‘You have to vote’: Donald Trump tells evangelical Christians

The 78-year-old former president, who rarely appears in church himself, has built a crucial base among the religious right.

Donald Trump delivers the keynote address at the Faith & Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Policy Conference in Washington on Saturday. Picture: AFP

Former US president Donald Trump urged evangelical Christians at the weekend to vote en masse for him in November, vowing to “aggressively” protect their religious freedom if he is elected.

The 78-year-old Republican, who rarely appears in church himself, has built a crucial base among the religious right, promising – and delivering – on some of their biggest priorities, including by appointing Supreme Court judges who helped overturn the federal right to abortion.

“The evangelicals and the Christians, they don’t vote as much as they should,” Mr Trump told hundreds of supporters at a Washington conference put on by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative advocacy group, on Saturday (Sunday AEST).

“They go to church every Sunday, but they don’t vote,” he said, adding in a half-joke: “In four years, you don’t have to vote. OK? In four years, don’t vote. I don’t care.”

If elected, Mr Trump would be ineligible to run for president again in 2028 because of term limits.

Evangelical voters were crucial for Mr Trump’s 2016 victory and again in his failed 2020 campaign, when 84 per cent of white evangelical Protestants voted for him, according to the Pew Research Centre.

Mr Trump promised to protect their interests on Saturday, as he vowed to “aggressively defend religious freedom”.

“We will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals and in our public square,” he told supporters.

The former president claimed that he had “stood up to the communists, Marxists and fascists to defend religious liberty like no other president has ever done”.

“If I took this shirt off, you’d see a beautiful, beautiful person. But you’d see wounds all over, all over me, I’ve taken a lot of wounds,” Mr Trump said.

Many Republican officials and conservative voters now are pressuring Mr Trump to support a national abortion ban or restrictions.

However, Mr Trump has refrained from making any such commitment, which could prove politically perilous, telling supporters it is instead up to states to individually decide.

“The people will decide, and that’s the way it should be,” he told the crowd.

Mr Trump additionally promised to create “a new federal taskforce on fighting anti-Christian bias” that would investigate supposed “illegal discrimination, harassment (and) persecution” of US Christians.

Almost half (49 per cent) of Americans believe that religion’s influence is declining in the United States and that this is a bad thing, according to a Pew Research survey published in March.

The number of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped from nearly 90 per cent in the 1990s to less than two-thirds of the population in 2022, mostly due to rising numbers of people who are not religiously affiliated.

Congress remains overwhelmingly Christian, with 88 per cent of the voting members sworn in in 2023 identifying as such.

Trump’s Democrat rival in the election, President Joe Biden, who favours abortion rights, is a 82-year-old devout Catholic who attends mass regularly.

For many white evangelical Christians – a conservative grouping that makes up about 14 per cent of American voters – it is crucial that religion stays relevant in public life.

Mr Trump told the crowd that the political left wanted to “silence you, demoralise you, and they want to keep you out of politics”. “They don’t want you to vote, that’s why you have to vote,” he said, adding “if you vote, no, we cannot lose”.

Mr Trump will face Biden in the first 2024 presidential debate on Thursday (Friday AEST).

AFP