As campaign officials in the closing stretch of the 2024 presidential election focus on fundraising, concentrating advertising dollars, and hosting mass campaign rallies, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee warns that Christians may lose sight of the most important election year fact: “The battle is spiritual.”

Huckabee, a Baptist pastor who served as governor of Arkansas for nine years, called on the nation’s Christian voters to rededicate the nation to its godly purpose Thursday evening during the 2024 Pray Vote Stand Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“What we’re facing today is not the traditional historical political spectrum that is horizontal: Left versus Right, liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican,” said Huckabee, who hosts a weekly TV show on TBN. “Our issues today are vertical: Heaven and Hell, righteous and unrighteous, good and evil. And we have to understand that the battle is spiritual. The consequences will be political, but the underpinning is spiritual.”

The spiritual groundwork underlying America’s present-day political strife explains the “irrational” level of hatred pervading society, he said.

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“We’re living in a day where people think that it’s perfectly okay for folks to burn down a city, trash a police car, and burn down a police station, and the news media will say it’s a ‘mostly peaceful protest’ as the fire rages behind them,” said Huckabee, referring to an infamous CNN chyron. “That’s not a difference of opinion. This is insanity.”

Huckabee said he felt a deep “burden” for his seven grandchildren, who now live in a post-Christian society. “I don’t want them to grow up in a culture where a 12-year-old can’t get a tattoo, buy liquor, buy tobacco, can’t enter into a contract, get married, can’t drive a car, but can make the decision to have his or her body chemically castrated or surgically mutilated,” he said. “I do not want her to be in the girl’s locker room and have a biological boy undressing in front of her, and her being expected to undress in front of a biological boy — and if she says anything about it, that it makes her uncomfortable, she’s the one who gets into trouble.”

Pray, Vote, Stand Is a ‘Command’

Due to the spiritual nature of America’s political issues, Christians must vote, he said.

“Without any sense of hyperbole, this really is the most important election” in the history of the United States, Huckabee told the crowd. “God is calling every one of us to engage in the civic responsibility. It’s not just our right. It is our responsibility to be engaged in the process,” Huckabee encouraged a receptive audience. “If we don’t like the government we have and don’t vote, we end up getting the government we deserve and not the one we wanted.”

“Pray, vote, stand: I pray that you will embrace this as more than a slogan, that you will see it as a command,” exhorted Huckabee.

Too many evangelicals have decided to sit out the process, he said. “There are 40 million self-described evangelical Christians who do not vote in a presidential election. Let me explain what that means: If half of those people who sit in church … would pray, stand, and vote, we would change every election in this country from the school board all the way to the White House.”

Evangelical Christians are twice as likely to support former President Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, according to a poll from Lifeway Research. Nearly two-thirds of evangelicals (61%) favor the Republican candidate over the incumbent Democratic vice president (31%), found the survey, which was taken in August and released last week.

“I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life totally focused on reaching the pastor, building relationships that are authentic. You can’t do it by some far away digital ad saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to go vote,’” said Republican National Committee National Director of Faith Engagement Chad Connelly, who has likewise estimated between 40 and 45 million evangelical Christians do not vote.

The group Faith & Freedom, led by Ralph Reed, announced it plans to spend $62 million toward evangelical Christian registration and voter turnout. Voter registration efforts have paid dividends in swing states, as registered Republicans now outnumber Democrats in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which borders President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton.

“I would never ask a pastor or want a pastor to endorse candidates from the pulpit, even when I was a candidate,” said Huckabee. “But part of preaching [the whole counsel of God] is to encourage people to do something that is a privilege in this country, and that is the privilege of voting and helping to select the government.”

“Any pastor who does not encourage his people to be a part of civic engagement and voting is being derelict in the duty of being a shepherd to the sheep,” Huckabee declared.

On the other hand, America’s cultural and political landscape will continue to deteriorate if Christians refuse to vote. “The putrification of our culture degenerates into something that is unrecognizable and unlivable,” said Huckabee.

Democrats have attempted to appeal to believers through such organizations as Evangelicals for Harris. These efforts, too, have seen some success. For instance, Ray Ortlund — an emeritus council member of The Gospel Coalition and founder of Nashville’s Immanuel Church in Nashville, which lists former Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore as a “Minister in Residence” — endorsed Kamala Harris but soon deleted the message, saying it had been misinterpreted.

But many in the Democratic Party’s core constituencies say the spiritual strength of the nation may depend on Christians voting according to biblical morality, nor historic affiliation. “How do we get to a place where we celebrate the castration of our children and call it affirming? How do we get to a place where right is wrong, wrong is right, and to even say that is antithetical because there’s no such thing as right and wrong to many people who are teaching in our schools. How do we get to the place where we have oppression of the defenseless, where there’s human trafficking from low levels to high levels in our society?” asked Bishop Vincent Mathews, missions president of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), an historically black Pentecostal denomination, during the Summit on Thursday.

“Because we’re in a time of rebellion,” the bishop answered. “This is not partisan rebellion. It’s not geographical rebellion. It’s rebellion against a living God. And until we grapple with what we’re really facing, we’ll never find true solutions.”

“There are even people who say that a nuclear family is racist, that black people shouldn’t have a family. It is something that’s patriarchal and white in society,” Mathews noted. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed the “abolition of the family” in “The Communist Manifesto” and replacing it with “an openly legalized community of women.”

But the modern anti-family onslaught “is not even from a communist perspective. It is the demonic insertion into God’s creation. Because if you can destroy God’s institutions, then you can destroy the ones that Jesus died for,” he contended.

Culture has sidelined “biblical values that we used to call common sense,” such as hard work, diligence, and accountability. Modern America faces “a time of strong delusion, strong confusion,” Mathews said. “Demonic misinformation is destroying the world.”

While overwhelming majorities of white (80%), Asian (64%), and Hispanic (57%) evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump in 2016, only 8% of black evangelicals voted for the pro-life presidential candidate in that race.

Experts agree that biblically-engaged Christian political activism transforms political participation. “Hispanic practicing Christians are 38% more likely to have voted for Donald Trump than the general population of Hispanic voters,” wrote Michael O. Emerson in a study published by the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. “The pattern for Asian and white voters is even stronger. Only one-fourth of general Asian voters voted for Trump, but over half of Asian practicing Christians did (57%).”

Spiritual confusion led Family Research Council to develop a different kind of Pray Vote Stand Summit in 2024, one less marked by candidates’ speeches and more directed toward spiritual renewal. “The Family Research Council team had a sense from the Lord that this year’s focus needs to be different, and they set about and prayed for 36 hours and waited on the Lord,” said former 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann before offering the event’s opening prayer on Thursday evening. “This is the year to return to the Lord. And that’s what we’re here to do.”

Bachmann, who serves as Family Research Council board chairman, prayed that the Lord would “reset the city of Washington, D.C. to be in alignment with Your Word” through a “supernatural override of Your Holy Spirit.”

Noting that the first day of the conference commenced at the end of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, she urged believers to “say goodbye to the old, welcome to the new.”

The deadline to register for the November election varies from state to state; Vote.gov lists the deadline for each U.S. state and territory.

The speakers held out optimism for the future, which they emphasized is held by the Victor in history’s pivotal battles. God is “bringing us together, mobilizing his church to not only pray, but to vote” and no longer be complacent, said Mathews. “The true Christians are awakened.”