The weekend before the election, one Pennsylvania pastor told congregants that hosting Elon Musk weeks earlier was “phenomenal.” In Nevada, another dressed as a garbageman while urging his flock to vote Trump.

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last Sunday, at the Life Centre megachurch, hundreds of people filed in for a 9 am service. A table on the right side of the entryway stood under a sign reading “Voter’s Guide Here.” Congregants manning the tables asked others if they’d already voted, and handed out sample ballots for nearby counties – Dauphin, Lancaster, York, Lebanon. At the table, there was also an election guide from the evangelical magazine Decision, featuring a picture of Vice President Kamala Harris next to former president Donald Trump with a banner reading “Socialism vs. Freedom.”

Another pamphlet, titled the PA Family Voter Guide – created by the evangelical Pennsylvania Family Council, which describes it as a “nonpartisan, informative guide” for candidates running for office in Pennsylvania – was also available. Families milled around, grabbing coffee at an in-house cafe, before joining a worship service that could rival many small rock concerts.

“Tuesday, go vote,” Pastor Ben Evenson, told congregants at the service. “Let your voice be heard, and let God handle the details. We love this nation; God loves this nation.”

Just two weeks before, the church had played host to centibillionaire and X owner Elon Musk, as he hosted a town hall in support of Trump. There, he quipped (again) that “no one’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala Harris” because she is a “puppet” while answering questions at the event.

The day after Musk’s visit, the church’s founder, Charles Stock, gave a sermon entitled How to Vote Like Jesus, in which he discouraged congregants from voting third party or writing in a candidate, saying, “The devil will be happy you didn’t vote.” Stock also told congregants that “a flawed leader who does good things is better than suffering under Ahab and Jezebel, who are wicked,” and argued that government had stepped out of its role by “redefining marriage” and “erasing gender,” which he called a “plague upon our nation.” He also told worshippers about a petition from Musk’s America PAC supporting the First and Second Amendments, and Musk’s (possibly illegal) $1 million per day giveaway in the days leading up to the election.

“It was phenomenal,” he said of hosting Musk’s visit. “It was an honour to host a wider community here, and be a blessing.”

A congregant who spoke to said that some members of the church did attend the Musk event, and that he felt there was some alignment with Musk when it came to issues of constitutional rights and free speech.

Across the country in Clark County, Nevada, just after 8am in the low-ceilinged room at Calvary Red Rock Church just east of the Las Vegas strip, the band on stage was finishing its set, the lights went up, and Pastor Gregg Seymour strode onto stage, dressed as a garbageman.

The audience cheered loudly, and on two huge TV screens either side of the pulpit, an image of a garbage truck was displayed, alongside the phrase “G.A.R.B.A.G.E.” It turned out to stand for “Great America Rebels Believing Almighty God is Everything.”

“You know that if anybody in here is a Trump supporter, you are now garbage,” Seymour told the audience, trusting that the allusion to President Joe Biden possibly having called Trump supporters garbage would be understood. “For any of you who are in that camp, you are garbage.”

The church is heavily involved in election integrity efforts. It has a dropbox in the lobby which is overseen by Seymour’s daughter Alex, who says many members of the congregation feel safer posting their ballots at church because they don’t trust the postal service. The church also ran training last month for people Seymour described as “patriots who care about upholding election integrity.” The training helped organise people to work in shifts to observe the election processing centre in Clark County.

Seymour says he is certain the election was stolen, although he cannot say exactly why, mentioning Dominion voting machines and vague allegations of hacking and manipulation. Seymour says he doesn’t see himself as a Christian nationalist, but in the same breath says the “church needs to be involved in government.”

He adds that there are aspects of Trump’s character he does not agree with, including his embrace of prophetic Christian groups and leaders like Lance Wallnau. But he’s happy to vote for him because, he says, “less babies will die under a Trump administration.”

American Christians as a whole don’t see Trump as a Christian candidate; they also don’t see Harris as one, but white evangelicals, who have been promised more power during a second Trump administration, do. They have been working overtime to help get him back into the White House.

“Religious-right leaders rallied around Trump in 2016 and 2020 and they are working hard to put him back in power this year,” Peter Montgomery, research director at People For the American Way, says. “Conservative white evangelicals have voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers and he is counting on them to put him back in power.”

