In the months leading up to the election, Donald Trump ramped up his warnings that Christian supporters would “suffer greatly” if he lost.
“If Kamala Harris gets four more years, the radical left is not going to leave Christians alone … Your religious liberty will be gone,” he said. He claimed that he, in contrast, embraced believers and would protect their interests as president.
President-elect Trump, according to the Associated Press, has won the White House. He won the election in part by courting conservative religious communities — and appealing to their anxieties — on the campaign trail. His policy agenda will likely be shaped by these groups, influencing the White House on a range of issues from education to reproductive rights.
Culture war policies
The president-elect’s policy proposals that directly relate to religion aim to protect religious Americans, specifically Christians, from discrimination. While Christians still make up a majority of the U.S. population and are overrepresented in Congress, recent years have seen culture-war clashes that highlight a growing sense among some believers that Christian values are under attack.
According to the Republican Party platform, Trump would support the creation of a “Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America.”
This promise of protection extends to the sphere of public education, which Trump has characterized as a site of anti-Christian sentiment.
“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways, it is resembling an established new religion,” he said in a campaign video. “For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue potential violations of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”
Trump has framed his education agenda as a matter of “parental rights” — a concept which has a deep history among conservative evangelicals. Since the Supreme Court ruled that school-facilitated prayer was unconstitutional in the 1960s, some Christian parents fought to have more autonomy over their children’s education, including by homeschooling. These efforts laid the groundwork for the current parental rights movement, according to the Washington Post.
For his part, Trump has proposed the direct election of school principals by parents and universal school choice. He has also promised that on his first day in office he would sign an executive order cutting federal funding from schools promoting “transgender insanity,” along with critical race theory and “any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.”
Abortion
Restricting or eliminating abortion access has been a central goal of conservative evangelicals and Catholics for decades. Trump has been an ally to the anti-abortion movement since his election in 2016 — but it’s unclear how concrete his support will be in his second term.
During his first term, Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, all of whom helped form the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, dismantling the legal basis for the right to abortion nationally. While Trump and his team touted these anti-abortion bona fides during the campaign, the president-elect has said he would veto a national abortion ban, preferring to leave the decision up to the states.
This approach has alarmed anti-abortion groups, who hope Trump will further restrict abortion access in his second term, according to Politico.
It’s likely Trump will face pressure from conservative evangelicals and Catholics on the issue. Last year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops endorsed a Senate plan to federally ban abortions after 15 weeks, according to the National Catholic Register. The plan, which has not been passed, would exceed Trump’s campaign promises.
The president-elect’s support for in vitro fertilization access also differs from the position of the Catholic Church, which holds that the practice is immoral.
Immigration
If implemented, Trump’s immigration policies and the responses to them may also be shaped by religious values and identity.
The first items on Trump’s agenda are to “seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” According to the GOP platform, this would involve increasing penalties for illegal entry and potentially moving troops to the southern border.
During the deportation surges of Trump’s first term, some congregations, called sanctuary churches, provided shelter to those facing deportation. Future mass deportations could put immigration officials and the Trump administration into conflict with churches like these, if they take similar steps again.
The GOP platform also proposes strict vetting for legal immigrants to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America,” along with “jihadists and jihadist sympathizers.” It’s still unclear how this faith-related ideological vetting would be implemented, but the proposal underscores the Trump administration’s commitment to providing special protection for U.S. Christians.
The president-elect has also promised to bring back the ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries that faced legal challenges during his first term.
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