The January 6th Save America March, where then-President Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol, opened with a prayer. Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and White House adviser, the Florida televangelist Paula White, called on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour.” Standing at the same podium where, an hour later, Trump would exhort the crowd to “fight like hell,” White called the election results into question, asking God to let the people “have the assurance of a fair and a just election.” Flanked by a row of American flags, White implored God to “let every adversary against democracy, against freedom, against life, against liberty, against justice, against peace, against righteousness be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”

Within hours, insurrectionists had surrounded the Capitol, beaten police, battered down barricades and doors, smashed windows and rampaged through the halls of the Capitol, breaching the Senate chamber. In video captured by The New Yorker, men ransacked the room, rifling through senators’ binders and papers, searching for evidence of what they claimed was treason. Then, standing on the rostrum where the president of the Senate presides, the group paused to pray “in Christ’s holy name.” Men raised their arms in the air as millions of evangelical and charismatic parishioners do every Sunday and thanked God for allowing them “to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs.” They thanked God “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.”


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President Donald Trump walks along the Colonnade with Judge Amy Coney Barrett after a news conference to announce Barrett as his nominee to the Supreme Court, in the Rose Garden at the White House, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Trump's Christian Judges March On
False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump
White evangelicals have been Trump’s most dedicated, unwavering base, standing by him through the cavalcade of abuses, failures and scandals that engulfed his campaigns and his presidency — from the Access Hollywood tape to his first impeachment to his efforts to overturn the election and incite the Capitol Riot. This fervent relationship, which has survived the events of January 6th, is based on far more than a transactional handshake over judicial appointments and a crackdown on abortion and LGBTQ rights. Trump’s white evangelical base has come to believe that God anointed him and that Trump’s placement of Christian-right ideologues in critical positions at federal agencies and in federal courts was the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation. Throughout Trump’s presidency, his political appointees implemented policies that stripped away reproductive and LGBTQ rights and tore down the separation of church and state in the name of protecting unfettered religious freedom for conservative Christians. After Joe Biden won the presidency, Trump administration loyalists launched their own Christian organization to “stop the steal,” in the ultimate act of loyalty to their divine leader.

Since even before Trump took office, his cry of “fake news” was embraced by GOP leaders and leaders on the Christian right, who reinforced their followers’ fealty by seeking to sequester them from reality and training them to dismiss any criticism of Trump as a witch hunt or a hoax. At the 2019 Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, held just months after special counsel Robert Mueller released his report on the Russia investigation, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell accused the president’s critics of “Trump derangement syndrome,” and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, urged the audience to disregard mainstream news and turn instead to the “most important name in news” — “you and your circle of friends.” A few months later, amid Trump’s first impeachment hearings, then-Rep. Mark Meadows, who would go on to become Trump’s chief of staff, encouraged Christian-right activists at a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel in Washington to counteract news reports by retweeting him and other Trump loyalists in Congress. He underlined the power of this alternative information system, claiming that recent tweets from himself and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio — who would later vote to overturn the results of November’s election — had received 163 million impressions, “more than the viewership of all the networks combined.”