Nearly half of Gen Z says Trump makes them less likely to attend church
Evangelical leaders traded their moral credibility for political power—and young Americans noticed
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There’s at least one silver lining to Donald Trump being president: A hell of a lot of young people say they’re less likely to go to church because of his ties to Christianity.
That’s according to an unpublished study from the Billy Graham Center Research Institute, based out of (evangelical) Wheaton College, and cited by the Christian Post:
The Billy Graham Center Research Institute surveyed 2,365 Gen Z adults, ages 18-28, through NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel between Aug. 9 and Sept. 26, 2024. The study was funded by the Lilly Endowment.
According to the research, 48% of respondents said they agree with the statement “Christians’ support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church.”
That included 19% who “strongly agreed,” 14% who “agreed” and 15% who “slightly agreed.” By contrast, 52% disagreed, including 21% who “strongly disagreed,” 16% who “disagreed” and 15% who “slightly disagreed.”
Rick Richardson, professor of evangelism and leadership at Wheaton College and the study’s lead researcher, told The Christian Post on Tuesday that the research is yet unpublished and being adapted into a book.
It’s hard to say a lot about this study without knowing more about how it was conducted or what the nature of this book is going to be, though it’s important to note it was done before the 2024 election and Trump has only gotten more extreme and more corrupt since then—largely due to the Christian Nationalist sycophants who seem to defend his actions at every turn. If that many young people were turned off by him in 2024, you have to imagine the numbers are even worse today given his war of choice in Iran, his careless destruction of our economy, his suppression of the Epstein files, DOGE, the explosive diarrhea, etc.
But let’s assume these results are accurate. It would confirm what critics have been saying for years now, which is that white evangelical leaders chose short-term political gain over long-term religious success. They have prayed with Trump in the Oval Office, argued that certain victories (like the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade) are worth everything else, and convinced roughly 80% of white evangelicals to vote for Trump in each of the last three presidential elections.
The relationship between Trump and conservative Christians has always been transactional. Trump gave them whatever they wanted—credibility they never earned, federal judges who prioritized right-wing religious beliefs over a plain reading of the law, access to political power, etc.—and they gave him their votes. No scandals dissuaded them. No wars bothered them. No attempt to overthrow our democracy gave them pause. No amount of sinning in real time made them budge. They’re just as immoral as he is. It was a match made in Hell.
They’ve had countless opportunities to distance themselves from him and it would have been easy for them to justify it—with the Epstein files, the appointments of ignorant zealots to positions of power, the brazen ways he’s enriched himself at the expense of the country. They never did. They always argued that Democrats were the real enemy even as the argument became harder and harder to justify to a conservative base.
Not only were they silent in the face of moral disaster, they openly advocated for him even when they didn’t have to, insisting that Trump was one of their own. The now-dead abuse advocate James Dobson said in June of 2016 that Trump had become “born again,” adding that he personally knew the person who “led him to Christ.” Pastor Mark Burns (who famously lied about his own credentials) said in 2024 he’s “personally heard [Trump] profess his faith in the Lord Jesus.” Evangelical huckster Hank Kunneman claimed Trump was anointed by God. Souther Baptist preacher Robert Jeffress agreed Trump was “born again” and a Christ follower.
And those are just the preachers around him. Trump himself has said he identifies as a Christian, a move that allowed him to sell an overpriced cheaply made Bible plastered with his name:
Don’t forget when he held up a Bible in front of a church after his team used tear gas to drive away peaceful protesters:
To a large extent, his Christian cosplaying has worked. In 2023, Republican voters said Donald Trump was more religious than Mitt Romney and Joe Biden. They just overlooked the fact that Trump was a thrice-married racist who paid hush money to porn stars he was having affairs with when his current wife was pregnant with his fifth child. That he was the Two Corinthians guy. That he said he doesn’t need forgiveness. That he couldn’t even name his favorite Bible verse.
When you look at all of this holistically, Trump has hijacked evangelical Christianity the same way he hijacked the Republican Party. He took an already broken and extremely dysfunctional group of people bounded together by who they hate and brought them all together under his umbrella. You can’t separate Trump from the GOP any more than you can separate Trump from conservative Christianity.
I think there’s an argument to be made that if you ask young people if they want to go to church—especially a white evangelical, non-denominational megachurch—it’s like you’re asking them if they support Trump. Because that’s what church is now. It’s not about Jesus. It’s not about the Sermon on the Mount. It’s about culture wars and right-wing politics.
That’s the Faustian bargain that Christian leaders made when they sold their souls to prevent Hillary Clinton from getting into the White House. (To be fair, they lost their credibility long before then, but if there were any shreds of it left, they’re gone now.)
People under 30 have been watching all this play out their entire adult lives, so it doesn’t surprise me that nearly half of them now say Trump has dissuaded them from going to church. Most church leaders—certainly white evangelical and Southern Baptist ones—have never done enough to condemn this administration. In some cases, they avoided doing so because they didn’t want to alienate their already shrinking congregations.
If pastors can’t speak out against the moral atrocities of this administration when it’s this damn obvious, why would anyone trust their judgment on spiritual matters? If people went to church because they thought it would provide a moral backbone to their lives, the Trump administration has blown that argument right out of the water.
Even as Trump makes life harder for immigrants through his (mis)use of ICE, and even as National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim stressed that the administration’s deportation policies were literally harming churches, many Christian leaders with large platforms have either remained by Trump’s side or said nothing of value.
If you want to look for moral clarity these days, you’ll have a far easier time looking to the Muslim mayor of New York City than a Southern Baptist preacher in Texas.
Even if we can’t see the underlying research that says many young people are turned off of church because of Trump, we already know that that the push toward theocracy generates backlash wherever it happens, whenever it happens.
Christian Nationalists believed they could use their power to codify their beliefs into law. They never stopped to think about whether those policies were any good or whether Americans—including young people who might have been Christian leaders in the future—might be turned off by their willingness to cede moral authority to the least moral person to ever occupy the White House.
This isn’t going to end well for them. But instead of admitting they went down the wrong path, you can bet good money that Christian leaders will just double down on their support of Trump and his allies in the future. At this point, even they don’t care about the long-term success of their religion. They just want to cling to whatever power they can.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
Few things ever demonstrated the disconnect between religion and morality quite like the evangelical preachers pledging their unconditional love for the most corrupt, incompetent and grotesquely immoral President in our history. The preachers can talk about their loving Jesus and the glorious afterlife from now on, but there is nothing they crave more than power and control on this earthly plain. Power few groups would be more ill-equipped to exercise. They saw Trump as a means to that end, and were too stupid to realize he was playing them and couldn’t care less about them.
𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ, 48% 𝑜𝑓 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 “𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑠’ 𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑚𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑜 𝑡𝑜 𝑐ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑐ℎ.”
What the research doesn't say is what other factors are also making Gen Z less likely to go to church. Christian support for Trump, plus systemic child abuse scandals, plus naked greed from pastors, plus the racism, plus the homophobia, plus the transphobia....
In other words, the kids are paying attention, and can figure out just how toxic religion is. The kids are alright. Let's hope they get to take over from the old bigots currently running things sooner rather than later.