Perspectives on Evangelicals' Support for Donald Trump

From the start, Donald Trump's relationship with evangelicals has seemed perched on a foundation of uncertain strength. One perspective holds that evangelicals have backed Trump with caution and hesitancy. In 2016, for instance, it appeared that many evangelicals had concluded that while Donald Trump may have been a suboptimal and even disgusting candidate, he remained the best option among the likely winners (Scott et al., Reference Scott, Killough and Burke2016). The most prominent example of this viewpoint was voiced by Franklin Graham, who, in 2016, counseled his followers, “you may have to hold your nose and vote”—something that would not have been necessary were evangelicals drawn to Trump with unfettered zeal (qtd. in Law, Reference Law2016; see also Djupe, Reference Djupe2017). Further suggestions of hesitancy have followed, including claims that evangelicals struggled with the moral contradictions in evidence once the Trump presidency began (Keen, Reference Keen2018), signs that Trump's grip on evangelicals weakened following the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol (“Evangelicals are Divided”, 2021), the apparent movement of some evangelicals away from Donald Trump and toward Ron DeSantis in the run up to the 2024 Republican primaries (Thomson-DeVeaux and Cox, Reference Thomson-DeVeaux and Cox2023), Trump's ensuing claim that evangelical leaders were exhibiting “disloyalty” by not rushing to endorse his 2024 campaign (Holmes et al., Reference Holmes, Orr and Collins2023), and polling data showing that an increasing number of evangelicals might support Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2024 general election (Impelli, Reference Impelli2024).

The contrary perspective also has its advocates. The aforementioned analysis by Djupe (Reference Djupe2017) revealed no sign that evangelical Trump voters in the 2016 general election were in any way half-hearted. Prior to that, a hint of hesitation toward Trump may have existed in the 2016 primaries because evangelicals with higher levels of church attendance favored other candidates by a small margin in early contests (e.g., Layman, Reference Layman2016), but they quickly came around to support Trump at very high rates once he became the nominee. The oft-repeated statistic is that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 general election (Martinez and Smith, Reference Martinez and Smith2016), and the exit poll numbers have been corroborated with survey data (e.g., Burge, Reference Burge2017; Whitehead et al., Reference Whitehead, Perry and Baker2018; Margolis, Reference Margolis2020). Moving past the 2016 election context, subsequent reports found that evangelical support for Donald Trump remained vibrant despite the dozens of criminal indictments he faced (Williams, Reference Williams2023), that the commitment of evangelical voters had not changed from 2016 to 2020 to 2024 (Strong, Reference Strong2024), and that, if anything, by 2024 evangelicals had gone “all in” for Trump (Perry, Reference Perry2024).

Voting for Donald Trump should not be conflated with supporting him enthusiastically. Unfortunately, much of the commentary on whether evangelical support for Donald Trump is enthusiastic or reluctant in form reports impressionistic or anecdotal accounts. Building on Djupe's (Reference Djupe2017) direct test following the 2016 election, we develop a more systematic and multifaceted approach to addressing this question. With focus on the approximate midpoint of Trump's presidency, we seek to marshal as much evidence as possible regarding the intensity dimension of evangelical Trump support. Although our primary objective entails resolution of the intensity question, results also may speak indirectly to the viability of alternate accounts regarding content, or the substantive bases of the link between Donald Trump and his evangelical supporters. This is because some of the perspectives on why evangelicals side with Trump match better to either the enthusiastic or reluctant views of intensity. Thus, if clear evidence emerges regarding intensity, that evidence may help direct subsequent research on content.

If evangelicals offer Donald Trump only lukewarm support, one plausible explanation in terms of content is that evangelicals perceived transactional value in siding with Trump. On a personal level, Donald Trump's character and morality may be off-putting to evangelicals who favor both moral character and policy leadership consistent with their Christian values and principles. But, seen pragmatically, it might be better to side with a personally reprehensible politician if doing so brings wins on the policy front. This is what Franklin Graham meant by “hold your nose and vote for Trump.” Trump vowed to promote the evangelical policy agenda in exchange for their political support. For their part, joining that transactional framework may have been politically expedient for evangelicals, but they certainly did not have to like it. After all, no amount of Supreme Court Justices would erase the reality of Donald Trump the person. Policy-minded evangelicals reasonably may have voted for Trump and offered him minimal support, yet still felt coolly toward him and perceived him to be deficient on criteria such as honesty and morality. It follows that if our analyses show evangelical support for Donald Trump to be of weak intensity, that finding would bolster the viability of a transactional, policy-focused view of why evangelicals have sided with Trump.

