(LifeSiteNews) – Almost half of Gen Z claims that the public association between Christianity and President Donald Trump makes them less likely to attend church, according to an alarming new survey.
Religion News Service reported that the Billy Graham Center Research Institute surveyed 2,365 adults between the ages of 18 and 28. It found that 48% of the respondents agreed with the statement, “Christians’ support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church,” while 52% disagreed.
As expected, the results differed substantially by party affiliation, with 67% of Democrats agreeing as opposed to a little over 21% of Republicans. Forty-two percent of Independents agreed. Also as expected, agreement was strongest among atheists and agnostics who already disregard church, but sizable portions of self-described Christians agreed as well: “44% of those who identified as a generic Christian, 42% of Catholics and 30% of Protestant young adults said they were turned off by the Christian-Trump alliance.”
Researchers Ryan Burge and Rick Richardson further qualified the findings by noting that the sentiment is strongest among self-described Christians who do not regularly attend anyway. Therefore, they say, “it’s not fair to use this data to make the claim that young Christians would be flocking back into the church if the church would drop politics.”
“However,” they added, “the other way to interpret this data is that about 40% of young adult Christians see the church’s association with Trump as an impediment to them becoming more involved with their faith community. According to this result, more daylight between the church and the GOP may lead to an uptick in attendance among young Christians at every level of the attendance continuum.”
The survey highlighted the still-contentious nature relationship between Trump and the so-called Religious Right. Trump’s ascent to the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 caused great anxiety among traditional conservatives due to the candidate’s salacious history as a liberal celebrity businessman. But Trump allayed those fears by committing to a pro-life policy agenda and conservative-approved judicial nominees that he upheld in his first term along with establishing a solid record in defense of religious liberty and against the extremes of the transgender agenda (while retaining his general liberalism on homosexuality and marriage). Religious support for Trump intensified after his three Supreme Court nominees went on to help overturn Roe v. Wade.
Such victories overshadowed lingering objections to Trump’s personal character but did not completely erase them, and during the 2024 election cycle, Trump reignited tensions by working to make the GOP “less radical” on life, from removing the party’s longstanding support for a national abortion ban to embracing embryo-destructive in vitro fertilization.
Upon returning to office, he maintained his positive religious freedom record and continued to work against taxpayer funding of abortion, though Planned Parenthood’s funding recently resumed after the White House and Congress failed to renew defunding by the July 4 deadline. His administration has also refused to enforce federal law against mailing abortion pills across state lines, though officials continue to tease that a policy change could follow a long-delayed review of abortion pill safety data.
Trump has repeatedly claimed credit for a nationwide religious revival, but a number of recent surveys suggest otherwise, giving cause for concern about the state of religiosity and corresponding moral questions in the minds of the general public.
Last November, Gallup released the results of a survey finding that 49% of Americans call religion an important part of their daily life, down 17 points from 66% in 2015. Moreover, that is a larger drop than all but 14 of the world’s 160-plus nations have allegedly registered since 2007. The month before, Axios reported that some 15,000 churches were projected to close by the end of 2025, noting a Pew survey that found a record number of Americans (29%) identifying as religiously unaffiliated.
Polling on contemporary issues shows mixed results on the public’s adoption of moral and social values commonly associated with religiosity. Over the past decade, Gallup, Pew, and Marist have all found attitudes on abortion trending in an overall more “pro-choice” direction (though pro-life voters are more strongly politically motivated than pro-abortion ones). Sixty-eight percent of Americans support recognizing same-sex “marriage,” according to Gallup (though an Economist/YouGov poll found a much lower 54% in October).
On the other hand, polls also show the transgender agenda remains a bridge too far. Sixty-six percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding for “gender transitions,” according to an April 2025 Cygnal poll, and Pew found that 66% support limiting athletic participation to actual members of a team’s designated sex, 56% support prohibiting “transition” procedures on minors, and 53% oppose forcing insurance companies to cover “transition” services. Another June 2025 Gallup poll found that not even half of Democrats support letting males compete in female sports. A month later, the same outfit found 54% of Americans go so far as to call attempting to “transition” genders “morally wrong.”