Christian nationalists embrace Trump as their savior – will they be his?

A Trump rally in Rome, Georgia, on 9 March 2024. Photograph: Robin Rayne/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

A thrice-married man who refers to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, was apparently unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness was always an unlikely hero for the most conservative Christians in the US.

But in both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump resoundingly won the vote of white evangelicals. Now, with Trump having almost certainly secured the Republican nomination for 2024 and eyeing a return to the White House, his campaign is doubling down on religious imagery, securing the evangelical base and signaling sympathies with Christian nationalism.

Indeed, the former US president’s relationship with the religious right has deepened so much that Trump is now comfortable with comparing himself to their messiah.

“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said: ‘I need a caretaker,’” booms a video that Trump shared on his Truth Social account, and that has been played at some of his rallies.

“So God gave us Trump.”

The video, made by Dilley Meme Team, a group of Trump supporters, continues:

“God said: ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay up past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.’ So God made Trump.”

To some, it is a baffling pairing. Evangelicals, who typically adhere to a literal reading of the Bible and, theoretically, follow a strict code that opposes infidelity, immorality and abortion and is critical of same-sex relationships, seem an odd match-up with a man like Trump.

But the pairing has had benefits for both parties: Trump got elected in 2016, and evangelicals got a conservative supreme court that has already overturned the Roe v Wade ruling, which enshrined a constitutional right to abortion.

Now, Trump is believing the hype he’s received from some on the religious right: that he has been chosen, or anointed, by God himself.

He has increasingly begun to lean into the rightwing social conservatism that white evangelicals – who make up 14% of Americans – favor. That was clear in February, when Trump spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters convention (NRBC), a gathering of the kind of conservative Christians who lead mega-churches, host televangelist shows and claim to receive prophecies from God.

Trump said in that address that there was an “anti-Christian bias” in the US, and promised that he would create a taskforce to investigate “discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America”.

While Trump easily won the white evangelical vote in his previous two presidential elections, Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University whose research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics, said this election cycle sees him leaning even further into this appeal.

Du Mez said his speech at the NRBC was “a new level we haven’t often seen”.

“He was promising [the evangelical audience] power, but in much more explicit terms,” she said. “And he was really leaning into this language of culture wars, of religious wars: that he was going to protect their interests and protect their power against the enemies – against fellow Americans, against liberals, against the enemies who were trying to persecute Christians, who were persecuting Christians.”

The “God made Trump” video is not the only example of Trump seeing himself as a deity. On 25 March, Trump said on his Truth Social account that he had received the following message from a supporter:

“It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”

It follows Trump sharing a fake court sketch in late 2023, published during Trump’s fraud trial in New York, which shows him seated beside Jesus Christ.

About 85% of white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump in 2020, Pew Research found, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.

Securing, and adding to, that vote could be key to a Trump victory. Du Mez pointed to research by the Public Religion Research Institute that shows how crucial the evangelical vote is in swing states. Evangelicals make up about a quarter of residents in Georgia and North Carolina, 16% of the population in Pennsylvania and about 12% of voters in Wisconsin.

Biden beat Trump in all but North Carolina in 2020. Given the lack of enthusiasm for both candidates, both men are desperate to win every possible vote in what is expected to be a tight election.

It helps Trump that evangelicals feel under attack. Since 2015, he has told his supporters that they are looked down on by liberal elites, and that their rights are threatened. That same message resonates with some religious voters, Du Mez said, who could also resent the mockery of Trump’s imagining himself as Jesus Christ.

“It only reinforces the scripts that they’ve been handed, which is that the left is out to get you and they are mocking and they have no respect for your faith,” Du Mez said.

While Trump has long enjoyed popularity among evangelicals, and has been courted by leaders including televangelists and pastors at mega-churches, this is the first election cycle in which he has been confident enough to compare himself to Jesus Christ. So, what’s changed?

Trump “has been getting this message from these folks for years now”, said Matthew D Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, recalling the sight of evangelical leaders praying over Trump during his time in office.

The thirst for Trump as a biblical figure can be traced to the unique way he ascended to become an evangelical favorite, Taylor said: when he launched his campaign in June 2015, few in “respectable evangelical circles” wanted anything to do with the brash, twice-divorced, self-proclaimed billionaire.

It made sense. This was a man who, during his first presidential campaign, memorably misnamed the body of Christ, and while at church put cash in a plate that is meant to hold the communion. During his early forays into religious outreach, Trump was asked to name his favorite verse in the Bible, and couldn’t name one – asked again three weeks later, he named one that doesn’t exist.

He enlisted Paula White as his spiritual adviser, and charged her with bringing the evangelical elites onboard. The problem was that White, herself a thrice-married multimillionaire who preaches the idea that God will bestow wealth on his followers, didn’t move in those circles.

Taylor noted that White’s allies were among fellow prosperity gospel preachers and “new apostolic reformation leaders” – a movement that seeks to inject Christianity into politics, the judiciary, the media and business.

“These folks were really on the margins not only of American Christianity, but of American evangelicals. They were seen as kind of lowbrow and prosperity gospel types and televangelists. They were seen as kind of a laughable sector of evangelicalism in respectable evangelical circles,” Taylor said.

As Trump won primary elections in state after state, the respectable evangelicals were able to overcome their moral objections to him being the Republican candidate.

But by this point, Trump’s main advisers were cemented as the type of religious leaders once scoffed at by the religious elites. Trump continued to rely on the Paula Whites of this world, and the more far-out religious leaders won influence – and are set to have even more if he wins in 2024.

“Those are the type of people I think Trump would be bringing in to help shape policy, help shape identity,” Taylor said.

“These aren’t the kind of people who are policy wonks, but there are Christian nationalists who have very clear agenda items, especially on topics like abortion, on topics like support for Israel, on topics like religious freedom, on topics such as LGBTQ +rights.

“Trump has surrounded himself and has brought into his White House advisers echelons some very, very extreme Christian voices. And he seems to be at the very least playing footsie with them, if not overtly endorsing some of their ideas.”

This bodes poorly for a Trump second term, when abortion rights, the rights of LGBTQ+ people and even the right to access IVF treatment could come under attack.

There are also warning signs, Taylor said, should Trump again refuse to concede the election – and if his supporters once more interpret his rhetoric as a call to attack the home of US democracy.

Trump’s religious supporters were among those at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Taylor said he was seeing “more and more of this cross-pollination between far-right and even overtly racist elements and these spiritual warriors”.

“When you are mixing white nationalism and neo-Nazi ideas with very heavy religious fervor and processes, that is a very, very dangerous mix,” Taylor said.

“Because it’s encouraging more and more people to do extraordinary things, if they feel like their country is slipping away from them.”