When the U.S. began its war on Iran on February 28, the prominent American evangelical pastor Franklin Graham praised President Donald Trump “for giving the Iranian people a chance to be free,” noting that “we haven’t had a president who had the guts to take them on.”
“Thank you Mr. President for standing up to bring this evil empire to an end,” Graham added.
There seemed to be no daylight between his particular Christian good-vs.-evil perception of this war and the Trump administration’s framing. Nor did the son of Billy Graham leave much doubt about his approval of the war.
Graham probably spoke for some of the 81 percent of white evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Majorities of other Christian denominations also voted for Trump, but none approach as high a number as white evangelicals.
But might this be diminishing?
According to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, conducted April 27 through April 30, Trump’s job approval rating with white evangelical Christians is at 64 percent, with 34 percent disapproving. Measuring those who approve against those who disapprove, this gives the president net approval rating of plus 30.
Newsweek reported Thursday that “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Plunges with White Evangelical Christians,” observing that these numbers represent “a notable decline from earlier in the year… The result is a 10-point net drop in approval among white evangelicals in just three months.” (Emphasis added.)
Obviously, the U.S. has been at war with Iran for most of this time, something that has been deeply unpopular with Americans and even reaching what the Washington Post called this month “Iraq- and Vietnam-era disapproval.”
Evangelicals have often been one of the most supportive of American wars among Christian blocs, and Franklin Graham has by no means been the only evangelical leader to apparently endorse and amplify the Iran war.
Still, the U.S. began the current war with Iran on February 28. In January, a Pew poll conducted January 20–26 showed evangelical support for Trump was still strong but even then trending down. That survey found that 69 percent of white evangelicals still approved of Trump, down from 78 percent in early 2025. Pew noted, “White evangelicals’ views of Trump are less positive than they were in the early days of his second term. The changes in their views mirror those seen among the U.S. public as a whole.”
Make no mistake: Trump’s white evangelical support remains strong but does seem to be going down in 2026.
Trump’s sharing of a controversial AI-generated image of himself portraying Jesus in April on his own Truth Social platform (that he eventually deleted) and some of the religious language that has been used by the administration to promote war has also not been received well by Christians. Polling done by the Canadian Angus Reid Institute found that 67 percent of Americans thought that Trump’s Jesus depiction post went too far, with 64 percent of Christians overall saying the same. This poll also found strong majorities of Americans overall either not believing or not being sure of Trump’s later claim that he thought he was just playing a doctor in that image.
When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said during a religious service at the Pentagon in March that there would be “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” an ABC News–Washington Post–Ipsos poll found that 69 percent disliked his remarks. That same poll showed a whopping 87 percent of disliking Trump’s faux messiah post.
One could couple these faith-related missteps by the administration with an increasingly unpopular war, all occurring in the same three month time period that Trump dropped by double digits in approval.
White evangelical support was also key for the last Republican president.
Twenty years prior, President George W. Bush received the votes of 78 percent of white evangelicals in the 2004 election. The greatest support for Bush’s Iraq War among Christians also came from white evangelicals, but eventually that began to slip too. Bush launched the Iraq war in 2003 with broad public support. But by 2007 a Pew survey conducted in August of that year “found that 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants surveyed felt the United States made the right decision in using force in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein, below the 71 percent in a previous poll in September.”
That was a 13-point drop with evangelicals in the span of a month, four years after the war began.
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This 10-point drop for Trump with evangelicals has occurred over just ten weeks of a war that was never popular with Americans to begin with.
White evangelicals have been indispensable to Trump’s MAGA coalition for the last decade. Time and events will determine whether this will remain the case indefinitely.
