The Rev. Franklin Graham is urging Christians to vote in South Carolina on Tuesday, warning that they may "lose this country" if they don't engage in the political process.
Graham, who is the head of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan's Purse, addressed a crowd of over 7,000 during a stop in Columbia, South Carolina this past weekend.
"America is being stripped of biblical heritage," Graham warned during his speech delivered at the Statehouse in Columbia as part of his "Decision America" tour.
"I want to get to as many Christians as I can to vote in the next election," the evangelical leader continued, according to WISTV. "Our country is going in the wrong direction. And I think some of the politicians that are running have tapped into the anger and the frustration in this country. And I want Christians to know that their vote does count and we've taken God out of government, schools and everything else and we need to get God back into it."
"Our society is unraveling and it's coming apart," Graham added.
Graham's "Decision America 2016 Tour" is heading to all 50 states as the presidential nomination process heats up until the November 2016 election. The evangelist's latest stop in South Carolina comes ahead of the state's presidential primary set to take place on February 20.
Graham, who is also the son of evangelist Billy Graham, is not the only religious leader to urge Christians to make their voices heard at the ballot box.
Rafael Cruz, the pasor father of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, recently lamented that "too many pastors have been divorced from the political process. And they have just tried to be politically correct instead of biblically correct."
The elder Cruz, who recently released his latest book, "A Time for Action: Empowering the Faithful to Reclaim America," added, "If Christians just do what they're supposed to do biblically, the whole game changes."
In defending his arguments, Cruz cited Acts 20:27, where the Apostle Paul discussed teaching the "whole counsel of God" and Proverbs 29:2, which reads, "When the righteous thrive, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan."
When people follow the Judeo-Christian principles of America's founding, "we have harmony, we have peace, we have prosperity," Cruz said, but trampling them produces "discord."
"Then we have the wicked electing the wicked, and it becomes our fault," the pastor added.
According to a study done by the Barna Group, forty to 50 million Christians, many of them evangelicals, failed to vote in the last elections. There are 82 million practicing Christians in the country, meaning almost half didn't practice their right to vote.
The study also found that the percentage of evangelical Millennials who believe "religious freedom in the U.S. has grown worse in the past year" is larger than the percentage of Christian Boomers. Also, the percentage of evangelical Millennials who are "very concerned" about restrictions on religious freedoms has tripled since 2012.
