Donald Trump, Evangelicals and the 2024 MAGA Coalition

On December 30, 2015, the evangelical Christian pastor Lance Wallnau took the over 1,500-mile trip from Dallas to Manhattan to meet with then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the tower that bears his name. Twice divorced and the former owner of the Miss Universe Organization, Trump did not extoll the pious values one might expect to ignite the support of an ardent evangelical. However, Wallnau left that day declaring Trump God’s choice for president.
“I was updating some random social-media activity when I ran across a simple PowerPoint showing Trump seated in the Oval Office with the words ‘Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States,'” Wallnau wrote in an October 5, 2016, article for Charisma magazine. “I heard the Spirit impress upon my mind, ‘Read Isaiah 45.’ To be honest, I didn’t recall what the chapter was about. I opened a Bible and began to read, ‘Thus saith the Lord to Cyrus whom I’ve anointed.'”
Wallnau went on to conclude that his experience signified God’s plan to anoint Trump like the Bible states God did with the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great, who liberated the Jewish people from Babylon and facilitated their return to the Land of Israel. As Wallnau reflected on Trump’s role in disrupting liberal culture and the institutional values of Washington, he began to see parallels between the non-evangelical Trump and the non-Jewish Cyrus. “It never occurred to me that God anoints secular leaders who are not part of the faith community,” he wrote.
Wallnau became one of the first evangelical ministers to prophesize Trump’s victory as well as one of the former president’s early supporters within the faith community. Ultimately though, back in 2015, Wallnau was an outlier, and Trump was a very different candidate than he is today. Newsweek has reached out to Wallnau for comment via email.
In November 2015, at the start of his campaign, Trump scored a favorability rating of just 39 percent among white evangelicals, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). However, as he’s moved further from New York reality star to conservative politician and champion of evangelical priorities, he’s attained an 81 percent approval from white evangelicals, per PRRI, in 2024.
However, since the historic 2016 election, Trump’s evangelical favor has coincided with Republicans underperforming in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. The path to the presidency runs through Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all of which rank among the bottom half of states in number of adults who identify as “highly religious,” according to the Pew Research Center in 2016, leaving Georgia and North Carolina as the only swing states in the top half. Given that dynamic, the 2024 election nears with lingering questions on whether Trump’s religious turn has alienated the constituency that delivered him the White House in 2016 or has consolidated the support among his MAGA based needed to win this year’s race.
“Americans of faith are proudly standing up for [former] President Trump because they know that only he will fight for religious freedom, protect women’s sports, and stand up against using their tax dollars towards abortions,” Trump Campaign National Faith Chairman Dr. Ben Carson said in a statement the campaign provided to Newsweek. “Our campaign will continue to engage with faith leaders and remind Believers that President Trump did more for the faith community than any president in history.”
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who, in part, overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022 and have offered other rulings declaring states must fund private religious schools if they fund any other private schools, and enshrining a public high school coach’s right to lead a prayer session on the 50-yard line after football games. During his presidency, he also appealed to evangelicals by banning transgender individuals from serving in the military and moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a decision some Christians viewed as providing greater stability to the Middle Eastern country, which must be fulfilled to bring about the Messianic Age.
The Trump campaign noted that the former president signed an executive order establishing the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative which supports faith-based organizations in attaining government grants. It also pointed out that Trump was the first president to attend the anti-abortion March for Life, and advocated for the Hyde Amendment, which ensures that no federal funding goes towards abortions and has called for it to be made permanent. These, among other actions, support the campaign’s belief that Trump will motivate record turnout among churchgoers in key battleground states. Yet, questions remain whether Christian turnout can replace any potential losses in socially liberal conservatives.
“While he came off early on as a sort of New York type Republican—liberal on social issues and more conservative on fiscal issues—you have to look at his record as president in terms of seeing where he shifted, and he clearly shifted on abortion,” Robert Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia University and president of the Academy of Political Science, told Newsweek. “When he ran for president, he tried to appeal to the gay and lesbian vote, but now, he’s basically been silent on that except now on transgender issues he’s taken a more conservative position.”
