Trump to Meet with Evangelical Leaders

Last month, TIME religion reporter Elizabeth Dias broke an important story about a large group of evangelical leaders meeting with Donald Trump in New York on June 21.

The conventional wisdom of 2015 was that Trump could not win the nomination. And the conventional wisdom this year was that vast swaths of the GOP establishment would not support him. But in a somewhat surprising turn of events, the Republican Party coalition (such as it is) began dutifully coalescing behind the presumptive nominee shortly after his resounding victory in the winner-take-all Indiana primary May 3.

Trump’s less serious primary opponents endorsed him almost as soon as they dropped out. But even his more principled opposition is rallying around the candidate who received more primary votes than any Republican in history.

The most vocal holdouts have been subsets of the conservative media and the Christian right political movement. But as with electeds, it looks like faith leaders may be coming around, even if somewhat reluctantly.

When Trump met with several dozen faith leaders last September, almost all of the attendees were pretty far outside the evangelical mainstream. Trump picked up an endorsement from the Reverend Dr. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, early on. He has prominently touted his support from Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University.

If you haven’t seen a video of faith leaders praying with Trump, you really should watch this YouTube clip.

But most of the evangelical establishment supported Rubio or Cruz, with many shifting from Rubio to Cruz once the Florida senator withdrew from the race following his home-state primary. Throughout March and April, then, Cruz was conservative evangelical faith leaders’ overwhelming favorite. Ohio Gov. John Kasich received stunningly little evangelical support, in spite of a self-consciously Christian policy platform.

Now out of options, the Christian right has to decide whether to encourage its followers to support Trump or to leave the top of the ballot blank as they dutifully vote a straight Republican ticket down ballot.

In the days after the June 21 meeting, we will know more definitively which Christian leaders think rank-and-file evangelicals should support the GOP’s presumptive nominee.