Some in this demographic view Trump’s win not as a relief but only as a temporary reprieve against a rapidly secularizing America.
Some in this demographic view Trump’s win not as a relief but only as a temporary reprieve against a rapidly secularizing America.
W hite Evangelicals were the strongest voting demographic for Donald Trump. Exit polls say their support increased to 82 percent from 76 percent in 2020. White Evangelicals also decreased from 28 percent of the electorate in 2020 to 23 percent in 2024.
But this win does not necessarily evince optimism.
Before the election, a prominent North Carolina preacher tweeted (on X):
One argument for voting for Trump is that he will give the church four years to prepare for a completely secular and hostile world. He will keep the wolves at bay, as far as religious freedom is concerned, so that the church can pray and preach for a new reformation and revival.
Merely postponing, and not averting, disaster is not very inspirational. The modern religious Right was founded in the late 1970s, a grim time of high inflation, recession, and strategic defeat for the U.S. around the world, with the Soviet Union seemingly ascendant. But the movement, led by groups such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, was optimistic about “taking back” America.
The name assumed a socially conservative “moral majority” of Americans that included Evangelicals, traditional Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and other religious social conservatives. They enthusiastically embraced Ronald Reagan’s cheerful spirit and confidence about the future. There was little wrong about America that America could not itself, with God’s help, repair.
That cheerfulness is largely gone for much of conservative white Evangelicalism. Reagan, like other Republicans after him, especially George W. Bush, spoke in Evangelical language that resonated with conservative Christians. Both were intimately familiar with Evangelical Christianity. Reagan was a teenage Sunday school teacher after a conversion experience. Bush famously had a born-again experience in early middle age. Both spoke not only as Christians but as American exceptionalists and, like nearly all presidents, were chief priests in the statecraft of American civil religion.
Trump’s life experience with Christianity is far more limited, although his family was associated with the New York church of Norman Vincent Peale, famous for his “power of positive thinking.” Perhaps the first president not to use the language of civil religion, Trump understandably views his relations with Evangelicals as strategically transactional. They will vote for him if he delivers on some of their issues.
Interestingly, early Republican primary voters in 2024 rejected other Republican candidates who were more strongly religious and more socially conservative. In South Carolina, for example, Trump won 71 percent of white Evangelicals, versus 39 percent of all others. In the Iowa caucuses, 53 percent of white Evangelicals backed Trump, versus 27 percent for Ron DeSantis, who in his personal church life and social conservatism is much closer to Evangelicals.
White Evangelical attraction to Trump seemingly does not originate in views about abortion or transgenderism but rather in a personal attraction to his strong persona. He ostensibly offers protection.
After Trump’s victory, the North Carolina pastor declared:
God just gave America a great mercy we didn’t deserve. Four more years to pray and work for reformation and revival without government interference. I praise God for it. It’s not an evil but a mercy.
He was responding to a tweet (on X) from famous Calvinist Baptist preacher John Piper, who had lamented:
Presidential election results. Having delivered us from one evil, God now tests us with another.
Needless to say, Piper’s lament was widely denounced by other conservative Evangelicals. Such ambivalence about Trump was more acceptable in 2016, when some prominent Evangelicals abstained from endorsements. Over eight years, Evangelical ambivalence and reluctance gave way to enthusiasm, coupled with hostility toward Evangelical dissenters.
So the white Evangelical relief over Trump’s victory is mixed with pessimism about America, which is widely seen in an almost irreversible, post-Christian decline. The pessimism about religion in America is not unjustified. About one third of Americans now identify as not religiously affiliated. And according to one survey, white Evangelicals declined from 33 percent to 21 percent of the population in two decades.
As the North Carolina pastor noted in his sigh of relief about Trump’s win, with a few more years of protection from rabid secularism, “the church can pray and preach for a new reformation and revival.”
But much of public Evangelical political rhetoric does not offer much optimism about a revival of Evangelicalism or Christianity in America in the absence of a spectacular supernatural intervention. Instead, the Evangelical impulse is to blame national moral decline on national spiritual decline characterized as the fault not of the church but of its secular adversaries.
From this perspective, as white Evangelicalism declines further, political alliances with perceived “strong” allies disconnected from Christianity will become more imperative. In 45 years, political evangelicalism has journeyed from wanting to save America to mostly wanting to protect itself from America.
These fears of a post-Christian America are not baseless. But they are also self-fulfilling. A religious movement without confidence and hope about the future is unlikely to reverse its decline. And tight association with controversial political figures, whatever the perceived temporary benefits, will likely further estrange the movement from much of the wider population.
Any reversal of Christian decline in America will require more confidence about Christianity and about America. And that confidence, if meaningful, will have to supersede any election cycle.