Back when he entered the 2016 race, Trump stood out among his GOP primary competitors due to his decades in the public eye and standing as the star of his own NBC reality show, The Apprentice. While he often commented on politics, Shawn Patterson, Jr., a research analyst at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, notes that Trump was largely an “apolitical figure” who had a wide array of celebrity relationships, donated to candidates of both parties, and boasted a career in New York real estate.
An August 2024 study titled, “The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media,” published in American Political Science Review by Patterson and Eunji Kim, a political scientist at Columbia University, analyzes the role Trump’s celebrity status played in propelling him to the top of the 2016 GOP primary. The report details the concept of parasocial ties, defined as one-sided psychological bonds viewers cognitively develop with media figures. Given that most Americans consume more entertainment content than news and generally accept apolitical messages over political ones, celebrities often build parasocial relationships with greater ease than politicians. In turn, avid viewers of The Apprentice were 28 percent more likely to support Trump, the study found. Nonetheless, he still faced challenges within the Republican Party.
Situated next to Texas Senator Ted Cruz on the January 2016 Republican presidential debate stage, Trump glared as Cruz pejoratively described New York values as being “socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage, focused on money and the media.” Trump defended his home state, saying conservatives, like the famous intellectual William F. Buckley, come out of Manhattan before praising the city’s response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and calling Cruz’ comment “insulting.”
However, Trump again found himself on the defensive in a February debate against Cruz, labeling him “the single biggest liar” after the Texas Republican referenced Trump’s past position of being “very pro-choice”—a statement he’d previously made. Cruz further rattled the New Yorker by questioning his prior backing of Planned Parenthood, which Trump doubled down, extolling the “wonderful” women’s health care services offered by the agency but rejecting its abortion services.
Trump’s socially liberal attitude compared to his GOP peers picked up further attention, as news outlets pointed out his relative support for gay rights. Notably, he broke with much of his party by saying in April of that year that trans individuals should “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate” when asked about North Carolina’s 2016 law blocking trans people from using public bathrooms aligning with their gender identity. He publicly went all-in on the position later that same month. After Cruz garnered backlash from trans former Olympian Caitlin Jenner—who had previously expressed support for the Texan—for supporting the bathroom bill, Trump invited her to Trump Tower to use the bathroom of her choice, which Jenner later publicized in a video.
Despite ultimately winning the 2016 primary, however, Trump’s ability to turn out Christian voters faced serious questions after Cruz won the Iowa caucuses and bested the New Yorker in the evangelical-heavy states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. The Patterson-Kim study found that while Trump’s celebrity status improved his performance in the GOP primary, it found no evidence that it helped him in the general election where party identity plays a key role. It’s after the primary that Trump made major moves to consolidate the party base.
In July 2016, he chose then-Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate in a move that his advisers and family members said would unite the party, according to reporting from The New York Times. Pence’s credibility among the Christian right, his hardline cultural views, and his demure personability ran contrary to Trump, the Times reported, which appeared to potentially factor into Trump’s hesitancy to select Pence. The Times reported that Trump fielded a last-ditch appeal to fellow blue state Republican Chris Christie, the then governor of New Jersey, whose social views aligned more closely with his own than Pence’s.
“He could have picked whoever he wanted as a vice president,” Patterson told Newsweek. “He selected Mike Pence in order to, at least from the outside it looks like, maintain that relationship with evangelical Christians who are a large part of the Republican base.”
Trump’s attitudes didn’t change immediately after that decision. He made a point in his 2016 Republican National Convention (RNC) speech of expressing his support for LGBTQ+ Americans after the Pulse nightclub shooting that resulted in the deaths of 49 people, saying, “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”
However, as time has passed, Trump’s focus on causes traditionally aligned with socially liberal positions has weaned as discussion of religion has grown. During his 2016 RNC speech, Trump said the word “God” once. During his 2020 speech, he used the word eight times, and in 2024 he said it nine times. Trump’s 2017 State of the Union address saw him mention “God” three times. In his 2018 address he said it four times, in 2019 five times, and in 2020 10 times.
