godanddonaldtrump.com CHAPTER 2 AN ANSWER TO PRAYER ★★★★★ WHILE SOME PEOPLE interpreted Donald Trump’s win as a political revolution, many conservative Christians saw it as a cultural counter-revolution and an an- swer to prayer. Respected journalist David Aikman articulated this very well in an op-ed published by Charisma magazine. I’ve known Aikman, who is now retired, since the 1970s when he worked as a senior foreign correspondent for Time magazine, a post he held for twenty-three years. An outspoken Charismatic, Aik- man served as Time’s bureau chief in Berlin, Jerusalem, and Beijing and covered Middle East affairs from Jerusalem. He had reported from five continents and more than fifty-five countries and wrote three “Man of the Year” cover stories for Time. He has an excellent grasp of social and cultural issues. During his distinguished career Aikman interviewed many world figures, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Mother Teresa of Calcutta to Billy Graham. As a jour- nalist Aikman understood the animosity of the members of the media toward
Trump, who publicly denounced reporters at almost every opportunity. When his audiences erupted in raucous approval, the media who covered those events were seething with disgust. But Trump didn’t oppose the press just because most of them backed Clinton, Aikman says. He opposed them because they seemed clue- less to “the economic and cultural resentment” of the voters all over America.¹ The fact that so many journalists were oblivious about the extent of Trump’s support showed that very few of them had spent any time in the so-called flyover zones where Trump had millions of followers. The beltway pundits were blinded by their own wishful thinking about the upcoming election, Aikman says. An op-ed that ran in the New York Times showed how out of touch they were. Robert Leonard, the news director for a couple of Iowa radio stations, wrote that he’d had a flash of insight—an epiphany, he said—about the media’s disconnect when he spoke with Oklahoma Baptist pastor J. C. Watts, who had served in the US House of Representatives from 1995–2003. Listening to Watts, Leonard said, suddenly the lights went on. “The difference between Republicans and Democrats,” Watts told Leonard, “is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see
people as fundamentally good.” Watts told Leonard that Democrats believe we are born good, that we create God in our own image. God didn’t create us; we created Him. But Watts pointed out that young children don’t have to be taught how to behave badly: “They are born knowing how to do that,” Watts said. “We are born bad. We teach [our children] how to be good. We become good by being reborn—born again.”² Aikman wrote that “if reporters who covered Trump had realized what a huge subterranean Christian prayer movement was under-girding the Trump campaign, even if the reporters themselves did not believe in God or the power of prayer, they might have been less dumbfounded by the actual election result.”³ This tells us, he said, that many Americans who heard Trump saying he wanted to “make America great again” hoped he was also saying that he wanted to make America “morally great again.”⁴ For conservative Christians this moral greatness only comes from spiritual revival, something many believers had been praying for. They weren’t praying to elect Donald Trump so much as they were praying for a change of direction and a new moral and spiritual awakening. For most voters in the heartland, their concerns had little to do with
Obamacare, gun control, or defense spending, although most would have an opinion on such matters. Rather the moral issues and downward spiritual spiral of the nation had them fired up. Supreme Court rulings taking prayer out of school in 1962⁵ and Bible reading out of school in 1963⁶ were just the beginning. Legalizing abortion on demand under the Supreme Court’s faulty 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade⁷ signified a tragedy of even greater magnitude. Removing restrictions on Internet pornography and legalizing same-sex marriage after the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling in 2015⁸ were among the reasons conservatives be- lieved they were under attack. And that’s why the cultural revolution was becom- ing a major issue in the election. Mike Bickle, founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mis- souri, explained his perspective on the election to me, saying, “We prayed God would raise up a righteous voice. We didn’t have anyone in mind.”⁹ That’s be- cause his organization focuses on causing America to wake up. And if the person who could wake them up turned out to be Donald Trump, Bickle said, that would be fine with him. Chuck Pierce, who heads an apostolic and prophetic ministry in Texas called
Glory of Zion International, said much the same thing. Donald Trump, he told me in a recent conversation, is not just a candidate; he is the path to a spiritual rem- edy for America. “I think you have to look past his unrighteous modes in the past to see how God has righteously chosen him to affect the way that this nation goes forward.” Pierce told me he had predicted in 2008 that “America must learn to play the Trump card” and explained that’s because once you play the trump card, your opponent can’t play over it. “It was as if the Lord was saying that He has a plan the opponent cannot stop.”¹⁰ A NEW CULTURAL AGENDA Americans who grew up in the 1950s, or whose lives were formed at an early age by people from that era, tend to look back on that time not only as a wonderful era of American prosperity but also as a time of moral righteousness on a na- tional level. Many Americans look back fondly to this period of history as a time when there were no disputes about right and wrong, good and evil. Everybody seemed to agree about such things. Small groups and individuals who had a more liberal perspective worked behind the scenes, we now know. But no one
