How the Decline of Evangelicalism Helped Elect Donald Trump

A whopping 80% of evangelicals voted for President-elect Donald Trump in 2024. But behind that headline number, the dramatic fall in these Christian’s cultural influence played a much more profound role in Trump’s victories than evangelical voters did.

In the 1990s, evangelicals were a political force. Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition was one of America’s most powerful political groups. Fortune ranked it the seventh-most impactful lobbying interest in 1997. With many millions of evangelical voters, movement leaders like Robertson could sway elections. Today, despite still serving as a key voting bloc in the GOP, evangelicals don’t even have the political power to keep an anti-abortion plank in the Republican Party platform.

This shows the impact of the decline of Christianity more broadly in American culture since the 1960s. This decline has passed through three phases or worlds: the Positive World (1964-1994), in which Christianity was declining but still viewed positively; the Neutral World (1994-2014), in which it was no longer seen positively but not yet negatively, either; and the Negative World (post-2014) in which, for the first time in American history, official, elite culture now views traditional Christianity negatively, or certainly at least skeptically.

In the Positive World, evangelicals could say they were a “moral majority,” as a leading organization of that era called itself. It may not have been true even then, but like former President Nixon’s “silent majority,” it was at least a plausible claim. Today, no one would dare make it.  

In the Negative World, the traditional Christian moral system has been rejected in key areas. The public wants abortion to be legal. It’s the same for gay marriage, gambling, porn, and pot. For example, in the red state of Ohio, a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana passed with 57% of the vote. Political parties exist to win elections, and evangelicals are unlikely to get the GOP to support proven electoral losers like abortion bans. 

But rather than create a permissive, progressive utopia, this change in public sentiment instead ushered in the age of Trump. 

Donald Trump is precisely the kind of person whose path to the presidency would have been barred in the previous era in which America was still a Christian-dominated society. As someone who had talked about running for president since the 1980s—but didn’t actually do so until decades later—Trump no doubt knows this. His magazine-cover-page affair with Marla Maples happened in the same era when Sen. Gary Hart had to drop out of the presidential race after allegations of infidelity. Trump owned casinos at a time when the institution was seen as a seedy business, perceived as having deep ties to the mafia. Trump’s boasting and ostentatious lifestyle were at odds with the WASP rectitude traditionally expected of political leaders.

Today, every standard that could have been used to disqualify Trump has been removed or even inverted. Affairs are seen as no big deal. Gambling is now legal and socially approved of; the sports leagues themselves are partners in the business. Relentless self-promotion is what we all do on social media every day. Our culture celebrates crudeness, in both word and deed. How can Trump’s language be held against him in an era of Cardi B’s?

Trump detected this cultural shift—the transition into the Negative World—that happened during former-President Obama’s second term. Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015, and the rest is history. 

There’s a great irony in this. It’s the very people who did the most to tear down the old, Protestant-inspired moral order in favor of unlimited personal freedom and autonomy who also did the most to pave the way for Trump. He is the natural product of the liberationist agenda.

Having lost the culture war, evangelicals were no longer bound to continue trying to uphold their old standards in a country that had rejected them. It made it easier to vote for Trump despite his personal failings and contrary policy positions on certain issues, figuring he was still better than the Democrats.

This was not without controversy, to be sure. It has produced something of an evangelical crackup similar to that in the GOP, with a visible and vocal “Never Trump” contingent inside the evangelical world, many of whom vocally supported Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. But as in political circles, this is a clear minority whose voice has been disproportionately amplified by the media. Still, the change makes clear that evangelical Trump voters have lost significant clout.

The result is an increasingly post-religious Right in America, one more concerned with cultural concerns like immigration than moral matters. The Republican Party is shifting toward a new social base that’s more multi-ethnic, more apt to follow Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson than some pastor or prophet, more likely to bet on the big game than read the Bible, more working class than Social Register. It’s one that increasingly doesn’t go to church even while still claiming a religious label. This—not the old evangelical Right—is the party of Donald Trump.