What decision-making process would be consistent with a finding that Donald Trump's evangelical supporters, both en masse and across multiple dimensions, have hitched themselves to Trump with discernible enthusiasm? In this scenario, it would seem plausible that some force other than Christian values and principles motivates their behavior. Multiple often interconnected theses have been advanced. One with arguably the most traction is that Trump explicitly offered to restore Christians to a powerful position in the U.S. (Gorski, Reference Gorski2017; Whitehead et al., Reference Whitehead, Perry and Baker2018), and relatedly, that Trump himself provided strong guidance to evangelical followers who score high on right-wing authoritarianism (RWA – Dean and Altemeyer, Reference Dean and Altemeyer2020). Consistent with these perspectives, a Christian nationalist worldview continued to have a tight relationship with Trump support (Baker et al., Reference Baker, Perry and Whitehead2020) through to January 6 and beyond (Armaly et al., Reference Armaly, Buckley and Enders2022; Djupe et al., Reference Djupe, Lewis and Sokhey2023).

Christian nationalism is not the only dimension on which enthusiastic evangelical support for Trump might be expected. Guth (Reference Guth2019), for example, finds evidence that evangelicals are more likely to be populists, a descriptor often applied to Trump's politics (e.g., White, Reference White2016). Another throughline is the racial conservatism that tends to characterize white evangelicals, which was a dominant force explaining their 2020 vote in at least one analysis (Baker et al., Reference Baker, Perry and Whitehead2020).

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping suggestion is that evangelicals were so threatened by the shifts in politics and demographics in the United States that they were willing to change their fundamental values. Evidence aggregated by PRRI (2016) shows that evangelicals once were the most opposed to the idea that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their private life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Whereas only 30% of white evangelicals agreed with that statement in 2011, 72% agreed with it in 2016. An “evangelical crackup” with the GOP was clearly not in the making (Djupe and Claassen, Reference Djupe and Claassen2018).

The possible link between the intensity of evangelical Trump support and the substantive basis of that support can be explored by contrasting evangelicals and nonevangelicals. If principled evangelicals pursuing a policy agenda anchored in concern about values and morality backed Donald Trump reluctantly, then an intensity gap should be seen when levels of evangelical and nonevangelical Trump support are contrasted. Conversely, if evangelicals have sided with Trump due to factors such as a thirst for power rooted in Christian nationalism and a desire to slow the nation's changing demographics, then an intensity gap would be unlikely because Donald Trump has constituted a strong ally in pursuing those objectives and his moral and character deficiencies should not have muted enthusiasm about that alliance.

Two hybrid accounts also warrant consideration. First, seen in the political realm, the evangelical label might encompass multiple perspectives. According to this view, assessing four core religious beliefs—the so-called Bebbington (Reference Bebbington1989) Quadrilateral (e.g., Kidd, Reference Kidd2016; Keller, Reference Keller2017)—would enable analysts to differentiate between enthusiastic Trump support among nominal evangelicals and more tepid Trump support among true believers. Some prior research casts doubt on whether this distinction will be seen. For instance, Margolis (Reference Margolis2020) shows convincingly that nominal evangelicals are more likely to have supported Clinton or someone else in 2016. Although our survey lacks data on core beliefs, we will explore heterogeneity among evangelicals in broad form by assessing whether religiosity moderates evangelical Trump support.

