Eight in ten white evangelicals vote for Trump, and most of them are convinced his power is ordained from on high. Three weeks before the midterm elections, this sacred edifice has cracked for the first time, and the fault line runs through the war with Iran.
On March 5, 2026, the sixth day of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, the Oval Office turned into a prayer hall for a few minutes. Donald Trump sat at the Resolute desk with his eyes closed. Around him stood some two dozen pastors, their palms resting on his shoulders, back, and forearms. Pastor Tom Mullins led the prayer, asking for divine wisdom for the president and protection for American troops. The video was posted online by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, and the gathering was organized by the White House Faith Office, headed by televangelist Paula White-Cain. The circle included Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas; Greg Laurie, founder of the California congregation Harvest Christian Fellowship; Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; and, reportedly, religious right veterans Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer.
The image was almost deliberately symbolic. A nation whose First Amendment bars Congress from establishing an official religion was waging war on a Shiite theocracy, and its leader was being blessed for that war in the manner of a charismatic worship service. Tehran could not have dreamed of a better propaganda shot: for more than forty years the ayatollahs had cast America as a crusader, and here the crusader was posing for the camera himself.
The March 5 scene was no improvisation. Behind it stands a machine that the American religious right spent half a century building: thousands of megachurches, television networks and podcasts, foundations funded by oil billionaires, databases covering tens of millions of voters, and a theology capable of explaining anything, from lawsuits against the president to the bombing of Iran. Its power can be measured by a simple number. About 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2024, and four years earlier the figure was even higher.
The machine's vulnerability shows up in other numbers. In January 2026, according to the Pew Research Center, 69% of white evangelicals approved of the president's job performance, down from 78% at the start of his second term. By the end of April, a Marist Poll found approval at 64% and disapproval at 34%.
The anointed one has begun to lose his flock.
A Stadium Instead of a Cathedral: How Charlie Kirk's Funeral Became a MAGA Liturgy
Charlie Kirk was shot dead on September 10, 2025, while speaking to students at Utah Valley University. He was 31. Eleven days later, State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, which seats roughly 63,000, filled with people in red MAGA gear. At the entrances they were checked in by volunteers from Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk had founded in 2012 at the age of eighteen. Christian hymns rang out from the stage, and in the stands people raised their hands, closed their eyes, and wept as if at a Sunday megachurch service. Between the hymns came speeches from Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Eyewitnesses described the event as a religious revival fused with a political rally. From the stage came calls for the government to draw the sword against evil, and from the stands came vows to have the president's back. The activist's death was packaged as hagiography: a martyr who fell for the faith and for the president at once, with the line between those two forms of service erased entirely.
Kirk grew up in evangelical circles and spent his final years deliberately building a bridge from the pulpit to the polling station. In 2024 his TPUSA Faith project convened pastors at summits where they were invited to serve as informal surrogates for the Trump campaign and to send their congregants door-knocking in swing states. Through a dedicated online portal, clergy were handed ready-made sermon outlines and campaign graphics. Political strategy dressed up as liturgy works better than any campaign headquarters, because a sermon is not perceived as advertising.
The funeral cemented this fusion. In December 2025, Idaho pastor Doug Wilson spoke at Turning Point's annual AmericaFest convention. Two months later he would be invited to preach at the Pentagon.
King Jesus at the Pentagon: The Secretary Who Dreamed of a Crusade
Pete Hegseth arrived at the Defense Department with a reputation he never tried to hide. In 2020 the former television host published a book titled American Crusade, in which he called for a holy war against the American left. Four months after his appointment, in May 2025, he launched monthly Christian worship services at the Pentagon, the first held in the department on a regular official basis and broadcast over the building's internal television network.
The first service was led by Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth's pastor from Tennessee and a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). Potteiger thanked God for using Trump to restore stability and moral clarity to the country. The secretary himself addressed his prayer to King Jesus.
On February 5, 2026, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Hegseth spelled out the ideology in plain terms: America is a Christian nation, it is in the country's DNA, and public officials have a sacred duty to glorify God. Twelve days later, on February 17, Doug Wilson stepped up to the lectern in a Pentagon auditorium.
Wilson is 72. He lives in the small town of Moscow, Idaho, is one of the founders of that same CREC, and openly calls himself a Christian nationalist. In his congregations women are barred from leadership positions, and within his church circles women's suffrage is seriously called into question. The pastor has described his political views as being just to the right of a Confederate general, has spoken about slavery in the American South in terms his critics call apologetics, and has referred to Muslims and Hindus who have moved to the United States as parasites.
