"THIS is really a battle between good and evil," evangelical TV preacher Hank Kunneman says of the slew of criminal charges facing Donald Trump.
"There's something on president Trump that the enemy fears: it's called the anointing."
The Nebraska pastor, who was speaking on cable news show FlashPoint last summer, is among several voices in Christian media pressing a message of Biblical proportions: the 2024 presidential race is a fight for America's soul, and a persecuted Trump has God's protection.
"They're just trying to bank-rupt him. They're trying to take everything he's got.
"They're trying to put him in prison," author, media personality and self-proclaimed prophet Lance Wallnau said in October on The Jim Bakker Show, an hour-long daily broadcast that focuses on news and revelations about the end times that it says we are living in.
In the 2016 and 2020 elections, evangelical voters supported Trump despite claims of adultery and sexual misconduct, which he denied.
With Trump now facing dozens of criminal charges as he pursues a second term, some Christian media are bolstering his support by portraying him as an instrument of God's will who faces persecution by his foes.
While the people making these claims are largely outside the mainstream in Christian media, they have amassed significant online followings and their messages reverberate across radio shows, cable TV and streaming platforms that reach millions of Americans every day.
Trump's legal woes include allegations of sexual abuse and financial chicanery.
In May, a jury decided Trump must pay US$5 million in damages for sexually abusing a magazine writer in the 1990s and then branding her a liar.
He is also facing a criminal trial on charges he covered up hush-money payments to a porn star.
He has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
The barrage of legal actions have served to rev up Trump's support among Republicans rather than diminish it, according to a July Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The roughly 80 million Americans who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Protestants, a quarter of the population, have provided the bedrock for his meteoric rise, and their turnout levels this November could prove critical in a tight contest against Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Language that casts Trump in messianic terms help to energise his base, said Paul Djupe, a political scientist at Denison University who specialises in religion and politics.
Christian media includes thousands of religious podcasts, radio shows, cable TV and streaming platforms, with a combined monthly audience of more than 140 million Americans, according to the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) association.
Shows like FlashPoint and Bakker's show are comparatively niche.
FlashPoint, for instance, pulls in an average monthly cable TV audience of roughly 11,000 households, according to Comscore data, while the Victory Channel it appears on has more than a million followers on YouTube and Facebook combined.
Trump participated in six interviews with FlashPoint between 2021 and 2023.
Many preachers command significant online audiences. Wallnau has his own podcast and more than 1.3 million followers on social media.
Kunneman, another self-styled prophet, has close to 250,000.
Many Christian voters credit Trump with a series of policy victories, including the US Supreme Court's decision in 2022 to overturn the constitutional right to abortion after he appointed three conservative justices to the court, plus the moving of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Much of the Trump content on Christian media looks at him through the lens of the Bible, he added.
It's difficult to get an exact count of how much of the Christian media is explicitly pro-Trump, because like other aspects of the fragmented media industry, it has ballooned in recent years over TV, radio, podcasts and social media.
NRB president Troy Miller said the view that Trump had been anointed by God reflected the fringe of Christian media, but that the notion of spiritual warfare playing out in the US was more mainstream.
Trump himself has leaned into the battle.
He has started some rallies with a messianic video made by social media influencers which opens with: "On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said: 'I need a caretaker, so God gave us Trump'."
He has also shared on the Truth Social media app a sketch of himself in court, sitting next to what appears to be a rendering of Jesus Christ.
Written above the drawing: "Nobody could have made it this far alone."
The writer is from Reuters