preached rebellion against the conventional moral code. Of course it was also a time of segregation in part of the country, and minorities who lived under the injustice of Jim Crow laws that weren’t changed until a decade later don’t look back fondly on those days. The fifties weren’t perfect in other ways: for example, many adults who deal with sexual abuse as children were molested in the fifties, but it wasn’t talked about. And the “stable” fifties were the incubator for the social fomenting of the 1960s. Nonetheless, David Aikman writes that America had a civic religion in those days, a basic Christian morality reinforced by the preaching of evangelists such as Billy Graham, who was greatly admired by all regardless of their political leanings. Trump himself was a product of that era, and although there’s not a lot of evi- dence he had a religious side, it was only much later in life that he became moral- ly libertarian.¹¹ “The American civic religion was largely eroded,” Aikman said, “after the cam- pus upheavals and the antiwar movement of the 1960s. The entire culture began to experience a shift that introduced new gatekeepers and new worldviews in Hollywood, academia, and the media.”¹² Some of those worldviews, such as
Marxism, he said, reemerged after years of unpopularity. But constant pressure from the Left, and the explosion of hedonism and self-gratification in the 1970s and 1980s, escalated the pace of change. “Most of the new cultural paradigm rejected the view of a created world and of a deity who was still interested in human behavior,” Aikman writes. “As of 2017, America has undergone seven decades during which the existence of God and even the very notion that there might be design behind the formation of the uni- verse has been repeatedly mocked or utterly dismissed on college campuses and in public schools. It has been repeatedly ridiculed by Hollywood.”¹³ While Donald Trump never said anything about wanting to change the Amer- ican culture, his attacks on “political correctness” and his insistence on restoring the freedom to say “Merry Christmas” endeared him to the audiences on his tours. After the election many Christians and other supporters of traditional American values began to think that President Trump might be favorable to any grassroots movement that sought to make America “morally” great once again.¹⁴ Part of Trump’s appeal for many voters was that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. “We would have voted for any conservative who could beat Hillary,” Mike Bickle told
me after the election. “When it came down to Trump or Hillary, there was no question.” Unfortunately the candidate kept shooting himself in the foot with one outlandish tweet after another. But he was the comeback kid, Bickle said. The more outrageous he was, the more the people loved him. And things that would have destroyed any other candidate didn’t seem to slow him down.¹⁵ As Election Day drew near, Aikman said, it often looked as if Clinton might actually win. The polls certainly suggested she would win. But if she did, not only would it be a continuation of America’s unfortunate lurch to the left; it also would be the doorway to a new era of corruption like nothing we had ever seen. It would unleash an all-out effort to transform the culture, to dismantle “Christian Amer- ica,” and to make the hope of renewal and restoration many Christians were pray- ing for much, much harder to achieve.¹⁶ Evangelist and media personality James Robison told me in a recent telephone interview that “a lot of Christians were praying that we wouldn’t lose freedom, that we would not lose the opportunities this nation offers with the protections and safeguards, and government functioning as a protector, and not potentially replacing God and our love for one another.”¹⁷ Robison, who serves on the
president’s Faith Advisory Board and remains a friend and confidant of Trump’s, believes now that Donald Trump represents a supernatural answer to prayer, but he didn’t come in the package people wanted. Of the seventeen Republican nomi- nees, he ranked as the last choice of most Evangelicals. “He would have been my last choice,” Robison told me. “Many conservatives said that we don’t know where Donald Trump is going to end up taking us, but we know exactly where Hillary Clinton would take us, and that would be a continuation of everything that’s wrong, destructive, and that would ruin America by taking away our freedoms.”¹⁸ During the week of Trump’s inauguration, thousands of Evangelicals con- verged on Washington, DC, to celebrate the big win and to thank God for answer- ing their prayers. There were inaugural galas and plenty of prayer meetings all over the District of Columbia and neighboring towns. Over and over Christian leaders who did not initially back Trump thanked God for a reprieve. Even estab- lishment conservatives in the respected Council for National Policy (CNP) were elated by Trump’s win when they met right after the election. Ray Moore from South Carolina, whom I introduce later, is a member of CNP. After one session
he walked alongside Tony Perkins, who besides being president of the Family Re- search Council is also president of CNP. “I put my arm around Tony’s shoulder,” Ray remembers, “and thanked him for his part in getting Trump elected and sav- ing America.”¹⁹ When I attended the first post-election CNP meeting as a guest in February 2017, the general mood was “we dodged a bullet.” The secular pundits, on the other hand, saw Trump’s victory only as a battle between Democrat and Republican, or between the Left and the Right. But Robi- son saw it as a supernatural spiritual battle. “What happened,” he told me, “is that God overpowered the foolishness of political correctness and the liberal (not just deceived but possessed) Left, which is far too often dead-set against a bib- lical worldview and against America’s traditional Judeo-Christian ethics. But they were being totally pushed back.”²⁰ The secular Left in this country, Robison said, are being manipulated by the powers that Jesus was talking about when He said of those who crucified Him, “They don’t know what they’re doing.” They knew exactly what they were doing, but Jesus said no, they didn’t. “They were under the control of another force, an- other power in the invisible supernatural realm of the Spirit. They were deceived
