When Donald Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign, many prominent evangelical leaders were wary of declaring their support. Others outright opposed him. But with just a few days to go before the Iowa caucuses, the former president seems destined to lock up the pivotal evangelical bloc in the Republican primary.
That likely outcome would erase more than a year of anti-Trump campaigning by Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats, a conservative evangelical power broker who is backing Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Of course, disapproval from established evangelical leaders amounts to little when the laity so fervently backs Trump. A December poll from NBC News, The Des Moines Register, and Mediacom found that 51% of Iowa evangelicals support Trump, nearly double the share backing DeSantis. And though Vander Plaats is hoping for something like a repeat of 2016—when Trump lost Iowa to the more evangelical-tinged Ted Cruz campaign—anything outside of a total Trump victory seems unlikely: He currently leads his closest competitors, DeSantis and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, by more than 30 points among likely Republican voters in the state.
Trump has also turned to a motley crew of loyalist pastors to boost his credibility, as noted by Axios. Opening for the GOP front-runner at a rally last month in Coralville, Iowa, Joel Tenney, a self-described evangelist who deems Christianity incompatible with the Democratic Party, told the crowd that reelecting Trump was “part of a spiritual battle” against demonic forces. “Judgment is coming,” he said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
Religious conflict is something that Trump has laced into his campaign rhetoric. He has said that if reelected, he will create a task force to combat “anti-Christian bias” in America. Jackson Lahmeyer, the Christian nationalist pastor of Sheridan Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has hailed Trump as the “best pro-Christian president.” Lahmeyer, who has compared Democrats to demons, is the founder of Pastors for Trump, a group that earned Trump’s blessing and adulation after it organized a national call to prayer ahead of his March indictment in the New York business fraud case.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, Ottumwa Baptist Temple pastor Travis Decker told The New York Times he wants Trump “to get a second shot at it, another chance to just prove himself.” A 2020 election denier, Decker noted his dislike for “some of the language that Trump uses.” Still, he reasoned, “We’re not voting for somebody in church. We’re voting for somebody to lead a country.”
