Gender, Christian Nationalism, and the 2024 US Presidential Election
The desire for a society ordered according to a traditional social hierarchy is part of the Christian nationalist project the Trump administration is committed to achieving.
We’re now over half a year beyond the 2024 US Presidential election. The new administration has moved quickly to enact various changes across all sectors of society. While it once distanced itself from Project 2025—an inherently Christian nationalist policy roadmap—many of the executive orders and appointments in Trump 2.0 align with the goals of the 900+ page document.
An independent tracker estimates the Trump administration has thus far achieved around 40 percent of the objectives outlined in Project 2025. In 2016 and then 2020 individuals who embraced Christian nationalism likewise pulled the lever for Donald Trump. Project 2025 in many ways appealed directly to these folks, ensuring that the policy positions they’ve long desired would be effectively instituted this time around.
So is Christian nationalism predictive of which states voted for Trump in 2024? Yes, yes it is.
Using PRRI’s state-level estimates for proportion of the population who at the very least are sympathetic to Christian nationalism, we see a strong positive correlation with the percent who voted for Trump in 2024. It’s important to unpack this relationship to see what else is going on.
There was one particular set of issues that animated much of the Trump campaign leading up to the 2024 election: gender and sexuality. Around 20 percent of the campaign’s ad budget—around $40 million—was spent on attacking Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s stance on gender and sexuality.
Internal polling by the Harris campaign suggested that these ads, punctuated with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” resonated with swing voters and likely motived Trump’s base to vote on election day.
This focus on gender and sexuality is nothing new for Trump. His 2016 and 2020 campaigns made similar overtures to the American public. Voting for him would ensure a return to a time marked by “traditional” understandings of gender and sexuality. A new article of mine provides a first-look at how Christian nationalism, gender and sexuality, and voting for Trump overlapped in the 2024 election.1
A desire for a society marked by traditionalist social hierarchies—primarily organized around gender and sexuality—is a foundational element of Christian nationalism. When I define Christian nationalism, I like to underscore that the “Christian” of Christian nationalism doesn’t only refer to orthodox Christian teachings like “Jesus is the Son of God,” or “Jesus was resurrected on the third day.”
It includes these things, certainly, but the “Christian” of Christian nationalism also brings with it what I like to call extra cultural baggage. So when proponents of Christian nationalism say they want to “make America Christian,” the “Christian” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It refers not only to Christian beliefs shared by the many different expressions of Christianity practiced around the country and world, but also to a particular set of social and cultural values.
This is why scholars define Christian nationalism as a cultural framework which desires to see a particular expression of Christianity fused with American civic life, and that all levels of government should defend and preserve this cultural framework as central to our national identity, civic participation, and social belonging.
“Traditional” understandings of gender and sexuality are one of the foundational cultural commitments of the particular expression of Christianity inherent to Christian nationalism. Prior academic work by myself and others demonstrates over and over that Christian nationalism is strongly associated with more traditional views of gender roles (men lead, women submit), sexuality (marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples), and families committed to procreation (families = mom, dad, biological kids).
When I use the same PRRI data of state-level estimates of Christian nationalism, we can see that there is a strong correlation with the proportion of each state who who oppose LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws (chart below), who oppose same-sex marriage, and who support religiously based refusals to serve lesbian or gay people.2
Again, this underscores how “traditional” understandings of gender and sexuality are a foundational cultural value of Christian nationalism.
And when we look at the percent of each state that voted for Trump in 2024, we see strong correlations with the proportion of the population who oppose LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws (chart below), who oppose same-sex marriage, and who support religiously based refusals to serve lesbian or gay people.3
These three visualizations show 1) Christian nationalism is strongly correlated with each state’s support for Trump, 2) Opposition to LGBTQ issues is strongly correlated with Christian nationalism, and 3) Opposition to LBGTQ issues is strongly correlated with each state’s support for Trump.
This desire for traditionalist social hierarchies—a foundational cultural value of Christian nationalism—is one reason why states with more citizens who are at least sympathetic to Christian nationalism overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2024.
What does this all mean? As I wrote here,
“Trump and his campaign made the case that he alone could protect the Christian identity of the United States and that Harris’ embrace of nontraditional gender and sexuality conceptions was a threat to the nation. The above analysis of data at the state level demonstrates that a traditionalist social ethic, Christian nationalism, and support for Trump in the 2024 presidential election are indeed closely intertwined.”
The Trump administration has already made good on this promise of limiting the participation of gender and sexual minorities in civic life. For instance, these are just a few of Project 2025’s goals around gender and sexuality that are already completed: 1) transgender soldiers are barred from serving in the US military, 2) the White House removed the words "sexual orientation and gender identity" and "gender equality", among others, from every federal rule, 3) the Department of Health and Human services reversed prohibitions on healthcare discrimination based on gender identity, and 4) the CDC ended data collection on gender identity.
As with the 2024 election, the coming months and years will be about whether this is a country by and for all people or by and for a particular people—those who embrace Christian nationalism and its unwavering commitment to a traditionalist social hierarchy.
Be sure to check out the whole Spring 2025 issue. It contains a slew of great articles on the 2024 election and Christian nationalism.
The charts visualizing the percent at least sympathetic to Christian nationalism and the percent of those who oppose same-sex marriage or who support religiously based refusals to serve lesbian or gay people are very similar to the one shown here. However, you can find visualizations of these other two measures in this article which is the basis for this post.
Like the above footnote, the charts visualizing the percent voting for Trump in 2024 and the percent of those who oppose same-sex marriage or who support religiously based refusals to serve lesbian or gay people are very similar to the one shown here. However, you can find visualizations of these other two measures in this article which is the basis for this post.
I should be depressed, but I was happy to see that only 20ish percent of Ohioans oppose LGBTQ rights. I thought it was higher.