I picked up some parts
In recent election cycles, though, the connection between the movement and the party has frayed. While the presidency of conservative evangelical George W. Bush was a high point for the Christian right, no bona fide conservative Christian Republican candidate has attracted overwhelming support from the movement, which has no single recognised leadership or formal structure.
Instead, white evangelical Republicans have ultimately backed the candidate they felt had the greatest potential of defeating a Democrat. In 2008, Mike Huckabee was rejected for John McCain; in 2012, Catholic Rick Santorum and Conservative evangelicals Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were rejected for Mitt Romney, a Mormon. Both nominees were defeated by Barack Obama.
The same dilema was presented in 2016. Conservative Christian voters had to get behind a candidate who could defeat their longtime bête noire, Hillary Clinton, while remaining at least sympathetic to their views. As in previous races there were strong conservative evangelical candidates on offer, in particular Ted Cruz, who had a 100% voting record on values issues in the Senate and who won the straw polls taken at the Values Voter Summit three years in a row.
A relationship with Him
He positioned himself as a Christian, albeit one who had never found the need to ask God’s forgiveness. In his 2015 book Crippled America, he wrote:
I think people, are shocked when they find out that I am a Christian, that I am a religious person. They see me with all the surroundings of wealth so that they sometimes don’t associate that with being religious. That’s not accurate. I go to church. I love God, and I love having a relationship with Him.
Trump made all the right promises: to restore, cherish and protect the nation’s Christian heritage, to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court, and to repeal the Johnson Amendment which prohibits tax-exempt organisations from endorsing political candidates. He told Values Voters at their 2016 summit that: “There are no more decent, devoted, or selfless people than our Christian brothers and sisters here in the United States.”
Trump also brought Christian right leaders formally into his campaign, setting up an evangelical and Catholic advisory bodies and filling them with movement stalwarts. Above all, he chose as his running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a leading campaigner for value issues who describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order”.
Not everyone was pleased. A number of prominent evangelicals worried that dallying with Trump would fatally damage the movement’s credibility, given his chequered past and his attitudes towards Mexicans, Muslims and women. This opposition grew with the release of the Trump Tapes revealing his predatory attitude and actions towards women. But none of this seriously diminished the resolve of Trump’s evangelical backers, who were content to stay the course in pursuit of worldly power.
In the end, white evangelicals came out to vote in greater numbers than ever before, and 81% of them backed Trump on November 9.
Trump clearly intends to return the favour, and is already appointing leading religious conservatives to key cabinet posts. As far as the organised Christian right is concerned, it doesn’t get much better than this. Their movement is back, bigger and bolder than ever. In Trump’s own words: “And you believe it. And you know it. You know it.”