Vendors sell T-shirts on February 22 in Nashville, where Donald Trump came to speak at the National Religious Broadcasters Association’s International Christian Media Convention.Seth Herald/Reuters
On a Sunday morning in Eastern Washington, Ken Ortize stands before the congregation he has led for decades and reads a Bible passage about the end times. He doesn’t take long to speak Donald Trumpwhom he describes as a champion of good political priorities.
“It’s a contrast between globalism and nationalism,” he says. “And Donald Trump is an unapologetic nationalist. MAGA, after all. You can’t say it any clearer.
“That’s right,” shouts someone from the Calvary Spokane congregation.
The sermon ranges from the Book of Revelation to conservative pet peeves – David Rockefeller, Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, George Soros – to the prosecutors bringing charges against Mr. Trump (Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, “these people have been put in a position to change the legal system), to a call to Christians to mobilize for political action. “Jesus, the first, said, ‘Be busy until I come.’ The word “occupy” means to engage,” says Ortize.
When Donald Trump first declared his presidency in 2015, some religious leaders responded with condemnation. Pastors and parishioners debated whether to vote for a television entertainer with a questionable commitment to personal virtue.
Mr. Trump “really lacks a moral compass, in terms of what we expect from a Christian,” said André Gagné, the author of American evangelicals for Trump, who heads the department of theological studies at Concordia University.
Nearly nine years later, however, many voter misgivings are distant memories, assuaged in part by Mr. Trump’s arrival of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, paving the way for dozens of states to sharply restrict abortion. “He delivered the goods,” said Professor Gagné.
Ken Ortize, pastor of Calvary Spokane Church in Eastern Washington, is pictured February 25, 2024.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
In response, American churches have embraced politics — and Mr. Trump — like never before. In this year’s primary elections, white evangelical Christians flocked to his campaign. In Iowa, he increased his vote share in heavily evangelical counties by 35 points from 2016, according to exit polls. He swept white evangelicals in New Hampshire (his rival Nikki Haley won less than a third) and bettered that score in South Carolina, where he won about three-quarters of the group’s vote.
Mr. Trump, in return, promised his solidarity. Others “want to tear down crosses where they can and cover them with social justice flags,” Mr. Trump said in a recent speech to the National Religious Broadcasters’ International Christian Media Convention. “But no one will touch the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear.”
Mr. Trump’s popularity in the Church has confounded critics, even as evangelical affection for him has sometimes morphed into religious fervor. Modern-day Christian prophets, who find an audience among charismatic and Pentecostal believers, say “that Trump is still God’s man for the White House,” said James Beverley, a research professor at Tyndale University in Toronto who has written extensively about evangelicals and Mr. Atout.
Ordinary believers, meanwhile, hear Mr. Trump as a man who “claims to be Christian in an open way that matches the way evangelicals talk,” Professor Beverley said. “Either he is deceitful – deceitful, liar – or he knows the language of the evangelicals. »
Indeed, in the Christian sanctuaries that dot Spokane, which lies in the conservative heart of the Inland Northwest, many see the former president as the man they trust most to carry out the work of the Lord in the White House.
They also feel a new boldness in mixing messages from politics and the pulpit. “There is this lie, the separation of church and state lie, that has really silenced a lot of churches,” said Caleb Collier, senior regional director for the Western United States at TPUSA Faith, a religious outreach arm of the Turning Point organization. this has been a major supporting force for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Collier calls this a lie, one that evangelical leaders are working to dispel with new efforts to gain political influence. (The U.S. Constitution prohibits politicians from coercing or prohibiting religious practice, but the ban on political support by nonprofit organizations exists only in the tax code.) “If the Church really wants to involve the community and really transform it, we’re going to have to engage politically,” he said.
Mr. Collier, a former appointed Spokane Valley alderman, is part of a group of staunch advocates who have moved between politics and the church. He likens the church to a canteen for Christian soldiers, who can eat in the pews and then “return to battle – the political battle.”
Tablets with the Ten Commandments are placed in front of a church in Piedmont, South Carolina, near a polling place for the February 3 Democratic presidential primary.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Public education has become a priority. In the United States, conservative state legislators began advocating new laws requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in schools and giving education administrators the option of hiring chaplains rather than counselors.
