(CP) Former President Donald Trump told a national gathering of Christian conservative activists Saturday not to let the secular left "silence" and "shame" them in a bid to keep them from voting, saying Christianity would 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 can to encourage fellow Christians to vote in the upcoming November election, bemoaning that not all Christians vote.
"We need Christians to turn out in the largest numbers ever to tell Crooked Joe Biden ... 'Joe, you're fired,'" said Trump, the 2024 presumptive Republican nominee for president.
"The radical left is trying to shame Christians, silence you, demoralize you and they want to keep you out of politics. They don't want you to vote. That's why you have to vote," he maintained. "If you vote, we cannot lose. They don't want you to vote. But Christians cannot afford to sit on the sidelines. If Joe Biden gets in, Christianity will not be safe in a nation with no borders, no laws, no freedom, no future."
After predicting that "your religion certainly will be, I think, in tatters," Trump highlighted the criticism the Biden administration has faced regarding its treatment of Catholics.
Trump asked, "What's going on with Catholics?" He lamented that "they are being persecuted."
"What is that all about?" he inquired before suggesting that Biden, a Catholic, "has no idea what the Hell is happening."
"I don't think it is him. I think it's the people that 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 year, and he filed a lawsuit against the federal government last November.
The administration was criticized over a leaked FBI memo last year warning about 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 fact that "they know that our allegiance is not to them, our allegiance is to our country and our allegiance is to our Creator."
"We do not 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 faith," 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 of 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 new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias" designed to "investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, persecution against Christians in America."
"Never again will the federal government be used to target religious believers," he said, opining that "Americans of faith are not a threat to our country; Americans of faith are the soul of our country."
Trump also raised a connection between high crime rates and the decline of religion in the U.S.
"One of the reasons we have so much crime is you don't have the faith. ... You don't have people wanting to be good because they want to go to that special place."
"Religion, it's going down at a level that nobody's seen before," he declared. "Religion is becoming less and less of a factor, less and less important in our country, and that's causing a lot of the chaos and a lot of the crime that you see."
Trump spent much of the speech reflecting on his efforts to promote religious liberty during his term in office.
"I defended Judeo-Christian heritage like no president in the history of our country," he recalled. "With your help, I will continue to fight for our values and our civilization for four more years in 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 of the things that we've done for doctors, nurses, teachers and faith groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor. We came to their defense. I stopped 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 right to freedom of worship does not end at the door of the public school" and characterized himself as the only person to hold the office to "convene a meeting at the United Nations to end 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 is no guarantee that a vacancy will arise in the next four 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 outcome of the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which determined that the U.S. Constitution does not contain a right to abortion.
"We've gotten abortion out of the federal government and back to the states, the way everybody and all legal scholars all said it should be," he said.
Trump warned that if Democrats win the 2024 presidential election, "they will have a federal law for abortion to rip the baby out of the womb in the seventh, eighth and ninth month."
He characterized the Democrats as "the radical ones on this issue," assuring the crowd that "in the Republican Party, we will always support families, babies, [and] life."
Trump raised the issue 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, male and female," Trump said, promising to "sign an executive order to keep men out of women's sports."
