Donald Trump’s presidencies are the evangelical church’s unwanted gift to America.
You don’t have to rehash all the events of the last decade to make that case. A single statistic tells the tale: In 2024, Trump received 82 percent of the white evangelical/born again vote. He lost the rest of the vote by a whopping 18-point margin, 58 percent to 40 percent.
And while their support for Trump is declining, white evangelicals are still Trump’s most loyal religious supporters. In February, a Pew Research Center poll found that white evangelical Protestants were the only large religious group in America in which a clear majority still supported all or most of Trump’s plans and policies.
And this brings me to perhaps the least shocking statistic in America. The Billy Graham Center Research Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois recently released polling data showing that almost half — 48 percent — of Gen Z adults surveyed said that Christians’ support for Trump made them less likely to want to attend church, at least to some degree.
Actions have consequences. And one of those consequences is that a church that wraps its arms around arguably the most vulgar, most corrupt president in American history will repel good people, especially those people who’ve encountered MAGA’s claws. Or, as Jesus said during his Sermon on the Mount, “By their fruit you will recognize them.”
That reality is reflected in the stark partisan divide in the Graham Center’s numbers. Two-thirds of Democrats said Christian support for Trump made them less likely to want to go to church. And 42 percent of independents were inclined to agree. I was a bit surprised to see that one in four Republicans were also put off from church by Christian support for Trump.
This is a finding that should trigger soul-searching among American evangelicals. If Jesus instructed his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations,” then it’s worth pondering whether the decision to so loyally support a man like Trump is worth actively repelling millions upon millions of Americans from church.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Last week the popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey hosted two Christian apologists, Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle, to discuss the survey and its findings. Cliffe Knechtle and Stuckey’s different responses were almost perfect encapsulations of the different ways that evangelicals approach the political challenges of the moment.
First, Cliffe Knechtle, the senior pastor of Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Conn., described the view that I had understood to be the most sound approach to faith and politics. As Knechtle observed, people are suspicious of Christians’ political motives, so in his evangelism he rejects explicitly political arguments. “Instead,” he said, “we are going to address moral issues. So we’re going to address every ethical moral issue, but I learned from Billy Graham that we’ve got to be very careful how closely wedded to a politician we get.”
Graham, Knechtle noted, got much too close to Richard Nixon. Reflecting on his choices later in life, Graham told Christianity Today, the magazine he founded, that he regretted his political engagement and he “would have steered clear of politics.” The implication was clear: If Christians tie themselves too closely to any politician or party, that’s our fault.
In that formulation, Christians — just like every American from every other faith background — should express their values in the public square, and we should not be deterred by the fact that many people vehemently disagree. Thank God, for example, for the enduring Christian witness of so many 19th-century abolitionists and members of the civil rights movement.
At the same time, no political party embodies Christianity, and while you can certainly argue as to whether any given party or given politician is more Christian in its platform or his personal conduct, God doesn’t have a party. And the effort to marry God to a political party will harm the church.
Stuckey had a different take, one that I’ve heard more often in the age of Trump. She questioned whether revulsion at Trump was the real reason people are retreating from church. In reality, Stuckey argued, “We don’t want to see our sin because it’s hard.”
As she amplified in a post on X, “There may be many reasons a person won’t go to church, but most of the reasons people give are excuses. The main reason, I think, is this: we are uncomfortable seeing our own sin and our need for a Savior.”
Before I disagree with Stuckey, I’m going to agree with her. I absolutely believe that people can be uncomfortable in church because of their own sin. A man who is cheating on his wife won’t enjoy a sermon condemning adultery. A racist is going to squirm in his seat if a pastor describes his Black or brown neighbor as a human being of equal worth and dignity.
If you aren’t trying to change for the better, church should be an uncomfortable place.
But that’s not what’s happening here. When many young people look at the church’s embrace of Trump, they’re not rejecting the church because it’s too moral. They’re rejecting it because they see the church’s immorality. They see its fear and moral compromise.
In other words, they don’t reject church because they’re afraid to shed their sin and become better people. They’re rejecting the church because they refuse to embrace sin and become, well, worse people.
We’ve seen the intensity of Christians’ support for Donald Trump. We’ve heard the prophecies. We’ve seen the rallies and the politicking in the pulpit. We saw the Christian crosses and flags on Jan. 6.
We’ve seen the conduct of so very many Christians in the MAGA movement — we’ve seen their cruelty, their dishonesty and their racism.
Let’s go back to the Sermon on the Mount. If Christ says that we will know people by their fruits — by their character and actions — then what kind of fruits do you see in Trumpism?
As my friend Russell Moore, an editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today, wrote in Plough magazine in 2021, “The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings.”
For example, here’s one of those teachings, taken from the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 resolution on the importance of character in public officials: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
The convention was quite obviously taking aim at Bill Clinton, but if that sentence doesn’t describe a man like Donald Trump, who could it describe? And yet 76 percent of Southern Baptists supported Trump in 2024, an increase over both 2016 and 2020.
I’ve spent enough time around Trump-supporting Christians to know that there is a deep well of hurt and anger over any suggestion that they (or the church more broadly) should face any social disapprobation over voting for Trump.
A majority of believers in the pews have never been unkind to anyone online. Many of them don’t even know about the cruelty meted out against evangelical dissenters. The only anger or cruelty they’re familiar with is meted out against conservative evangelicals, by the left, and those incidents (real and imagined, told straight and wildly exaggerated) blanket right-wing airwaves.
