Vendors sell T-shirts this past Feb. 22 in Nashville, where Donald Trump came to speak at the National Religious Broadcasters Association International Christian Media Convention.Seth Herald/Reuters
On a Sunday morning in eastern Washington, Ken Ortize stands in front of the congregation he has led for decades and reads a biblical passage about the end times. It isn’t long before he is talking about Donald Trump, whom he describes as a champion of the right kind of 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 more clearly.”
“That’s right,” someone in the Calvary Spokane congregation calls out.
The sermon wends from the Book of Revelation to conservative bêtes noires – David Rockefeller, Klaus Schwab, Justin Trudeau, George Soros – to the prosecutors pressing cases against Mr. Trump (Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, “these people were put into position to change the legal system”), to a call for Christians to muster themselves to political action. “Jesus, first of all, said: ‘Occupy until I come. The word ‘occupy’ means to engage,” Mr. Ortize says.
When Donald Trump first declared his presidency in 2015, some church leaders responded with condemnation. Pastors and parishioners alike questioned whether to vote for a television entertainer with a questionable commitment to personal virtue.
Mr. Trump “really lacks any kind of moral compass, in terms of what we would expect a Christian to actually be,” said André Gagné, the author of American Evangelicals for Trump, who chairs the department of theological studies at Concordia University.
Nearly nine years later, however, many voter qualms are distant memories, assuaged in part by Mr. Trump’s delivery of a conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, opening the way for dozens of states to heavily restrict abortion. “He delivered the merchandise,” Prof. Gagné said.
Ken Ortize, pastor of Calvary Spokane church in eastern Washington, is photographed on Feb. 25, 2024.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
In response, churches in America have embraced politics – and Mr. Trump – like never before. In primary voting this year, white evangelical Christians have flocked to his campaign. In Iowa, he increased his share of the vote in heavily evangelical counties by 35 points, relative to 2016, exit polls showed. He swept white evangelicals in New Hampshire (rival Nikki Haley took less than a third), and improved upon that tally in South Carolina, where he won about three-quarters of the group’s vote.
Mr. Trump has, in return, pledged solidarity. Others “want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Mr. Trump said in recent remarks to the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.”
Mr. Trump’s popularity in the church has confounded critics, even as evangelical fondness for him has, at times, become religious in fervour. 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 Toronto’s Tyndale University who has written extensively on evangelicals and Mr. Trump.
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Everyday believers, meanwhile, hear in Mr. Trump a man who “claims to be a Christian in an overt way that synchronizes with the way evangelicals talk,” Prof. Beverley said. “So he either is duplicitous – deceiving, lying – or otherwise he knows the language of evangelicals.”
Indeed, in the Christian sanctuaries that dot Spokane, which lies in the conservative heartland of the inland northwest, many see the former president as the man they most trust to accomplish the Lord’s work in the White House.
They also feel a new boldness to mix messages from politics and the pulpit. “There’s this lie, the separation of church and state lie, that has really silenced a lot of churches,” said Caleb Collier, who is the senior regional manager for the western U.S. at TPUSA Faith, a religious outreach arm of the Turning Point organization that has been a major supporting force for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Collier calls that a falsehood, one that evangelical leaders are working to dispel with new efforts to attain political influence. (The U.S. Constitution bars politicians from constraining or prohibiting religious practice, but a prohibition on political endorsements by non-profits exists only in the tax code.) “If the church truly wants to engage the community, and really transform it, you’re going to have to get engaged politically,” he said.
Mr. Collier, a former appointed city councillor in Spokane Valley, is among a group of outspoken advocates who have moved between politics and the church. He likens the church to a canteen for Christian soldiers, who can find nourishment from the pews, then “go back into battle – the political battle.”
Tablets with the Ten Commandments sit outside a church in Piedmont, S.C., near a polling station in Feb. 3's Democratic presidential primary.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Public education has become a key focus. Across the U.S., conservative state legislators have begun to advocate new laws obligating the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and providing education administrators the option to hire chaplains instead of counsellors.
