Reince Priebus: 'It took a business guy from New York' to deliver for evangelical voters

Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff for President Trump, witnessed firsthand the machinations of a very unconventional and mercurial president. Now, nearly three years after his tenure came to end, he bears an altogether different sort of witness: God has put Donald Trump in the White House for a reason. 

“God uses people in different ways for whatever the mysteries of time to accomplish His will,” Priebus tells Just The News in a podcast interview on The Pod’s Honest Truth With David Brody.

Priebus marvels at how Trump, of all people, became a champion for evangelicals on their top-tier issues of abortion, religious liberty, and the defense of Israel. “It took a took a business guy from New York to do these things,” he says.

“Faith is the foundation for everything in my life,” says Priebus. To those who know him well, he is viewed as someone with a deep Christian faith, even helping to start a Bible study for young married couples.

The former Republican National Committee Chairman will work hard to get Donald Trump re-elected in 2020 but not in the way you might think. Rather than wield his political skills, he’s taking a more faithful approach this time around.

To that end, Priebus is reuniting with a key man he brought in as RNC Faith Outreach Director in 2016. Chad Connelly now heads up Faith Wins, an evangelical group dedicated to equipping and pushing pastors across the country to register their congregants to vote.

“We're going to continue what we did with GOP Faith, but we have more resources, more manpower,” Connelly tells Just The News. During his time at the RNC, Connelly says he had contact information for roughly 10,000, but since the beginning of this year, that number has increased by well over four thousand more.

Last week, Faith Wins conducted a virtual conference call with over 800 pastors from all 50 states. The goal is to get 10,000 new churches to conduct voter registration drives before the general election in November. 

Priebus, who was the special guest on the video call, hammered home a central point: It’s not up to political leaders to lead on issues that intersect faith, culture, and politics. Pastors have to speak out boldly from their pulpits. 

“If we're going to be salt and light in everything that we do,” Priebus says, “it has to transpire and it has to transform into Sunday morning. It has to be that pastors are the tips of the spear. It can't be that party leaders are the tips of the spear. Pastors have to do it.”

While support among white evangelicals has remained consistently high during his administration, the Pew Research Center details a few uncomfortable facts among this key group: While they see President Trump as someone who is fighting for their beliefs, they question his morals. Only 15% of them describe the president as “morally upstanding,” and a paltry 23% call him “honest.”

On that front, Connelly consistently and bluntly tells pastors, “Jesus isn't running.”

But Trump’s perceived lack of private morality has given critics an opening to try and peel away some of that key evangelical vote the president will need to win in 2020. The Lincoln Project, led by some influential moderate Republicans, has already released a video condemning churchgoers who support Trump, emphatically concluding: "Beware of false prophets … If [Donald Trump] is the best that American Christians can do, then God help us.”

Additionally, an editorial earlier this year from Christianity Today calling for Trump’s removal from office piled on the anti-evangelical Trump bandwagon. 

“You can say all you want to say about Donald Trump,” Priebus says, “but when it comes to actually accomplishing the things that we care about as people to faith, hey, the proof’s in the pudding.”

Donald Trump won a record 81% of the white evangelicals vote during the 2016 presidential election.

But with a media targeting his every move and a Democrat party full of contempt for this president, evangelicals may need to improve on that number if Trump is to be re-elected. 

“I don't know one pastor in my world who's upset about anything the president's done,” Connelly tells Just The News. “In fact, they love him more. They see the vitriol, they see the hatred and the anger, the complete negative tone.” 

And yet, despite the fact that evangelicals make up 26% of the electorate in a general election, there are still tens of millions of evangelical Christians who sit on the sidelines and simply don’t vote. Connelly says it’s those folks in the pews who will be the difference-makers this time around.

“If they vote biblical values, our side is going to win,” he says.