Five stories to follow after the election

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The 2024 elections are (finally) over.

Donald J. Trump is returning to the White House, Republicans regained control of the Senate (with the House still too close to call) and a range of measures and propositions have gone one way or another on matters such as abortion rights and immigration.

Though there may be a natural drop-off in the frequency, and intensity, of religion+politics coverage in the weeks and months to come, the storylines we have been tracking will not slow down.

As we transition from the nonstop election cycle to cover its aftermath and look to what is ahead, here are five ongoing religion stories for you to follow in the weeks and months to come.

  • Faith shifts
  • The election’s global ramifications
  • Minority concerns, with a focus on Indigenous land protections
  • The 2024/25 U.S. Supreme Court term
  • A whole range of issues with religion angles, including the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, debates about gender and sexuality and more …

Faith shifts

Religion is no stable thing in the United States. Not only is religion as we have known it changing and “churning” across the country, but voting tendencies among America’s faithful have also shifted.

In 2024, those shifts were telling. Political scientist Ryan Burge, looking at Fox News Voter Analysis and Harvard University’s Cooperative Election Study data, noted the changes between 2020 and 2024 in five major U.S. religious demographics. In particular, he pointed to a shift among Protestants (64% support for Trump in 2020, 59% in 2024). That 5 percentage point drop, he argued, is a big deal in terms of total numbers, even if, for the third election cycle in a row, Trump performed well with white evangelicals (81%), according to NBC News exit poll data.

But also notable was the movement among Catholics and Muslims according to some polls. Exit polls conducted by The Washington Post indicate that Trump did very well with Catholics (56%), winning by a stunning 15-point margin: 56% to 41%. In 2020, Catholics backed Joe Biden, who would become America’s second Catholic president, by a 5-point margin. In both years, about a quarter of voters were Catholic.

And according to Fox News Voter Analysis, there was also a 28-point shift among American Muslims. In 2020, only 6% of U.S. Muslims backed Trump. In 2024, that jumped to 33%. Data from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) paints an even starker picture, with exit poll results showing Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein receiving 53% of the Muslim vote, followed by President-elect Donald Trump with 21% and Vice President Kamala Harris with 20%.

The largest reason for this change in Muslim voting patterns is the handling of the war in Gaza by the Biden administration. But it also signals how Muslims in the U.S. are beginning to realign with Republicans on issues related to the economy, education and parental rights.

Meanwhile, NBC reported that Harris did better with Jewish voters (77%), those who identified as “something else” (60%) and nones (71%).

These changes — or lack thereof — have been written about, analyzed and commented on for months now, but each deserves more reporting in the aftermath of this year’s election. The question becomes not only what these numbers mean for Trump’s ensuing presidency, but how these trends might shape midterms in 2026 and the presidential election in 2028, impacting American democracy for years to come.

Related media and research

Relevant sources

  • Ryan Burge

    Ryan Burge studies the intersection of religious beliefs and political behavior and is an expert on survey methodology. He teaches political science at Eastern Illinois University.

  • Daniel Cox

    Daniel Cox is director of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion with American Enterprise Institute. He previously served as research director for Public Religion Research Institute.

  • Emily D. Crews

    Emily D. Crews is the executive director of the Marty Center at the University of Chicago. Crews is a scholar of Christianities in Africa and the United States. Her scholarly research explores the ways that people’s religious lives are connected to their ideas about gender, race and the body. She is especially interested in how Christian communities and individuals think and behave vis-à-vis reproductive issues such as pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, childbirth and motherhood, and how those issues shape their perspectives on what it means to be a good religious person.

  • Institute for Social Policy and Understanding

    The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding is an independent nonprofit think tank committed to research and analysis of U.S. domestic and foreign policies, with an emphasis on issues related to the Muslim community in the United States. Katherine Coplen is director of communications.

  • John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics

    The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics advances the study of the intersection of religion and politics and publishes the journal Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. It is based at Washington University in St. Louis. Mark Valeri is director.

    Contact: 314-935-9345.

  • Robert P. Jones

    Robert P. Jones is president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI. He has written several books, including White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.

  • Kyle Roberts

    Kyle Roberts is executive director of the Congregational Library in Boston and the author of Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860.

