(CP) Former President Donald Trump told a national gathering of Christian conservative activists Saturday to not let the secular left “silence” and “shame” them in a bid to maintain them from voting, saying Christianity can be in “tatters” if President Joe Biden is reelected.
On Saturday, Trump addressed the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., encouraging attendees to do all they’ll to encourage fellow Christians to vote within the upcoming November election, bemoaning that not all Christians vote.
“We need Christians to prove in the biggest numbers ever to inform Crooked Joe Biden … ‘Joe, you are fired,'” said Trump, the 2024 presumptive Republican nominee for president.
“The radical left is attempting to shame Christians, silence you, demoralize you and so they wish to keep you out of politics. They don’t desire you to vote. That’s why you may have to vote,” he maintained. “If you vote, we cannot lose. They don’t desire you to vote. But Christians cannot afford to sit down on the sidelines. If Joe Biden gets in, Christianity won’t be protected in a nation with no borders, no laws, no freedom, no future.”
After predicting that “your religion definitely will probably be, I believe, in tatters,” Trump highlighted the criticism the Biden administration has faced regarding its treatment of Catholics.
Trump asked, “What’s occurring with Catholics?” He lamented that “they’re being persecuted.”
“What is that every one about?” he inquired before suggesting that Biden, a Catholic, “has no idea what the Hell is going on.”
“I do not think it’s him. I believe it is the people who surround him, the fascists, communists,” he said. “They’re young, very smart, vicious people.”
The Biden administration faced backlash for its prosecution of a Catholic father and pro-life activist, Mark Houck, after he protested outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia. Houck was found not guilty last yr, and he filed a lawsuit against the federal government last November.
The administration was criticized over a leaked FBI memo last yr warning concerning the connection between “radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology” and “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”
Trump suggested that the hostility from the Biden administration stems from the undeniable fact that “they know that our allegiance shouldn’t be to them, our allegiance is to our country and our allegiance is to our Creator.”
“We don’t answer to the bureaucrats in Washington; we answer to God in Heaven,” Trump said.
“Joe Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department to viciously persecute pro-life activists and Americans of religion,” Trump declared.
He cited the imprisonment of Paulette Harlow, a 75-year-old pro-life activist who was arrested for “singing” outside of an abortion clinic, as “one among many peaceful pro-lifers who Joe Biden has rounded up, sometimes with SWAT teams, and thrown … in jail.”
Trump categorized these “brave Americans” as “persecuted Christians,” reiterating his previous vow to “create a latest federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias” designed to “investigate all types of illegal discrimination, harassment, persecution against Christians in America.”
“Never again will the federal government be used to focus on religious believers,” he said, opining that “Americans of religion are usually not a threat to our country; Americans of religion are the soul of our country.”
Trump also raised a connection between high crime rates and the decline of faith within the U.S.
“One of the explanations we now have a lot crime is you haven’t got the religion. … You haven’t got people wanting to be good because they wish to go to that special place.”
“Religion, it’s happening at a level that no person’s seen before,” he declared. “Religion is becoming less and fewer of an element, less and fewer necessary in our country, and that is causing quite a lot of the chaos and quite a lot of the crime that you simply see.”
Trump spent much of the speech reflecting on his efforts to advertise religious liberty during his term in office.
“I defended Judeo-Christian heritage like no president within the history of our country,” he recalled. “With your help, I’ll proceed to fight for our values and our civilization for 4 more years within the White House. We’re going to straighten it out. We’re going to straighten it out fast.”
“We restored the conscience rights and all the things that we have done for doctors, nurses, teachers and faith groups just like the Little Sisters of the Poor. We got here to their defense. I finished the IRS from using the Johnson Amendment to interfere with pastors’ freedom of speech and all religious leaders.”
Trump listed guidance he implemented stating that “the fitting to freedom of worship doesn’t end on the door of the general public school” and characterised himself because the only person to carry the office to “convene a gathering on the United Nations to finish religious persecution worldwide.”
Vowing to “aggressively defend religious freedom in all its forms” in a second term, Trump signaled his intention to “protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals and in our public square.”
Trump said he plans to appoint a “rock-solid conservative” to the U.S. Supreme Court, although there isn’t a guarantee that a emptiness will arise in the subsequent 4 years.
“We put in almost 300 judges and three Supreme Court justices to interpret the law and the Constitution as written,” he added. Trump acknowledged the role of his three Supreme Court picks from his presidency in influencing the final result of the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which determined that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t contain a right to abortion.
“We’ve gotten abortion out of the federal government and back to the states, the best way everybody and all legal scholars all said it must be,” he said.
Trump warned that if Democrats win the 2024 presidential election, “they’ll have a federal law for abortion to tear the child out of the womb within the seventh, eighth and ninth month.”
He characterised the Democrats as “the unconventional ones on this issue,” assuring the group that “within the Republican Party, we’ll all the time support families, babies, [and] life.”
Trump raised the difficulty of trans-identified men playing in women’s sports, asking, “Who would think that men playing in women’s sports is OK?”
“God created two genders, female and male,” Trump said, promising to “sign an executive order to maintain men out of ladies’s sports.”
