The president of International Christian Concern (ICC), an organization that documents and advocates against Christian persecution around the world, urged Christians in America to vote for former President Donald Trump in a statement Monday, arguing that any “conflicted” personal feelings about Trump do not erase his “second to none” record defending religious freedom.
ICC president Jeff King added that, independent of Trump’s merits, the American left has adopted stances that have “marginalized and silenced Christians,” becoming an authentic threat to American religious freedom.
King’s statement, issued to reporters in a press release on Monday, was in response to the recent publication of a report by Arizona Christian University finding that a little over half of “faith voters” are planning to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
“That means a full 104 million faith voters are unlikely to vote this election — including 41 million born-again Christians (defined by their beliefs regarding sin and salvation, not self-identification), 32 million regular Christian church attenders, and 14 million who attend an evangelical church,” researchers noted. Dr. George Barna, who conducted the study, described potential Christian apathy as a potential “game-changer” for the results of the election.
“To my fellow conflicted Christians, politics is a messy and noxious affair, and no leader will fully embody Christian morality,” King said in his statement. “The simple truth is that we aren’t voting for a pastor; we’re choosing a flawed human being who we hope will respect and govern within a constitutional framework.”
While conceding that he is “conflicted” by Trump as a person, King credited the former president with having “built a religious freedom team that was second to none in modern politics.” Trump, he continued, also “appointed justices to the Supreme Court who have upheld religious freedoms and protected constitutional values that align with biblical principles.”
“Like you, I am conflicted by Donald Trump. But I’m much less conflicted by the Left and how they have marginalized and silenced Christians and sought to literally revoke our nation’s religious freedom for the sake of one of their factions,” King added. “What worries me most though is that all the tricks I’ve seen used overseas by tyrants to marginalize and silence Christians are being practiced in the United States by the Left.”
“We must learn from the past, and to a certain degree, grow up. We must not retreat from the public square. For if we disengage, we will get what we deserve (just as we are now),” he concluded.
ICC works to both advocate for protection for Christians persecuted abroad and to raise awareness of the harrowing situations millions of Christians face across the globe. The group has for years warned in particular about the violent situation in Nigeria – repeatedly named the most dangerous place to be a Christian despite nearly half of the population being Christian. ICC also works in places such as India – where Christians face violent attacks by Hindu nationalists and Muslim extremists – as well as Pakistan, China, Indonesia, and North Korea.
President Trump prioritized religious freedom advocacy as a formal policy of his White House, establishing January 16 as “Religious Freedom Day” and creating an international alliance for religious freedom bringing together a diverse set of nations including Brazil, Israel, Ukraine, Gambia, the United Kingdom, and Togo.
At home, Trump asserted in declaring the creation of a religious freedom day, “[N]o American — whether a nun, nurse, baker, or business owner — should be forced to choose between the tenets of faith or adherence to the law.” Abroad, Trump centered religious freedom as a foreign policy directive.
“Religious freedom, America’s first freedom, is a moral and national security imperative,” Trump declared in an executive order in 2020. “Religious freedom for all people worldwide is a foreign policy priority of the United States, and the United States will respect and vigorously promote this freedom.”
Trump also advocated for religious freedom on international stages, including the United Nations. In 2019, the former president delivered an unprecedented speech urging fellow U.N. member states to prioritize defending religious minorities within their borders.
At that event, Trump said:
As we speak, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Yazidis, and many other people of faith are being jailed, sanctioned, tortured, and even murdered, often at the hands of their own government, simply for expressing their deeply held religious beliefs.
Today, with one clear voice, the United States of America calls upon the nations of the world to end religious persecution, to stop the crimes against people of faith, release prisoners of conscience, repeal laws restricting freedom of religion and belief, protect the vulnerable, the defenseless, and the oppressed. America stands with believers in every country who ask only for the freedom to live according to the faith that is within their own hearts.
Under outgoing President Joe Biden, Christian persecution and religious freedom generally dropped far below the level of priority that Trump had elevated it to during his tenure. Biden particularly outraged religious freedom advocates in 2021 by removing Nigeria from the State Department’s list of countries of particular concern for religious freedom. Christians in Nigeria face outsized jihadist violence from terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and the ethnic Fulani terrorists in the center of the country. Some international observers suggested the removal of Nigeria from the list was not related to the actual situation on the ground in Nigeria but, rather, an attempt to bring the country closer to the United States after years of China successfully enhancing its influence there. Religious freedom advocates nonetheless expressed outrage, calling the move a “baffling error.”
In Nigeria, Christians lamented the erasure of their suffering.
“I am educated enough to know that America needs allies in the world … but our appeal would be that it shouldn’t be at the expense of Christian lives and the blood of innocent people,” Father Remigius Ihyula, a Catholic priest serving the Middle Belt of Nigeria, told Breitbart News in July 2023.
Biden’s extension of the 20-year-old Afghan War, leading to the return of the Taliban jihadist organization to power, also dramatically increased persecution of Christians and other minority religious groups in Afghanistan.
“We are telling people to stay in their houses because going out now is too dangerous,” an Afghan Christian leader reportedly told ICC in 2021. “Some known Christians are already receiving threatening phone calls. In these phone calls, unknown people say, ‘We are coming for you.’”
In July, ICC President King described Biden announcing he would not run for reelection as a cause for hope for religious freedom advocates.
“While President Trump is a very polarizing figure, during his presidency, the U.S. became a focused and effective champion pushing for religious freedom around the world,” King said at the time. Trump’s team’s “effectiveness in promoting religious freedom around the world was unmatched in decades (if ever),” he added.