A second hybrid account speaks to a possible information effect. It may be that all evangelicals potentially would see Donald Trump as personally repugnant, but those perceptions require awareness of problematic aspects of Trump's character. Evangelicals who tune out politics or do not look beyond slim information silos may have no basis on which to assess Donald Trump negatively. Given the widespread, multi-year discussion of Trump's personal failings, this scenario might seem unlikely, but a direct test is possible by factoring in information exposure. If many evangelicals warmly embrace Donald Trump only because they lack information that he is, as Dean and Altemeyer phrased it, “an enormously phony Christian” (2020, 178), then the intensity of Trump support among evangelicals should fall as information exposure rises.

The case developed here maps to a multi-step empirical strategy. First, examination of data from a period clear of the electoral context facilitates the assessment of views of Donald Trump the president rather than of Donald Trump the presidential candidate. Second, contrasts of views about Trump as expressed by evangelical and nonevangelical Trump supporters promise to provide direct evidence on the question of intensity and may yield indirect evidence on the matter of content. Third, conditional tests that incorporate information on religiosity and information exposure offer leverage on hybrid accounts that hold that some, but not all, evangelicals supported Trump reluctantly.

Data and Methods

All data are from an internet survey fielded in the United States in the period March 9–14, 2019. The survey was administered by YouGov and was completed by 2,500 respondents. The survey addressed topics related to political information and opinion and multiple items were included to measure facets of possible support for Donald Trump. The survey was conducted just past the midpoint of the Trump presidency. This places it after Charlottesville, the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh nominations and confirmations, the start of the Mueller investigation, the 2018 midterm elections, and the criminal convictions of Trump associates Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort, but before the Mueller report was delivered, and well before the COVID pandemic, the two Trump impeachments, and the events related to the 2020 election.

Analyses center on Trump supporters. Two operationalizations are used. The first includes only those respondents who reported that they voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (N = 871). The advantage of this operationalization is that it enables us to gauge subsequent enthusiasm for Trump among his actual 2016 voters. A disadvantage is that it excludes Trump supporters who, for whatever reason, did not vote in 2016. Despite not voting in 2016, these individuals may have been politically engaged during the Trump presidency and may have planned to vote for him in 2020. To incorporate such respondents, a second operationalization includes 2016 Trump voters plus any respondents who did not vote in 2016 but who either awarded Donald Trump a higher feeling thermometer rating than Hillary Clinton or who indicated that they planned to vote for Trump in 2020. This operationalization increases the number of respondents identified as Trump supporters by just over 25% (N = 1,090). Critically, neither operationalization preordains that respondents identified as Trump supporters must be enthusiastic toward him. His 2016 and prospective 2020 voters may have perceived him to be the lesser of two evils, and he could have received a score as low as one (to Hillary Clinton's zero) on the feeling thermometer.

To produce an expansive perspective on whether evangelical and nonevangelical Trump backers differ in the enthusiasm of their support, six dependent variables are used. Three incorporate data from feeling thermometers. The first, Trump FT, is the 0–100 Trump measure. This provides a holistic take on Trump support. If evangelicals are cooler toward Donald Trump than are nonevangelicals, a difference in feeling thermometer scores will be observed. For 2016 Trump voters, the mean on this variable is 82.52 (s.d. = 22.78); for Trump supporters in our expanded operationalization that includes 2016 nonvoters, the mean is 79.23 (s.d. = 24.63).

The second dependent variable, Trump-Pence, represents the difference between the respondent's feeling thermometer scores for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. By 2016, Vice Presidential nominee Pence was strongly linked to evangelicalism both in his home state of IN (e.g., Sikich, Reference Sikich2016) and nationally (e.g., Boorstein, Reference Boorstein2016), and analyses suggest that Pence's reputation as a Christian conservative helped the Trump-Pence ticket weather challenges linked to Donald Trump's moral character, and especially the release of the Access Hollywood video (Merwin, Reference Merwin2023). This is a likely place to search for signs of hesitation in Trump support because, even for evangelicals committed to Donald Trump, the relative ratings of Trump and Pence should be expected to lean more toward Pence for evangelicals than for nonevangelicals. The means on this measure are 2.09 (s.d. = 18.24) for 2016 Trump voters and 3.15 (s.d. = 20.29) for all Trump supporters (positive numbers signal warmer feelings toward Trump).

