President Donald Trump is on the fence about whether he will be accepted into heaven. At the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, he said that he may not “qualify,” before clarifying that he was joking and he “probably should make it.”
Despite this uncertainty about his spiritual future, Trump does understand that white evangelical Christians have always been key to his political success, supporting him by wide margins and helping to guide him to the White House twice. But that dependence is mutual: For a significant number of white evangelical Christians, support for Trump is not only a core part of their faith identity but is inextricably intertwined with their vision of what the country should be—and what steps should be taken to impose that vision.
New polling released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 67 percent of white evangelical Christians qualify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers, meaning that they believe the United States is a nation founded on Christian principles and should be governed as such. The new PRRI poll also found that Christian nationalist beliefs are strongly correlated with Republican Party identity and support for Trump.
“Christian nationalism, I think, absolutely has to be one of the primary lenses that we understand, really, the turmoil in our politics today,” said Robert Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute.
The measure of Christian nationalism was determined by respondents’ answers to five questions: whether they believe that “the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation,” that “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values,” that “if the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore,” that “being Christian is an important part of being truly American,” and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”
Race alone is not predictive of support for Christian nationalism: A majority of Hispanic Protestants also hold Christian nationalist beliefs, and far smaller percentages of white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, and Hispanic Catholics are adherents or sympathizers.
Christian nationalist ideology predominates in the South and Midwest. If you look at a map, the states that supported Trump in 2024 are also the states with the highest share of the population that identify as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers. States with a higher number of Republican legislators also correlate with higher levels of Christian nationalism.
“This relationship between, say, favorable views of Trump and Christian nationalist adherence are fairly linear,” Jones said. The graph showing the relationship between a state’s approval of Trump and its level of Christian nationalist beliefs is a “textbook example of a positive correlation in a scatterplot,” he continued.
As compared to “skeptics” or “rejecters” of Christian nationalism, adherents and sympathizers are also more likely to agree that “because things have gotten too far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Christian nationalist beliefs were also strongly correlated with support for authoritarianism. Seventy-three percent of adherents, and 68 percent of sympathizers, agreed with the statement that “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”
Americans who hold Christian nationalist beliefs are also more likely to be aligned with Trump’s positions on immigration, with the majority of adherents and sympathizers agreeing with the “great replacement” theory that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” and with the idea that undocumented immigrants should be deported without due process.
Trump has embraced Christian nationalism in his second term. Among other moves, he created a Religious Liberty Commission, which includes several conservative Christian faith leaders and commentators. In remarks to the commission in September, at the Museum of the Bible, Trump attacked the separation of church and state, and said, “As president, I will always defend our nation’s glorious heritage, and we will protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding.” Meanwhile, at right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk’s memorial service that same month, Vice President JD Vance encouraged Americans to “put Christ at the center of your life.” The month prior, the official Defense Department social media account posted a recruitment video overlaid with a Bible verse, in keeping with a trend of agency social media echoing white supremacist messaging.
“If you were only to look at those feeds and say, ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ you would see this portrayal of being white and being Christian as normative for being truly American,” said Jones.
Support for Trump among white evangelical Christians is not necessarily immutable. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that the share of white evangelicals who say they support all or most of Trump’s policies declined from 66 percent in February 2025 to 58 percent in January 2026. Only 40 percent said they are extremely or very confident that Trump acts ethically while in office, as compared to 55 percent who said the same last year.
The PRRI poll found that the majority of Americans do not hold Christian nationalist beliefs, with 37 percent qualifying as Christian nationalist skeptics and 27 percent as rejecters. These percentages have largely remained stable since PRRI first began asking questions on Christian nationalism in 2022. But Jones noted that Christian nationalism long predates Trump, stretching back to the foundation of the country. The notion of the United States as a “Christian nation” was used to help justify such policies as Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, as well as slavery and Jim Crow.
The debate over Christian nationalism will again be in the spotlight as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. In preparation for it, Trump has launched an “America Prays” initiative to exhort people to pray weekly for the nation. Come July, the anniversary will be characterized by dizzying levels of pomp and circumstance, with Trump aiming to reshape the very foundations of the nation’s capital for the festivities.
“The country will be reflecting collectively about our identity.… Who are we as a country? How were we founded? And who do we want to be in the future?” said Jones. “Whether we are a pluralistic democracy or whether we are a white Christian country—it’s going to be one of the key fault lines and debate points around the 250th anniversary.”
