Trump Has Exposed Evangelicals for Who They Are

Having followed the so-called "Christian Right" for over three decades and seen a number of them up close during my years as a Republican activist, I long ago came to the conclusion that this group and many of its members were neither "Christian" in the sense of actually following Christ's gospel message nor "right" about anything, especially their contempt for and treatment of others, and were "right" only in the context of being right wing.  The message of the Sermon on the Mount" and other sayings attributed to Christ have no place in their quest which ultimately boils down to a pursuit of power. Power to denigrate and abuse those of other faiths and beliefs and to reserve privilege and control over others to themselves. Feeding the hungry, aiding the poor, and sheltering the homeless are invisible in their polemics and they ultimately want the ability to (i) actively harm and subjugate anyone they label as "other" or a "sinner" - think racial minorities, LGBT individuals and non-conservative "Christians" - and (ii) to stamp out anyone and anything (including science and modern knowledge) that challenges their cherry picked bible verses or the falsity of their ignorance embracing Bronze Age dogma. Trump, who is the embodiment of the seven deadly sins) has played upon these ugly motivations and promised them power in 2016, including ending Roe v. Wade, and now in 2024 promises them retribution against anyone who stands in their way.  Project 2025 with its white Christian nationalism and white supremacy agenda. A piece in The Atlantic and a column in the Washington Post look at for how a thirst for renewed political power and heavy dose of hatred of others, including childless women, now define what it means to be evangelical.  First highlights from The Atlantic that looks at the perverse prays of pastors at Trump rallies: 

A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. The nation was in crisis, he told the Lord—racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”

But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was about to come onstage. . . . . Terry prayed. “We know the hour is late. We know that time grows shorter for us to be saved and revived.” . . . . Soon Trump appeared to rapturous applause and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”

For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself.

To understand the evolving psychology and beliefs of Trump’s religious supporters, I attempted to review every prayer offered at his campaign events since he announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Working with a researcher, I compiled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The resulting document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, revealing religious text: benign in some places, blasphemous in others; contradictory and poignant and frightening and sad and, perhaps most of all, begging for exegesis.

There are many ways to parse the text. You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61). You could break down the demographics of the people leading the prayers: 45 men and 13 women; overwhelmingly evangelical, with disproportionate representation from Pentecostalism, a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues.

The scripture verse that’s cited most frequently in the prayers comes from 2 Chronicles. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and political scientist I asked to review the prayers, told me that this verse—which is quoted 10 times—is regularly cited by evangelicals to advance a popular conservative-Christian narrative: that America, like ancient Israel before it, has broken its special covenant with God and is suffering the consequences.

Trump’s supporters attribute America’s fall from grace to a variety of national sins old and new—prayer bans in public schools, illegal immigration, pro-transgender policies, the purported rigging of a certain recent election. Whatever the specifics, the picture of America they paint is almost universally—biblically—bleak.

The premise of all of these prayers is that America’s covenant can be reestablished, and its special place in God’s kingdom restored, if the nation repents and turns back to him. Burge told me that these ideas have long percolated on the religious right. What’s new is how many Christians now seem convinced that God has anointed a specific leader who, like those prophets of old, is prepared to defeat the forces of evil and redeem the country. And that leader is running for president.

Bradley Onishi, a scholar and former evangelical minister who studies the intersection of politics and Christianity in America, told me that prayers at political events have traditionally fit a certain mold. God is asked to grant the political leader inspiration and wisdom, to help him resist temptation and lead the country in a righteous direction.

But Onishi, like several of the other experts I asked to read the prayers, was struck by how many of them take Trump’s righteousness for granted. “No one prays for Trump to do right; they pray that God will do right by Trump,” Onishi told me.

Indeed, rather than asking God to make Trump an instrument of his will, most of the prayers start from the assumption that he already is. Accordingly, many of them drop any pretense of thy-will-be-done nonpartisanship, and ask explicitly for Trump’s reelection.

At a February campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina, Mark Burns, a televangelist in a three-piece suit, squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his right hand toward heaven. “Let us pray, because we’re fighting a demonic force,” he shouted. “We’re fighting the real enemy that comes from the gates of hell, led by one of its leaders called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?

It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?

Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began.

Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day. . . . “Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

With that, he invited the audience to remove their hats, and turned his voice to God. “Lord, help us make America great again,” he prayed.

Of course, to these pastors, the greatest evil is anyone and anything that challenges evangelical privilege and power.  It has nothing to do with Christ or furthering his gospel message. The Washington Post column focuses on how being a Trump supporter and supporting other extremist Republicans now defines what it is to be an evangelical:

Despite an effort to overthrow an election and a bevy of criminal charges, Donald Trump has managed to solidify and even expand his support among core demographics. . . . . The voters most loyal to the former president are White evangelicals. More than 80 percent backed him in the 2020 elections. And this has long presented a puzzle: How can people who prize moral rectitude and personal witness to Jesus so faithfully support the most secular president in American history, someone who seems by his behavior at best indifferent to Christianity?

It is easy to forget it now, but evangelicals initially were skeptical of Trump. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) was the preferred choice of churchgoing evangelicals, while Trump’s strongest support came from evangelicals with lower levels of church attendance.

But Trump’s awkward relationship with evangelicals grew stronger. At first, it was transactional, a question of power. He was the Republican candidate, and the vast majority of White evangelicals were Republicans. He promised them policy victories and delivered on appointing the staunchly conservative Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. And it wasn’t just that. As American culture became more secular and progressive on social issues, White evangelicals perceived themselves as under attack. Trump said he would protect them. He would fight not just for their preferred policies but for their very identities.

The catch was many of these new evangelicals didn’t go to church. They became evangelicals because of what it meant politically, most of all because it was a way to signal support for Donald Trump. Among White Trump supporters who were not evangelicals in 2016, 16 percent began to identify as evangelical by 2020, suggesting again that politics rather than religion was the driving factor.

Evangelicalism, in short, has become about shared political convictions. In one survey of Christian attitudes, for example, 43 percent of evangelicals said they did not believe in the divinity of Christ. But it gets even more bizarre. According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, 14 percent of Muslims (and 12 percent of Hindus and 5 percent of Jews) described themselves as “born-again” or evangelical Christians. This is not a joke.

If we look more closely at the numbers, what’s happening becomes clearer — and it’s fascinating. . . . In an America that is rapidly secularizing — in just two decades, church membership has plummeted to under 50 percent, from about 70 percent — partisan commitments are replacing religious affiliation as people’s overarching source of identity.

Now that White evangelicals are so disproportionally and unapologetically Trump-supporting, the share of Democrats who view Christianity negatively is likely to remain high or perhaps even increase. . . . Religion matters, even when it’s not really about religion.

It is all about power and the ability of a shrinking minority to impose and inflict their beliefs on the majority of Americans.  Christ and feigned religious belief have nothing to do with the real agenda. It's