International reactions and ramifications

U.S. presidential elections have a global audience, and as U.S. voters go to the polls, their choices reverberate throughout the world.

This time around, the election took place at a time when the demands of wars in Europe and the Middle East, China’s reasserted role in Asia and Africa, and coalitions of autocratic leaders are putting tremendous stress on the rules-based international order. Though U.S. global influence is waning, its economic and military strength, coupled with its major role in many multilateral alliances, means the election still matters on a global scale.

The impending presidency of Trump seems set to complicate matters for leaders across the globe. Indications suggest that Trump’s foreign policy will take a nationalistic tone and retrench the U.S. from global governance.

Though some experts do not expect a pivotal shift to occur in U.S. foreign policy,  the posture from the Trump camp seems set to be less multilateral and, at times, decidedly anti-multilateral. This posture will undoubtedly impact the peoples of Europe, Russia, Eurasia, the Indo-Pacific, broader Americas, Africa and the Middle East, and there is a palpable uneasiness around the sheer unpredictability of what U.S. foreign policy will look like over the next four years.

As the alliance among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea grows stronger, NATO rearms and tensions in the war in the Middle East widen, the world seems a more dangerous, unpredictable and violent place. This inevitably impacts the landscape of international religious freedom. Minoritized religious groups will continue to serve as easy scapegoats for governments and nationalist groups around the globe, with Christians, Jews, Muslims and others facing the ire of public stereotyping, discriminatory policy and violence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has included targeted attacks on evangelical Christians within Russia’s occupied territories, and the ongoing tensions around Israel’s war in Gaza — along with attacks in Lebanon and Iran — continue to produce both antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party continues its brutal persecution of Uyghur Muslims along with a general sinification and repression of mosques across China. Iran continues to persecute Baha’is, Christians and other communities outside the auspices of its own version of Twelver Shi’ism, and authoritarian powers in Algeria, Belarus and Eritrea continue to persecute populations within their borders. At the same time, both the United States and the U.K. have stepped back from intervening on behalf of religious minorities, despite established, unilateral foundations for IRF policy.

The religion angles of those impacts, and the overall state of IRF, deserve special attention by religion reporters in the U.S. over the next four years.

Related media and research

Relevant sources

  • Mohammed Abu-Nimer

    Mohammed Abu-Nimer is a full professor in the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at American University and the Chair of the Said Abdul Aziz for Peace and Conflict Resolution. He previously served as the director of the Peacebuilding and Development Institute from 1999 to 2013 and is the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development. He has researched, intervened and conducted conflict resolution workshops around the world, including in the Palestinian territories, Israel, Egypt, Northern Ireland, the Philippines (Mindanao) and Sri Lanka. Abu-Nimer is also a senior adviser to KAICIID, the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue.

  • Bani Dugal

    Bani Dugal is the principal representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the U.N. As part of the community of international nongovernmental organizations at the U.N. since 1994, she is currently serving on the steering committee of the NGO Working Group on the Security Council.

  • FoRB Women’s Alliance

    FoRB Women’s Alliance is an international community of religious freedom and human rights advocates seeking to advance, facilitate and support solutions for freedom of religion or belief for women.

  • Office of International Religious Freedom

    The Office of International Religious Freedom promotes universal respect for freedom of religion or belief for all as a core objective of U.S. foreign policy. It monitors religiously motivated abuses, harassment and discrimination worldwide, recommending, developing and implementing policies and programs to address these concerns. Contact Isaac Six, senior official in the office, or Mariah Mercer, deputy to the IRF ambassador.

  • Gaetan Roy

    Gaetan Roy is the official representative from the World Evangelical Alliance to the United Nations. He is also chairman of network-m and a board member of the Association of Evangelical Missions, and he represents evangelicals both in the German and European parliaments. He has extensive experience in international humanitarian aid and advocacy.

  • David Saperstein

    David Saperstein is an American rabbi, lawyer and Jewish community leader who served as U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from 2015-2017. He previously served as the director and chief legal counsel at the Union for Reform Judaism‘s Religious Action Center for more than 40 years and as a commissioner at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is one of the founders of the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, which seeks to build mutual trust and respect among faith leaders through civic engagement, authentic relationships and honest dialogue leading to resilient, compassionate and flourishing communities.

