Lest we forget, there are good reasons why Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016 and received so much support in the conservative faith communities – and why he is poised to be elected again with that support intact.

The foremost reason is that the United States – and the entire Western World – were, and are, in the throes of an all-out spiritual war. That assertion used to make many folks cringe, but not so much now. Events keep breaking down into simple pieces that everyone can see. Right and wrong have been flipped inside out. Evil is good, and good is now evil.

Blatant Issues

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the war on women and children. We have progressed from abortions being “safe and rare” to the new presidential candidate who supports “aborting” a nine-month pregnancy. Now, women who – thanks to Title IX – have enjoyed an explosion in women’s sports must compete against men who think they are women despite the hard science of DNA. We actually have adults – including doctors, hospital administrators, and so-called therapists (all of whom have a financial incentive) – promoting life-altering surgeries and powerful hormone-blocking drugs for minor children who – because they are children – have a transitory fancy. Instead of a fish, they are given a stone.

It’s also clear now that organized institutions of faith, learning, and government have rotted from the inside out and collapsed for want of moral integrity. The ruin cuts a hard mental image, like a photo of a bombed-out city. The national political institutions have cast aside the constitutional and legal basis upon which they were created and become unrestrained transmission belts of money and unlimited power.

Massive and fabulously wealthy foundations, single-issue interest groups, transnational corporations, and foreign and domestic oligarchs have pushed citizens out of the way to take an iron grip on the global apparatus and dream of a global government that creates a new feudal order. Ordinary people will play the serfs; they the kings and princes.

None of this is even hidden anymore. It’s paraded proudly – the new era of trans-humanism, where God is buried once and for all. The hubris is so dense that these would-be kings and queens think they can change the earth’s weather patterns if they can only depopulate enough humans from the world.

Shedding Light

While former President Trump isn’t known for his piety or lifelong profession of faith, he is the only person on the national stage pointing out the obvious truth of our political calamities experienced together as citizens and the social chaos that churns in the land. Contrasting Mr. Trump against the previous four years of ultra-radical social and financial disasters makes the difference all the more apparent. He’s the only person perceived as tough enough to withstand the “heat in the kitchen.”

To many faithful believers, he has presented a palette of touchpoints that resonate with their worldview. They have only grown more pronounced.

For many Christian voters, the heart of that worldview was succinctly summed up by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” What the imperfect Donald J. Trump describes as “common sense” these voters see as the reality today.

Professional Christians

None of this is to deny there aren’t fault lines in support of the former president in the faith communities, especially evangelicals. There’s a contingent of faith leaders and “intellectuals” who are as opposed to Donald J. Trump today as they were in 2016 and 2020. The names have changed, and others have been recycled, but their arguments are largely the same – which is, to say, selective and often disingenuous.

Some, perhaps many, in the intellectual class of Evangelism, Inc. – those who hold the keys to the institutions of faith, including a cadre of “national pastors” – long ago became disengaged from the people who sit in the pews. Many have almost no connection to the life of average Americans.

In measurable ways, some “leaders” in the modern traditionalist and evangelical church have fallen victim to the hardened, formidably organized, radical left in far too many seminaries, non-church ministries, and pulpits. This “progressive” movement within the larger church, while supposedly small, has been towed into the public arena by a sympathetic news and entertainment industry, making it appear more prominent than it is.

Egged on by a corrupt corporate media, the meme of the “Trump worshiping” evangelicals and the timorous pastors who hate Trump but dare not criticize him for fear of emptying the pews has grown like weeds in a summer garden. And while the claim may be suspect or have little merit, it has been implanted as a standard talking point in the faith-oriented media.

A Simple Choice

But, by my count, around 122 promises that candidate Trump made in 2016 were kept, or he attempted to keep them but was blocked by Congress. He is the first “straight talk” and transparent president (some might say too transparent!) the US has had since Ronald Reagan. And time and again, he has defended faith in the public square and protected Christians and Jews alike. That alone makes him unique.

But speaking for myself as a practicing evangelical, I’m called to bear the Truth of Christ into the world and to be an ambassador of reconciliation. I’m reminded the world isn’t mine to save. I’m only one of His tools. At the end of every subject, that is my mission statement.

One candidate supports my public right to do so, and the other is beholden to a movement that hates Orthodox Christians and Jews and wishes to take their voice away – and one suspects more than even that.

The decision is really no more difficult than that.

Originally published July 26 on The Bull Elephant. Reprinted with permission.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture, and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.