The third dependent variable is used to address the possibility that, as political actors, evangelicals are motivated primarily by traditional conservative Republican principles. This variable captures the difference between warmth toward Trump and average warmth toward two prominent traditional conservative Republicans, Senators Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell; specifically, Trump-Republicans = Trump FT – ((Cruz FT + McConnell FT)/2). Descriptive statistics for 2016 Trump voters are: mean = 21.01, s.d. = 20.59; the corresponding statistics for all Trump supporters are mean = 20.24, s.d. = 21.27. These marks reveal that Trump supporters are, on average, much more favorable to Trump than to other Republican leaders.

The remaining dependent variables draw on items other than feeling thermometers. Morality is a summative index that includes data from four questions tapping the extent to which respondents agree or disagree with allegations of wrongdoing against Donald Trump. Pro-Trump values indicate that respondents believe (1) the Trump administration was one of the least corrupt in U.S. history, (2) the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt that produced no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Trump's associates, (3) Donald Trump does not lie a lot, and (4) Trump probably has not committed several serious crimes. Each item is coded 0 (strongly anti-Trump) to 4 (strongly pro-Trump). For 2016 Trump voters, the 0 to 16 index is highly reliable (Cronbach's α = 0.79); descriptive statistics are: mean = 11.56, s.d. = 3.40. Including Trump supporters who did not vote in 2016, α = 0.80, mean = 11.13, and s.d. = 3.55. On the three feeling thermometer variables, it is possible that evangelical respondents pleased with Trump actions such as the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh nominations used the feeling thermometers as opportunities to express their support and gratitude rather than actual feelings of warmth. The morality scale is much less susceptible to such shifting in interpretation because the four items address very specific topics and behaviors of direct relevance to Donald Trump's character. Hence, this variable offers a more liberal test of the possibility that evangelicals were reluctant Trump supporters.

The fifth dependent variable, True-False, includes data from four items on which respondents were asked to gauge whether statements made by Donald Trump were true or false. In actuality, two of the statements were true.Footnote ¹ Due to Trump's history of struggles with veracity, wary evangelicals concerned about Donald Trump's personal history should be highly attentive to the possibility that some of his claims were false. Therefore, the sum of how many times respondents answered “true” should be lower for evangelicals than for nonevangelicals. Descriptive statistics are mean = 2.94 and s.d. = 1.08 for Trump voters and mean = 2.87 and s.d. = 1.13 for all Trump supporters.

The final dependent variable pertains not to Donald Trump, but to respondents' views of their fellow Trump supporters. By the time the survey was fielded, respondents had the opportunity to know that Trump-supporting white supremacists and neo-Nazis had marched at Charlottesville and that several Trump advisers had been convicted of crimes. In this context, seven-point scales captured the extent to which respondents saw “most Trump supporters” as honest or dishonest, hard working or lazy, intelligent or unintelligent, and patriotic or unpatriotic. If the “hold your nose and vote for Trump” mentality serves partly as a means for evangelicals to differentiate themselves from Trump supporters who do not share their principles, then evangelicals should produce lower scores on the 0 to 24 summative scale. For 2016 Trump voters, Cronbach's α = 0.62, mean = 18.20, and s.d. = 4.31. For all Trump supporters, α = 0.67, mean = 17.64, s.d. = 4.63).

The survey includes the Pew religious identification items. We code respondents as being Evangelicals (1 = evangelical, 0 = nonevangelical) if they indicate that they consider themselves to be born again and their religion is either Protestant or “something else.” Nonevangelicals are respondents who do not consider themselves to be born again, or who are born again but who specify a different religion.Footnote ² It is important to note a continued debate about using a denominational compared to an identification approach to classifying evangelicals (e.g., Burge and Lewis, Reference Burge and Lewis2018; Smith et al., Reference Smith, Sciupac, Gecewicz and Hackett2018; Smidt, Reference Smidt2019); we use the available identity-based classification strategy (limited by religious group) without the ability to comment on the broader debate. Among all respondents, 556 (22.2%) are evangelicals. Among 2016 Trump voters, 302 (34.7%) are evangelicals. For all Trump supporters, 362 (33.2%) are evangelicals.Footnote ³ Although some research on Trump support among evangelicals examines only white evangelicals, we do not impose this restriction because we select cases on the basis of Trump support, meaning nonwhite evangelicals who voted against Trump are excluded. To determine whether the inclusion of Trump-supporting nonwhite evangelicals alters results, core tests were re-run with only white evangelicals included (see Appendix A), but all results remained consistent with those reported below.

