Religion News Service spoke to self-identified evangelicals in their 20s and early 30s about how their faith is informing their potential pick for president.
By Kathryn Post
(RNS) — Since Donald Trump secured 80 – 81% of the white evangelical vote in 2016, strategists have known better than to discount religion as a factor in national elections. But while the 2020 faith vote largely fell along similar lines, it’s not yet clear how the recent flip on the Democratic ticket will impact younger generations’ political leanings.
A 2022 survey of young people by nonprofit Neighborly Faith found that evangelical youth were much more likely to trust Donald Trump (40%) than Joe Biden (16%). Still, some surveys — including a 2021 poll from Barna Group and other scholars — indicate that self-identified evangelicals between the ages of 18 to 29 share a wide range of beliefs and policy preferences and are more likely than older evangelicals to support issues like fighting climate change. But despite the apparent diversification of younger evangelicals’ views, researcher Ryan Burge argues in his 2022 book that it would be a mistake to assume they are more moderate than earlier generations.
To better understand their thoughts on the 2024 election, Religion News Service spoke to several evangelicals in their 20s and early 30s about how their faith shapes their political values and potential pick for president. While they prioritized a range of policy issues — from immigration to abortion and health care to climate change — these young adults routinely called for candidates to display authenticity, integrity and dialogue and repeatedly insisted that young evangelicals, as a group, are not a monolith.
Kyle Chu, 22, Wellsville, Pennsylvania
Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently living in Eastern Pennsylvania, recent college graduate Kyle Chu is studying for the LSAT, does jiu-jitsu — and is not thrilled by either presidential candidate.
“A lot of politicians’ speech is extreme, radical,” he said. “Whereas these problems are very complex.”
For most of his life, Chu attended a nondenominational church that was culturally conservative but didn’t discuss politics head-on. While at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Chu realized political issues aren’t always straightforward and began to view living sustainably in hopes of delaying climate change as a matter of faith.
“It’s hypocritical that we call ourselves a majority Christian society, but we don’t seem concerned about how our individual actions aggregated together have an immense effect on the world and other communities,” he said.
This spring, Chu worked on a campaign for House of Representatives hopeful Janelle Stelson, a Democrat. But his experience on the other side of the aisle left him with the sense that too many politicians prioritize attacking their opponents over proposing actionable solutions.
He wants a candidate with high integrity, who acknowledges the nuance of political issues and is willing to dialogue with people of all views. Right now, he’d vote for Harris if forced to choose, but he doesn’t think either candidate fits the bill.
Isaac Willour, 22, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A onetime political science major at Grove City College in Pennsylvania who now works in political finance, these days Isaac Willour sees his politics as center-right. Willour is the son of a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and his faith informs his appreciation for political takes that feature nuance and reason.
“I’m operating off a world view in which human life matters, in which individual liberty is actually meaningful. It’s an extension of the Imago Dei,” he said.
Willour strongly believes in protecting the rights of the unborn by opposing abortion, thinks a healthy economy is vital and is concerned about the “general sympathy with gender ideology” he observes in the broader culture. It’s in part for these reasons that, when asked to choose, Willour said he’d vote for the Trump-Vance ticket, despite his lack of enthusiasm for what he sees as the Trump campaign’s indulgence of populism.
“Kamala Harris, I completely disagree with her vision for the country,” he said, pointing to her track record on policing and racism. “I’m voting for which party could create the environment that is most conducive to true conservatism.”
Willour also noted that within evangelicalism — and within conservatism — there’s a “radical spectrum” of ideas often ignored by simplistic portrayals of evangelicals, who, he said, by and large are “normal people” who attend church regularly and are highly involved in charity and volunteerism.
Mary Parker, 22, Birmingham, Alabama
Mary Parker spent her childhood in a conservative Methodist family surrounded by peanut and cotton farms in a small Alabama town. Today, she’s an Alabama delegate for the upcoming Democratic National Convention, where, “unless something drastic happens,” she’ll be voting for Harris and Walz, she said.
