CHARLESTON, S.C. — In 2015, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott attended the funerals of those slain by a racist gunman at Mother Emanuel AME Church. Scott would later tear up on the Senate floor recounting the faith of the fallen and their families. Haley would go on to write that she leaned on God and her faith deepened as she grappled with the trauma of the Charleston shooting.
If the state’s first Asian American governor and its first Black senator since Reconstruction embodied how far South Carolina has come on race, the murders of the Emanuel Nine showed just how far it has to go.
Eight years later, the region around Charleston, known as the Holy City, is home to the two Republicans’ presidential campaigns. Scott grew up in North Charleston, and after leaving her post as U.N. ambassador, Haley moved to nearby Kiawah Island.
Both are still waiting for a breakthrough moment, possibly in the first GOP debate on Wednesday. Both have been part of influential S.C. churches, and as candidates of color must appeal to their party’s white evangelical base to have a prayer against former President Donald Trump, whose hold on the GOP and its Christian voters remains strong.
“These two have managed to make their mark nationally, in part because they are candidates of color, and they have done it without emphasizing that fact,” said Danielle Vinson, a political science professor at Furman University. “It’s still a bit of a necessity in a Republican Party that wants to focus on a colorblind society that has made great strides.”
For Haley, an Indian American raised Sikh before converting to mainline Christianity, faith is just one of many differences she learned to navigate as “a brown girl in a black-and-white world,” as she likes to say.
For Scott, raised in the Black church tradition by his single mother before becoming a born-again Christian, faith is a central part of his pitch. He is counting on his fellow evangelicals to help him in the crowded GOP field.
On a…
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