By RACHEL ZOLL
AP Religion Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — The list of prominent evangelicals denouncing Donald Trump is growing, but is anyone in the flock listening?
The bloc of voters powering the real estate mogul through the Republican primaries is significantly weighted with white born-again Christians.
As Trump’s ascendancy forces the GOP establishment to confront how it lost touch with so many conservative voters, top evangelicals are facing their own dark night, wondering what has drawn so many Christians to a twice-divorced, profane casino magnate with a muddled record on abortion and gay marriage.
John Stemberger, a Trump critic and head of the Florida Family Policy Council, an affiliate of Focus on the Family, said many evangelicals have changed. Litmus tests that for so long defined the boundaries for morally acceptable candidates seem to have been abandoned by many Christians this year, he said, no matter how much evangelical leaders try to uphold those standards.
"Evangelicals are looking at those issues less and less. They’ve just become too worldly, letting anger and frustration control them, as opposed to trusting in God," Stemberger said.
Trump has won the support of one-third of self-identified born-again Christians across the dozen or so states that have held GOP contests and where exit polls were conducted. In eight of the presidential primaries, he won more evangelicals than Ted Cruz, a Southern Baptist who has made appeals to conservative Christians the core of his campaign.
Trump is a Presbyterian who has said he has never sought God’s forgiveness for his sins, botches Bible references and, on a recent campaign visit to church, mistook a communion plate for a donation plate.
Critics insist exit polls have overstated Trump’s share of evangelical support, arguing many voters identifying themselves as "born again" in primaries are only nominally Christian. An October survey from the Public Religion Research Institute backs this view, finding frequent churchgoers are less likely to back Trump.
"There’s a form of cultural Christianity that causes people to respond with `evangelical’ and `born-again’ as long as they’re not Catholic, even though they haven’t been in a church since Vacation Bible School as a kid," said the Rev. Russell Moore, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore was an early and vocal opponent of Trump.
Trump’s biggest evangelical endorsement of the race — from Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, who said the billionaire businessman "lives a life of loving and helping others" — reflected the rift among Christians and even within the university itself, where Trump only got 90 of nearly 1,200 votes in the Virginia GOP primary last Tuesday, according to a precinct report.
In a remarkably public criticism, Mark DeMoss, a Liberty board member and longtime adviser to the school’s founder, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., called the endorsement a mistake.
"My concern, thinking about evangelicalism and Liberty University, is more about a style and a behavior and a demeanor and a vocabulary that you can’t find any support for in Scripture," said DeMoss, who had advised Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns.
Similar sentiments have been expressed across a spectrum of influential evangelicals. Yet, it’s not clear whether conservative Christian voters are paying attention. Trump’s candidacy has revealed a distance between evangelical leaders and rank-and-file Christians similar to the one coming to light in the GOP.
While Moore and others are urging Christians to evaluate candidates using the Bible, many evangelicals are using other criteria, such as seeking a candidate who can protect them from the Islamic State group, liberalism, growing secularism among Americans and economic insecurity for the country and their families.
The Rev. Carl Gallups, a Southern Baptist pastor from Milton, Florida, who gave the invocation at Trump’s Pensacola rally last January, said he’s had many conversations with fellow conservative Christians about making a pragmatic choice in favor of Trump.
"I tell them, if you are not thoroughly satisfied with what you might interpret the depth of his faith might be, then the next thing we must look at is the candidate who will best preserve your First Amendment rights and allow you to express your Christian faith," Gallups said. "We’re not electing a priest, a pope or a pastor. We’re electing a president, a CEO, a commander in chief. I’m not perfectly happy with Donald Trump either, but I’m a realist."
Evangelicals have never been as monolithic or easily led as they have been perceived. And 2016 is far from the first election season when a disconnect has been evident between groups of evangelical leaders and conservative Christians. But the chasm has been much more keenly felt this year, with a significant chunk of the conservative religious vote going to a candidate like Trump.
"I think it’s more a commentary on growing cynicism in American life, including among religious Americans," Moore said. "There is a certain segment of evangelicalism that has given up virtue in public life or character in public officials."
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AP News Survey Specialist Emily Swanson in Washington, and Associated Press writers Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee, Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, and Tamara Lush in Tampa, Florida, contributed to this report.
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