Mr. Collier argues that schools have grown hostile to conservative Christians even as they “bend over backwards in order to ensure you can worship your god or worship science or worship gender confusion.”
Conservative politicians in the U.S. have 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, one fertilized by a righteous anger founded on the idea that the church is under attack. “We’re in a completely different category of Christians now, where they engage in literally demonizing their political adversaries using spiritual warfare rhetoric,” said Prof. Gagné, the Concordia scholar. In this way of thinking, the Democratic Party, “if you understand it in spiritual terms, is under the influence of demonic forces – and this is why we need to get rid of them and have someone, a champion, like Trump.”
It’s hardly an approach rooted in settled theology, Prof. Gagné says. The Jesus of the Bible recommends turning the other cheek, and devotes his attention to matters of the soul over those of politics.
Religious, patriotic and pro-Trump artwork were common sights in the 'Take Our Border Back' convoy near Quemado, Texas, in early February, where protesters called for stricter U.S. border and immigration policies.SERGIO FLORES/AFP via Getty Images
Mr. Trump has nonetheless found new supporters in the church. Joshua Bingle, the lead pastor at Genesis Church in Spokane, did not vote for Mr. Trump in 2016. Mr. Trump “repulses me,” he said. But in 2020, he sat at his kitchen table, took a deep breath, uttered a “forgive me Lord,” and “I filled in the little circle for Donald J. Trump.”
He intends to vote for Mr. Trump again this year.
“It’s more that we support the policy than the person,” he said. “When I go to my doctor, I don’t need him to help old women across the street. I need him to get the tumour out.”
Many in the church say they have been compelled to respond to the overreach of government policy, citing a Colorado baker and web designer who fought to the Supreme Court to support their rights to refuse service for gay weddings. Both of those defendants won their cases.
“The government has come into our lane,” said Mr. Bingle. “Now it’s incumbent on me as a shepherd to protect my sheep.”
At Calvary Spokane, church leaders have 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 at the front of the church, and a pastor welcomed to the stage Semi Bird, a Republican candidate for state governor. 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, to laughs.
Mr. Ortize, the pastor, wants his congregants to participate politically.
“We as Christians know that laws end up becoming the moral measurement of any society,” he said in a recent podcast.
Taking that measure is a matter of considerable subjectivity: Many would argue for the moral virtue of efforts to protect women’s right to govern their bodies and to shield the vulnerable from discrimination based on their identity.
Mr. Ortize, however, offers no room for such consideration.
Remaining silent “in the face of things like abortion or transgenderism and all that kind of stuff, we are abdicating our responsibility to be the voice of morality.”
The message is: “Don’t be ashamed of your Christian faith when it comes to politics,” Terry Liljenberg, a retiree from the local sheriff’s office, says after a recent service at Calvary Spokane.
Some evangelical leaders, meanwhile, describe their role as defenders of what the United States should be.
“If you don’t engage in politics, if you don’t contend for souls, if you don’t take a stand for what is right, then by default the corrupt, wicked people are going to grow into power,” said Jay MacPherson, pastor at Liberty Remnant Church in Spokane.
Many observers would use that language to describe Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden is a devout Catholic who has 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, though, dismisses questions about Mr. Trump’s conduct as a “witch hunt,” while accusing the sitting President of sniffing children (last year, an altered video circulated in which loud sniffing sounds were added to footage of Mr. Biden speaking to a baby). The most recent Democratic political platform, meanwhile, stands “in direct conflict to what is right and what is loving and what is caring and what is holy and what is moral,” Mr. MacPherson said. That platform emphasizes systemic justice, economic equality and rights for minorities.
At Liberty Remnant Church, however, “we want to make America great again,” Mr. MacPherson said. “And we’re hopeful that Donald Trump can continue a lot of the good things he did while he was in office last time.”