With Trump as nominee, America's evangelicals feel 'abandoned' by GOP

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published 9 May 2016

America's evangelicals tend to vote Republican in presidential elections, but now that Donald Trump is the GOP's presumptive nominee, they're at a loss. "In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party," Pastor Gary Fuller of Gentle Shepherd Baptist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, told The Washington Post. "There's nobody left." Fuller said he initially planned to support Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and even invited the former candidate's pastor father to speak to his congregation, but with Cruz out of the running, Fuller, like many other evangelicals, finds himself "dismayed and adrift," The Post reports.

Just last week, a coalition of nearly 60 Christian leaders wrote an open letter urging voters to reject Trump's "vulgar racial and religious demagoguery" and warned that he poses a "moral threat" to our nation. One professor who signed the letter even went so far as to call Trump "fundamentally antithetical to the Christian faith."

However, their other choice, Hillary Clinton, doesn't seem a much better match to evangelicals' conservative outlook either. Clinton's liberal stance on social issues clashes directly with evangelicals' views, leaving them all the more unsure of how to vote. "I got the idea of 'Who would Jesus have voted for, Herod or Pilate?' and probably neither one," Fuller said, "and that's where I feel we're at here."