IN the NEWS - Trump to Christians

"President Trump told his political base of evangelical Christians that he would continue to restore the religious liberty many of them feel they’ve lost.
“It is time to put a stop to the attacks on religion,” Trump said in a speech Thursday (June 8) to the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
“We will end the discrimination against people of faith. Our government will once again celebrate and protect religious freedom,” Trump, a Presbyterian not known to be particularly religious, told more than 1,000 people in a hotel ballroom across town from the hearing.

He said he and his audience were “under siege.”

The sentiment resonates with evangelicals, who often charge that American politics and culture has shunted them aside.

Trump read a verse from the Book of Isaiah - denounce his political enemies as lying obstructionists.

 “Learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow,” he said, quoting the biblical verse. Then he added:

“The entrenched interests and failed bitter voices in Washington will do everything in their power to try and stop us from this righteous cause, to try to stop all of you. They will lie, they will obstruct, they will spread their hatred and their prejudice, but we will not back down from doing what is right.
“Because as the Bible tells us, we know the truth will prevail,” he added.

 To sustained applause, Trump listed what he had done in his four months as president to help fulfill conservative Christians’ agenda:

• He nominated a Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, whom he described as a worthy successor to conservative hero Antonin Scalia.
• He blocked federal funds for nonprofits that perform abortions abroad.
• And he touted his executive order that last month directed the IRS to tread lightly with the federal regulation that bars pastors from politicking in the pulpit.

“The people that you most respect can now feel free to speak to you,” Trump said. “That was a big

deal. And it was a very important thing for me to do for you and we’re not finished yet, believe me.
As long as I am president no one is going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what is in your heart,” Trump added.

White evangelical Christians voted for Trump in November by larger margins than any other religious group - 81 percent.
“I want to know, who are the 19 percent?” he quipped, referring to those evangelicals who didn’t vote for him. “Where did they come from?
You didn’t let me down and I will never, ever let you down, you know that,” he promised. “We will always support our evangelical community.”

 

Trump is president in no small measure because he “focused like a laser beam on winning the support of evangelical voters and people of faith,” Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told the audience before Trump’s speech.

 

The coalition is not exclusively evangelical. Some Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews dotted the audience for Trump’s address." CRUX