A Crusade to Challenge the 2020 Election, Blessed by Church Leaders

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The 11 a.m. service at Church for All Nations, a large nondenominational evangelical church in Colorado’s second-largest city, began as such services usually do. The congregation of young families and older couples swayed and sang along to live music. Mark Cowart, the church’s senior pastor, delivered an update on a church mission project.

Then Mr. Cowart turned the pulpit over to a guest speaker, William J. Federer.

An evangelical commentator and one-time Republican congressional candidate, Mr. Federer led the congregation through an hourlong PowerPoint presentation based on his 2020 book, “Socialism — The Real History from Plato to the Present: How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control.” Many congregants scribbled in the notebooks they had brought from home.

“I believe God is pushing the world to a decision-making moment,” Mr. Federer said, building toward his conclusion. “We used to have national politicians that held back the floodgates of hell. The umbrella’s been ripped after Jan. 6, and now it’s raining down upon every one of us. We had politicians that were supposed to certify that — and instead they just accepted it. And, lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”

Evangelical churches have long been powerful vehicles for grass-roots activism and influence on the American right, mobilized around issues like abortion and gay marriage. Now, some of those churches have embraced a new cause: promoting Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. They have opened their church doors to speakers promoting discredited theories about overturning President Joe Biden’s victory and lent a veneer of spiritual authority to activists who often wrap themselves in the language of Christian righteousness.

For these church leaders, Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.

“What’s going on in our country right now with this recent election and the fraudulent nature of that?” Mr. Cowart, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, asked in a sermon last year. “What is going on?”

It’s difficult to measure the extent of churches’ engagement in the issue. Research suggests that a small minority of evangelical pastors bring politics to the pulpit. “I think the vast majority of pastors realize there is not a lot of utility to being very political,” said Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor.

Still, surveys show that the belief in a fraudulent election retains a firm hold on white evangelical churchgoers overall, Mr. Trump’s most loyal constituency in 2020. A poll released in November by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 60 percent of white evangelical respondents continued to believe that the election was stolen — a far higher share than other Christian groups of any race. That figure was roughly 40 percent for white Catholics, 19 percent for Hispanic Catholics and 18 percent for Black Protestants.

Among evangelicals, “a high percentage seem to walk in lock step with Trump, the election conspiracies and the vigilante ‘taking back of America,’” said Rob Brendle, the lead pastor at Denver United Church, who recalled that when he criticized some Christians’ embrace of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in a sermon the Sunday after the riot, he lost about a hundred members of his congregation, which numbered around 1,500 before the pandemic.

He thinks many fellow clergy may share that view. “I think the jury’s still out, but it’s not a fringe,” he said.

Some of the national evangelical figures who supported Mr. Trump during his presidency and his 2020 campaign, like Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, separated themselves from his insistence that the election was stolen. Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham and the president of Samaritan’s Purse, equivocated. Writing on Facebook the month after the election, Mr. Graham acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory but said that when Mr. Trump claimed the election was rigged against him, “I tend to believe him.”

Others embraced Mr. Trump’s claims or argued for the preservation of his rule in spite of his loss. Shortly after the election was called for Mr. Biden, Paula White, a Florida televangelist who served as the White House faith adviser during Mr. Trump’s presidency, led a prayer service in which she and others called upon God to overturn the election.

Greg Locke, a preacher who leads the Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Juliet, Tenn., spoke alongside Alex Jones of Infowars at a “Rally for Revival” demonstration in Washington the night…