The sermon lasted about sixteen minutes before a packed room, and Wilson prudently kept silent about his most scandalous positions. Still, he said what mattered most: he would like to see the whole world become Christian. Hegseth came up on stage, placed a hand on his shoulder, and offered the closing prayer, then reposted a video bearing Wilson's motto: "All of Christ for all of life." The motto expresses an idea popular among American evangelicals that Christ's authority extends to every sphere, including the state and the military. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson answered reporters' questions briefly: the secretary, like millions of Americans, is a proud Christian. Wilson was the tenth preacher to speak at the Pentagon since May 2025.
Eleven days after that sermon, American and Israeli aircraft launched the first strikes on Iran.
Eight in Ten: Anatomy of America's Most Loyal Electorate
Demographically, the United States remains a Christian country that is rapidly secularizing. According to a major Pew Research Center study from 2023-2024, 62% of American adults identify as Christian, down from 78% in 2007. Another 29% claim no religion at all. Pew assigns 23% of adults to the evangelical Protestant tradition, 11% to historically mainline Protestant churches, 5% to historically Black Protestant congregations, and about a fifth to Catholicism.
Politically, the decisive variable is race, not doctrine. In 2024, 85% of white evangelical voters identified with or leaned toward the Republicans, while 84% of Black Protestants backed the Democrats. The phenomenon that needs explaining is white conservative evangelicalism, and it rests far more on a network of institutions than on the Bible.
Within that network coexist movements that, in theological disputes, would readily excommunicate one another. Classic evangelicals emphasize the authority of Scripture, the atoning death of Christ, personal conversion, and the duty to convert others. Fundamentalists, born of the war on liberal theology in the early twentieth century, insist on the literal truth of biblical miracles. Pentecostals and charismatics believe in the present-day gifts of the Spirit: healing, prophecy, speaking in tongues, casting out demons. Independent networks that scholars classify as the New Apostolic Reformation recognize living apostles and prophets who, their followers believe, receive direct messages from God. At the level of faith these are different worlds. At the ballot box they become a single organism.
The ecosystem's strength lies in its horizontal structure. Thousands of autonomous congregations do not wait for orders from above: pastors appear on one another's livestreams, a prophecy uttered by one is broadcast within a day on another's network and spreads through short videos. The center of gravity is the megachurch, a Protestant congregation drawing at least 2,000 worshippers a week. The Hartford Institute for Religion Research identifies such churches by the sole authority of the senior pastor, their own media operations, a professional staff, and dozens of social programs. When the pastor of such a congregation endorses a candidate, what is at stake is the mobilization of a resource, not a private opinion.
Paula White-Cain is a perfect illustration of this blurriness. She can be called, with equal justification, an evangelical, a charismatic, a nondenominational Christian, and a preacher of the prosperity gospel. That last doctrine promises that faith and a monetary donation, the so-called seed offering, will return to the believer as health and wealth. Many Baptists and Reformed Christians regard the doctrine as exploitation of the flock. For Trump it fits perfectly: if wealth is a sign of divine favor, a billionaire in the White House looks like proof rather than temptation. White has known Trump since the early 2000s, became his adviser in 2019, and in February 2025 took charge of the White House Faith Office, created by presidential executive order essentially for her.
Sociologists reveal the depth of this bond. In a post-election survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 60% of white evangelical Protestants agreed that Trump's victory had been ordained by God. No other major religious group showed anything like that certainty. According to the same institute's 2025 data, 29% of white evangelicals are committed adherents of Christian nationalism and another 38% are sympathizers. Together, two-thirds.
The researchers did not ask respondents about the term itself. They asked whether people agreed that the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over society.
Cyrus the Great, Esther, and Cruise Missiles: A Theology That Explains Any War
In 2016, charismatic preacher Lance Wallnau found a formula that relieved evangelicals of candidate Trump's chief moral problem. A thrice-married tycoon facing accusations of sexual misconduct was poorly suited to the role of defender of Christian morality. Wallnau compared him to the Persian king Cyrus the Great. In the forty-fifth chapter of the Book of Isaiah, the pagan Cyrus is called the Lord's anointed: God chose him to bring the Jews back from Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem. Cyrus does not have to be righteous. He has to be an instrument.
The formula proved to be a skeleton key. The president's moral character ceased to matter because the mission outweighed the vessel, and the mission was framed as liberating believers from captivity to secular liberals, feminism, and an allegedly anti-Christian state. From then on, every failure had an explanation. Televangelists described the legal cases against Trump as an assault by demonic forces and the 2020 defeat as a temporary victory of darkness.
