When she was a child, Karen Johnson attended the Lutheran church so regularly that she won an award for perfect attendance. As an adult, she taught catechism classes. But nowadays, Johnson, a 67-year-old employee at a slot machine business, no longer goes to church. She still considers herself an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe it’s necessary to go to church to live in communion with God. “I have my own way with the Lord,” she says.
Johnson’s relationship with religion includes frequent moments of prayer, as well as listening to podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss political topics and “what’s happening in the world” from a right-wing and occasionally Christian perspective. No one plays a more central role in her opinions than Donald Trump, whom she believes can defeat the Democrats. She is convinced that the Democrats are destroying the country and will end up in hell. “Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Johnson said recently, while waiting outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear a speech by the former president.
For decades, white evangelical Christian voters have backed Republican candidates, shaping the party’s focus on conservative cultural issues. Thanks to them, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush became nominees and presidents. However, no Republican has had a closer—or more illogical—relationship with evangelicals than Trump.
This twice-divorced casino magnate did not make an effort to appear particularly religious before his presidency. The fervent support he received from evangelical voters in 2016 and 2020 is often described as a transactional move: an investment in his Supreme Court appointments that would promote the abolition of federal abortion rights and other key priorities of the group. In general, evangelical supporters compare Trump to the ancient Persian king Cyrus the Great, who freed the Jewish population even though he wasn’t one of them.
But thanks to an increasing amount of data, religion scholars propose another explanation: evangelicals are not exactly what they used to be. In the past, being evangelical meant regularly attending church, having salvation and conversion as the main interests, and holding strong opinions on specific issues like abortion. Today, it is just as frequently used to describe a cultural and political identity—one in which Christians consider themselves a persecuted minority, view traditional institutions with suspicion, and place Trump in a prominent position. “Politics has become the main identity,” said Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor. “Everything else is determined by party affiliation.”
This analysis is particularly accurate among white Americans, who during Trump’s presidency began identifying more as “evangelical,” even as overall church attendance declined. This trend was especially pronounced among Trump supporters: in 2021, an analysis by the Pew Research Center revealed that more white Americans who expressed “favorable opinions” of the former president began identifying as evangelicals during his presidency than those who did not.
The Republican caucuses to be held in Iowa next week will test the extent to which Trump still holds that identity. Among his rivals, Governor Ron DeSantis has made the most effort to attract Iowa evangelicals with traditional actions. He has gained the support of prominent evangelical figures and has endorsed his authentic radical stance on abortion, a topic on which he has criticized Trump’s lack of consistency, as well as in cultural battles in Florida, his home state. “In Iowa, these issues matter,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for DeSantis’ campaign.
But Trump’s track record and recent polls suggest that there is no certainty on this point. In early December, Trump had a 25-point lead over DeSantis among evangelical voters, according to a survey conducted by the Des Moines Register, NBC News, and Mediacom Iowa.
Perhaps more important than the support of prominent figures and political plans is the way Trump has adopted Christianity as a cultural identity, in addition to his commitment to defend it. In a recent rally in Waterloo, Iowa, Trump described Christians as a group that suffers great persecution and faces a government that has become a weapon against them. Catholics are now the target of “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” he said, referring to a recent controversy surrounding a retracted FBI memo, and added that “evangelicals will soon follow.”
Empty pews
Long before Trump entered the political scene, Johnson’s Sunday morning routine had changed. When she was in her twenties, she married a man who had no faith, so “she stopped going to the building.” Although she didn’t lose her faith, life’s ups and downs, children, and some moves caused her to change direction.
In this regard, her case was not extraordinary. Church membership in the United States has been declining for several decades, as has the proportion of Americans who identify as Christians, especially Protestants, the branch that historically has been the gravitational center of American religion. In the mid-20th century, 68 percent of Americans identified as Protestants. By 2022, that percentage had dropped to 34 percent, according to Gallup (another 11 percent only described themselves as “Christian,” a category Gallup did not include until the late 1990s).
Initially, the declines primarily affected the more liberal mainline Protestant groups. But in recent years, church attendance among those who identify as evangelicals has also decreased, with a higher proportion of conservatives than liberals saying they have left the church. In 2021, for the first time according to recorded data, less than 50 percent of Americans belonged to any church.
“It’s the most pronounced and rapid religious change in the history of our nation,” said Michael Graham, a former executive pastor of a multiconfessional church in Orlando, Florida, and co-author of The Great Dechurching, a recently published book.
The transformation has been particularly visible in Iowa, where self-identified evangelicals (who represent about a quarter of the state’s population) have a significant influence on Republican politics, but religious practice has shown more pronounced changes than in the rest of the country.
Between 2010 and 2020, the state’s population belonging to a church—people with some involvement in a congregation—fell by nearly 13 percent, a steeper decline than in other states, with the exception of New Hampshire, according to the U.S. Religion Census, a comprehensive decennial survey of congregations.
In interviews, congregants and clergy described churches and attendance as transformed by a series of forces, such as an aging population and youth activities.
In Lucas County, a sparsely populated rural area with the second-lowest church membership rate in Iowa, Marci Prose, the lead pastor at Chariton Church of the Nazarene, serves a congregation of about 30 people. Recently, the congregation moved to a smaller space that used to be a gym.
When the church organized a luncheon for older members of the congregation, “only one woman from the church, my husband, and I were the people who weren’t invited,” she said.
The early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when churches suspended in-person worship due to quarantine orders and, in many cases, began livestreaming services on Facebook and YouTube, produced lasting changes in habits. Now, some faithful who used to never miss church join online services and, in some cases, try out different churches or explore spirituality in different ways.