Feucht spent the Sunday before the election in Scottsdale, Arizona, with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Republican senatorial candidate Kari Lake, hosting a worship service called Pray For The Nation (Kirk endorsed Feucht during his congressional run).
Other groups that have spent millions of dollars to get Trump reelected with get out the vote efforts are Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, the American Family Association’s ivoterguide.com, the Paula White-led National Faith Advisory Board, and My Faith Votes, Montgomery tells WIRED.
“Many Christian-right media figures have significant media platforms which they use to promote Trump to their supporters. Shows like FlashPoint on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel provide a steady flow of pro-Trump propaganda,” Montgomery said. “Conservative Christians have been told over and over again that Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. At a recent rally on the National Mall, New Apostolic Reformation leader Che Ahn issued an ‘apostolic decree’ that Trump would win the election.”
While many conservative politicians have enjoyed broad support from evangelical Christians in the past, the way evangelical leaders speak about Trump as a messianic leader, particularly in the wake of the failed assassination attempt in July, is something new.
“Because many of Trump’s core evangelical advisers and most prominent evangelical boosters are charismatic, they have also used charismatic spirituality to imbue Trump with a quasi-messianic aura, using their prophecies and messages to link him to many biblical characters,” Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, where he specializes in American Christianity, tells WIRED. “Paula White-Cain has been the chair of all of these efforts and a gatekeeper controlling religious leaders’ access to Trump, so she has played a pivotal role in guiding these connections.”
As well as supporting Trump’s candidacy, evangelicals are also more willing to indulge the former president’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“Evangelical Christians, particularly, but not exclusively white evangelicals, have been [Trump’s] most unwavering bloc of supporters,” Taylor said. “ If roughly one third of the country believes Trump’s 2020 election lies, among white evangelicals it’s closer to two-thirds.”
Trump, who has struggled to present himself as a man of faith—in 2016, he proved unfamiliar with even the naming conventions of Biblical texts—has himself also been taking part, attending a “Believers for Trump” event in Michigan last month and taking part in a “national faith summit” organized by his first adminstratiuon’s faith leader Paula White last week.
“We believe you’re a vessel,” Pastor Jentezen Franklin told Trump on stage during the event. “You’re a chosen vessel,” he added, while comparing the former president to the Apostle Paul.