All of those dire warnings about Hillary Clinton running away with the Catholic vote turned out to be groundless as newly released data show President-elect Donald Trump won the Catholic vote by seven percentage points.

Crux is reporting on yet another shocking upset in Tuesday’s election – Catholics voted for Trump by a margin of 52 to 45. This contrasts starkly with four years ago when President Barack Obama won the Catholic vote by a narrow margin of 50 to 48.

What was not so surprising is that evangelicals voted for Trump in even more overwhelming numbers, choosing him by a massive margin of 81 to 16.

Analysts are still trying to determine why there was such a huge disparity between polls and actual election results, but we have some strong clues as to why Clinton fared so poorly with Catholics and Christians in general.

“Coming on the heels of an administration known for court battles with faith-based businesses, the U.S. bishops and other religious leaders over policies such as the HHS contraception mandate, which includes sterilization procedures and drugs critics regard as abortion-inducing, revelations seen as indicative of team Clinton’s hostility to aspects of evangelical Protestantism and the Catholic faith certainly didn’t help,” Crux reports.

“Nor did a Catholic on the bottom half of her ticket who took public policy positions at odds with the teaching of his Church on issues including abortion, the death penalty and marriage.”

Leaked emails from Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, in which he discusses ways of infiltrating the Church to change its doctrine almost certainly had an impact on Catholic voters.

Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the Podesta revelations “troubling”. Publis officials are expected “to respect the rights of people to live their faith without interference from the state,” Kurtz wrote. “When faith communities lose this right, the very idea of what it means to be an American is lost.”

The same emails also struck fear in the hearts of other Christians, such as the more than two dozen black Christian leaders who penned an Open Letter to Hillary Clinton Regarding Religious Freedom for Black America in which they called Podesta’s threats to the Catholic Church a direct threat to their own beliefs and way of life.

“Will black pastors and intellectuals be free to lead and guide our communities in accordance with our widely accepted faith-based knowledge tradition?” they asked in the letter. “How will your policies encourage or discourage our authority to lead?”

As a result of the Podesta leaks, the leaders requested a meeting with Clinton during her first 100 days in office to discuss critical issues in the black community such as education and employment, religious freedom, violence, and “justice for the unborn.”

With 80 percent of America’s 41 million black Christians counting themselves as members of historically black churches, this was a shot-across-the-bow to the Clinton team that was apparently overlooked.

Christians as well as Americans in general may also have been put off by Clinton’s radical abortion stance which calls for freedom to abort a child up to the moment of birth.

As Crux points out, this position is at odds with eight out of 10 Americans who favor substantial abortion restrictions.

Her support for repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortion, was also way out-of-line with popular sentiment. Two out of three Americans oppose forcing taxpayers to pay for other people’s “personal choices.”

Her perceived hostility toward the unborn as well as religious freedom certainly weighed on the minds of many Americans, particularly the religious. The fact that a Clinton administration would have an opportunity to change the Supreme Court in such a way that would promote “progressive” social changes that have already left the country deeply divided, such as with same-sex marriage and the transgender bathroom controversy, also may have caused voters to turn away from the Clinton ticket.

According to Crux, the bottom line is that regardless of whether religious voters were embracing Trump or blocking Clinton, there seems to be a clear political message in the result, which is that people of faith cannot be ignored, disparaged or taken for granted.

The Christian way of life remains deeply embedded in the heart of the majority of this nation. Future politicians need to stop listening to the “progressive”  pundits and media outlets who are out-of-touch with America’s heartland – and accept the fact that these are the same people who just elected the 45th president of the United States.

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