In the spring of 2026, the Persian storyline took an unexpected turn. At a Holy Week event at the White House, Franklin Graham, son of the legendary Billy Graham, reminded Trump of the Book of Esther, in which a plot to annihilate all the Jews ripens at the court of a Persian king, and added that God had raised up President Trump for this hour. Benjamin Netanyahu, at Passover, compared the joint war with Trump to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. At an Easter luncheon at the White House, Paula White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus.
The result is a theology in which Persia both saves and destroys. Ten years ago Trump was the new Cyrus, a Persian liberator. In 2026 he is at war with the heir to that very Persia and receives his blessing through the Book of Esther. The logic crumbles at the first touch, but the audience is untroubled: spiritual warfare has no need of consistency, only of an enemy.
The Catholic world responded differently. On March 29, Palm Sunday, Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff from the United States, said in St. Peter's Square that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war but rejects them. It is hard to imagine a more direct reply to the scene in the Oval Office. On April 3 the pope called Israeli President Isaac Herzog and urged him to open every path to dialogue.
Seven Mountains and One Summit: Why Facts Are Useless Against These People
Two concepts shield the religious right's rhetoric from scrutiny. The first is called spiritual warfare. According to it, events in the visible world reflect a parallel battle between angels and demons, with control over cities, governments, universities, and entire nations at stake. Prayer becomes a weapon, and a political opponent becomes a tool of demons. There is no point in arguing with such an opponent; he must be cast out.
The second concept, the Seven Mountains Mandate, sets out a program of action. Christians, it holds, must take control of seven spheres of earthly life: government, media, education, business, family, religion, and arts and entertainment. Wallnau has promoted the idea for years, and by 2026 it had ceased to be a fringe theory. A defense secretary praying to King Jesus at the Pentagon looks like a flag planted on one of the summits.
The system's invulnerability is most evident in its failures. In the fall of 2020, prophecies of a guaranteed Trump victory spread through charismatic networks. The prophecies did not come true, yet holding their authors accountable proved impossible: the network has no bishop, no synod, no mechanism of recall. An apostle is not appointed from above; his authority rests on the recognition of peers and followers, and that recognition survived the error unscathed.
Underlying all of this is a construct Americans call family values. It is not a biblical dogma. It was assembled politically in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country was hit simultaneously by desegregation, feminism, the sexual revolution, and the end of mandatory prayer in public schools. There is no consensus on what served as the trigger. One influential account points to the federal government's move against tax exemptions for Christian schools that practiced racial segregation: in 1983 the Supreme Court definitively upheld the revocation of Bob Jones University's exemption. Abortion, which later became the main mobilizing issue, initially failed to unite evangelical leaders.
The most effective salesman of the new ideology was a psychologist, not a pastor. James Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977 and, on his radio program, blamed the nation's decline on liberal child-rearing and the erosion of gender roles. Working women, contraception, cohabitation, abortion, and same-sex marriage added up, in his telling, to a single moral catastrophe. Ronald Reagan listened to his views, and by 2005 the organization's annual revenue reportedly approached $140 million. Family values became at once a theology, a media product, and the electoral identity of the Republican Party.
Trump monetized that identity. In 2016 he promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. On June 24, 2022, three justices he had appointed provided the majority in Dobbs, the federal constitutional right to abortion vanished, and the issue passed to the states. Asked about his own role, Trump gave the credit to God. On the first day of his second term, January 20, 2025, he signed an executive order recognizing only two biological sexes. The deal was being honored on both sides, and the flock could see it.
Sowing the Seed: Who Pays for the Great Awakening
American law prohibits tax-exempt churches from campaigning for candidates. The decentralized infrastructure gets around the ban through nominally independent nonprofits, political action committees, and activist groups.
The flagship of this system is Ralph Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition, which links conservative evangelicals and Catholics to the Republican Party. According to its leadership, the coalition's operating budget for the 2024 election cycle was about $60 million, its work ran through 13,000 churches, and its activists visited roughly 10 million households. On the eve of the vote, the organization expected to reach 17 to 18 million voters in swing states. A permanent religious infrastructure accumulates databases and personal relationships with believers over years, and no campaign operation built for six months can compete with it.
Behind the pastors stands a layer of major donors. The secretive Ziklag network brings together very wealthy Christian families, including the owners of the Hobby Lobby retail chain and the distributor Uline. Internal documents leaked in 2024 revealed a plan to spend about $12 million to mobilize pro-Republican voters and to challenge the registrations of more than a million voters in swing states. Ziklag gave another $700,000 to the Courage Tour run by Lance Wallnau, the very author of the Cyrus comparison. At one tour stop in Pennsylvania, an official JD Vance event was slotted directly between religious sessions, and the screen behind the stage switched in sync from the tour's emblem to the Trump-Vance campaign logo.
