Has Trump protected religion — or just politicized it?

While headlines have long pointed to a decline in the number of Americans identifying as religious, America is still a relatively religious place compared to other advanced economies, according to 2025 Gallup findings. About 49 percent of US adults say religion is an important part of their daily life — down from 66 percent a decade earlier — compared to a median of 36 percent of adults in other advanced economies.

But it was the president’s claim about his huge impact on religion that I found most interesting.

“I’ve done more for religion than any other president,” Trump boasted.

That might be true — but perhaps not in the ways the president means. There’s an argument to be made that Trump is one of the most prominent faces of Christianity — certainly conservative Christianity — in the United States, if not the world. Trump might view that as a good thing, but he should consider how others view the mixing of religion and politics in the Trump era.

▪ During Trump’s first term, nearly 4 in 10 Americans said churches and other houses of worship have too much influence on politics, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

▪ Roughly half of US adults say conservative Christians have gone too far in trying to push their religious values in the government and public schools, according to a 2024 Pew survey.

▪ While the percentage of people under 30 who think religion’s influence on society is growing, less than half of them think it’s a good thing, according to a 2025 Pew survey.

Trump’s regular politicizing of faith — including arresting journalists covering a protest at a church, self-congratulatory claims of “bringing back God” at last month’s March for Life, and bombing African communities to “protect Christians” — might win him points with some of his supporters. But they are also examples of what millions of Americans, especially young people, can point to as reasons they have turned away from religion.

Despite its divisive history, religion has the opportunity to unite people from different backgrounds around a set of beliefs. But in some ways, faith has become factious as it has been politicized under the Trump presidency. The president used the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual Washington gathering that historically has brought people of various faiths together regardless of their politics, as a chance to call the faithfulness of his political opponents into question.

“I don’t know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat,” the president said. “I really don’t. And I know we have some here today, and I don’t know why they’re here, because they certainly don’t give us their vote. … They cheat.”

While continuing to make false accusations about the 2020 presidential election, Trump questioning the rationale behind Democrats gathering in prayer with their fellow Americans simply because they didn’t vote for him is dismaying.

Full disclosure, I am agnostic. But I was raised in a Christian home, am named after a Baptist pastor, and personally identified as a Christian as recently as Trump’s first term — which included regularly attending an evangelical church. So my point of view is not one of an outsider, but of one who has observed major cultural shifts in religion in America over the past decade.

Historically, a core practice of evangelicals has been to share the gospel of Jesus Christ not just in word but by deeds. Christian supporters of the president might affirm his language or support his position as an aggressive culture warrior to be important in a society where many Christians feel persecuted. But it’s difficult to imagine that any person outside the MAGA movement left the prayer breakfast longing to know more about the Jesus Trump and his supporters profess to follow.

However, it is possible that the prayer offered by Representative Jonathan Jackson, a Democrat from Illinois and son of civil rights activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson, stirred up interest in the Christian faith.

“[We] remind him that we are all Americans, all made in the image of God, and that none of us are free unless all of us have our freedoms protected,” Jackson said of the president, who stood behind him.

In an increasingly diversifying country, if Christians long to see their faith adopted by the next generation of Americans, becoming less political, not more, is the way forward. That doesn’t necessarily mean discussing policy less, but it does mean creating distance from leaders and parties who seek to use their faith primarily as a weapon.