Former US President Donald Trump on Saturday urged Christian evangelicals to vote en masse for him in November, saying he would defend their religious freedom “with all his might” if elected.
The former leader, who rarely appears in church himself, has built a significant base among the religious right, promising to fulfill some of their biggest priorities, including the appointment of Supreme Court justices who helped dismantle the federal right to abortion.
“Evangelicals and Christians, they don’t vote as much as they should,” Trump told hundreds of supporters at a conference in Washington organized by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative advocacy group.
“They go to church every Sunday, but they don’t vote,” he said, joking that “In four years you won’t need to vote. OK? Don’t vote in four years. I don’t care.”
Trump will be ineligible to run for president in 2028 because of term limits.
Evangelical voters were key to Trump’s 2016 victory and again in his unsuccessful 2020 campaign, when 84 percent of white evangelical Protestants voted for him, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump promised to protect their interests on Saturday, vowing to “aggressively defend religious liberty.”
He told supporters, “We will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals, and in our public squares.”
He additionally promised to create a new “federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias” that would investigate alleged “illegal discrimination, harassment, persecution” against American Christians.
Nearly half (49 percent) of Americans believe the influence of religion in the United States is declining, and that that’s a bad thing, according to a Pew Research survey published last month.
The number of Americans who identify as Christian has declined from nearly 90 percent in the 1990s to less than two-thirds of the population in 2022, largely due to the growing number of non-religious people.
For many white evangelical Christians — a conservative denomination that makes up about 14 percent of the American electorate — it is important that religion remains relevant in public life.
Trump told the crowd that the political left “wants to silence you, to demoralize you, and they want to keep you out of politics.”
“They don’t want you to vote, so you have to vote,” he said, adding, “If you vote, no, we can’t lose.”
Trump will face his Democratic rival, President Joe Biden, in the first presidential debate for 2024 on Thursday.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
