Why Trump is closer to the Christian evangelists than ever
Donald Trump’s assessment of the failed attempt on his life was clear. “God alone saved me,” he said, and of course, his most devoted supporters agreed.
“For many on the Christian Right, the failed assassination attempt is a sign that God is protecting Trump,” says John Fea, a professor of history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania and author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. “They see his survival as a miracle. I fully expect to see a ramp-up of language related to Trump as God’s chosen person to reawaken America to conservatism and Christianity. In fact, in some of this rhetoric, there seems to be little difference between the fate of America and advancement of God’s Kingdom.”
At first glance, Trump and religious conservatives may not seem like natural bedfellows. He is, after all, the first former American president to be convicted of a crime – related to hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels (accusations he denied) – and he still faces criminal charges relating to the January 6 riots and electoral fraud in Georgia.
Yet for all the 78-year-old’s brashness, and tendency to become embroiled in controversy, Republicans say the root of his appeal to the evangelical movement is quite simple: he delivered for its followers during his one term in office.
As a result, the received wisdom is they will turn out for Trump come election time – perhaps in even greater numbers than before, energised by the assassination attempt. It is estimated that 81 per cent of Christian conservatives supported him against Hillary Clinton in 2016. “I fully expect Trump to get about 80 per cent of the white evangelical vote again,” says Fea.
‘It’s a mystery to many commentators’
Gary Bauer, the president of the conservative advocacy group American Values and a former presidential candidate himself, was appointed by Trump to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and frequently met with him in the White House. He acknowledges the contradictions inherent in the relationship between the Republican candidate and his religious base, but says it’s the former president’s actions, as much as any of his words, that have won over the evangelical movement.
“It’s a mystery to many commentators why someone with Donald Trump’s mixed history would be a favourite of conservative Christians and evangelicals. It goes back to policy,” he says.
“In 2016, a lot of conservatives and evangelicals were not happy with the Republican establishment that wanted our vote on election day, but it wasn’t the thing they cared about when they spent their political capital. And then former president Trump started reaching out to Christian leaders and pastors, and he often asked us, ‘How can there be so many Christians in America and yet you don’t seem to have much influence?’ It was an entirely different approach and it endeared him to many people.
“Across Supreme Court appointments, religious liberty, educational reform, parental rights and the sanctity of life, he was willing to say the right things to the rest of the country, not just in private to us, and the four years of his presidency reinforced all that. Religious liberty is in the strongest position on the Supreme Court than it has been for 50 years and he was aggressive in defending Christians abroad and speaking out on Christian persecution.”
For Julienne Davis, the Christian actress and writer who appeared alongside Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut and is one of Hollywood’s leading Republicans, it is actions such as these and Trump’s overarching vision for America that seals his relationship with the religious Right.
“Trump might be, frankly, a bit of a cad – but Christian conservatives see him as a patriot who truly believes in America and loves the idea of freedom,” says Davis. “I wouldn’t call Trump overtly religious, though he is anti-abortion. But it’s about raising national morale and saving America and American culture.”
Others cite the opposition in accounting for the steadfast evangelical loyalty to Trump. “Not only do we have the most conservative Supreme Court in decades but the Democrat Party has more than ever been taken over by radical Left-wingers who in both values and actions are diametrically opposed to evangelicals,” says Ken Danieli, a Republican political analyst and former brand strategist for Pepsi.
“Trump is laissez-faire about a lot of social issues but he’s not going to be for children having sex changes or men competing in women’s sports. Some Democrats like those things,” he adds. “They [evangelicals] see Trump as the opposite of the enemy – which is the radical Left-wing Marxist politics that has taken over universities and corporations.”
Of course, not every evangelical minister is on the Trump train. Heidi Neumark, a pastor who runs the Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan, was so appalled by Trump’s attitude to migration and minorities that shortly after the 2016 election she staged a Christmas pageant in her church with King Herod wearing a blonde wig, resembling the then president. “Only God knows the details and depths of Trump’s spiritual life, but what Trump says and does publicly disavows every core teaching Jesus set forth in the Sermon on the Mount,” Neumark wrote in her book Sanctuary.
But while twice-divorced Trump may have never exactly personified devoutness, he has been less sacrilegious than his enemies might claim. He may have colloquially described Communion in 2015 as “when I drink my little wine, which is about the only wine I drink, and have my little cracker,” but he has also said the Bible “means a lot to me” – albeit while cannily refusing to “get into specifics” when questioned about his favourite verse.
And with what some might think of as uncharacteristic humility, given Trump’s grand pronouncements about his bestselling 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal, he once said of the Bible, “Certainly, it is the book.” (The only time Christ is cited in The Art of the Deal is when he recounts his father chastising his mother for watching Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. “‘For Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he’d say,” Trump recalled. “‘Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.’”)
In his political life, meanwhile, insiders say Trump has assiduously cultivated evangelical power brokers such as televangelist Paula White. “[White] really helped in brokering access to [leading religious leaders] and that meant he got support from the likes of Jerry Falwell Jr, Ralph Reed and Franklin Graham before the 2016 election,” says a former Trump aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Still, faith-based initiatives in the White House weren’t always smooth sailing. There was the surreal occasion in 2017 when the then president, honouring St Patrick’s Day at an event with Enda Kenny, the then Irish taoiseach, read out an Irish proverb (“Always remember to forget the friends that have proved untrue/But never forget to remember those that have stuck by you”) only for it to subsequently emerge that the Irish proverb was reportedly written by the Nigerian poet Albashir Adam Alhassan.
Trump did, however, establish the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative – led by White – to give spiritual leaders a voice in government. Bauer says he advised Trump on the US-Israel alliance and moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
In return, he would call on evangelical conservatives for support in crucial moments. Shortly after a bombshell story broke in 2017 concerning a meeting between leading Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer, salvation came from Johnnie Moore, a pastor and president of The Congress of Christian Leaders, who tweeted a picture of himself and other evangelical leaders laying their hands on the president. The post went viral and helped deflect attention away from the stories of alleged Russian collusion that were dominating the news agenda.
Such public support has only intensified in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. Commenting on the Pennsylvania rally shooting in his sermon last Sunday, Moore said: “What we saw was an actual miracle … we need to join together in praying for another miracle: God will help our nation to embrace a political debate on the basis of ideas, not the demonisation of individuals.”
Trump himself said: “God alone … prevented the unthinkable from happening” while he was on the campaign trail. “We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” he wrote in a social media post on Monday. A former Trump aide suggests this will be a theme carried through the Republican National Convention currently taking place in Milwaukee. “There will likely be many comparisons made between Trump and Jesus during the RNC and beyond over leaders persecuted to the point of death. I doubt former president Trump will be seeking to discourage those comparisons.”
What is certain is that, for now, nobody can foresee Trump losing his stronghold on the evangelical vote. “Even those who have reservations about Trump because of his character issues will still hold their nose and vote for him because they cannot imagine voting for Biden because of the president’s views on abortion and sexual identity,” says Fea. “I am not sure that there is anything Trump can do at this point that will cause conservative evangelicals to abandon him.”