Like other social scientists and scholars, I’ll spend the next weeks and months scouring pre-election data, the exit polls, and the first wave of post-election surveys trying to understand how a majority of American voters chose to return Donald Trump—a twice-impeached convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser who incited a violent insurrection when he lost the last election—to power.
Because elections are won and lost at the margins in a deeply divided nation such as ours, most of that analysis will rightly focus on which subgroups (like Latinos and young men) shifted most significantly away from the Democratic Party’s winning 2020 coalition. But that focus, while strategically important, will obscure the deeper peril facing our nation. Authoritarianism, when it blossoms, emerges from the deeper soil at the center.
With the Republican presidential candidate regularly spewing racist, misogynistic, and even Nazi ideology (such as claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country), the most remarkable thing about this election is not which groups shifted marginally in his direction, but which groups continued to provide him with supermajority support. Namely, we must talk about how thoroughly Christian nationalism has infected mainstream white Christianity.
Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 was made possible because, as noted by the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, 77% of white evangelical Protestant Christians, along with 57% of white non-evangelical Protestants and 64% of white Catholics, lent him moral legitimacy and gave him their votes. Even after watching Trump implement cruel policies such as separating migrant children from their parents and putting them in cages, even after witnessing his impeachment for abusing the power of the presidency to try to get a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 election, white Christians continued to support him. White evangelical Protestant support for Trump in the 2020 election ticked up to 84%, while non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics generally held steady (57% each).
As Trump staged his political comeback in 2023 and 2024, white Christians had the benefit of witnessing a second Trump impeachment for inciting a violent insurrection in an attempt to remain in office after losing that election, four criminal indictments and a felony conviction, and the most overtly racist presidential campaign since George Wallace (who also held a fascist-style rally in Madison Square Garden in 1968).
Read More: How Trump Won
Despite all of this, in stark contrast to 2016, there were virtually no major dissenting voices among the leaders of Trump’s most stalwart supporters. Just two weeks before the 2024 election, American evangelical Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, explicitly petitioned God for Trump’s election at a Trump rally in Concord, NC. “There’s a spiritual element that’s at work here. There are dark forces that are arrayed against this man. They’ve tried to put him in prison; they’ve tried to assassinate him twice; he’s attacked every day in the media,” he lamented. “We pray for our nation and, Father, if it be thy will, that President Trump will win this election. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
According to the 2024 National Election Pool exit polls, 8 in 10 (81%) white evangelicals once again declared their allegiance to Trump, as did 60% of white Catholics and similar numbers of white non-evangelical Protestants. (Note: While there are no publicly available exit poll numbers for white non-evangelical Protestants, pre-election polling from PRRI suggests 6 in 10 once again supported Trump).
If we put white Christians’ strong support for Trump into context, we can clearly see their singular contribution to his power. Overall, more than two thirds (68%) of white Christians favored Trump over Harris—a mirror image of the rest of the country, including Christians of color (33%), followers of non-Christian religions (30%), and the religiously unaffiliated (28%). While the proportion of white Christians in the country has been declining over the last three decades, they remain 41% of the population and an even higher percentage of voters. Even a modest decline in the overwhelming level of support for Trump among white Christians would have denied him the Republican nomination or the presidency.
Most disturbingly, this time, white Christians, who once proudly called themselves “values voters,” knew exactly who and what they were voting for. With Trump abandoning the Republican Party’s longstanding support of a national ban on abortion and no Supreme Court justices left to appoint, the fig leaf of abortion fell away, exposing the uglier elements that have always tied white Christians to Trump.
Read More: Trump’s Christian Nationalist Vision for America
PRRI’s surveys have consistently found strong support among white Christians for the racial grievance and xenophobia that is the deeper DNA of the MAGA movement. Majorities of white Christians agree that “today discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities.” And three quarters of white evangelical Protestants, along with 6 in 10 white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics, say they favor even the most extreme parts of Trump’s mass deportation scheme, described in the survey as “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, even if it takes setting up encampments guarded by the U.S. military.”
But numerical support for Trump is only one facet of what white Christians have wrought in our nation. Historically, we know that all authoritarian leaders need a mechanism for projecting moral legitimacy, particularly as they accelerate efforts to consolidate power and undermine democratic norms and individual freedoms.
Nearly a century ago, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement coopted the German Evangelical Church. Today we are seeing similar uses of the Orthodox Christian churches in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Catholic Church in Viktor Orbán’s so-called “illiberal democracy” in Hungary—contemporary models both Trump and white evangelical leaders have praised.
Over the last decade, many white Christians have not just selfishly supported a dangerous, narcissistic man who promised to restore their waning influence; they have now willingly blessed the advent of a new American fascism that threatens our democratic future. They are principally responsible for Trump’s rise and return to power—and for everything that is coming for all of us in its wake.