In Texas, evangelicalism and oil have long lived under one roof. Oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks both serve as lay preachers and fund a sprawling network of committees, think tanks, media outlets, and nonprofits. According to investigative reporting, since 2000 Dunn and his wife have given more than $29 million to Texas candidates, and Wilks and his wife another $16 million. In 2024 Dunn stepped onto the federal stage, directing $5 million to support Trump's presidential campaign.
The final stage of the process is personnel. Project 2025, run by the Heritage Foundation together with a coalition of secular and ultra-religious organizations, built a database of ideologically reliable appointees and a program to train them. It is through such filters that people enter the federal bureaucracy for whom a White House Faith Office and a prayer hall at the Pentagon seem a natural part of the state.
The Amendment Nobody Notices Anymore
Formally, the main barrier between pulpit and ballot box remains the Johnson Amendment. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson pushed it through Congress in 1954, and ever since, any nonprofit, including a church, risks its tax status if it endorses or attacks a candidate.
The Trump administration decided to tear down that barrier. In July 2025, the Internal Revenue Service, in a filing in federal court in Texas in a lawsuit brought by the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and two local churches, likened endorsements from the pulpit to a family conversation and proposed a settlement. On March 31, 2026, U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker in Tyler declined to approve it, citing a lack of jurisdiction. The NRB announced an appeal, and the Justice Department asked the appeals court to overturn the ruling.
Legally, the law is alive. In practice, the IRS under the current administration has retreated from enforcing it against churches, and investigative journalists have found at least twenty violations by churches over two years, more than the agency investigated over the entire previous decade. The public, meanwhile, feels otherwise: as far back as 2019, 76% of Americans believed clergy should not endorse candidates from the pulpit.
My forecast: the appeals court will not rule before November 3, and pastors will wage the fall campaign in a legal gray zone where the law exists only on paper.
An Icon Deleted After Twelve Hours: Where the Armor Cracked
On the evening of April 12, 2026, Trump lashed out at Pope Leo XIV, calling him weak on crime and terrible on foreign policy. Less than an hour later, an AI-generated image appeared on his Truth Social account: the president in white and red robes touching the forehead of a sick man, light radiating from his hand and head, an American flag waving above him.
The backlash came from an unexpected quarter. Loyal conservative Christian commentators spoke of blasphemy and demanded that the post be deleted and that he repent before God. A little more than twelve hours later, the image was gone. On April 13, Trump explained to reporters that he had seen himself in the picture as a doctor affiliated with the Red Cross.
A national poll conducted April 24-28 captured the scale of the fiasco: 87% of Americans viewed the post negatively, as did 80% of Trump's 2024 voters and about nine in ten white evangelical Protestants. For the first time in a decade, the flock publicly rejected a gesture by its anointed one.
The image was a symptom, not the cause. The cause is the war. The U.S.-Israeli strikes continued for 38 days, gasoline prices in the United States soared, and before the two-week ceasefire announced on April 7 with Pakistani mediation, Trump threatened Iran with the death of an entire civilization. The ceasefire proved fragile, negotiations are stalling, and the Strait of Hormuz remains a bargaining chip. On September 22, from the podium of the UN General Assembly, Trump declared that he was choosing between a deal with Tehran and the destruction of the Islamic Republic, and suggested that Iran was waiting for the results of the midterm elections. That same day it emerged that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had held a three-hour meeting with an Iranian delegation on the sidelines of the UN.
Two independent samples give different numbers but point in the same direction. In January, Pew recorded a drop in approval among white evangelicals from 78% to 69%, with only 40% of them confident that the president behaves ethically. Marist's late-April poll showed 64%. By comparison, nationwide, 37% of adults approved of Trump in January.
An honest caveat is in order here. Sixty-four percent is still a figure any other American politician can only dream of, and there will be no mass defection of white evangelicals to the Democrats. The danger for the Republican Party lies elsewhere: a disillusioned believer does not vote for the opponent, he simply stays home. There is a precedent. White evangelicals' cooling toward the Iraq War coincided with November 2006, when Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. By August 2007, only 58% of them considered the invasion of Iraq the right decision, down from 71% in the previous September survey.
Exporting Grace: From Brasília to Seoul
The American religious right has long been in the export business. The closest analogue is Brazil, where 47.4 million people, about 26.9% of the population, identified as evangelical in the 2022 census. Pentecostal and charismatic congregations there often stand in for a weak state: they help people struggling with drug addiction, feed the poor, and solve everyday problems. In such neighborhoods a pastor's authority extends far beyond the worship service.
