Roe gone, Trump now option for evangelicals
GOP rivals court influential pastors as priorities shift
On a recent Sunday morning at Elmbrook Church, a nondenominational evangelical megachurch in Brookfield, Wisconsin, Jerry Wilson considered the far-off matter of his vote in 2024.
“It’s going to be a Republican,” he said, “but I don’t know who.”
In 2016 and 2020, he had voted for former President Donald Trump. “He did accomplish a lot for Christians, for evangelicals,” Wilson, 64, said. But “he’s got a lot of negative attributes, and they make you pause and think, you know? I’d like to see what the other candidates have to offer.”
White evangelical voters were central to Trump’s first election, and he remains overwhelmingly popular among them. But a Monmouth University poll in late January and early February found Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who has not declared his candidacy for president but appears to be Trump’s most formidable early rival, leading Trump by 7 percentage points among self-identified evangelical Republican voters in a headto-head contest.
It was an early sign that as he makes a bid for a return to office, Trump must reckon with a base that has changed since his election in 2016 — and because of it.
Some of the changes clearly benefit Trump, but others may have weakened his hold on evangelical voters and the prominent evangelical pastors who are often seen as power brokers in Republican politics.
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June, which overturned the constitutional
right to an abortion, has shifted much of the fight to further roll back abortion rights — the nearly singular political aim of conservative evangelicals for more than four decades — to the state level. Last year, Trump disparaged Republican candidates for focusing too much on the “abortion issue,” a statement that was viewed as a betrayal by some evangelicals on the right and an invitation to seek other options.
Conservative evangelical politics have both expanded and moved sharply rightward, animated by a new slate of issues like opposition to race and history curricula in schools and LGBTQ rights and shaped by the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which some pastors rallied against as a grave affront to religious freedom. These are areas where DeSantis has aggressively staked his claim.
“It is a different landscape,” said John Fea, a historian at Messiah University
and author of “Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.”
This year, likely Trump rivals have sought and received the imprimatur of several pastors aligned with Trump in previous elections.
When Nikki Haley, Trump’s U.N. ambassador and the former governor of South Carolina, formally introduced her own candidacy in February, she did so alongside televangelist John Hagee, who expressed his support for Trump in 2016.
In January, when former Vice President Mike Pence offered his most direct comments to date about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, he did so at the First Baptist Dallas megachurch, in an onstage conversation with its pastor, Robert Jeffress, one of the country’s most influential evangelical leaders and a staunch ally of Trump throughout his presidency.
“I thank God for President Trump because it’s because of his judicial appointments that Roe v. Wade was overturned,”
said Tom Ascol, the senior pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida. He said he would support him again in a head-to-head contest with President Joe Biden. But the Republican presidential primary is another matter.
Ascol said he was looking for “a person of principle and a person of courage.” Trump, he said, is “courageous and unprincipled,” citing his recent statements on abortion. In January, Ascol gave the opening prayer at DeSantis’ inauguration for his second term as governor.
He has yet to make an endorsement in the presidential race, however. Neither has Hagee, nor Jeffress.
The Monmouth poll, which was taken before Haley officially entered the race, found Pence and Haley commanding support in the single digits among self-identified evangelical Republican voters. But DeSantis’ strong showing, with favorable ratings comparable to Trump’s, suggested that the former president can’t take the constituency’s primary support for granted.
In 2016, Trump reordered the landscape of evangelical politics, drawing the support of white evangelical voters away from candidates with deeper evangelical bona fides and away from the warnings of church leaders, many of whom were initially wary of Trump. As president, he reordered it again by delivering on his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Michele Margolis, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies religion and politics, argues that Trump’s embrace of evangelicals as a constituency has even changed the way Americans use the label “evangelical,” for themselves and others.
“This term has become a political term,” she said. “It signals something about whether you’re a Trump supporter or not.”
Mark Burns, a pastor from Easley, South Carolina, who served as a campaign surrogate for Trump in 2016 and has endorsed his 2024 run, said Trump’s presidency had changed evangelical voters’ expectations of what a president should deliver for them.
“There’s so many Christian presidents who sound like Christians, who act like Christians, who talk like Christians, who look like good Christians — but they don’t create Christian policies,” he said. “Donald J. Trump is not that person.”
When he first sought the Republican nomination seven years ago, Trump offered conservative evangelicals a bluntly transactional proposition: Vote for him, and he would nominate Supreme Court justices who would end legal abortion.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that “President Trump’s unmatched record speaks for itself,” noting his moves to restrict abortion beyond overturning Roe v. Wade, including blocking federal funding for Planned Parenthood and withholding U.S. government support from health organizations abroad that discuss abortion or family planning.
“There has been no bigger advocate for the movement than President Trump,” he said.
But Fea argues that Trump’s delivery on his big promise to conservative evangelicals had, paradoxically, freed conservative church leaders from their alliance of convenience with the former president.
“They tolerated a lot from Trump, and they refused to question him because they knew there were bigger issues at stake,” he said. “But now the slate has been wiped clean, and you have to rethink the question of, is Trump worth it? Or has he done what we needed him to do?”