Christian Nationalists Are All in on Trump—and Vice Versa

A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute shows how support for the president correlates significantly with Christian nationalist views.

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.........

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