Trump’s believers see a presidency with God on their side

Eight years ago, conservative Christians wondered if Donald Trump, who had just been elected president, would truly be their champion. They were weary, and angry, after wandering in the wilderness of the Obama years when liberal values seemed ascendant and they felt powerless.

Trump delivered. A promise to “my beautiful Christians” came true even after he left office, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion.

Now, as Trump’s re-election victory brings them to new heights of power, they believe his return is more than an electoral mandate: They believe it is a divine one.

Trump has repeatedly invoked a religious anointing since he survived an assassination attempt in July. And when he claimed victory Tuesday night, he did so again.

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump told supporters. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.”

It is a remarkable claim for a president who claimed to be a “dictator” – if only on Day 1.

While politicians have often invoked God or cited passages from the Bible to make their case, the country is entering a new landscape, one where Trump is not only the leader of the Republican Party but also the de facto figurehead of conservative American Christianity.

And as his victory sunk in, his followers looked ahead to their new horizons. “We are rejoicing!” Jason Rapert, president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which began in 2019 to try to expand Christian influence in government. He called it a “Red Sea moment in America,” a reference to the Book of Exodus, in which God miraculously delivers his people to freedom.

Trump’s conservative Christian coalition will have power at the highest levels of all three branches of government. Alongside Trump in the White House, Vice President-elect JD Vance will elevate an energetic strain of Catholicism that promotes a traditionalist vision of family life. In Congress, Mike Johnson, the current and possibly future House speaker, has placed evangelical Christianity at the center of his political vision. And the Supreme Court that Trump helped create is poised to further strengthen religious rights.

Many of his supporters saw the battle for the White House as a kind of holy war, which Trump depicted as a choice between Christianity and its enemies. It began with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, when grievance and religious fervor fueled participants’ rage and falsehoods about the 2020 election results. At recent campaign events, Trump has claimed that the Biden administration used the federal government to target Christians specifically. The Republican Party platform released in July promised to create a federal task force that would fight anti-Christian bias, and Trump vowed to give special access to the Christian leaders who supported him.

In particular, many saw it as a war with Christianity on one side and pluralist, feminist values on the other.

Trump’s Christian allies frequently likened Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent, to Queen Jezebel, a biblical figure who persecuted prophets. “As Christians, we are obligated to do everything we can to stop Jezebel from taking the throne,” Mark Driscoll, an influential evangelical pastor in Arizona, posted on social media Tuesday. Some pastors described her as “demonic.”

Trump’s message of male power complemented the growing anger among many conservative Christians about changing gender norms and family patterns. That anger accelerated after the #MeToo movement and the combative Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who was accused of sexually assaulting a high school classmate.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative leader of Turning Point Action, which invested heavily in mobilizing conservative Christian voters and volunteers this election cycle, was among the allies who made the gender divide explicit in the campaign’s final stretch. “Men need to GO VOTE NOW,” he wrote on social media last week.

Backlash against female power has intensified in conservative Christian circles since Trump’s first term. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has cracked down on women in leadership, ousting its largest congregation over the issue. Young women have fled conservative congregations, in part as a reaction to widespread revelations of sexual abuse in evangelical and Catholic churches.

Other resentments have been simmering since the coronavirus pandemic, including widespread temporary closures of churches in many states. The public health measure has become a touchstone for those who argue that the government has become weaponized against Christians, a belief accelerated by vaccine mandates and by perceptions that protesters who called for racial justice in the summer of 2020 were treated relatively gently.

“A Big Mac has become more essential than our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Lt. Col. Allen West, chair of the Dallas County Republican Party, said on a recent prayer call, noting that fast-food restaurants had remained open during the pandemic closures. “That is what is on the line.”

While Trump backed away from abortion, which has driven Republicans voters for decades, he intensified his opposition to transgender rights. The issue mobilized a similar set of conservative Christian voters. Anti-abortion activists also won their first major victories of the post-Roe political era this week, when they prevailed through ballot measures in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.

With the election won, conservative Christian activists are swiftly moving ahead. They are making long-term plans to unwind the new state protections for abortion rights – “mini-Roes,” as the activists call them.

“Now the work begins to dismantle the pro-abortion policies of the Biden-Harris administration,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a leading anti-abortion group.

Activists and lawyers are also pressuring the Trump campaign on Cabinet appointments.

Some plan to lay groundwork in federal agencies to further restrict abortion and in vitro fertilization, amid Trump’s contradictory rhetoric. They are looking for ways to pull levers of power throughout the federal bureaucracy, as they did during his first administration.

As Trump prepares to take power, there seems to be no other religious institution on the left – including the historically powerful Black church – able to match either the command or the authority of Christian conservatives.

On Wednesday morning, the Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, a broadly progressive denomination, wrote a sober letter to the entire church.

“We are Christians who support the dignity, safety and equality of women and LGBTQ+ people as an expression of our faith,” he said. “I pray that President Trump and his administration will do the same.”

But for Christian conservatives, the rhetoric was fiery and defiant.

On the eve of the election, Rob McCoy, pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Southern California, described Trump’s opponents as the “enemy” who “attempted so many divisive and evil deeds.”

“Lord, please do a great and mighty thing we know not of,” he prayed.

And when the results came in, Trump’s followers believe God did.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.