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Pastor Gary Fuller planned a Sunday service focused on involving Christians in the political process and featuring a speech by the pastor father of Sen. Ted Cruz. But after a week in which Cruz abruptly dropped out of the race, his father scrapped his appearance here and Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, a dismayed Fuller kept the political portion short.

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/opinion/2016/04/07/cruz-teavangelical-can-win/82711226/

The latest Pew Research poll reveals that while Ted Cruz is supported by white evangelical Republicans and those who regularly attend church service, the GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is preferred by white mainline Protestants and those who attend religious services less frequently. The poll released Friday shows that 41 percent of white evangelical Protestant Republican voters back Cruz, compared with 38-percent support for Trump. And 44 percent of Republican voters who regularly attend religious services are likely to back Cruz, while Trump has the backing of only 29 percent in this category. The poll also suggests that 57 percent of...

Robert Jeffress, pastor of the 12,000 member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, is rebuking talk radio host Glenn Beck for his recent criticism of evangelical Christians who live in the South and are not supporting Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 97% ’s campaign to secure the Republican Presidential nomination. “All throughout the South the Evangelicals are not listening to their God,” Beck said at a rally in Utah on Monday. “Beck’s wacko comment speaks for itself,” Jeffress tells Breitbart News. “However, by using the phrase ‘their God’ to refer to the God we evangelical Christians worship, Beck is finally admitting...

Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly has been one of Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters, much to the dismay of her fellow Eagle Forum activists who have rallied behind Ted Cruz. However, Schlafly stood by her position in an interview with WorldNetDaily today, even mocking the Cruz campaign’s failure to win support from a plurality of evangelical Republican voters in many of the early primary states: “The amazing thing is, Cruz based his campaign on courting the evangelicals, and even the evangelicals voted for Trump!” “Trump has got the energy to punch the kingmakers in the nose and take the selection...

President Barack Obama's nominee to fill the vacancy on the United States Supreme Court once joined an opinion that rejected an evangelical Christian defense based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was recently tapped by President Obama as a nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In a case decided in June 2001, Judge Garland joined an opinion authored by fellow appellate judge A. Raymond Randolph that rejected a RFRA argument for a pair of evangelical Christians who wanted to...

Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.

Donald Trump does not have a the support of most evangelical voters. It's a myth that falls flat on its face when one looks at Super Tuesday exit polls in the Southern states, a political scientist concluded. Trump's message is clear, wrote Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, describing the Republican presidential frontrunner and billionaire businessman thus: "I may not be one of you. I can't recite or even correctly cite Scripture. But I will patrol the borders of Christendom on your behalf. After all, who do you want out there — a choir boy or a tough guy with...

LINZEY: He's a businessman. When he becomes president, he's going to have nothing to do with his business. It's going to go into a blind trust and all that. But as a businessman, there are things you do for business. And that is separate from running for president of the United States. And I'd like to take Mitt Romney to task because he's violated the moral tenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he violated the Mormon rule of doing unto others what you would have others do unto you. And what he did to Trump...

This story has been updated. It was one of Donald Trump’s first powerful endorsements: Jerry Falwell Jr., who testified for many evangelical Christians that despite leading a life of excess, the thrice-married, trash-talking mogul was indeed a God-fearing president-in-waiting. But Falwell’s plunge into presidential politics did not sit so well with intimates of his late father, Jerry Falwell Sr., nor with some at Liberty University, the Christian college in Virginia founded by the elder Falwell and now led by his son. Mark DeMoss, who for many years served as chief of staff to Falwell Sr. and considered the televangelist a...

Tuesday night's Nevada Republican caucuses had some very bad news for Ted Cruz. Cruz, who rode a wave of white evangelical support to victory in Iowa, lost badly to real estate tycoon Donald J. Trump, even among evangelicals, and by larger margins than he lost by in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Pundits struggle to explain why self-described evangelicals support a man who cannot recall ever asking God for forgiveness, has had three wives, has boasted about sleeping around, and can't tell a communion plate from an offering basket. National Review's J.D. Vance has perhaps the best explanation for this...

