January 8th 2020

Bill Berkowitz

President Donald Trump’s appointments of ultra-conservative judges, attacks on abortion rights, espousal of white nationalism, vilification of transgender people, and declaring his opponents the embodiment of evil, have solidified his hold on conservative evangelical Christians. On Friday night January 3, fresh from ordering the killing of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Trump told an audience of thousands at Kendall’s Ministerio Internacional El Rey Jesus (King Jesus International), in Miami-Dade County, that Soleimani’s “bloody rampage is now forever gone. He was plotting attacks against Americans, but now we’ve ensured his atrocities have been stopped for good. He was planning a major attack and we got him.” 

The church is “home to one of the largest majority-Hispanic congregations in the country,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. The congregation was there “to pray, sing and cheer on the president. During an opening prayer delivered as the audience raised their hands toward the stage, El Rey Pastor Guillermo Maldonado compared Trump to the Biblical Persian King Cyrus, who freed the Jews from Babylon captivity and decreed that the temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt.”

Trump was there to shore up his evangelical base, just days after an editorial in the well-respected evangelical publication Christianity Today, called for the impeached president’s removal. Christians “have never had a greater champion — not even close — than you have in the White House right now. Look at the record,” Trump said. “We’ve done things that nobody thought was possible. We’re not only defending our constitutional rights, we’re also defending religion itself, which is under siege.”

Not long after the election of Trump, the doors to the White House -- and to a vast array of government agencies – opened up to the Christian Right. Prior to the election, some Christian right leaders struggled over whether to support Trump’s run. Back then, as in most years of the preceding four decades, Christian conservative organizations were busy organizing voter registration drives, launching boycotts, defending (and sometime condemning) a number of high profile evangelists that were involved in sex scandals. There were battles to be fought over same-sex marriage, the meaning of “religious freedom,” and against Planned Parenthood, the Girl Scouts of America, and transsexuals. Some leaders were battling what they called a porn “epidemic” sweeping through the pews. Over the course of the years, several high-profile leaders died. 

These days, the angst that supporting Trump may have initially caused, has devolved into total acceptance, and in some cases overt worship. 

Despite Christianity Today’s searing editorial, the vast majority of evangelicals are standing by their man in the White House. According to a recent CNN/SSRS poll, support among evangelicals is holding firm at 75%. As Alex Tam pointed out earlier this month in the Harvard Political review, “Since 2004, no Republican presidential candidate has gotten less than 74 percent of the evangelical vote, culminating with Donald Trump’s record-high 81 percent of the vote in 2016”.

In late-December, Rob Boston, the editor of Church & State magazine, published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, wrote: “The impeachment inquiry has failed to make any dent in Trump’s support among white evangelicals.” Trump continues to be “beloved by America’s Christian nationalists.” In the ultimate quid pro quo, “Trump is giving right-wing evangelicals what they want, mainly judicial appointments and policy changes at the regulatory level, so they back him.”

In a recent fundraising email, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins laid out the major reasons Christian evangelical conservatives will not abandon Trump:

“More victories for life than at any time in our nation's history, including policies that cost Planned Parenthood (America's largest abortion provider) $16 MILLION in direct taxpayer-funded Title X grants, and potentially millions more, and ending U.S. government support for abortion overseas.

“Confirmation of two originalist justices to the Supreme Court, and dozens more to federal appeals courts, where one out of every four judges is a Trump appointee!

“Religious liberty finally protected by executive order, making clear that our federal government may not interfere with any American's right to live out their faith.

“Tax cuts for American families, especially those with children.

“American leadership for religious liberty around the world as when President Trump addressed Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia and also world leaders at the United Nations, and when I was tasked with escorting Pastor Andrew Brunson back to the USA after two years in Turkish prisons.”

Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which has extensive outreach to conservative evangelicals in battlegrounds across the country,

is another longtime Trump booster. His new book, titled For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump, “but its original title, believe it or not,” according to Americans United’s Boston, was Render to God and Trump.

“In 2016 evangelical Christians went out and helped us in numbers never seen before. We’re going to blow those numbers away in 2020,” Trump said at the King Jesus International rally. “I really believe we have God on our side.”

In 2020, religious right organizations will be organizing to keep its base solid for Trump. “Social conservatives need to maximize turnout from the base and expand the map by stressing the softer side of the faith agenda: education reform, immigration and criminal justice reform, and anti-poverty measures,” Reed said in early November. 

“Very few people anymore are in the middle,” said FRC’s Perkins. “Barack Obama brought us to this point more quickly because of the extreme policies that he pushed. Trump, with the support of evangelicals, has worked to move the pendulum back.”