Why Trump-supporting Christians are driving Gen Z away from church

In February 2020, I accepted a job with Young Life, a parachurch ministry focused on building friendships with unchurched young people to share the gospel. I volunteered with the organisation in college and saw multiple friends become Christians through its relational approach.

A few months later, as Covid-19 swept through the world, I had a conversation with my mother about Donald Trump. As social movements gained prominence during the pandemic, we spoke alot about politics and faith.

She helped me understand why Christians in her generation had voted for Donald Trump - to secure conservative Supreme Court justices, protect religious liberties and push back against progressive culture.

I said I feared that the American evangelical church’s support of Donald Trump - not primarily his policies, but his character - would create so much cognitive dissonance for unchurched young people that they would be unwilling to join faith communities.

I added that I hoped to be wrong, but the high schoolers I knew seemed to indicate this. Six years later, as they’ve grown up, the data has seemingly proved my hypothesis.

A losing witness

A recent survey revealed that nearly half of Gen Z adults say Christians’ support for Donald Trump makes them less likely to attend church — a figure that jumps to 65% among agnostics and 72% among atheists. 

While it may be easy to dismiss this as young people tending to be more progressive and therefore less religious, that argument largely misses the stories beneath the story. The issue driving young people away from the Church is not just an issue of politics, but an issue of affection. 

At a Young Life summer camp, I sat down with a 16-year-old boy named Reid, who was not raised in church. I asked him what he thought about Jesus. He  brought up a TikTok video he’s seen, that claimed you couldn’t follow Jesus and vote for a Democrat. Nervous and sincere, he asked: “Kenny, do you think I can follow Jesus and not like Trump?” 

It is a story that played out in conversation after conversation with my unchurched high school friends. Whenever we would read the Bible together, they would be shocked to learn that Jesus cared for immigrants, outcasts, the poor and the marginalised. For a myriad of reasons, their Christian friends who went to church really loved Trump, and he seemed to be against many of the things that Jesus was for. It confused them greatly.  

How can Christians celebrate a saviour who died for His enemies while simultaneously applauding a leader who degrades his? 

The cognitive dissonance has less to do with Republican policy and more to do with the stark contrast between the kinds of person that Jesus and Trump call us to be. It is more to do with posture.  

Much of American evangelicalism has seemingly endorsed Trump’s vision of how to treat political enemies over Jesus’ command to love them. But the tragedy of this posture is that the enemies targeted by culture-war rhetoric are not abstract political entities. They are Gen Z: the multi-racial kid, the child of immigrants, the LGBTQ+ teenager.

When the Church cheers for the public degradation of its ‘opponents,’ these same young people think: Oh, I am the enemy they’re talking about. 

Could it be that, just like Reid reacting to that TikTok video, spiritually interested Gen Z interprets this anger as directed at them? And if God’s people are angry at them, surely God must be, too. If they are the enemy of the Church, surely they must not be a friend of God, either. They naturally conclude they have no seat at the table of Jesus. 

Love thy neighbour, hate thy enemy

If the American Church had supported the policy but remained willing to criticise Trump when his behaviour defied Christ’s teachings, I suspect these stats would look different. The core issue isn’t that Christians vote conservative; it’s that the Church has stopped holding its preferred political leaders to a Christlike standard. 

When Trump calls his opponents “vermin,” “maniacs,” or “low-IQ,” and the Church cheers that language on, unchurched young people notice. Jesus commanded His followers to love their enemies, pray for those who persecute them, and allow themselves to be nailed to a cross for the people who hated them. How can Christians celebrate a saviour who died for His enemies while simultaneously applauding a leader who degrades his? 

Nowhere was this contrast clearer than at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. His widow, Erika Kirk, forgave the man accused of killing her husband, saying, “The answer to hate is not hate… The answer, we know from the gospel, is love… love for our enemies”. But moments later, Donald Trump pushed back, saying, “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.” 

That afternoon, Gen Z was given a clear choice between two postures: a widow embodying the grace of Jesus, and a political leader explicitly rejecting forgiveness in favour of hatred. 

The issue driving young people away from the Church is not just an issue of politics, but an issue of affection

To be clear, Jesus expressed fierce anger — calling religious hypocrites “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27) and a ”brood of vipers” (Matthew 12:34). The difference is who the anger was directed towards and what triggered it. His indignation was directed at religious leaders who exploited power and kept outsiders from being able to worship God.

Today, the anger of the Church and its preferred politicians is often directed towards those who do not pledge loyalty to the agenda, painting progressives as the enemy to both Church and country.   

When anger replaces grace, the church’s front door locks from the inside. This may win short-term political victories that may benefit the American Church, but at the cost of the moral authority needed to invite the next generation to know Jesus.