We’ve noted before that the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody often acts as a virtual press agent for Christian-nation political operative David Lane, promoting his matchmaking events for Republican politicians and conservative pastors in return for exclusive access. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. Yesterday, Lane’s American Renewal Project promoted Brody’s recent interview with Ted Cruz, which was arranged while Cruz was in Spartanburg, South Carolina, “to meet privately with pastors at an event sponsored by the American Renewal Project.”
At that “Pastors and Pews” event, to which Brody had “exclusive access,” Cruz told “hundreds of pastors and their wives” that “the men and women in this room have the ability to change the outcome of the South Carolina primary, and in doing that to change the outcome of the presidential election, and in doing that to change the outcome, the direction of this country.” He told the pastors they could bring the country back to “the free market principles, the constitutional liberties, to the Judeo-Christian values that built this nation.”
From Brody’s coverage of his interview with Cruz:
In an exclusive interview with The Brody File down in South Carolina, GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz says believers in Jesus Christ must stand and vote biblical values rather than letting non-believers selected the leaders of our country.
"For far too long, Christians have been staying home, have been ceding the public square to non-believers and when we look at the state of the country, when our heart weeps at what's happening to the country and we wonder why is it that the federal government is waging war on life, is waging war on marriage, is waging war on religious liberty is it any wonder when 54 million evangelical Christians stayed home in 2012, did not vote?”
Cruz continues: "If we allow our leaders to be selected from non-believers we shouldn't be surprised when our leaders don't share our values. So what I'm working to do more than anything else is energize and empower the grassroots and do everything we can for Christians to stand up and vote biblical values."
As others have noted, Cruz’s assertion about 54 million evangelical voters sitting out the 2012 election is a dubious claim. And his assertion that “non-believers” are choosing America’s leaders is a dismissal of the faith of millions of Christians and other people of faith who voted for Barack Obama and who support other progressive candidates.
Brody has praised Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim comments in the past, but in this week’s coverage of the Cruz interview, Brody engages in barely veiled cheerleading for Cruz’s candidacy:
Look folks, evangelicals have an important decision to make. Ted Cruz is speaking their language and has a record that matches his rhetoric. You would think that would be a perfect match for evangelicals and so far, at least in Iowa, they have shown strong support.
Can evangelicals in South Carolina duplicate that effort? We’re going to find out. Cruz's team will need to work overtime because with Donald Trump being such a factor in this presidential race, he’ll need EVEN MORE evangelicals to show up.
It becomes a numbers game. You can easily make the argument that without significant turnout by evangelicals in Iowa, Cruz would have lost the Hawkeye state.
Brody seemingly ignores the fact that evangelical voters are quite divided and Trump has consistently drawn strong support from evangelicals in spite of his personal history and previous political positions. A poll released last Friday showed that Trump is actually outpolling Cruz among South Carolina evangelicals, 33 percent to 23 percent — with Rubio at 15 percent. That’s actually a slightly bigger lead than Trump showed in a late-January poll in which he led Cruz among South Carolina’s evangelicals by 33 percent to 25 percent. Of course it is possible that Cruz’s investment in an actual ground game, with thousands of volunteers working on turnout, will give Trump an unpleasant surprise in South Carolina the way it did in Iowa.
Brody also interviewed Marco Rubio in South Carolina recently, but he posted that interview with none of the rah-rah commentary, perhaps because Rubio criticized Cruz’s “disturbing” willingness to “make things up out of whole cloth just to win an election.”
