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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowed to create a “task force” to combat “anti-Christian bias” if reelected this week, during a “prayer call” hosted by the candidate's closest allies in the Christian nationalist movement.
The “prayer call,” which took place shortly before Trump’s September 10 presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, was hosted by the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB), an organization founded in 2021 by former Trump administration advisors and Christian evangelists with Trump’s endorsement. During Trump’s remarks on the call, the former president told listeners he would create a “task force of anti-Christian bias” if given a second term in order to “defend religious liberty at the highest level.”
“[W]hen we win, I will stop the weaponization of our government against Christians,” Trump said during the call, per recordings posted to social media by the watchdog account PatriotTakes. “I’ll protect Christians in our schools, our government, our military, and our public square. And we’ll bring our country back together as one nation under God.”
If the promise of a “task force” to protect their interests was the carrot, Trump’s “stick” was xenophobic, anti-immigration conspiracy theories. Trump claimed during the call that Democrats are “flooding our country with millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants in order to illegally cast more ballots for Harris, which he described as a plot to “destroy the voting powers of Christian conservative voters forever [...] There should be no more important voice than the voice of Christians.” Trump has peddled a similar lie since losing the 2020 election, baselessly claiming votes from undocumented migrants helped “rig” the polls against him.
All of this, Trump warned Christian listeners, was part of the endgame for “the Left’s war on Christianity. [...] Christians will be reduced to second-class citizens, and that’s what they want.”
Trump’s statements on the NFAB call echoed sentiments of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory popular among white- and Christian nationalists, which posits that nonwhite, non-Christian immigrants are “replacing” white Christians to take control of “their” country. Republicans have increasingly embraced “Great Replacement” rhetoric in the MAGA era, evidenced in the push to redefine the U.S. as a “Judeo-Christian nation” in public schools. These conspiracies are also linked to the GOP’s crusade against transgender youth, itself a byproduct of evangelical natalist doctrine that compels believers to produce as many white, Christian babies as possible.
Though the religious Right is far from a new entity in U.S. politics, conservatives have increasingly weaponized Christian “religious liberty” concerns to roll back LGBTQ+ rights over the last several years. In 2021, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine used the state budget to declare that health care workers would be allowed to refuse to perform treatment to LGBTQ+ patients based on religious beliefs. Similarly, a federal judge ruled in 2022 that businesses may block employee health insurance coverage of the HIV prophylactic drug PrEP on the basis of the employer’s “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Last July, the Supreme Court opened the gates for other such policies in the 303 Creative v Elenis ruling, which declared that businesses may deny services to LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds. A Washington Post investigation last October revealed that numerous recent “religious liberty” court battles were brought by businesses that may have been created by right-wing groups to file those lawsuits under false pretenses.
This alliance with Christian nationalists is one that Trump has cultivated for years, using the movement’s natural authoritarianism to propel his own bids for presidential power. He’s even gone so far as to sell Bibles branded with his name for $59.99 earlier this year, underscoring to his followers that he is the man who will make the U.S. into a kingdom of God — if not a messiah figure unto himself, after he survived an assassination attempt in mid-July. Trump has also vowed that Christians “won’t have to vote anymore” after giving him their support in 2024, because “we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote.”
“Martyrs don’t demand riches, authority or respect. Martyrs don’t exploit people’s faith for personal gain,” said “exvangelical” writer Tiffany Torres Williams in a July editorial for U.S. News and World Report. “[I]f Christians want a leader who models Jesus and Christian values to help those in greatest need, Trump is far from it [...] He is no Christian martyr.”
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