At a campaign rally for Sen. Roger Marshall in Park City, Kansas, on Monday, President Donald Trump claimed a pastor once told him he’d “lead us to a period of time in Christianity that nobody else can do.”

“I have the all-time, in history, Christian vote. I have the evangelical vote, the Christian vote. I have by — I know more, I know more than anybody,” Trump bragged before launching into an anecdote about “a certain pastor from a place in Dallas, Texas.”

Paraphrasing the pastor’s comments about him, Trump continued: “He said, you know, ‘He might not read the Bible as much as us, he might not know every passage, and he might have some other little weaknesses, but one thing about him, he’s the greatest leader, and he’s going to lead us to a period of time in Christianity that nobody else can do, that nobody else can do.’’’

“And he turned out to be right,” the president added.

Trump on Christianity:I know more than anybody... A certain pastor said 'he's gonna lead us to a period of time in Christianity that nobody else can do' pic.twitter.com/MYk2iWSl1e

Trump has told versions of this story before; in 2024, he told Tucker Carlson that a pastor had said of him, “You know, Trump may not be the best Christian of all, but he’s the only one gonna take us to the promised land.”

The pastor Trump is referring to is Robert Jeffress, a senior evangelical pastor at the 14,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas and a very vocal Trump supporter since 2016.

Jeffress confirmed with HuffPost that he is the pastor Trump is referencing and said the president was paraphrasing a Fox News interview he gave in 2015.

The pastor remembered saying something along the lines of, “We are in a downward trajectory under Obama as a nation, and the only one who can reverse that trajectory is Donald Trump.”

“I said, if [Trump] is elected, I believe he will be the most faith-friendly president in history,” Jeffress told HuffPost. “Looking back 11 years later, I believe that came true.”

Jeffress has claimed repeatedly that homosexuality leads to pedophilia, said former President Barack Obama was “paving the way” for the Antichrist in 2014, called Islam and Mormonism “heresies from the pit of hell” in a 2010 interview, and said the Catholic Church was led astray by Satan in 2017.

Speaking to HuffPost, the pastor clarified that Trump has been “especially more Christian faith-friendly than any president, not just Obama, but even George W. Bush.”

“I think he just changed the entire spiritual environment of the nation from being hostile toward religion,” he said.

Jeffress cited as an example the three conservative Supreme Court justices Trump nominated during his first term — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who helped vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

The White House did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

For white evangelicals, the claim largely holds up. For Christians as a whole, it’s more complicated.

In political scientist and statistician Ryan Burge’s 2024 Cooperative Election study, published in April 2025, Burge found that there was record-breaking support for Trump among white evangelicals. Burge, who is also a former American Baptist pastor, told HuffPost that Trump’s “claim does stand up” when compared to other modern presidencies, “because Christians have basically sorted to the Republicans in the last 30 years.”

“Fifty years ago, Christians were pretty evenly divided between the two parties,” Burge said. But with the rise in non-religious-identifying voters, “[Christians] are concentrated with the GOP.”

Since 1960, the largest share of white Christian votes has gone to Republican candidates Richard Nixon (72% in 1972) and Trump (69% in 2024), according to the Public Religion Research Institute. PRRI found that white evangelical support for Republican presidential candidates has increased since former President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

“Trump is exaggerating a bit,” Melissa Deckman, PRRI’s CEO, told HuffPost, referring to Trump’s statements at the Kansas rally. “But his performance is better than George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. However, his strongest base of support by far [is] white evangelicals.”

Aside from Nixon in 1972, Trump outperformed other Republican presidential candidates with white evangelical Christian voters in 2024, securing a record 84% of their votes. Trump has also performed better among white Catholic voters compared to other Republican presidents — except for Nixon — with about 6 in 10 white Catholics voting for him in 2024, according to PRRI.

But according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted between Sept. 28 and Oct. 4, Trump’s approval rating across even that subset of voters is at its lowest point in his second term. His support from white evangelical voters, in particular, has dropped from 78% to 58%, according to Pew. However, white evangelicals are still the only religious group with a majority that approves of Trump’s performance.

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