We are in the fight of our lives today. Amen. Listen, 16 can't hold a candle
to this election now and it is an election of good v evil, flat plain and simple.
Faith and religion have always played a role in American presidential elections
but Donald Trump's victory in 2016 solidified a major religious voting bloc.
White Evangelicals who made up a quarter of the electorate and 81 of them voted for Trump.
But this time around, there's a real battle going on because flipping just a small percentage of
these voters could alter the outcome of the election.
God's man is in God's hour right now.
God chose him and that's why he's the president.
It's white Evangelicals and white Catholics
that have a fixation with staying Republican no matter what.
The level of sin that these people in the name of religion are doing is atrocious.
I've come to the battleground state of North Carolina where white Evangelicals
are the largest religious group. If trump has any hope of winning
a second term he needs to turn out this demographic in massive numbers.
Evangelicals for Trump, an official wing of the campaign, is designed to do just that.
I came to see one of their events in the city of Raleigh where a host of Conservative Evangelical megastars
took to the stage to preach their support for the president.
This is the most (...) election lifetime ...
There are spiritual, demonic forces at play.
We need to secure some things for the church.
Come on, we need to secure some things for our country.
We are going to win North Carolina.
And give Donald Trump four more years.
Do you still have faith in Donald Trump?
I do. I believe God has placed him there and and I believe that the whole body of Christ is right behind him.
Do you wholeheartedly believe that he is a practicing Christian?
Depends what you mean by practicing. Yeah, practicing failing, messed up screwball christian just like me.
We don't fool ourselves into thinking he's perfect, I mean, we don't worship Donald Trump.
Even though I might not like the guy as a person but as a politician, I stand for what he stands for.
I feel like we're asking the wrong questions here. It's not about who is right/who's wrong situation,
it's what what's our country founded upon and who is the candidate that most supports that.
Conservative evangelicalism has not always been a force in US politics but in 1980 Ronald Reagan
wrote a growing political movement of right-wing christianity spurred by the rise of televangelism.
This was a movement grounded in anti-abortion and anti-gay rights and ardently opposed to socialism.
'I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the
communists coming out of the closets. It's time for God's people to come out of the closets out
of the churches and change America.'
It's remained a powerful force in right-wing politics ever since.
To explore the belief system in 2020, I wanted to get away from political rallies.
So I came to a Sunday service, an independent Baptist church
just outside the city of Charlotte at the invitation of pastor Tim Jones.
Our president fights every day with the media.
Our president fights with people around the world, he fights with politicians, he fights with his own party.
I mean, he is in a all-out war every day but God's man is in God's hour right now.
God chose him and that's why he's the President.
If Joe Biden becomes the president, what are you going to do?
You're seeing a nation barely treading water because we have forgotten God.
He described this election as a battle of good v evil. Do you guys agree with that?
I do feel like it's good v evil and the main reason is because of what the other candidate is standing on
which is for abortion which we don't agree with. If you take this country which was founded on
democracy, right, and like, you know, the American dream, well, Joe Biden and everybody else is going
to take that away.
Donald Trump has been married a number of times, he has children from different wives,
he's been accused of being adulterous and that sort of thing as well ...
At times, maybe he's not as close to God as he should be but I think he is to in my opinion a Christian.
Sleeping with a porn star, that's what he's been accused of.
In my opinion, God's using him because he is not a politician,
he's just an ordinary, everyday man.
It was becoming clear to me that conservative politics had essentially enmeshed itself
with a version of Christianity here.
Pastor Tim was even carrying a firearm during the service and during his sermon he gave his
position on same-sex relationships.
There is no way that you can support that wickedness
and call yourself saved there's no way.
Same-sex marriage is a discussion that happened, you know, five or six years ago.
When you equate that to what you're suggesting is radicalism, I find it
quite difficult to follow because it's a mainstream view now.
Right, just because something's a mainstream view doesn't make it right.
If the bible says it's right, it's right, if the bible says it's wrong, it's wrong.
Because some people watching that sermon may have described it as homophobic.
A lot of people probably would have done.
And that's their prerogative.
... a man kissing a man or a woman kissing a woman, people have been like,
'oh my gosh that's taboo' well then
it's OK for a man to change his sex, a woman to change her sex.
So we're seeing just a sexual perversion, it just continues ...
It's always going to be pushed to the limits.
Our forefathers did not envision a nation that is leaning to the left like like we're seeing in this election cycle.
This extremism is commonplace among much of Trump's religious base
but it's not the only version of Evangelicalism out there and there are polls to suggest that
some white Evangelicals may be turning away from the president.
Vote Common Good is a Christian group that's been traveling the country in a small tour bus,
out to try and spread a different type of Evangelicalism rooted in more compassionate politics.
We're not here to tell you how bad Donald Trump is, we're here to remind you how
good you are, Amen.
I'm going to vote against hatred, I'm going to vote against racism,
I'm going to vote against misogyny and homophobia that's what I'm voting against. How about you?
Do you think you're cutting through? You think you're changing people's minds?
We're not convinced that our job is to change someone's mind,
we think Donald Trump does all that work for you.
What we want to do is help those Christian voters, who are very uncomfortable with Donald Trump,
who are put off by the way he's behaved, who do think that the way he is, the president,
is wrong.
It's white Evangelicals and white Catholics that seem to have a fixation with staying republican no matter what
and that might have more to do with them being white than with them being Christian or Republican.
One of the preachers on this tour is Dan Dietrich. He's written a song called 'Hymn for 81%'
about leaving conservative Evangelicalism.
It's become an anthem among progressive Christians.
I wrote it because I came from that world, I grew up in an Evangelical home
and it was great and loving and then in 2016, I just saw people of faith
voting for a man that looked nothing like that Jesus that I learned about.
'Oh, they started putting kids in cages, ripping mothers from their babies,
then I look to you to speak on their behalf .'
It hit Fox News and within an hour we had threats, yeah, threats on my life, arson threats ...
People saying they wanted to put me in a cage and blow my head off, awful stuff from good Christian people.
It's kind of wild to me that Trump wouldn't be acceptable in any business,
in any church, in any school and yet when it comes to the presidency, people of faith are saying,
'he's our guy.'
But North Carolina's most famous Christian Evangelical is not a conservative.
It's reverend William Barber, a civil rights and moral movement leader.
I've been following his work since Trump's election as he's led a social and racial justice
movement across the country. He doesn't hold back when describing conservative Evangelicalism.
Trump is messing around and leaning into false prophecy
but it's not his fault alone, the preachers have
gone in and prayed for him that's hypocrisy, that's theological malpractice, that's heresy.
It traces all the way back
to slave master religion when there was an attempt to claim that Christianity
endorsed slavery.
How are you going to feel and respond if he wins this election?
If Donald Trump wins this election.
I will never say that his winning is it because I serve God,
but if he wins, it really says something that ought to cause us all to step back to, cringe to weep,
maybe to gird up and fight even more because this nation is sick.
It's clear that the majority of white Evangelicals will continue to support Donald Trump
but my journey through North Carolina has made me realize that for some at least,
the president's moral failures have crossed a line.
In an election that has increasingly become about character that could prove decisive.