Trump has always had very strong support within the evangelical community, but this time around, there has been a concerted effort among leaders on the religious right to engage with members of their congregations who rarely or never vote.

They have done this through high-profile events and tours across swing states while evangelical pastors have pushed the message to their own congregations from the pulpit. These evangelical groups have also been helping to recruit poll workers and train poll workers.

The most high-profile of these efforts has been the Courage Tour, organised by Lance Wallnau, a leader in the dominionistic New Apostolic Reformation movement, which wants to see Christianity put at the centre of all aspects of American society. The tour combined religious revivalism with MAGA politicking and travelled to the key swing states in the months leading up to the election. The speakers on the tour claimed Trump was battling the “forces of darkness” and that demonic forces had overtaken America.

The Courage Tour was supported by pro-Trump conservative activist groups such as Turning Point USA and America First Works, the political arm of the America First Policy Institute. (Linda McMahon, chair of the latter, which The New York Times has reported is poised to be more influential than Project 2025 in the event of a Trump victory – was recently among those sued for allegedly turning a blind eye to child molestation in WWE.)

Another Christian nationalist travelling roadshow that has been traversing the US since 2021 is the ReAwaken America tour, which brings leaders in the Christian nationalist world together with election deniers, far-right extremists, and MAGA insiders, including a number of Trump’s own family members.

Life Centre, the Harrisburg megachurch, has, as Evenson acknowledged in his sermon, been labelled as “Christian dominionistic.” In May, the church played host to Sean Feucht, the political activist and Christian nationalist worship leader, who held large gatherings during Covid-19. Earlier this month, one of Life Centre’s apostles performed the opening prayer for Feucht, as part of his “Kingdom of the Capitol” tour of US state capitals.

Feucht unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2020 and has since dedicated himself to mobilising evangelicals to be more politically engaged. He performed as part of the ReAwaken America tour.

Feucht spent the Sunday before the election in Scottsdale, Arizona, with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Republican senatorial candidate Kari Lake, hosting a worship service called Pray For The Nation (Kirk endorsed Feucht during his congressional run).

Other groups that have spent millions of dollars to get Trump re-elected with get out the vote efforts are Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, the American Family Association’s ivoterguide.com, the Paula White-led National Faith Advisory Board, and My Faith Votes, Montgomery says.

“Many Christian-right media figures have significant media platforms that they use to promote Trump to their supporters. Shows like FlashPoint on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel provide a steady flow of pro-Trump propaganda,” Montgomery said. “Conservative Christians have been told over and over again that Trump has been anointed by God to lead the country. At a recent rally on the National Mall, New Apostolic Reformation leader Che Ahn issued an ‘apostolic decree’ that Trump would win the election.”

While many conservative politicians have enjoyed broad support from evangelical Christians in the past, the way evangelical leaders speak about Trump as a messianic leader, particularly in the wake of the failed assassination attempt in July, is something new.

“Because many of Trump’s core evangelical advisers and most prominent evangelical boosters are charismatic, they have also used charismatic spirituality to imbue Trump with a quasi-messianic aura, using their prophecies and messages to link him to many biblical characters,” Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, where he specialises in American Christianity, says. “Paula White-Cain has been the chair of all of these efforts and a gatekeeper controlling religious leaders’ access to Trump, so she has played a pivotal role in guiding these connections.”

As well as supporting Trump’s candidacy, evangelicals are also more willing to indulge the former president’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

“Evangelical Christians, particularly, but not exclusively white evangelicals, have been [Trump’s] most unwavering bloc of supporters,” Taylor said. “If roughly one third of the country believes Trump’s 2020 election lies, among white evangelicals it’s closer to two-thirds.”

Trump, who has struggled to present himself as a man of faith – in 2016, he proved unfamiliar with even the naming conventions of Biblical texts – has himself also been taking part, attending a Believers for Trump event in Michigan last month and taking part in a “national faith summit” organised by his first administration’s faith leader Paula White last week.

“We believe you’re a vessel,” Pastor Jentezen Franklin told Trump on stage during the event. “You’re a chosen vessel,” he added, while comparing the former president to the Apostle Paul.

• A Tell / Wired report