At question is whether Donald Trump's evangelical supporters view him more tepidly than do his nonevangelical supporters. In simplest form, testing requires only that we calculate mean differences for the two groups. That strategy risks conflating evangelical status with other variables. For instance, compared with nonevangelicals, evangelicals may be more conservative and they may view religion as more important in their lives, meaning failure to account for such factors could cause us to attribute effects to evangelicalism that actually trace to its correlates. To address this, all effects will be estimated in two manners. First, multivariate OLS regression models will be estimated for each dependent variable. Although the evangelical indicator measure is our chief independent variable, we control for multiple possible confounders, including political ideology, a 0–8 index of religiosity that incorporates information on frequency of church attendance and importance of religion (for 2016 Trump voters, mean = 4.54, and s.d. = 2.55; for all Trump supporters, mean = 4.39, and s.d. = 2.55), education, living in the South, race, and gender. Compared with nonevangelicals, evangelicals on our survey are more conservative, have lower education levels, are more likely to live in the South, and have higher religiosity. Because these are all plausible predictors of Trump support, we include them to avoid omitted-variable bias.

Our second estimation strategy is matching. We used optimal pair with exact matching on political ideology and religiosity. We attempted additional matching specifications, including nearest neighbor, full matching, and optimal without exact matching. However, these led to an inadequate balance of covariates.Footnote ⁴ Optimal pair with exact matching was estimated using Mahalanobis distance and all standardized mean differences (including squares and interactions) were not greater than 20% suggesting an adequate balance of covariates (Rosenbaum and Rubin, Reference Rosenbaum and Rubin1985). We fit linear models for each dependent variable and computed the marginal treatment effect on the treated (i.e., evangelicals) by running G-computations with robust standard errors clustered on the matched pairs. G-computation works by first fitting a linear regression for our outcomes given the treatment, covariates, and interactions between treatment and covariates. We include these interactions because of the remaining covariate imbalance and potential heterogeneity in the treatment. The model fit is then used to predict average outcomes under treatment and no treatment. The difference in point estimates is identical to the average treatment on the treated (Wang et al., Reference Wang, Nianogo and Arah2017).

Analyses proceed in three stages. First, OLS and matching tests will be conducted for the first group of Trump supporters – those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Second, tests are repeated for the expanded second group that includes both 2016 Trump voters and 2016 nonvoters who either planned to vote for Trump in 2020 or who awarded Trump a higher feeling thermometer score than they provided for Hillary Clinton.

In the third step, conditional tests are added. In the first of these, a second version of OLS models for both groups of Trump supporters will be estimated, this time including an evangelical × religiosity interaction. These models provide a coarse test of whether nominal evangelicals (individuals who identify as evangelical but neither see religion as highly important in their lives nor attend religious services with great frequency) were more supportive of Donald Trump than evangelicals for whom religion held a more central position. The second conditional tests are used to explore whether information differences among evangelicals lead to within-group variation in Trump support. Here, the logic holds that evangelicals only should have been reluctant to support Trump if they were aware of his personal failings, and low-information evangelicals may have lacked that awareness.Footnote ⁵ Drawing on research that factual knowledge is the strongest predictor of news acquisition (Price and Zaller, Reference Price and Zaller1993), we used data from a ten-item battery of awareness of nonpolitical current events (for 2016 Trump voters, mean = 7.40, s.d. = 1.78; for all Trump supporters, mean = 7.16, mean = 1.93). Our expectation is that respondents with wide knowledge of current events should be more likely to have heard about negative aspects of Donald Trump's personal history. Tests substituting a civics knowledge measure for current knowledge are reported in Appendix A; no noteworthy differences are observed versus the findings reported below.