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So far, the answer seems to be 'yes' Since the late ’70s, some of the most reliable voters for Republican candidates have been Christians who take the Bible literally — conservative Christians, we’ll call them. About 65 percent vote Republican now, and they typically turn out in large numbers for elections, said Andrew Lewis, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. Will they do so this year, when the Republican standard-bearer is Donald Trump, a not particularly religious person whose support for the pro-life movement has been lukewarm at best? The short answer is yes, said Lewis, who...

hDonald Trump, Sen. Mitch McConnell and other speakers are set to address the 2016 Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington, D.C. The conference is one of the largest events for religious conservative groups in the country. Trump’s speech marks an appeal to the evangelical voter base, whose support for Trump has taken some analysts by surprise. “Mr. Trump won a plurality of evangelical votes in the Republican primaries on his path to the nomination, and we welcome him to once again address members of Faith and Freedom and to express his views on the many issues of importance to...

The Post story, "In BrazilÂ’s political crisis, a powerful new force: Evangelical Christians," is an amazing account from a liberal perspective of how Christian conservatives are taking back their country. One leading critic of the ruling Workers Party in Brazil said, "We saw that communism was in their DNA." We saw this coming more than a year ago in our story, "Anti-Marxist Counter-Revolution in Brazil." The obvious question is, Can it happen here? The answer is, Not with Trump. Andrew Chesnut, a Latin America expert and professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is quoted as saying, "They think...

Donald Trump’s primary run left him with few friends among evangelical leaders, who are now weighing sitting out the general election entirely. But there is one way, they say, to win them back: picking a vice presidential candidate socially conservative enough to compensate for Trump’s many heresies. Several of the country’s top socially conservative leaders, from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council to Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America, said Trump’s choice of running mate would be among the most important factors in deciding whether to activate their extensive grass-roots networks on the real estate billionaire’s behalf. “Who’s...

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,...