The Rev. Bradford Reaves isn’t one to dwell on politics in his sermons. His mission as a minister, he says, is not to lead people to a certain party or political figurehead but to lead them toward the love and the selfless values of Jesus Christ.

It is this mission, he said, that led him to cast an enthusiastic vote for the Republican candidate for President this year: Donald J. Trump.

“I’ve always encouraged our people to look beyond human figures and look at the issues of the day that concern us as Christians, especially in the conservative arena,” said Reaves, the pastor of CrossWay Christian Fellowship, a Brethren Church congregation in Hagerstown. “Am I happy about Donald Trump’s election? Yes. He’s not our Pope. But we do know he’s in alignment with many of the values we espouse.”

For many Christians whose beliefs tend toward the scripturally and culturally conservative — a group often broadly labeled “evangelicals” — the reelection of Trump to the nation’s highest office borders on a godsend.

Evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics, Mormons and others who generally occupy Christianity’s rightward flank recall from his first term that Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, moving the abortion issue to the states after 50 years under federal protection. They know he led an initiative that helped faith-based groups apply for federal funding, became the first president to attend the anti-abortion March for Life, and moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a city evangelicals view as the divinely ordained capital of the Jewish state.

And their candidate burnished his credentials this election season. His “Believers for Trump” campaign initiative reached out to faith communities across the nation, and his proposal to create a federal task force to combat “anti-Christian bias” has resonated.

That idea certainly sits well with Reaves, who says it’s important for Americans to remember that, when Thomas Jefferson included the words “endowed by their Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, he was affirming the notion that it’s God, not the government, who grants their basic rights — and it’s government’s role to safeguard those rights, not erode them, as he says it did during the more progressive Obama and Biden years.

“I recognize that my platform in the pulpit is guaranteed only by the First Amendment, which includes freedom of religion, but as we’ve seen, we can be censored, especially through avenues such as social media,” said Reaves, one person among the 80% of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump this year, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters across the 50 states.

It’s hard to know how many self-professed Christians, in Maryland or elsewhere, cast their 2024 votes for Trump, a man whose popularity among the nation’s evangelicals has long maddened his critics.

After all, they argue, the former real estate magnate has rarely seemed on a godly path.

He was once known as an egotistical playboy, has been divorced twice, and has not publicly denied committing adultery with a porn star during his marriage to former and future First Lady, Melania Trump. And that doesn’t even touch on the cavalcade of legal troubles around the 45th president that have led, among other things, to his conviction by a New York jury on 34 felony charges related to a scheme to influence the 2016 election through hush-money payments.

But one man who works with conservative Christians across the state believes “there is significant support for President-Elect Trump among Christian pastors in Maryland.”

It may not appear that way, says Jeffrey Trimbath, the president of the Maryland Family Institute, an Annapolis-based nonprofit that works to protect life, preserve religious liberty and protect parental rights. He says that might be because “their support is muted by their desire to not alienate many in their congregations who may not share that view.

“Pastors always have to find a balance between speaking the truth and doing so in love to all congregants under their care.”

If nothing else, it’s clear that pastors who consider the Bible God’s inerrant word have little trouble believing that God has chosen a flawed man to carry out his work on Earth. Scripture is replete with such characters, including such figures as Rahab, a prostitute who concealed Israelite spies at her home and helped them escape to Jericho, only to be hailed in the New Testament for her “righteousness,” and King David, a man who committed adultery and murder but emerged as a favorite of God and a towering figure in Jewish history.

“We could spend an hour going through all those unbelievably broken examples that the Scriptures give us,” Trimbath said. “We’re not unfamiliar with people like that and the fact that God uses them. It’s part of our history, our biblical theology.”

The Rev. Stephen Unthank couldn’t agree more.

“Most thoughtful Christians don’t see Donald Trump as a savior,” says Unthank, who is pastor of Greenbelt Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist Convention congregation in Prince George’s County. “They don’t even necessarily see him as a Christian. I have never spoken to him personally, so I don’t know his testimony, and I’m not even sure he’d be accepted into the membership of our church.”

