A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. Th e nation was in crisis, he told the Lord— racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”

“With every passing day,” the minister said, “we slip farther and farther into George Orwell’s tyrannical dystopia.”

But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was about to come onstage. “We know what he did for us and how he strove to lead us in honorable ways during his term as our president—in ways that brought your blessings to us, rather than your reproach and judgment,” Terry prayed. “We know the hour is late. We know that time grows shorter for us to be saved and revived.” When he finished in the name of Jesus Christ, Amens echoed through the hall. Soon Trump appeared to rapturous applause and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”

For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself. But the prayers offered before Trump speaks illuminate this perilous moment in American politics just as well as anything he says from the podium. And they help explain how the stakes of this year’s election have come to feel so apocalyptically high.