Jair Bolsonaro exploited this resource methodically. In July and August 2022, 40% of his public appearances outside the capital took place at religious events, and his support among evangelicals exceeded 60% in the polls. Pastors warned their flocks that Lula da Silva would close churches and open the door to satanic forces, even though Lula is Catholic and repeatedly denied any such intentions. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God issued a manifesto declaring Christianity incompatible with left-wing views. On January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of the defeated Bolsonaro ransacked the buildings of Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court, some of them singing psalms as they smashed windows. In September 2025, Brazil's Supreme Federal Court sentenced the former president to 27 years and 3 months in prison for attempting a coup. By then Washington had already imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods, openly tying them to Bolsonaro's prosecution.
South Korea proved that the technology can be transplanted into any Christian tradition. After President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on December 3, 2024, and was impeached, radical Protestant pastors proclaimed the events a holy struggle against communists. The organization Save Korea drew more than 50,000 people to rallies under the slogan Stop the Steal, borrowed from Trump's supporters. On January 19, 2025, activists stormed the Seoul Western District Court. On April 4, the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld Yoon's removal, and on June 3 his opponent Lee Jae-myung became president.
The money follows the ideas. By investigative journalists' count, since 2007, 28 predominantly Christian American organizations have spent more than $280 million abroad, nearly $90 million of it in Europe. Legal groups linked to the American right have intervened in cases on abortion and LGBT rights in Austria, Italy, Poland, France, and the European Court of Human Rights. The influence runs both ways: Viktor Orbán's Hungarian model has supplied American conservatives with a ready-made blueprint for controlling courts, media, and universities while formally preserving elections.
The Karabakh Sermon That Fell Flat
One region became a place of outright defeat for the religious right's transnational machine, and for a reader in the South Caucasus it is especially instructive.
In June 2023, Sam Brownback, the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, declared the situation around Karabakh an attempted religious cleansing of Christians and called on Congress to pass a special human rights law for the region's Armenian population. Later, a group of religious activists sent Trump a letter demanding the release of so-called Christian political prisoners in Azerbaijan. They meant former leaders of the separatist regime and its armed formations who are on trial in Baku. The letter was signed by Brownback, Christian musician Sean Feucht, Troy Miller, head of that same NRB, and David Curry, a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The confessional framing shattered against reality. Azerbaijan is a secular state with a predominantly Shiite population, home to Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, and Udi Albanian communities, and Pope Francis visited Baku in 2016. The conflict over Karabakh was territorial from the first day to the last, and recasting it as a textbook case of Christian persecution required willful blindness.
Trump chose the deal. On August 8, 2025, at the White House, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan initialed a peace agreement in Trump's presence, and the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) project is meant to connect mainland Azerbaijan with Nakhchivan. That same day Trump signed Presidential Determination No. 2025-08 extending the waiver of Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which had restricted American assistance to Azerbaijan since 1992. President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev called the amendment unjust, and Washington effectively agreed with him.
The lesson extends far beyond the Caucasus. The evangelical lobby is strong where its agenda coincides with Trump's interests and powerless where Trump needs transportation corridors, energy, and an ally with a long border with Iran. In the year of the war with Tehran, secular, Shiite Azerbaijan proved more valuable to Washington than any sermon about persecution.
November Third
In twenty-four days, Americans will elect the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Trump himself, from the UN podium, tied the fate of an Iran deal to the outcome of that vote. The religious right enters the campaign with unprecedented infrastructure: a Faith Office in the White House, a prayer hall at the Pentagon, an IRS that has retreated from the Johnson Amendment, and mobilization networks battle-tested in 2024.
My forecast: on November 3, white evangelicals will give Republican House candidates between 75% and 80% of their votes, and that will not be enough for Trump's party to keep its majority there. The outcome will be decided not by support numbers but by turnout, and gasoline at today's prices will weigh more heavily on it than any sermon.
The machine, however, is not going anywhere. It was built long before Trump and will be run long after him, because sacralizing politics has proved the cheapest way to hold on to voters: a losing candidate becomes a martyr, an inconvenient fact becomes a demonic attack, and compromise is equated with apostasy. Brazil on January 8, 2023, and Seoul on January 19, 2025, showed where that logic leads when the anointed one loses.
The Resolute desk, at which Trump sat beneath the pastors' palms on March 5, is made from the oak timbers of a British barque abandoned by its crew in the Arctic ice in 1854. For more than a year the ship drifted with no one aboard until American whalers found it. Today the hands resting on that wood belong to people who are certain they know the course.