Trump leads RNA’s Top 10 U.S. Religion News Stories of 2024
FāVS News Brief
Religion News Association members name Donald Trump’s re-election the top national religion story of 2024. This include the other dynamics and demographics related to the election.
Other top U.S. stories included rising antisemitic speech, harassment and assaults, the strain the war in the Middle East is putting on Jews’ and Muslims’ traditional Democratic loyalties and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signing a law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public classrooms.
Members of the Religion News Association, a 75-year-old association for reporters who cover religion in the news media, have been voting on the annual story poll for decades.
“There is no one who knows religion news like RNA members,” said Ken Chitwood, RNA president, “so who better to ask to reflect on the top religion stories of the year?”
Top 10 U.S. Religion News Stories of the Year
- Republican Donald Trump is elected president again with strong support from white and Latino evangelicals and other white Christians. Democrat Kamala Harris is supported by a majority of Black Protestants, the non-religious and Latino Catholics as well as Jews and Muslims — despite grave reservations in the last two groups over Biden-Harris policies surrounding the Israel-Gaza war.
- Nearly two-thirds of Jews surveyed reported feeling less safe than a year earlier amid tensions over the Israel-Hamas war and reports of rising antisemitic speech, harassment and assaults, including the shooting of a man walking to synagogue in Chicago. Harvard and Columbia university presidents resign following contentious appearances before Congress and accusations that protests made campuses unsafe for Jews.
- The Mideast war strains Jews’ and Muslims’ traditional Democratic loyalties, with some of the former questioning how firmly Democrats are supporting Israel, even as they express alarm at Republican Donald Trump’s claims that they’d be to blame if he lost the presidential election. Muslims denounce the U.S.’s continued support and weapons supplies to Israel for its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon.
- Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signs law requiring Ten Commandments displays in public classrooms. Oklahoma’s top education official orders public schools to incorporate the Bible into lessons. The Oklahoma Supreme Court rules unconstitutional what would have been the nation’s first state-funded Catholic charter school. Texas’ State Board of Education allows Bible-infused teachings in elementary schools.
- Election-year debates surge over the definition and influence of Christian nationalism and the related New Apostolic Reformation, with its leaders strongly supporting former President Trump, depicting politics as spiritual warfare, portraying America as a Christian nation and interpreting Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt as a miracle signaling a divine mandate.
- Alabama Supreme Court rules that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law — with its chief justice citing Christian doctrine in a concurrence. Amid backlash even from conservatives, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signs legislation shielding in vitro fertilization providers from liability. Southern Baptist Convention laments the “destruction of embryonic human life” in IVF.
- Advocacy groups cite a surge in Islamophobia in the U.S. amid the Gaza war, with Dearborn, Michigan, going on alert after its large Muslim population was targeted in a prominent commentary. Universities are accused of failing to respond to Islamophobia on campus. Biden administration announces policies to combat anti-Muslim bias and hate crimes.
- Voters in seven states expand or reinforce access to abortion. Those in three others uphold abortion restrictions, the first states to do so by referendum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Democrats campaign heavily on abortion rights. President-elect Donald Trump gives mixed signals about his views, while Republicans remove from their platform their longstanding call for a constitutional amendment banning abortion.
- The United Methodist Church’s General Conference in May repeals the denomination’s longtime stance that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching” and overturns bans on openly LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriages. The Global Methodist Church, composed mainly of conservative churches that left the UMC, holds its inaugural General Conference.
- Major-party nominees reflect America’s fluid religious makeup: Kamala Harris, a progressive Baptist married to a Jewish man and influenced by the religions of her mother’s native India; Donald Trump, a non-denominational Christian with strong support from evangelicals and married to a Catholic; JD Vance, a Catholic convert influenced by post-liberal thinkers and married to a Hindu; and Tim Walz, who was raised Catholic and later joined the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his wife’s background.
