An interesting wrinkle in religion news came up the other day when a bunch of news organizations did some digging and found out that former President Donald Trump’s once loyal religious base had evaporated.
Perhaps one of the most shattering admissions of this loss came from one of his advisors who called the former president a “little elementary school child.”
Clearly a lot has changed on the Trump train faith-team front. Let’s start with this Religion News Service story:
WASHINGTON (RNS) — When Donald Trump launched his 2020 reelection bid in Orlando, Florida, three years ago, the event was riddled with faith-speak. Both Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly referenced God, arguing the Almighty had blessed America. Trump’s closest evangelical adviser, Florida pastor Paula White-Cain, opened up the event with a passionate invocation in which she insisted the “hand of God” would work for Trump.
But when Trump announced yet another White House bid from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday (Nov. 15), he did so with a speech devoid of overt religious references. It was unclear if the event included an invocation, and while some of Trump’s stalwart evangelical supporters were seen milling about the resort’s carpeted floors Tuesday evening — namely, conservative commentator Eric Metaxas, pastor Mark Burns and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — many of the former president’s longtime religious defenders were nowhere to be seen.
Which brings up a question I’ve been wondering for some months: Where is the Rev. Paula White and was she at this Mar-a-Lago gathering? If not, why not?
Why ask? She has turned over the reins of her Orlando-area church to her son, so she’s not tied down with ecclesiastical responsibilities.
Instead, most have remained silent about his new campaign, while others have hinted at allegiances to other potential 2024 presidential contenders such as Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
One is the Rev. Robert Jeffress, the megachurch pastor of First Baptist Dallas. Remember that obnoxious hymn “Make America Great Again”?
Hours before Trump’s speech on Tuesday, Jeffress encouraged his Twitter followers to buy Pence’s new book, “So Help Me God,” and described the former vice president as “a great friend, a committed Christian, and a true American hero.”
In 2021, White announced a national faith advisory board for Trump’s hoped-for second term, but it’s not clear who is on it a year later.
Jeffress told Newsweek he was reluctant to jump on the Trump train at this time. Talk about holding your finger to the wind.
BusinessInsider also put together a list of defectors from Trump
The Washington Post reported on a speech by a one-time Trump advisor, the Rev. James Robison, making it quite clear that numerous conservatives are done with the 45th president.
IRVING, Tex. — A televangelist who served as a spiritual adviser to Donald Trump says the former president has the tendency to act “like a little elementary schoolchild” and suggests that Trump’s focus on minor spats was preventing progress on larger goals.
“If Mr. Trump can’t stop his little petty issues, how does he expect people to stop major issues?” James Robison, the president of the Christian group Life Outreach International, said Wednesday night at a meeting of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL), a conservative political group that focuses on social issues.
Five years ago, Robison was saying way different things about Trump (see the video atop this page) such as Trump becoming “one of the greatest miracles the world has ever seen.”
Clearly, we are talking about some major disenchantment in the meantime.
But the real crux of the story came further down. It appears that the Rev. Mike Evans, an author and founder of the Jerusalem Prayer Team, was out the door.
In an essay sent to The Washington Post earlier this month, Mike Evans, a former member of the evangelical advisory board, said he would not vote for Trump again and recalled how he once left a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.”
“All of us knew that Trump had character flaws, but we considered our relationship with him transactional,” wrote Evans, a Texas author and Christian Zionist who raises money for outreach and support in Israel. “We wanted Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. We wanted his support of our biblical values. We all wanted his support for the State of Israel. Donald Trump indeed kept and exceeded his promises to us.”
Well, at least he was honest about the ‘transactional’ part.
When I reported on Paula White in 2017 for the Post Sunday magazine, it was clear to me that these guys were using Trump as much as he was using them.
However, Evans said Trump had done damage by turning “the pulpit that we preach from” into a political platform.
“Donald Trump can’t save America. He can’t even save himself. He used us to win the White House. We had to close our mouths and eyes when he said things that horrified us,” Evans wrote. “I cannot do that anymore.”
There’s a lot more out there on this but the main question is: Where are these folks going to go? To Mike Pence? Tom DeSantis? Someone else?
Evangelicals are still a formidable force and much more of a voting bloc than any other religious group in the country (Catholics are split down the middle, politically, with frequent Mass attenders going GOP, for the most part), so it’s definitely a story as to where they will end up.
This is not to say evangelicals are always of one mind. This Religion Dispatches piece on the ReAwaken America tour points out there’s a large contingent of charismatics and Pentecostals that no one is claiming, but which has growing power among evangelicals.
The above article was pretty alarmist about the political aims of these folks but if they are so dangerous and influential, why didn’t more of them –- and their supporters -– win in the recent midterm elections? Why wasn’t “White Christian nationalism,” the big villain to the Religion Dispatches folks and others of like persuasion, a big winner earlier this month?
I’m only hearing mostly silence from the Christian left on that one. One exception is this Salon report:
"A key to Trump's previous success was his strong support from two conservative Christian blocs that haven't always trusted each other: traditional white evangelicals and Pentecostal/charismatic Christians," [Baptist news editor Brian] Kaylor told Salon. The charismatic faction, from Copeland to the sorts of "prophets" who became central to Mastriano's campaign, "remains firmly in Trump's camp." But, Kaylor continued, "If DeSantis can gain support from Southern Baptists and other evangelicals" — a much larger pool of voters — "he could find a path to victory in the presidential primaries."
So the story from here on is how DeSantis aims to gain support among all these varieties of evangelicals.
Watch DeSantis take a breather over the holidays and then roll out a strategy to capture these folks. I don’t think it will take long for most of the non-charismatic evangelicals to bolt. As for the charismatics, they’ve got a lot more invested in Trump being their man — and several major voices in this crowd have prophesied Trump’s second coming — so they’ll hang on to the bitter end.
Unless cracks start to develop before that.
Reporters: Be looking for DeSantis (and Pence) to be hiring outreach directors to the religious community. Who they pick will show how discerning they truly are. And remember what GetReligion has been saying since 2016 — keep your eyes on Latino evangelicals and Pentecostal believers.
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