Polling released Wednesday showed that the vast majority of Americans reacted negatively to multiple religiously-tinged actions by President Donald Trump and his administration during the Iran war.
Almost nine in ten U.S. adults — including overwhelming majorities of Republicans, Catholics and Protestants — had negative reactions to Trump’s widely panned April 12 Truth Social post where he appeared to depict himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Wednesday. The same poll found that nearly seven in ten U.S. adults objected to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth praying at a March 26 Pentagon Christian service for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Seventy-nine percent of Republicans indicated they had negative reactions to Trump’s posted image showing him dressed in a white robe and red sash with one hand on man’s head and the other with a burst of light or energy appearing to come out of it, according to the survey. By comparison, 88% of independents and 95% of Democrats said they had negative reactions to the post.
Additionally, 90% each of Catholics, white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants felt negatively about the image, the poll found. Trump won all three of these religious groups by double-digit margins — and won white evangelicals by 65 percentage points — in the 2024 presidential election, according to the Pew Research Center.
Less than a day after it went live, Trump took the rare step of deleting his post of the image which conservatives, including many current and former supporters of the president, widely lambasted at the time. When pressed by reporters, the president claimed that he had thought the image, which circulated online for weeks before he posted it to Truth Social, depicted him as a “doctor” and not Jesus Christ, adding that he thought it “had to do with the Red Cross.” (RELATED: Conservatives Blast Trump For Christ-Like Image, Losing His Mind Over Pope)
Trump notably made his April 12 post hours after he posted a lengthy screed to Truth Social blasting Pope Leo XIV, the first ever American-born pontiff and a critic of the president’s unpopular war in Iran, calling him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
Newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Robert Prevost arrives on the main central loggia balcony of the St Peter’s Basilica for the first time, after the cardinals ended the conclave, in The Vatican, on May 8, 2025. Robert Francis Prevost was on Thursday elected the first pope from the United States, the Vatican announced. (Photo by ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images)
The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll that 69% of U.S. adults had negative reactions to Hegseth publicly praying for “overwhelming violence” during his March service at the Pentagon conducted less than a month into Operation Epic Fury. Just 27% of respondents conversely had a positive reaction to the wartime prayer.
“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” prayed the secretary. “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Hegseth prominently belongs to an evangelical network of congregations widely described as “archconservative.”
“Secretary Hegseth, along with millions of Americans, is a proud Christian. The Christian faith is woven deeply into the fabric of our nation and shared by America’s wartime leaders like President George Washington, who prayed for his troops at Valley Forge, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gifted Bibles to America soldiers during WW2 and encouraged them to read it,” acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement.
“Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation, Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it. Prayer services at the Pentagon are 100% voluntary and are not mandated whatsoever,” Valdez added. “It is not against the law to worship Christ voluntarily anywhere in the United States. The Secretary’s monthly prayer services undoubtedly improve morale for those who choose to attend and are constitutionally protected. We are proud to host these services and will continue to do so.”
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth takes questions during a press briefing at the Pentagon on May 05, 2026 in Arlington, Virginia. Tensions remain high in the Strait of Hormuz as the U.S. and Iran traded shots on Monday after Trump said the U.S. military would open the strait for shipping. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The survey’s release came one day ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s meeting with Leo at the Vatican to foster the partnership between the Catholic Church and the U.S. amid the president and pontiff’s clashes during the war.
“There has never been a greater president for Christian Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told the DCNF in a statement, in response to a question about the poll’s results. “President Trump ended the weaponization of the federal government against people of faith, proudly defended and expanded our religious rights, pardoned pro-life activists, stopped the chemical mutilation of our nation’s children, and protected parents’ rights.”
The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll surveyed a total of 2,560 adults across the U.S. online from April 24 to 28. The survey’s question on Trump’s Jesus-like image was asked to a sample of 1,268 respondents. The survey has a margin of error between plus or minus two percentage points and plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
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