Why a Less Christian America Is Producing More Christian Politics?

Ten days after Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, he was baptized while in office. The 62-year-old president had never formally joined a church. Billy Graham, the young evangelist who was rapidly becoming America’s most famous preacher, had encouraged him to do so. Soon Eisenhower was beginning Cabinet meetings with prayer, helping establish the National Prayer Breakfast and supporting the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. “In God We Trust” became the country’s official motto in 1956. Graham, meanwhile, became something close to a national chaplain, counseling presidents of both parties.

This was not yet what we now call the religious right. Religion was powerful enough that it did not have to present itself primarily as a faction. Church membership was soaring, from 49 percent of Americans in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960. Christianity provided much of the common vocabulary through which Americans talked about morality, communism, family and national purpose. The important political religious language of the Eisenhower era was closer to “America is a religious nation.”

In 2007, 78 percent of American adults still identified as Christian. By 2023-24, the number had fallen to 62 percent. The religiously unaffiliated had nearly doubled, from 16 to 29 percent. Protestantism, once the unquestioned religious center of American culture, fell from 51 percent of the population to 40 percent. The decline seems to have stabilized somewhat in the past few years, but the long-term transformation is unmistakable.

Yet Christianity’s political presence has hardly disappeared. White evangelical Protestants gave Donald Trump 81 percent of their votes in 2024. Christians make up about 62 percent of the public but 87 percent of Congress. The religiously unaffiliated constitute nearly three in ten Americans but less than 1 percent of lawmakers. And in 2026, 37 percent of Americans say religion is gaining influence in American life, up from just 18 percent two years earlier.

Religion is conclusively becoming weaker as a social institution while becoming stronger as a political identity. The transformation can almost be seen in the career of one preacher. In 1965, Jerry Falwell, then a fundamentalist Baptist pastor in Lynchburg, Virginia, delivered a sermon called “Ministers and Marchers.” He argued that ministers had no business trying to remake the political order. Their task was to preach the Gospel and save souls. Falwell was not unusual. Large sections of conservative evangelicalism had spent decades treating politics as worldly, compromising and secondary to the Christian mission.

Fourteen years later, Falwell helped create the Moral Majority. The same preacher who had warned ministers away from politics was suddenly touring the country telling Christians to organize politically. Within a year, the Moral Majority had operations in 47 states and ambitions to mobilize millions of previously disengaged evangelical voters. Falwell eventually summarized his new priorities as “convert people to Christ, baptize them, and register them to vote.”

American Christianity had begun to lose cultural taken-for-grantedness. The sexual revolution, the removal of compulsory prayer from public schools, feminism, abortion, gay rights and a growing federal role in enforcing new social norms convinced many conservative Christians that institutions they had once assumed reflected their morality were turning against it.

The abortion issue illustrates how political identities have been in production since seventies. In the 1970s, abortion was still regarded by many evangelicals largely as a Catholic concern. The theologian Francis Schaeffer and the surgeon C. Everett Koop changed that with their film project Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which urged evangelicals to regard abortion as part of a much larger struggle over the sanctity of human life and pushed Christians toward political action. Schaeffer explicitly argued that entering politics had become a Christian obligation.

By the end of the decade, scattered moral anxieties were being assembled into a political identity. Jimmy Carter was arguably the most openly evangelical president America had elected in generations. He taught Sunday school and spoke naturally about being “born again.” His candidacy helped make evangelical Christianity so nationally visible that Newsweek famously called 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical.”

Four years later, conservative evangelicals helped throw him out of office. Their preferred candidate was Ronald Reagan, who was considerably less observant and whose personal religious biography was far less conventionally evangelical than Carter’s. Yet when Reagan addressed thousands of Christian conservatives in Dallas during the 1980 campaign, he said that he knew the gathering could not endorse him, he said, but “I endorse you.”

Reagan’s sentence represented a profound change in American politics, whereas Christian conservatives alienation and endorsement turned into the kernel of political fight. That distinction explains much of the otherwise puzzling relationship between Donald Trump and conservative Christianity four decades later.

If voting were principally a referendum on personal Christian virtue, Trump’s dominance among White evangelicals would indeed be difficult to explain. But contemporary religious politics increasingly operates through logic of alienation. Many conservative Christians judge political leaders by whether they will protect religious schools, appoint favorable judges, restrict abortion, resist progressive policies on gender and sexuality, defend religious exemptions and restore what they believe to be Christianity’s legitimate place in public life.

Secularization has actually intensified religious politics making Trump the defender of Christians. When Christianity was overwhelmingly dominant, Christians could often take their cultural environment for granted. The public school Christmas concert, the broadly Christian language of presidents, and biblical references in public life simply felt normal. But once that normality disappeared, Christianity itself became more visible as an anxious identity.

There is a general political principle here. Groups do not always mobilize most intensely at the height of their power. They often mobilize when they sense that power slipping away. National identity can become more militant when national decline is perceived. Religion can behave in much the same way.

Seventeen percent of Americans currently support formally declaring Christianity the country’s official religion, while 79 percent still say churches should not endorse candidates. The American public remains deeply ambivalent about mixing ecclesiastical and political authority. Black Protestantism, progressive Catholicism, Jewish religious traditions and other communities have generated very different political conclusions from faith.

Race and historical experience profoundly shape what religion means politically. Among White conservative Christians, something historically significant has happened. Trump has transformed it into something closer to a politics of cultural restoration. The movement, in other words, has been from religion as consensus to religion as constituency.

That is why counting churchgoers alone can mislead us about the future of American religion. ChrisYounger Americans may continue abandoning churches, but religious conflict may become fiercer nevertheless. The great religious story of twenty-first-century America may therefore be the transformation of Christianity from the country’s largely invisible cultural background into an increasingly explicit political identity fighting to determine what comes after its dominance.