Mr. Collier says schools have become hostile to conservative Christians, even as they “go out of their way to make sure you can worship your god, worship science, or worship gender confusion.”
Conservative politicians in the United States spent decades courting evangelicals, whose churches provided networks that could be used to motivate action and become a source of funds.
But support for Mr. Trump has flourished in a changed religious landscape, fertilized by righteous anger based on the idea that the Church is under attack. “We are now in a completely different category of Christians, where they are literally demonizing their political opponents using spiritual warfare rhetoric,” said Concordia researcher Professor Gagné. In this way of thinking, the Democratic Party, “if you understand it in spiritual terms, is under the influence of demonic forces – and that’s why we need to get rid of them and have someone, a champion, like Trump” .
This is not an approach rooted in established theology, says Professor Gagné. The Jesus of the Bible recommends turning the other cheek and devoting one’s attention to matters of the soul rather than those of politics.
Religious, patriotic and pro-Trump artwork was common in the “Take Our Border Back” convoy near Quemado, Texas, in early February, where protesters called for tougher U.S. border and border policies. ‘immigration.SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images
Mr. Trump has nevertheless found new supporters within the Church. Joshua Bingle, senior pastor of Genesis Church in Spokane, did not vote for Mr. Trump in 2016. Mr. Trump “repels me,” he said. But in 2020, he sat at his kitchen table, took a deep breath, uttered a “forgive me, Lord,” and “filled the little circle for Donald J. Trump.”
He plans to vote for Mr. Trump again this year.
“We support the policy more than the person,” he said. “When I go to my doctor, I don’t need him to help the old women across the street. I need him to remove the tumor.
Many church members say they have been forced to respond to the excesses of government policy, citing a Colorado baker and web designer who fought in the Supreme Court to defend his right to refuse to perform same-sex marriages . These two defendants won their case.
“The government has come our way,” Mr Bingle said. “Now it is my responsibility as a shepherd to protect my sheep. »
At Calvary Spokane, church leaders decided to bring politics into the sanctuary, forming a political action committee last year and inviting candidates to speak. Moments after a recent Sunday service, an American flag was placed outside the church and a pastor welcomed Semi Bird, a Republican candidate for governor of the state, to the stage. Other candidates declined the invitation, leaving Mr. Bird alone in his appeal to those gathered: “We are in the house of the Lord, and I said ‘Lord,’ ‘and God,’ and ‘bless,'” he said with a laugh. .
Mr. Ortize, the pastor, wants his followers to participate politically.
“As Christians, we know that laws ultimately become the moral measure of any society,” he said in a recent podcast.
Taking this step is a matter of considerable subjectivity: many would argue for the moral virtue of efforts to protect women’s rights to govern their bodies and to protect vulnerable people from discrimination based on their identity.
Mr. Ortize, however, leaves no room for such a consideration.
By remaining silent, “in the face of things like abortion or transgender and all that kind of stuff, we abdicate our responsibility to be the voice of morality.”
The message is: “Don’t be ashamed of your Christian faith when it comes to politics,” said Terry Liljenberg, a retiree from the local sheriff’s office, after a recent service at Calvary Spokane.
Some evangelical leaders, meanwhile, describe their role as advocates for what the United States should be.
“If you don’t engage in politics, if you don’t fight for souls, if you don’t take a stand for what is right, then by default corrupt and evil people will come to power,” Jay said. MacPherson, pastor of Liberty Remnant Church in Spokane.
Many observers would use this language to describe Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden is a devout Catholic who attended church far more frequently than any recent predecessor, according to statistics kept by Mark Knoller, a former CBS News White House correspondent.
Mr. MacPherson, however, dismisses questions about Mr. Trump’s conduct as a “witch hunt,” while accusing the sitting president of sniffing children (last year, an edited video circulated in which loud sniffing noises were added to footage of Mr. Biden speaking). to a baby). The most recent Democratic policy platform, meanwhile, is “in direct conflict between what is just, what is loving, what is caring, what is holy and what is moral,” Mr. MacPherson said. This platform emphasizes systemic justice, economic equality and minority rights.
At Liberty Remnant Church, however, “we want to make America great again,” Mr. MacPherson said. “And we hope that Donald Trump can continue many of the good things that he did when he was in office last time.”
