United States
RNS
A new survey finds that majorities of all major US religious groups believe actions by former President Donald Trump detailed in a recent hush money trial were immoral, but views are more split on whether he broke the law.
It also remains unclear whether Trump’s new status as a convicted felon has helped or hurt his campaign to retake the White House.
Former President Donald Trump faces the audience on during his hush money trial. SKETCH: Jane Rosenberg/AP, Pool.
The 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll, which includes religion-related data provided to Religion News Service, was conducted online May 30-31 among a national sample of 5,893 US adults, drawn from more than two million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform daily. (The margin of error overall is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.)
It polled Americans immediately after Trump was convicted last week on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The case centred on $US130,000 in hush money payments meant to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels regarding what she described as a sexual encounter she had with the then-businessman, a scandal that threatened to derail Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Asked about Trump, now the first former president in US history to be a convicted felon, 61 per cent of Protestants – which SurveyMonkey defines broadly, without delineating between mainline Christians and evangelical Christians – said they believe the actions detailed in the trial were morally wrong, with only 35 per cent contending the opposite. The breakdown was similar among Catholics (63 per cent versus 33 per cent) and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (59 per cent vs 40 per cent).
Jewish Americans were more likely to say Trump’s actions were immoral (73 per cent), as were atheists and agnostics (88 per cent) and those claiming “nothing in particular” (72 per cent).
But religious groups answered differently when asked their opinion on whether Trump broke the law. Protestants were split, with less than half, 48 per cent, saying his actions were a crime, compared to 49 per cent who said otherwise. Most Catholics (54 per cent) and Jews (66 per cent) said they believed Trump broke the law, as did atheists and agnostics (86 per cent) and those in the “nothing in particular” category (63 per cent).
Meanwhile, most (57 per cent) members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said they did not believe Trump committed a crime, with only 39 per cent agreeing with jurors that he broke the law.
As to whether the outcome of the trial shifted any votes among religious groups, the poll is less clear. Taken together, the results show that most religious groups were not swayed to vote differently as a result of the trial. Shifts among Protestants and Catholics to and from support for Trump or President Joe Biden all fell within the poll’s margin of error.
There were some small exceptions: five per cent of Jewish voters, a group that historically has voted for Democrats by large margins, shifted toward Trump, while per cent of those classified as “other” religions shifted away from him.
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The most visible shift was among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: 13 per cent were convinced by Trump’s conviction to change their vote not to either major candidate but to an undetermined “other change” that would include undecided voters, those who do not intend to vote and those who plan to choose a third-party candidate.
Trump has long been bolstered by ironclad support from white evangelical Christians in particular, who backed him by large percentages in both 2016 and 2020. Any weakening of his support within that group may trigger a robust response from his campaign. But white evangelicals have also long been unmoved by his various scandals and are often his greatest defenders during times of trouble: When Trump triggered backlash in 2017 after blaming “both sides” for deadly racist violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, then-Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. praised the president’s rhetoric as “bold” and “truthful.”
Biden, meanwhile, has already begun referring to Trump as a “convicted felon” in speeches and recently told Democratic donors that his predecessor “snapped” after losing the 2020 presidential election.