Still, Unthank says, many Christians see in Trump glimpses of King Cyrus the Great, a Persian ruler and “gentile unbeliever” depicted in the books of Isaiah and Daniel who becomes a revered figure by liberating the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity.

“They don’t necessarily have to vote for a candidate who’s explicitly Christian,” Unthank says. “They’re not voting for a pastor of the U.S. They’re looking for someone who can bring us closer to the ethics flowing out of Scripture, whether he knows he’s doing it or not.”

From what, then, do Maryland’s pastors believe Christians need to be freed? For some, like the Rev. P.M. Smith, it’s the depredations of a powerfully secular culture — and a crucial political issue or two.

Smith, 77, grew up in what he calls the “worst ghettos” of East Baltimore, where his father, a barber, set an example of industry and self-reliance. As Smith grew up, attended high school, college and eventually law school, it occurred to him that those values were the building blocks of a life God would approve of: one in which he could develop the gifts he’d been given and dedicate them to the service of others.

Smith, who is African American, said he teaches those values as the pastor of Huber Memorial Church, a Biblically conservative nondenominational Christian congregation in Northeast Baltimore, and he believes his congregation of about 500 people generally agrees that Trump embodies them far more than the woman he vanquished this month, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Every Sunday at Huber, he adds, the call to worship is a reading of one of his favorite verses, Deuteronomy 30:19. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live,” he says, quoting the words from memory. “Which party is in favor of abortion? Which one protects the unborn? I’m not upset about Mr. Trump. I’m happy at the outcome,” he said.

Post-election polling suggests that the issue of abortion was less of a factor for voters than many expected, and conservative Christians were among those weighing a range of concerns.

Trimbath said many believe families should have broader educational choice, particularly at a time when it has become commonplace for public schools to require students to attend lessons on matters some Christians consider problematic. He also sees conscience rights as an issue — the question of whether the government may compel religious professionals to provide services that violate their sincerely held religious beliefs. (That question was put to the test when provisions of the Affordable Care Act required all employers, including religious ones, to provide cost-free coverage for contraceptives, sterilizations and “emergency birth control” in employee health plans. The Little Sisters of the Poor, a small congregation of Catholic sisters, sued two U.S. states over the matter in 2013, winning their case in the Supreme Court seven years later.)

Others pointed to concerns about laws being changed to make it legal for minors to undergo sex-change surgeries without parental consent, and to a proposed rule from the Biden Administration that would have prohibited blanket bans on transgender athletes playing school sports. Those and others are matters that concern “life, family, parental rights over children, sex — things the Bible talks about,” as Unthank puts it.

Other denominations, of course, have reacted differently to Trump’s reelection. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, for example, released a statement saying the result had “caused alarm across the nation and the world” and calling on members to “remain faithful and never cease praying.” The Episcopal Church expressed concern that Trump’s policies on immigration contradict its own, and the United Methodist Church is gathering signatures for an open letter to Trump that “implore(s) you and your administration to stop criminalizing immigrants.”

Even evangelicals have their doubts. Taylor, the Kainos Ministries counselor, said Trump’s past “flaws and peccadilloes” and often harsh rhetoric are a “genuine concern,” and many of his Christian friends feel the same way.

But he believes Trump offers the best chance to establish a “government that protects the citizenry,” a standard he says the Apostle Paul sets in the Epistle to the Romans, and in the imperfect world we occupy, that’s what concerns him most come election time.

Beyond that, Taylor says, he wouldn’t and doesn’t explicitly tell anyone how to vote, and other pastors echo that view. That’s between them and their God, most say, and even after the votes are counted and new leaders take their places, he’s the one in control.

“Our faith should define our politics not vice versa,” Reaves, the Hagerstown pastor, says. “Political seasons come and go. But the Gospel remains our foundation.”

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