—it's important to remember that good does defeat evil. What President Trump did in that moment by getting up is remind us that good does defeat evil when we have the courage to stand up and fight. Fight for God, fight for our families, fight for our country. I think President Trump is the great American fighter.

So much #Unity…

It also didn’t answer the question. The question was about how Democrats could respond in the wake of the attack; Sunshine just heard the word “praying” and immediately pivoted to demonizing the left.

The “left” didn’t condemn anyone for praying for Trump if that’s how they expressed grief, and prominent Democrats across the board expressed nothing but well-wishes for him. They want Trump defeated at the ballot box, not through violence. If the attempted assassination had succeeded, Americans would likely have to brace ourselves for a wave of political violence that benefits absolutely no one.

That’s why Sunshine’s claim that the left is “godless” isn’t just a lie and it’s not just a slur. It’s completely disingenuous. She implied that Democrats couldn’t possibly feel bad about the tragedy because they lacked religious faith even though they repeatedly and forcefully said as much about the violence (which, by the way, was committed by a registered Republican who “definitely was conservative” with access to a weapon that Democrats want banned).

It’s especially ridiculous considering President Joe Biden is a devout Catholic who attends Mass nearly every week and cites his faith in damn near every speech.

There’s something extremely arrogant about suggesting others can’t have empathy because they don’t think exactly like you. But that’s the GOP brand for you: If you’re not one of them, you’re a monster.

Sunshine is also just factually wrong in claiming the left is godless.

According to a Gallup poll from last year, only 33% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have no religious label. And many of those “nones,” as we know, still believe in a higher power even if they no longer call themselves “Christian.”

Gallup also found that about 61% of Democrats were specifically Protestant or Catholic. In other words, the majority of Democrats are Christian. They may be more liberal Christians, yes, but they’re Christians.

The numbers get even more religious when we look at Congress itself, where 76% of elected Democrats in the House and Senate are Christian, another 12% are Jewish, and another 3% belong to some other theistic religion.

To say Democrats are “godless,” then, is to say that any Christian who isn’t a conservative Christian—who wants abortion banned even if it jeopardizes the life of the mother, who refuses to accept the existence of trans people, who opposes civil rights, etc.—is effectively in the same category as an atheist.

If Republicans believe that, they ought to say it more explicitly.

It’s not like their attempts to broaden the tent are working anyway. When, on the first day of the RNC, a GOP leader from California, Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, offered a Sikh prayer, she got blasted by the Christian Nationalist crowd.

All that said, I’ve written before that Secular Americans are a growing part of the Democratic base. That’s still true. That doesn’t mean Democratic candidates have to shy away from talking about faith, only that they need to get better at adopting secular arguments for the causes that matter to their voters. Because when it comes to topics like reproductive choice and LGBTQ rights, non-religious voters are often the strongest advocates for those policies. Atheists and agnostics are also more likely to vote than the general public.

Religious “nones” are just as, if not more, important to the Democratic Party as white evangelicals are to the GOP. (A Pew Research Center survey from this year found that 59% of Protestants support Republicans while 70% of “Nones” support Democrats. And “Nones” represent a larger segment of Americans than Protestants.)

If anything, as those aforementioned surveys reveal, the Republican Party has a small but not-insignificant segment of non-religious voters too. 12% in that Gallup poll. If Sunshine thinks those voters are heartless and incapable of basic humanity, then those voters shouldn’t waste their time casting a ballot for anyone in the party, given that Republicans want nothing to do with them. It could make a difference in swing states with razor-thin margins.

There aren’t enough white evangelicals and conservative Catholics to give Republicans the votes they need. Yet they’re actively pushing away the very people they need to expand their base.

By the way, had Sunshine read the Bible for more than half a sentence, she would know that Ephesians 6:12 reminds people that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world…” That may be a perfect description of a country governed under Trump’s Project 2025.

Given the horrors that conservative Christians want to inflict upon America, we’d be lucky if more people were “godless.” Or at least willing to openly push back against the kind of religiosity infecting the right.

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