US protests: Donald Trump turn to religion with eye on polls

Cloaking himself in religion for a second day, Donald Trump sought to mobilise his religious conservative base.

Donald and Melania Trump visit St John Paul II National Shrine in Washington. Picture: AP

Cloaking himself in religion for the second day in a row, Donald Trump sought to seize the moral authority to justify his hard line against demonstrators and at the same time mobilise his religious conservative base.

The US President signed an executive order on international religious freedom on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) and went to the St John Paul II National Shrine, where he and the first lady laid a ceremonial wreath and observed “a moment of remembrance”.

A day earlier, he had held up a Bible and posed for photos in front of a historic church across from the White House that had suffered fire damage from protesters. He strode through Lafayette Park to the church after security forcefully broke up peaceful protests there.

Mr Trump’s religious outreach marked his latest efforts in a series of overtures to mobilise conservative voters of faith, particularly the white evangelical Christians who are among his most loyal supporters.

The furious, politically charged response to his gestures from less pro-Trump faith leaders, however, suggested his efforts to lock in one part of his base could backfire by turning off other religious voters.

Tuesday’s shrine visit was originally set as a venue for Mr Trump to sign the religious freedom order, which he eventually signed during a private event in the Oval Office, but his tweets made clear what was on his mind as he spent much of the morning urging Republicans to vote in primaries on Tuesday that he vowed would “lead to big victories on November 3rd”. ­

“SILENT MAJORITY!” he tweeted.

The President has turned to ­religion as he seeks to project strength and quell violent protests, but religious leaders across ­denom­inations accused him of trying to co-opt religion in an ­attempt to project leadership at a time of deep national strife.

Mariann Budde, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, said she was “outraged” by Mr Trump’s visit to St John’s Church the previous day and noted that he didn’t pray while visiting the landmark that has been visited by sitting presidents since the early 19th century. The church sustained minor fire damage during protests on Sunday night.

Gini Gerbasi, the rector at a church in Washington’s Georgetown neighbourhood, said she was “deeply shaken” after having been forcefully cleared from the Lafayette Square area on Monday. She urged Mr Trump to live by the Bible’s words “instead of carrying them around as a prop”.

The use of “weapons of war” to help the President “show his supporters that he’s religious” defied further comment, Dr Gerbasi said.

“I can’t even go there. The layers of irony and hypocrisy and sacrilege are already thick.”

As for Tuesday’s trip to the Catholic shrine, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington’s Catholic diocese said he found it “baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated”.

White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway defended Mr Trump’s St John’s visit as a powerful symbol to those who set the church ablaze, telling Fox News: “We don’t look into other people’s hearts and souls and discern and judge what their faith is, why the President felt compelled to walk there, why he held that Bible up.”

Mr Trump’s campaign framed his visit to St John’s as “a powerful statement that God will always prevail by standing before the burned church, Bible in hand”, spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said.

Bishop Budde challenged that narrative as she aligned with the goals of peaceful protesters, saying “if the President was trying to capital­ise on religious outrage ­because the church was burned, I think the real outrage was the death of George Floyd”.

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, a Christian conservative ally of the President, lauded Mr Trump’s visit for “sending a message that he’s not going to be intimidated, that our government is not in hiding”.

Only five months before the presidential election, polls show Mr Trump struggling in key swing states, with some evidence of waning enthusiasm among some of his most loyal supporters, including white evangelical Christians.

Polling from the public Religion Research Institute, a non-partisan non-profit organisation, found a double-digit decline in Mr Trump’s support among white evangelicals and Catholics from March to April, a sign the President could be struggling to consolidate his ­appeal with a demographic he desperately needs to win.

Institute chief executive Robert Jones cited data showing white evangelical voters were shrinking as a share of the US population, meaning Mr Trump “needs to overperform” among core religious supporters to win.

AP