  • Erin D. Singshinsuk

    Erin Singshinsuk serves as executive director of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. She is responsible for directing the day-to-day operations of the commission and managing its staff.

Aftermath for minoritized populations

Guriya Singh remembers what it felt like on Nov. 9, 2016. “It felt like a punch to the gut,” the daughter of parents who emigrated from the Punjab to Pennsylvania said about watching the results indicate that Trump was going to be the next president of the United States. “All the hateful rhetoric, all the things he said about immigrants and Muslims and brown-skinned people, I just felt so confused and scared,” said Singh.

Now, eight years later, Singh and others in the U.S. minoritized because of race, religion or sexual orientation are wondering what the next four years hold.

With razor-thin margins in swing state after swing state, both campaigns targeted minority groups in the lead-up to the election. And, as was the case in previous elections, the Trump campaign made inroads among some constituencies that were formerly solidly Democratic, including Muslims, Black communities and Latinos.

Regarding the latter, Kamala Harris failed to match Joe Biden’s 33-point margin of difference among Latinos in 2020. Exit polls show Harris captured only a slight majority of Latino voters nationwide in 2024 — who again accounted for 1 in 10 voters overall — with 53% compared to Trump’s 45%. As reported by Christianity Today, both parties sought to court evangelical Latinos, and gains made by Republicans among Latinos in general this time around might point to success in that regard.

But according to the Latino civil rights organization UnidosUS and its 2024 American Electorate Poll of Hispanic Voters, results among Latino voters are much more nuanced when you break down the numbers state-by-state. In Pennsylvania, for example, Harris was a clear winner, garnering 72% of the Latino vote and winning that constituency by 46 points. In Arizona, Harris won by a 30-point margin, but more telling might be the fact that 79% of Arizona Latinos supported the measure to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. Meanwhile, in Florida, while a majority of Latinos voted to protect the right to abortion (64% to 36%), more Latinos in the Sunshine State chose Trump (53%), who won the constituency there by a 9-point margin.

Despite such strong performances, many among the Black, Latino, Asian American and Indigenous communities remain wary of a Trump presidency. 

Take, for example, issues surrounding the protection of lands considered sacred by Indigenous communities across the U.S. The race for mineral domination threatens the rights of Indigenous groups worldwide — a prominent issue that featured at the U.N.’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in April 2024 — and the Biden-Harris administration had mixed results over the last four years.

On the one hand, the administration claimed to have made “Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples central” to its conservation agenda, including incorporating Indigenous knowledge into environmental reviews, advancing co-stewardship between government institutions and tribal authorities and funding for tribes facing forced relocation due to climate change. On the other hand, many tribal leaders and Indigenous luminaries feel Biden did not go far enough, and some moves, such as the appointment of Deb Haaland as the first Native American Cabinet secretary, were mere tokenism.

The Trump campaign has not produced specifics around what his presidency would mean for tribes. But if his previous tenure in office is any evidence, it would feature a rollback of protections for lands considered sacred by Indigenous peoples and a preference for the interests of fossil fuel companies over those of tribes.

Related media

Relevant sources

  • Miguel Astor-Aguilera

    Miguel Astor-Aguilera is a professor at Arizona State University whose scholarship concentrates on religious studies, sociocultural anthropology, ethnography, material culture and archaeology focusing on Indigenous epistemologies within Latin America.

  • Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice

    The Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice at Syracuse University works across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and alongside Indigenous communities, to facilitate research and student engagement opportunities in cultural heritage preservation and language revitalization, defending political sovereignty, and climate change and the environment. Contact is for the director, Scott Manning Stevens.

  • Sarah Dees

    Sarah Dees is an ethnohistorian of religion, race and culture in the United States. Her scholarship primarily focuses on the representation of Native American and Indigenous religions in political, scientific and popular realms.

  • Leah Sarat

    Leah Sarat is professor at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on ways in which people draw upon religion to confront the physical, emotional and psychological challenges of migration. Her book, Fire in the Canyon: Religion, Migration and the Mexican Dream, centers on the relationship between migration and tourism in an Indigenous community in central Mexico. Sarat’s project “Faith Behind Bars: Encountering Immigrant Detention in Arizona” examines how chaplains, faith-based volunteers and immigrant detainees at Arizona’s Eloy Detention facility draw upon religious narratives and practices to explain, survive and resist the realities of immigration detention.