by the deceiver.” Millions of Christians were praying for that deception to be over- thrown, to prevent the government from being raised up as another form of Pharaoh or some kind of an overseeing Caesar. The people were praying, “God, we’ve got to let You be God. We’ve got to stop this nonsense.” And Robison added, “Christians were praying for this to be stopped, but they never dreamed that it would be some person totally disconnected with politics, totally unable to even express himself like a politician, and someone who was best known as a shrewd maneuverer.”²¹ Trump spoke with conviction about what’s wrong in this country, Robison told me. “He was totally open about everything that was wrong. Most of us would agree that he didn’t address those problems in the most statesmanlike or diplo- matic terms, but everything he was saying was right on track. He was saying that many things in this country are bad and they needed to be dealt with. And he was 100 percent correct.”²² REDEEMING THE NATION Christians who were concerned about “government masquerading as God,” to
use Robison’s expression, knew the government needed to be brought under control, so Trump’s win served as evidence that their prayers were being an- swered. “Trump was coming in as a builder. He was first going to tear down things that needed to be torn down before replacing them with something better, which is exactly what you do when you tear down the old and build something new. “He understood what it means to lay a foundation,” Robison said. “He is a builder. What he didn’t realize was that he was actually returning to the foun- dation of our freedom, and we know that the solid rock upon which we are to build is the transforming truth Jesus referred to when He said, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’” (John 8:32, NKJV).²³ As many evangelical leaders did, Robison had initially backed Ted Cruz. He told me he had known Ted’s father, Rafael, ever since Ted was nine years old. But he also knew several other presidential contenders, including his lifelong friend Rick Perry. He was an adviser to George W. Bush and a friend to all the Bush fam- ily. He knows Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina and has prayed with all of them. “They all looked like they had such great qualifications,” he said, “and frankly I was
astounded that Donald Trump was even being considered and gaining momentum.”²⁴ Mike Huckabee was the first to tell Robison to get behind Trump after Huck- abee dropped out of the race. Robison had been recruiting Huckabee to counsel Cruz, but the governor told him, “James, the man who listens to counsel the best of anybody I’ve been around is Donald Trump.” Robison was surprised to hear that and said, “Mike, have you lost your mind?” Mike said, “No, I haven’t. I’ve known him, James. I’ve watched him, and I know it sounds crazy, but I believe he’s the right man at this time.”²⁵ Robison remembers hearing Jerry Falwell Jr. saying much the same thing. After Ben Carson dropped out of the race, Robison prayed with him nearly every day on the phone. “The week that Dr. Carson decided to endorse Trump, we probably talked on average about two hours a day. Then all of a sudden he told me, ‘I’m endorsing Donald Trump.’ And I said, ‘Ben, you’ve lost your mind! What are you doing?’ He said, ‘James, listen to me. I’ve spent two hours with him this week and two hours another day. It’s just not the way it looks.’ So I asked him, ‘What do you mean?’ And Ben Carson told me, ‘James, I’m telling you, he’ll listen
to wisdom. And my endorsement comes with the assurance that he will be willing to listen to those who have deep convictions and the ability to communicate their importance, and he agreed to do that.’”²⁶ Apparently Trump did listen, and before long Robison was flying with him to campaign events, giving him advice, and offering spiritual counsel whenever pos- sible. Robison said he has met with several presidents. “None of them were as open as Donald Trump,” he told me. “Mr. Trump called frequently on his cell phone, and he took my calls. We were able to have very open, honest exchanges where I could share the real concerns of pro-family, pro-faith leaders. He was al- ways very appreciative and responsive. I was also able to travel with him on the plane and ride with him in the car in very important moments when I shared seri- ous, deep concerns we had, which many thought Donald Trump would not listen to or even consider. But not only did he hear me with graciousness; he was very expressive in his appreciation for me and love for my family.”²⁷ In an interview for his organization’s website, Robison asked Jack Graham, pastor of the forty-two-thousand-member Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, how he assesses the president’s attitude toward people of faith. Robison
said, “You’ve seen him in settings where someone is sharing their concern. . . . Do you find it amazing the way this president responds to people no matter who they are?”²⁸ Graham answered, “Beyond just personal skills, I am convinced he has a gen- uine spiritual interest and a desire to hear the viewpoint of others. In particular, it’s apparent he wants to know what conservative, Bible-believing Christians think. It’s been very gratifying and satisfying. And not only him but the people he has put into place. Vice President Pence is a great Christian. Eight or nine of his cabinet members, the people closest to him, are Christians, and they are having Bible study and prayer together.”²⁹ Graham also said, “I am grateful this president has given us the opportunity to speak into his life. When we prayed for him in the Oval Office earlier this week, though he was under a great deal of pressure, he was buoyant and joyful. We stayed in there for a good while conversing and praying. It was a God moment and a powerful experience.” Robison and Graham agreed that Trump’s words and actions indicate that this president values the opinions of the Christian leaders. And Graham added that “Vice President Pence was with us and he is a great man
of prayer, a legitimate Bible-believing Christian. This president and his team have been nothing but responsive. I am very hopeful about the future of America right now because of this.”³⁰ The sudden groundswell of support for Trump that David Aikman referenced in his op-ed didn’t only occur at Trump’s political rallies. You could see it in church- es, prayer groups, and rallies of all sorts. The respected charismatic teacher Dutch Sheets traveled to seventy-seven cities holding rallies, not for Trump but for righteousness to prevail. His main teaching was, “God, show us mercy.”³¹ Cindy Jacobs, cofounder of Generals International and the Reformation Prayer Network, is not well known in evangelical circles but is widely respected by Charismatics as a prophet and teacher. She mobilized ten thousand intercessors to “prayer walk” the seven critical states that helped Trump win in November. These men and women would walk around courthouses or through the centers of towns praying for righteousness to prevail. In addition, a coalition of prayer lead- ers called As One also mobilized its networks two different times to prayer walk for forty days. “It was an urgent, Pentecostal type of prayer,” she told me.³² They knew this was not just another election. There were “battles in the heavenlies” for
the soul of America, and Cindy’s prayer warriors were engaged in those battles, praying that God’s will would reign in America once again. Cindy has ministered about such things all over the world, and as the cam- paign grew more intense in the fall of 2016, she began receiving calls from friends in Europe, China, and Latin America saying intercessors were praying fervently that Trump would be elected. Many took the election so seriously, they told her they were fasting and praying for hours each day. Cindy’s close friend Lou Engle, a revivalist and cofounder of TheCall, a group that hosts twelve-hour prayer ral- lies, sent out a call to friends and supporters to begin a three-day Esther fast— meaning no food and no water—as a petition for God’s mercy. He rallied thou- sands to join him because things looked so bleak. Conservative Christians be- lieved that if Hillary Clinton won this election, it would be “game over” for reli- gious freedom. The night before the election Jerry Johnson, president of National Religious Broadcasters, attended a prayer meeting in Washington, DC, and came away telling friends he believed Trump would win. I had been praying too, and I felt optimistic that Trump was going to win. That’s why I accepted the invitation from
Darrell Scott, pastor of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to fly to New York to watch the election returns at the New York Hilton on elec- tion night. Scott was joined by several other African American pastors. That event, with the whole world watching, turned out to be a huge victory celebration. For part of the evening I stood near pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, who told me what a miracle he thought it would be if Trump actu- ally won. CANCEL THE FIREWORKS For most of the evening the television commentators kept predicting that Clinton would be victorious. Even Fox News, which was broadcast live on TV screens in the Hilton ballroom, was reporting that Clinton had the edge and Trump had too much ground to make up. Yet by 10:00 p.m. Eastern time it seemed to me that Trump’s lead in electoral votes would be enough so that even a surge of West Coast victories couldn’t make up the difference. The networks were showing all of the jubilation from the Hilton ballroom. It was packed with people who had worked diligently for the campaign. The level of
tension increased throughout the evening as the numbers for Trump kept getting better and better. Victory seemed possible, and then when Trump’s numbers hit the 270 mark, the networks went silent. The liberal commentators were stunned silent by the realization that Trump had actually won. But at the Hilton ballroom the celebration became one of sheer joy. Anyone watching what was happening at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where Clinton’s supporters were gathered to watch the election returns, wit- nessed a very different scene. The Clinton campaign had erected a two-million- dol-lar stage, and the balloons and confetti that were being held up by huge nets were ready to descend when Clinton’s win was finally announced. But the an- nouncement never came. As I made my way to New York earlier that day, I heard the news that the Democrats had canceled their big fireworks display over the Hudson River in New York. I wondered then if Clinton’s people had a suspicion that maybe they weren’t going to win. The Democrats’ “victory celebration” continued for a while with champagne and all the commotion of a political rally. But by midnight the scene was more like a funeral wake than a coronation.
Where I was standing, in the Hilton ballroom, my Christian friends were shout- ing, and a few shed tears of joy. It was as if God had answered our prayers and the impossible had happened. We had a new president, one we believed God had raised up for such a time as this. And perhaps best of all, we each thanked God in our own way that Hillary Clinton was not going to be the next commander in chief.