Glenn Beck, the conservative talk-show host and Mormon commentator has agreed with the Christian ethicist Russell Moore that evangelical division over Donald Trump will be more damaging to the credibility of evangelicals than the televangelist scandals of the 1980s.
The comments come amid growing signs of Christian support ebbing away from the Republican presidential nominee following his lewd comments about women revealed earlier this month. For the first time, Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has taken a lead among white Catholics.
"It saddens me that our fellow Christian leaders don't see the long lasting effect here," Beck wrote on Facebook this week.
"I agree with the evangelical leader in the interview when he says this will be harder to overcome than the televangelist scandals in the 80s. I pray he is wrong but fear he is correct. We are going to need all hands on deck - ALL PEOPLE of real faith."
In his post, Beck linked to a CNN interview from earlier in October in which Moore, who is the president of the Southern Baptist's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said: "What we are seeing right now is a divide in evangelical Christianity. It wasn't created by 2016, but it is highlighted and was shown by 2016".
Moore added that the divide is "leaving a wreckage of cynicism," and that "it is going to take us longer to recover from this year than it took us to recover from the scandals of the TV evangelists of the 1980s."
Meanwhile, the poll by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that Clinton has taken a 46-42 per cent lead among white Catholics. At the start of the month, Trump led Clinton by 56-31 per cent among the category. Clinton enjoys a 61-34 lead among Catholics overall.
The conservative group Catholic Vote said in a statement: "Newly released comments by Donald Trump...are disgusting and simply indefensible. Christians should not waste their breath defending them. The mere fact that this conversation is occurring in the context of a presidential campaign impoverishes us all. If Donald Trump is unwilling to step aside, the Republican National Committee must act soon out of basic decency and self-preservation."
Referring to the latest polling, Robert Jones, a Public Religion Research Institute pollster, told the New York Times: "That's not where Trump wants to be in the home-stretch, particularly with a core constituency in Mid Western battleground states."