Donald Trump continues to amaze. Wednesday afternoon, he strode onto the Regent University stage (an influential Christian University) and received a prolonged standing ovation from the evangelical audience. He went on to speak eloquently about the importance of family (he even brought out his two sons who spoke highly of him), nominating pro-life judges, defending Israel, etc. After hearing what he had to say, he left over an hour later to another standing ovation. I saw it with my own two eyes. I was there as the moderator of this presidential forum. After seeing those evangelicals rise to their feet,...

PAT ROBERTSON TELLS TRUMP 'YOU INSPIRE US ALL'...

Like the Blind Leading the Blind: Donald Trump and Evangelicals This morning, like most mornings now, I found myself reading an article on Donald Trump’s candidacy. Everyday I ask myself the question, “How can so many American Evangelicals support such an openly narcissistic, power driven man?” Sarah Palin endorsed him, Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, endorsed him,[1] and not too long ago, a poll was released that showed that Evangelical Christians as a whole are gravitating to Trump.[2] But, this article I read today gave me a much needed answer as to why Americans and specifically republican...

Southern evangelicals are the types of voters that Donald Trump was supposed to find problematic. Their deep faith, their conservative ideology, and their polite sensibilities were all supposed to turn them off to the brash New Yorker’s bluster. And yet in South Carolina, Trump found significant success with this cohort, taking nearly a third of evangelical voters and significantly undermining what was supposed to be a firewall for Ted Cruz. Today, many political observers are asking: What gives? Why are southern evangelicals pro-Trump? Isn’t this a yuge break from their voting pattern?

Mark it down, said Joe Scarborough. Okay, done. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough repeatedly, emphatically, declared that Ted Cruz's campaign is "over." The campaign ended, said Scarborough, when Cruz lost evangelicals in South Carolina to Trump, despite the Donald's praise of Planned Parenthood. Scarborough let it be known that he would have voted for Jeb Bush, and also admires John Kasich. But with Jeb gone, Joe wants to clear the field of both Kasich and Cruz to set up a one-on-one between Rubio and Trump. Given the criticism of Scarborough for what some of us saw as bias against Rubio,...

Brody explained that evangelical voters are tired of being "political pawns" of the GOP and having nothing to show for it. Via The Brody File at Christian Broadcasting Network: For months and months, Donald Trump has been exclaiming, "The evangelicals love me and I love them." Well folks, tonight that love affair paved his way to victory in the all-important South Carolina Primary. 72% of the voters in South Carolina Saturday night with evangelical. Trump won 33 percent, of them. Ted Cruz won 27 percent, and Rubio won 22 percent. So let's not kid ourselves here: Donald Trump is on...

Key evangelical leaders are staunchly opposing a proposal to register women for the military draft, saying it would weaken America's military readiness and is at odds with traditional male-female relationships. "A nation relying on female combatants is a nation that has been brought to its knees by political correctness," said Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Recently in Congress, Army and Marine Corps leaders testified in favor of registering women for the Selective Service. "Not only Evangelicals, but also Catholics and Christian pacifists should speak out," Chelsen Vicari of the Institute on Religion and...

For Christians, the stakes couldn't possibly be higher in the 2016 elections, and presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) believes he can be the leader the nation needs to help turn things around. To do that, though, he knows he needs the support of a broad coalition--the former "Reagan Coalition"--of which evangelical voters make up a big voting bloc. And, as a result, his campaign has aggressively courted evangelical voters in South Carolina. "I believe we need to reassemble the Reagan coalition, to unite conservatives and libertarians and evangelicals and women and young people and Hispanics and blue collar...

Evangelical broadcaster James Dobson Wednesday praised Ted Cruz's bid for the Republican presidential nomination, saying in a new television ad that the Texas senator is critical to naming more conservatives to the Supreme Court. "With Justice Scalia's death, we need a president who will defend the Constitution and nominate conservatives to the high court," Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, said in endorsing Cruz as a private citizen. "I know Ted," Dobson said. "He's a Christian family man of the utmost integrity."