Half of Gen Z says Trump support keeps them out of church

Not too surprising. The vast majority of white evangelical Christians still support Trump and up to 40% of these same Christians think he is acting ethically in office. The younger people see through this. Since probably 7 out of 10 church members in your pews support Trump from a statistical perspective, even though you may not preach it from the pulpit, it is still pervasive within your church. It most likely comes up during Small Group, Sunday School, Men's prayer breakfast, so on and so on. People who are most likely less savvy in engaging people, probably blurt things out that offend many of those who are not supporters of Trump. Or they hear it so often, that they don't feel that they can align with anyone at the church and so they avoid the church, or seek one that is more progressive. This will be another challenge as we try to engage a culture that doesn't look like us.

dgszweda wrote: Since probably 7 out of 10 church members in your pews support Trump from a statistical perspective, even though you may not preach it from the pulpit, it is still pervasive within your church.

I guess it depends on what you mean by “pervasive.” Personal views, sure, I might go along with that. I haven’t done a formal poll or anything, but from personal conversations with other members, I’d guess your 7/10 is not that far off for my church, although a large percentage of those I would peg as reluctant Trump supporters rather than wholehearted. However, Trump is not only NOT preached from the pulpit, I’ve never heard him preached in SS, small groups, prayer meeting, etc. In other words, sure, the members might support Trump (at least much more than Biden/Clinton/Obama), but young believers are not going to hear about that in any official way. If they are offended by hearing that from personal conversations, then they are not likely to want a church like ours anyway.

I don’t know many church-going Democrats. The ones that I have met, however, at least in the years since Obama, almost always tend to go to the churches where they have women and/or gay preachers, or rainbow flags, support abortion clinics, etc., etc. We have plenty of churches like that in our area, so people are welcome to go there if they don’t want a church like ours that believes the Bible and has strong expositional preaching. However, I have met a number of younger families in my neighborhood (probably Millenial more than Gen Z), and I’m often surprised to hear that they not only go to church, they go to churches that are fairly solid (with pretty good preaching), if not what I would want worship-wise or association-wise.

If the members’ personal beliefs are what is keeping Gen Z seekers out of the church, I’m not sure what you think the solution is. Giving up our personal principles is certainly not on the table, particularly when most of those are based on scripture (which would include most of the issues people place under the “woke” category). If we don’t hold our own beliefs strongly enough to cause us to exercise our right to vote, and affect who we vote for, then I think we won’t likely hold up biblical beliefs any more strongly. We don’t have to like the representatives we have in office, or live like them, but most of us have good reasons for the way we voted, and deciding we are going to present ourselves as “apolitical” to enable more young people to comfortably come to our church is likely to also be seen as fake or hypocritical. I don’t think that will help in the long term either.

”The Billy Graham Center Research Institute fielded a survey of 2,365 Gen Z adults (ages 18-28) through NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel between Aug. 9 and Sept. 26, 2024.”

Am I reading this correctly? This data is from 2024? That would put it in the heat of the 2024 election.