  • UnidosUS

    UnidosUS, founded in 1968, is a national nonpartisan organization that serves as the nation’s largest Latino civil rights advocacy organization. Press contact is Ana Gabriela Fernández.

Remember SCOTUS?

We will have a more in-depth look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s most relevant religion cases in the beginning of 2025, but here is what to start watching out for as the news cycle turns to the high court’s impending decisions.

The justices typically hear around nine cases every month between October and April, before rulings roll out in May and June. While there are not yet any religious freedom cases on its docket for the 2024-25 term, there are a few that might be, which are likely to pique a religion reporter’s interest:

  • In October 2024, the court asked the U.S. solicitor to file a brief in a case brought by a former prisoner who was forced by prison officials to shave his dreadlocks, which he maintained for two decades in adherence to his Rastafarian beliefs.
  • St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was set to become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school prior to being blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. Its attorneys have now filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, asking justices to consider whether a state violates the free exercise clause by excluding privately run religious schools from the state’s publicly funded charter school program.
  • Earlier this year, in the case of Apache Stronghold v. United States, a divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stop the government from transferring Oak Flat, Arizona (or Chi’chil Bildagoteel), to the foreign-owned mining company Resolution Copper, which plans to turn the site into a massive mining crater. Western Apache and other Native peoples are trying to protect the site where they have worshipped, prayed and performed essential religious ceremonies for centuries. 
  • Meanwhile, the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board revoked parents’ ability to be notified and opt their elementary-age schoolchildren out of storybooks that discuss sensitive topics such as pride parades, gender transitions and pronoun preferences. In Mahmoud v. McKnight, a coalition of Muslim, Jewish and Christian parents filed suit. So far, lower courts have sided with the school board. 
  • In Diocese of Albany v. Harris, a group including Anglican and Catholic nuns sued New York after it mandated that they cover surgical abortions in their health insurance plans. The Supreme Court reversed the lower courts’ rulings to maintain the mandate, telling them to reconsider the case. State courts, however, ignored SCOTUS. Now, the nuns have gone to the justices once again, imploring them to step in. 
  • In 2024, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Catholic Charities’ work was not religious, which blocked the nonprofit from receiving a tax exemption for religious organizations. This in turn prevents Catholic Charities from opting out of the state’s unemployment compensation system. In Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, Catholic Charities is asking the Supreme Court to reconsider the case. 

Related media

Relevant sources

  • American Civil Liberties Union

    The ACLU addresses hate speech in its work on free speech, religion, LGBT rights, human rights and racial justice.

  • Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

    The Becket Fund is a public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C., that works to protect the free expression of all religious traditions. For interviews, contact Ryan Colby.

  • Kelsey Dallas

    Kelsey Dallas covers religion, sports and the Supreme Court for the Deseret News and serves as assistant managing editor. She is also a former ReligionLink editor.

  • Thomas Farr

    Thomas Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute in Washington, D.C. Farr is the former director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of International Religious Freedom and the Witherspoon Institute’s International Religious Freedom Task Force. Arrange an interview through Nathan Berkeley.

  • Religious Freedom Institute

    The Religious Freedom Institute advocates for religious freedom in the United States and abroad. RFI produces research and educational programs and maintains five regional action teams that lobby governments and civil leaders to protect religious freedom globally.

The issues that won't go away

The issues that were at the top of voters’ minds will remain important issues in the months to come. According to exit polls from NBC, the state of American democracy mattered most (34%), while 31% indicated the economy was the top issue. Abortion (14%) and immigration (11%) were also important, with just 4% naming foreign policy. Meanwhile, crime, gender and sexual identification and the local impact of the Gaza War remain important issues nationwide.

Each will require ongoing attention and diligent, balanced, accurate and insightful reporting.

That means religion reporters will continue to track faith angles on the economy and inflation, reproductive rights, immigration, crime, emerging technologies, national security, international relations and climate change, as well as debates around sexuality and gender identity.

The various guides below will help find relevant sources, stories and background information as you ramp up to continue your ongoing coverage of these issues: