The critical role Christianity plays in Trumpism
I remember being in Des Moines in August 2015 when Donald Trump made one of the first major appearances of his 2016 presidential bid: A stop at the Iowa State Fair. He emerged from a Trump-branded helicopter in a nearby parking lot, talking to reporters and meeting fans. One woman gave him a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” asking him to sign it. He did so, telling her it was “the second-best book ever.” The best, of course, was the Bible.
At the time, this just seemed like an obvious bit of pandering. But it was pandering that became a central element of his politics. Despite his … let’s say, sinful background, he positioned himself as the candidate of the religious right and, in short order, they welcomed him as their champion.
When Charlie Kirk was killed earlier this month, it was inevitable that the moment would become a rallying point for the political right. What’s been striking about that energy, though, is that it has flowed both to Donald Trump and to Christianity itself — a reflection of Kirk’s own embrace of the religion. There’s no reason to think that Kirk’s religiosity was insincere or calculating in the way that Trump seems to have been. But it’s probably the case that Kirk could not have become the force in right-wing politics that he was without it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about recent Gallup polling showing that Americans had shifted to the right on a number of moral issues over the past few years. That article included a version of the chart below, showing the relatively rapid erosion of self-identified Christians in the U.S. over the past few decades — an erosion that seems to have stalled since the pandemic.
The decline has served as a political catalyst much as rumblings about the decline in the density of Whites in the U.S. population have. The result has been a bunker mentality. In June, YouGov asked Americans how much discrimination different groups faced. Republicans said White Americans face more discrimination than Black or Hispanic Americans — and that Christians face far more discrimination than either of those groups as well.
Yet it remains the case that most Americans are Christian — as were most voters in the 2024 election. Not all of them are Trump’s preferred flavor of Christian (White evangelical) but there are far more evangelical Christians than members of non-Christian faiths.
As you would expect, this varies by region. The Midwest and Deep South are heavily Christian; the West Coast and Northeast, less so. (The county-level data below are from PRRI and only show counties for which I also had reliable 2024 election data.)
Displaying the map like that, of course, distorts what that means in terms of population. Scaling county symbols to population shows that many urban areas are much less densely Christian.
If we compare the density of each county’s Christian population to the results of the 2024 presidential election, you can see a loose correlation: more Christians generally means more support for Trump.
Obviously, the inverse holds true: a smaller percentage of Christians generally meant less net support for Trump.
In both cases, many of the outliers are places with large Black, heavily Christian populations, including a number of counties in the Deep South. In 2020, PRRI estimated the percentage of White Christians in each county. If we compare that figure to the 2024 results, the correlation is much sharper.
There is a subset of Trump’s support that explicitly combines race and religion, the Christian nationalist movement. Other PRRI analysis shows a close correlation between support for Christian nationalism — that is, support for American being an explicitly Christian nation. The percentage of people in each state who support or are sympathetic to that idea correlates to Trump support in 2024. The percentage of Whites who fall into that category correlates even more robustly.
Pew Research Center’s analysis of the 2024 electorate shows just how important Christians were to Trump’s victory: more than three-quarters of his voters were Christian. Only about half of Kamala Harris’s were; about 4 in 10 of her voters were unaffiliated with a religious tradition, including atheists and agnostics.
Those voters who wanted to see Trump advocate an explicit Christian identity for the United States are starting to see their investment bear returns. The assassination attempt on Trump’s life last year accelerated his and his movement‘s embrace of the idea that Trump was chosen by God to serve as president. (More than half of Republicans viewed Trump’s win as part of God’s plan or as a reflection of God’s support for his policies according to recent Pew polling.) Trump’s second term in office deviates from his first in many ways; his and its embrace of explicit religious language since January is a notable one.
You would have been forgiven for assuming, back in Des Moines in 2015, that thrice-married playboy Donald J. Trump would not become the avatar for a White Christian resurgence of right-wing politics in the U.S. But Trump gave it a shot, and it worked.
Photo: North Christian Church, Columbus, Ind., 1973. (National Archives)