The Christian right suffered a crushing defeat in last week’s midterm elections, plunging the movement into frustration and uncertainty as it reels from its biggest losses since reaching new levels of power with President Trump.
Over the last decade, conservative Christians have hitched their ambitions to Mr. Trump’s, defending his leadership to advance their own goals, particularly around abortion. His causes in turn became theirs as they wove themselves into the MAGA coalition and infused its politics into the American church.
Now, his losses are theirs, too. The election results suggest that the movement’s grip inside Mr. Trump’s party has weakened, and religious conservatives are scrambling to regroup ahead of the 2028 presidential contest.
“What does the Christian right have today?” said Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, a political advocacy group that has worked to defeat transgender rights measures. “We could have been actually passing laws that would have protected our kids, but instead we got the Iran war.”
Christian activists like Mr. Schilling said the Trump administration gave them few successes over the past two years beyond some executive orders, including one establishing the White House Faith Office and another on “anti-Christian bias.”
“There’s no signature achievement. There’s nothing,” Mr. Schilling said. “We squandered an opportunity.”
Already, the Christian right is pivoting to emphasize affordability as essential to its vision for the American family.
It is a recognition that the movement is competing with an energized religious left that helped win elections last week with a moral argument — one that emphasized protesting ICE and restoring cuts to the social safety net that Republicans pushed through last year as part of Mr. Trump’s domestic policy law.
Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who has championed what he has referred to as Christian nationalism, repeatedly mentioned needing to care for the poor in an interview on Thursday.
“Making sure people can afford to have a child or get married or buy a home or pay for their health care — these are things Christians care about. They are rooted in the Gospel,” he said.
He blamed low turnout by conservative Christian voters for the sweeping losses, and he urged Republicans to take more seriously the concerns of evangelical and Catholic voters who oppose abortion. He cited as an example the fact that Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions, still receives federal funding.
“The party’s focus has really got to change,” he said.
The election losses stung not only because of their scale, but also because many came in states where the Christian right had long been a political force. From Iowa to Kansas to South Carolina, causes that had previously mobilized the movement’s voter turnout machine, like opposition to abortion and support for Israel, played a minimal role as voters rebelled against rising costs and the war with Iran.
In Georgia, a hotbed of evangelical organizing, Democrats gained control of the governor’s office and the state House of Representatives. Even in Mississippi, ground zero in the legal fight that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned, a Democrat who supports reproductive rights unseated one of the anti-abortion coalition’s longtime advocates in the Senate.
The religious symbolism was equally powerful, as a large cohort of voters played a notable role in rejecting Mr. Trump’s agenda. The religious makeup of the next Congress is shifting to include eight Democrats who are Muslim and nine who are Christian pastors and seminarians.
An analysis from a new progressive political group, Evangelicals for A Better Future, found that the more Christian a county was, the more Democratic it voted in 2026 compared with 2024. Many of the counties with the most significant shifts have large Latino populations.
Most pointedly, Texas, the state whose Republican leaders pushed perhaps the most aggressive right-wing Christian agenda in the country, elected a Democratic senator, James Talarico, who motivated voters in part with his own progressive Christianity.
Conservative Christians earned a few victories. Voters in four states chose to bar transgender athletes from competing on female sports teams. In Idaho, where a total abortion ban is in effect, voters rejected a measure to restore abortion rights until fetal viability, the standard set in Roe. But in Virginia and Nevada, voters chose to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions.
Mr. Trump was elected two years ago with what many of his supporters saw as a divine mandate, and he promised to give Christians enhanced access to the White House. That resulted in photo ops and prayer services in the West Wing, but not in desired policy shifts, such as a ban on abortion medications.
In recent months, American adults lost significant confidence in President Trump’s ability to make good decisions about the economy, immigration and foreign policy, according to the Pew Research Center; that drop applied even among white evangelicals, long among Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters.
By October, while they remained the only religious group largely pleased with Mr. Trump’s performance, even their approval had dropped to 58 percent from 78 percent.
“If you don’t go to ask for everyone’s vote, you are not going to get everyone’s vote,” said Kristan Hawkins, founder and president of Students for Life, an anti-abortion group.
At the same time, the Christian right lost figureheads old and new, with late Senator Lindsey Graham’s unexpected death in July and Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year.
Mr. Kirk, an evangelical Christian, inspired young conservative voters and managed to tie together the Trump coalition’s social and economic ambitions. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, he spoke about the skyrocketing price of owning a home and said young people couldn’t afford to have children. The American dream was a reality only for the rich, Mr. Kirk said, but Mr. Trump was on a mission to rescue them.
“Republicans failed to address that,” Ms. Hawkins said, signaling the potential focus of conservative Christian activists moving forward.
“Had Charlie not been assassinated, do I think things probably would have gone differently?” she asked of the midterm election results. “Yeah, I do.”
The movement’s leaders are looking for champions to take up the mantle. Vice President JD Vance, a Roman Catholic long seen as a front-runner to succeed Mr. Trump, has tried to distance himself from the president’s decisions on the Iran war.
Senator Hawley proposed an hour of fasting and prayer in December.
“For Christians who are dismayed as I am by the results of this election, right now is the time to pray and to ask yourself, ‘What am I supposed to do for the future of the country?’” he said. “That’s what I’m doing right now.”
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, founded in 2019 to advance conservative Christian values and policy among elected officials, held its own three-day fast this week.
Jason Rapert, the group’s president, sees both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “bright shining stars.”
Mr. Rapert dismissed the idea that American voters had rejected the goal of building a Christian country, summing up the losses as a failure to get out the conservative Christian vote. Already, his group is mobilizing followers against a new set of political targets.
He posted a 16-page letter on the group’s website, nine pages of which were devoted to “The Danger of Islam,” including an extensive list of the names of newly elected Muslim Americans around the country.
But the Christian right now faces an awakened religious opposition that is unwilling to tolerate Mr. Trump’s agenda and anti-Islamic rhetoric.
Two years ago it would have been almost impossible to imagine last Tuesday’s results, said Bishop Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, who pleaded with Mr. Trump to “have mercy” the day after his inauguration last January.
This week she was cautiously optimistic.
“I’m grateful that Christians and other people of many faiths came together to fundamentally change the trajectory of our country’s future,” she said.
Still, she added, “We have a lot of work to do.”