The result is a sealed moral environment. First, there isn’t a single Christian I know who would admit to making politics his or her religion. Instead, all of them would argue that they voted for Trump because of their religion. Their politics flows from their theology, they’d say, and not the other way around.
But this means that many Christians then interpret an attack on their politics as an attack on their religion. If you’re angry at the choices you make because I’m a Christian, then you must also be angry at my Christianity.
Making matters even worse, the Bible predicts in many places that Christians will face persecution from unbelievers because, as Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” As a result, the very fact that Christians face criticism for supporting Trump becomes a perverse form of confirmation that they were correct. After all, they’re getting “persecuted.”
This self-conception, however, collides with reality. It turns out there is a lot of evidence that for many evangelicals, their faith flows from their politics, not vice versa.
As Ryan Burge, one of America’s foremost religion researchers, wrote in the pages of The Times, “Those who had warmer views of Mr. Trump were more likely to become evangelical between 2016 and 2020 than those who didn’t feel warmly toward him.” The politics preceded the faith.
“The evidence points in one direction,” he continued: “For many Americans, to be a conservative Republican is to be an evangelical Christian, regardless of whether they ever attend a Sunday service.”
In fact, the share of people who described themselves as “evangelical” in spite of rarely attending church has surged. Between 2008 and 2020, the percentage of self-identified evangelicals who reported that they seldom or never attended church increased to 26.7 percent from 16.1 percent. At the same time, white evangelicals became more politically unified under the Republican banner.
Evangelicals are less churchgoing and more partisan. When you read the words and watch the conduct of MAGA Christians online, it can seem as if the church is more influenced by Trump than the church influences Trump. When it comes to politics, he’s the evangelical pope.
When Stuckey said, “We don’t want to see our sin because it’s hard,” she was correct. But in this instance, the community most unwilling to see its sin is in the Christian church. The sin lives in the people who allowed fear and anger to swallow their commitment to truth and character.
Now the entire world lives with the consequences of the choices they made.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about “The Odyssey.” Yes, I know that you’re probably tired of reading the many, many takes on the most popular movie in the world right now, but I was fascinated by the moral framework of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation:
Without saying one word about modern politics, Christopher Nolan has rebuked the spirit of the age. His retelling of the “Odyssey” is an admonition: Moral transgressions always carry a consequence.
His version of Odysseus is a haunted man. After 10 years of war and 10 long years of suffering on the journey home, he seems broken. He can be ruthless. He can be vicious. But he is also suffering from a profound moral injury; only confession and penance provide pathways to peace.
One of the most vivid promotional posters for Nolan’s film features the broken, severed head from a statue of Athena and the exact quote I began with: “Defy the Gods.”
Combine that quote and that image, and it looks like an exhortation. Go ahead, Odysseus, defy the gods. Tear down their statues. Break their laws. Based on that alone, you’d expect a movie about a proud man standing up to irrational and capricious divine authority.
But that’s the opposite of what transpires. Yes, the severed head of Athena matters to the story, as does Odysseus’ defiance, but there is nothing good or laudatory about it.
My Saturday round table with my colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle focused on Trump’s new Red Scare. Will calling Democrats communists save the Republican Party from a midterm wipeout? How worried should mainstream Democrats be about the Democratic Socialists of America?
If I’m a Democrat, I’m not necessarily loving the D.S.A. that much, because it will often feel as if the D.S.A. is not so much focused on defeating Republicans as it is focused on defeating establishment Democrats. Which is a very similar dynamic that you saw unfold in the Tea Party side of the Republican Party, where really, if you wanted to get a hard-core Tea Party person agitated, absolutely say the name “Barack Obama.”
They did not like Obama. But I tell you, you would see almost equal anger when you’d use the name Mitch McConnell. And so, when you have these factional fights in a larger, bigger movement — and one faction seems to be concerned primarily with taking control of the movement, more so than essentially defeating the actual political opposition — I think that’s a real issue for Democrats right now.
And the bottom line is, I know the D.S.A. has different factions, and you can’t call them all Marxists. You can’t call them all socialists, truly. But there is some real extremism within the D.S.A. — some real extremism that is, in some cases, very ugly extremism. And so, I think I completely take the point that an actual Red Scare is ludicrous. It is also true that there are actual real extremists, who actually are not all that excited about defeating Republicans compared to destroying the Democratic establishment, and I think that’s a problem.
Finally, my newsletter last week, which outlined a possible MAGA legal argument to steal the midterms, generated an enormous amount of feedback — some of it genuinely alarmed and some of it skeptical.
The best skeptical comment came from Ned Foley at the Election Law Blog. He took issue with my concern that the outgoing House could refuse to seat any incoming members against whom an election contest was filed. That’s not possible, he argues, because the current Congress has no power to determine who is seated in the next Congress.
As a technical legal matter, I agree with Foley, but as I said in my newsletter, I am not arguing that my approach would be legally sound: “Remember 2020 — the point isn’t to be legally sound, but rather to create a legal pretext. MAGA is just as happy to abuse a law as it is to use a law, and a congressional election contest of this kind is extraordinarily vulnerable to abuse.”
The goal, like it was in 2020 and 2021, would be to persuade political actors that they have a legal basis for overturning the election and then dare the courts to stop them. And in this case, the Federal Contested Elections Act can permit a challenge to an election to commence in the old Congress, before the new Congress is sworn in.
We need to prepare for the bad legal arguments with the same rigor that we prepare for the good ones — especially when bad legal arguments could help break our Republic.
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