Now, having secured the loyalty of the evangelical community, Trump has tacked back toward the center on the issue of reproductive rights. Additionally, he has moved closer to the middle on social issues, stating opposition to a national abortion ban and proclaiming himself the “father” of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which Democrats have attacked him on after Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos created through IVF can be considered children under state law. The GOP’s 2024 platform, which Trump was instrumental in crafting, removed some language defining marriage as exclusively between “one man and one woman.”
New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox, who previously served on Trump’s 2020’s campaign finance team, rejects the idea that Trump’s achievements for evangelical voters will dissuade moderates this election. After the last four years, he believes voters will view Trump as a solution to the everyday problems that have plagued their lives under the Biden administration.
“The abortion issue is about getting pro-choice voters to the polls presumably to vote the Democrat line,” Cox told Newsweek. “But most voters are more concerned about inflation, about immigration, about crime, especially crime that merges with illegal immigration, and about this vague uneasiness that we’re losing control in the world.”
He’s not the only New York Republican who feels that way. Former New York Republican Congressman John Faso, who’s served as an unofficial adviser to many New York GOP candidates as well as the state party, believes Republicans have attained an edge on LGBTQ+ issues and abortion rights by striking a position that aligns more closely with average American voters.
Faso believes the Democratic Party has focused too heavily on those topics, putting forth a platform that alienates moderates. He points to New York State Prop 1 on the 2024 ballot which, along with protecting other classes, enshrines in the state constitution protections based on “sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.”
“What the Democrats are pursuing is really an extreme agenda,” Faso told Newsweek. “It’s currently against the law for such discrimination in New York, but by elevating it to a constitutional right that conflicts with long standing provisions which protect parents and their rights to govern the healthcare decisions of their minor children.”
The New York City Bar states that Prop 1 “does not change existing law with respect to parental consent, or parents’ ability to be involved in decision-making about healthcare or medical procedures for their minor children, including gender-affirming care.”
This conflict, nonetheless, exemplifies the partisan dissent surrounding these issues. It seems that Faso and Cox are far from the only Republican that feel their party has attained an edge on these matters. During an October appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, said he wouldn’t be surprised if they won the “normal gay guy vote.”
Reaching out to “normal” Americans through podcasts has become a central part of Trump’s campaign, Patterson notes. Trump’s frequent appearances on celebrity podcasts could be an attempt at rebuilding some of the parasocial relationships he was able to curate as an entertainer and may have lost since 2015 when he held stronger ties with Hollywood.
Whether these actions represent an attempt at igniting the spark of 2016 remains to be seen. However, Patterson and Shapiro agree that Trump remains fixated on the issue that he made a focus well before his outreach to evangelicals, one that separated him from many of those socially liberal and economically conservative New York Republicans since the onset of his candidacy—the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration.
“When he ran, when it came to issues of race and its relation to immigration, he came out sort of toward the racist end of the scale, so to speak, and that’s not a New York liberal point of view,” Shapiro told Newsweek. “The issue has become more salient because of the objective evidence of the increasing number coming over the border.”
The U.S. experienced a historic wave of border crossings under the Biden administration. Earlier this year, the Senate attempted to address the issue through a bipartisan bill, yet that effort was ultimately derailed after Trump instructed Republicans to kill the effort so he could campaign on the issue. Polling indicates that action may have paid off for Trump who 51 percent of registered voters believe will handle immigration and border security better than Harris who garners 36 percent approval, according to an October 17 Marquette University Law School poll. The southern border appears to be one of the issues that Trump may have leveraged enough to win the support of swing voters come 2024 like he did in 2016. It also happens to be a topic that’s largely supported by his evangelical base.
“America’s border is more than just a line on a map—it’s the frontline of a battle for the soul of our nation,” Wallnau wrote in a February 21 Instagram post opposing the bipartisan border bill. “It’s time to tear down the facade to show you the real stakes of the border chaos. It’s not just about policy; it’s about our identity as Americans and the awakening we need to face the truths hidden by mainstream narratives.”
Editor’s Note: This story was written under advisement of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where the author is working toward his Master of Arts.
Update 4/11/2024 6 a.m. ET: This story was updated with additional information.