In the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s historic electoral victory earlier this month, media pundits and talking heads have focused on his significant gains among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, such as young voters and both black and Hispanic men.
But a new study is suggesting that it was Christian voters who were the decisive factor in Trump’s win.
George Barna, senior research fellow for the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council and director of the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, published his postelection report last week demonstrating that Christian voters “made the difference in the race.”
Prior to the election, Barna had anticipated voter turnout among Christians would be low, with as many as 40 million Christians simply choosing not to vote. While Christians did vote in fewer numbers than they did in 2020, Barna noted that the “potentially devastating impact for the Trump campaign was blunted by the even lower levels of turnout among the Harris campaign’s target segments.”
Overall, 56% of self-identified Christians voted in 2024, which Barna pointed out “was barely higher than the involvement among people aligned with non-Christian faiths (53%), but significantly higher than among voting-age Americans who have no religious faith (48%).” Interestingly, Catholic voters and Christians with a biblical worldview both outperformed their 2020 turnout by three points.
“Trump was a heavy favorite among most of the three dozen Christian segments studied by the Cultural Research Center survey. The former president received a landslide 56% to 43% margin of victory among all self-identified Christians,” Barna observed. “Among the approximately 75 million votes Trump garnered in the election, more than three-quarters of them—78%—came from the Christian community.”
Barna also noted that Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, scored low among almost all Christian denominations and demographics, with the exception of “mainline and traditionally black Protestant congregations.” Overall, less than two-thirds of Harris’ votes came from Christians.
The majority of Christian voters also identified their religious beliefs, the differing party platforms, and the insight of their family as the biggest impacts on their choice of candidates. “Consistent with the patterns established, Trump voters were twice as likely as Harris voters to identify their religious faith as a major influence on their candidate of choice (30% vs. 14%, respectively),” Barna noted.
In comments to The Washington Stand, Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, explained, “Religion gives people a worldview which, among other things, gives people a way to understand what’s wrong with the world and what the solution is. Elections are one way people indicate their understanding of what’s wrong and what we need to do to fix it.”
Pointing to Barna’s study, he continued, “This survey is evidence that Christians think about these questions differently than people of other faiths or no religion at all, which really shouldn’t be surprising. If anything, it might be surprising that Christians aren’t more different, but elections never offer perfect choices, and this election was more complicated than others.”
Backholm added, “Christians were always going to be a significant part of this election, either through what we did or did not do. In this case, tens of millions of Christians evaluated an admittedly tricky choice and reached the same conclusion, and as Robert Frost would say, that has made all the difference.”
Appearing on Monday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Adam Rasmussen, who worked on the postelection report with Barna, explained just how decisive a role Christians played.
“What we saw is that 72% of those who came out to vote were Christians, and they have values,” Rasmussen said. He continued, “And we saw that—probably because of the platform of the Republicans and Donald Trump—Christians gave a 17 million vote advantage or cushion to Donald Trump. And because the margin between the two of them was less than that, it was insurmountable.”
Inflation and immigration were consistently ranked as top concerns among the general population heading into the election, and Barna’s postelection study found that Christian voters also placed the greatest emphasis on those issues. Overall, nearly 40% of Christian voters identified inflation as a major concern that determined who they voted for, and 34% rated immigration and border control as the same. Evangelical voters, however, placed a higher premium on immigration, with 40% identifying it as a major concern.
Rasmussen said that this was likely linked to a concern over the breakdown of law. “That’s one of the major responsibilities of the federal government, is to have safe borders. How could it not? And that was a decisive factor for certain,” he said.
Addressing the issue of the 44% of Christians who chose not to vote, Rasmussen recommended that pastors and church leaders should encourage their congregations to vote in accord with Christian principles.
“We found that perhaps if there was a last-minute push, pastors and family members and churches could encourage those 32 million Christians we were calling to come out and vote,” he said.
Rasmussen added, “And maybe that might push another 5 million into the voting polls. And we need to be more engaged in those things.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
