“ made no outreach like you’re doing,” Jeffress pointed out. None of the points mentioned were likely to be ones that Steve Bannon would have let escape Trump’s attention, but the gathering allowed him to demonstrate not just his allegiance but also his attention. In other words, when it came to religious liberty as the attendees defined it, he would make sure that America was on the right side of God. He would end the contraception mandate of Obamacare (“We’re getting rid of Obamacare anyway”) he would select only anti-choice judges (“And this president could choose, I mean, it could be five”) he would do away with the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt entities from endorsing politicians (“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could actually go and say, ‘I want Donald Trump’?”) he would support prayer in school (“I saw the other day a coach was giving a prayer before a football game, and they want to fire the coach now!”) he would oppose any bill that pulled funding from Christian schools that were charged with discrimination (“I can only tell you that if I’m president, it will be vetoed, OK?”) he would keep transgender people from using the “wrong” bathrooms and locker rooms (“We’ll get it straightened out”) and he would protect Israel, following the biblical pronouncement that nations that do so would be blessed (“ been the worst thing that’s happened to Israel I was with Bibi Netanyahu the other day, and he said he can’t even believe it”).

Over the next hour, the message was that theirs was a power Trump would heed - and heed more than any other president. I don’t even know if I’ve ever seen this.”

“What a group of people!” Trump exclaimed when he entered. “I usually stand when he comes in the room as a way of showing respect - he doesn’t ask that, but that’s just something that I’ve normally done,” Jeffress explained to the assembled, who included Wayne Grudem, a well-known theologian and co-founder of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Eric Metaxas, a bestselling Christian author and radio host Ryan Anderson, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation Jay Richards, a philosopher and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank that campaigns against teaching evolution in school and Ivanka Trump, who popped in momentarily to say hello. Robert Jeffress, the head of 14,000-member megachurch First Baptist Dallas, a contributor to Fox News, and one of the earliest evangelical leaders to support Trump, presided over the meeting. The meeting on September 29th, 2016, was one of the ways he tried to move the needle, to convince the religious right that their vision for America was one he shared. Even after he secured the nomination and named Mike Pence to be his VP, a survey of Protestant pastors conducted by Christian polling group LifeWay Research that summer found that only 39 percent of evangelical pastors planned to vote for him. He never gained a majority of Christian votes in the primary. Trump was exactly the type of character you would expect “values voters” to summarily reject - even before the famed “grab ’em by the pussy” tape, the optics weren’t great.

Around 60 percent vote, more than any other demographic, and among white evangelical voters, more than three-quarters tend to go to Republicans, thanks to wedge issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights. Evangelicals - a term that today refers to people who believe that Jesus died for their sins, that the Bible is the word of God, that every believer has a “born again” or salvation moment, and that the good news of Jesus should be widely disseminated - make up as much as a quarter of the country, or close to 80 million people. Considering their extreme views, these folks had an alarming number of followers, but certainly nothing of voting-bloc magnitude.Īnd without the evangelical voting bloc, no Republican candidate could hope to have a path to the presidency. For much of his political run, the thrice-married, swindling, profane, materialistic, self-styled playboy had appealed mainly to the more fringe elements of Christianity, a ragtag group of prosperity gospelers (like his “spiritual adviser” Paula White, a televangelist who promises her donors their own personal angel), Christian dominionists (who believe that America’s laws should be founded explicitly on biblical ones - including stoning homosexuals), and charismatic or Pentecostal outliers (like Frank Amedia, the Trump campaign’s “liaison for Christian policy,” who once claimed to have raised an ant from the dead).

Come to jesus moment for evangelicals