She began developing political sensibilities at an early age, thanks in large part to the internet, where she was exposed to ideas about feminism and marriage equality. These days, she aligns with the Democratic Party’s stance on most major issues but cares especially about the party’s stance on mass incarceration, immigration, and the war in Gaza.
“I see Jesus very much in the immigrants that are not allowed to come back to this country and are separated from their families. I see Jesus in the rehabilitated prisoner that’s stuck serving a life without a parole sentence for a nonviolent offense, I see Jesus in the person on death row, and I see Jesus in, you know, the Palestinian children who are now homeless and orphans,” she said.
Parker is also concerned about the politicization of Christianity. She thinks it’s crucial that Christians avoid framing political differences as theological disagreements of salvific significance.
Jacob Pesci, 32, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A veteran and a freelance photographer, Jacob Pesci is a self-described “Bernie Bro” who says he’ll begrudgingly vote for Harris in November. A lifelong evangelical, he grew up in a conservative family in the Bethel Park suburb of Pittsburgh, made famous for the Trump assassination attempt.
After joining the Navy shortly after high school and spending years as a hospital corpsman with the Marine Corps, Pesci’s political values shifted as his high views of the U.S. military shattered. Rather than being the “good guys” committed to caring for humanity, in his experience, the military glorified violence, he said.
These days, he’s interested in a political candidate who he believes resembles Christ’s character.
“That’s what concerns me the most. How do you care about people?” asked Pesci. “Bernie wanted to see the least of these cared for, where I see most political candidates not caring for the least of these. They’re caring for the party and power and political correctness rather than, ‘let’s make change, and make sure everyone has a right to a dignified life.’”
Jacklyn Mae, 27, Cincinnati, Ohio
To Jacklyn Mae, abortion is a human rights violation, a visceral life-or-death issue, and something her faith, reasoning and conscience won’t allow her to support.
“If you’re not a pro-life candidate then I’m sorry, but you don’t get my vote,” she said. If both presidential candidates had equal anti-abortion policies, she’d evaluate her choice based on their support for a smaller government, Second Amendment rights and “traditional family values,” she said.
Her own values have been shaped by her upbringing in Northwest Indiana. She was raised in the Christian Reformed Church — a historically Dutch Reformed denomination — before her family joined the United Reformed Church, a more conservative denominational offshoot, when she was in middle school. She currently attends a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America.
Her mother, a NICU nurse, was “very involved in the pro-life movement when I was growing up,” Jacklyn said, and she is still involved with the local Right to Life group in the town where she was raised. Still, while her values are leading her to vote for Donald Trump, she doesn’t see either candidate as ideal.
“Would I be friends with Trump in real life? Probably not,” she said. But, she added, some of the most “impactful pro-life actions” happened because of his administration.
“At the end of the day, the Lord is on the throne. That’s the mentality I’ve had to have,” she said. “You’re just kind of hoping and praying that the candidate that’s elected will, in the end, continue to make more good choices than ones that will impact people negatively.”
(Jacklyn asked to have her last name off the record due to the nature of her job.)
Grace Pixton, 21, Waco, Texas
Grace Pixton knows she won’t vote for Donald Trump due to what she sees as his lack of respect for women and other people groups, but that doesn’t mean she’s sold on Harris, either. In general, she’s feeling overwhelmed by the political climate.
“I think I haven’t fully processed everything, given the nature of the summer, and having a candidate drop, and having things change, and having an almost presidential assassination,” she said. “It’s hard to say which way I’m leaning.”
As a child in Portland, Oregon, politics were a part of the atmosphere, but it wasn’t until her senior year of high school, when her city shut down, and later as an intern at the Christian think tank The Center for Public Justice that she began to intentionally sort out how her faith informed her politics.
She’s still undecided about where she lands on issues like immigration and abortion, though she thinks the care with which candidates frame such issues is important. She said many of her peers are frustrated by the strong “either/or” messaging they’re surrounded by.
“There has to be a better middle ground, where we know how to care, love and come to disagreement and recognize the value of human life and care for people who are different from us, without walking away and feeling like, if I don’t vote under this political party, I can’t be a good Christian,” she said.
First published August 20, 2024
