White Catholics’ support of President Donald Trump and his policies has not changed significantly during his first year in office, while Hispanic Catholics have become slightly more skeptical of his ethical practices, new Pew Research Center data suggest.
Pew surveyed more than 8,500 U.S. adults between Jan. 20-26, finding that white Catholics’ support of Trump’s plans and policies dropped only five percentage points between February 2025 and January 2026 (51% vs. 46%). Hispanic Catholics’ support of his agenda remained nearly stable, going from 20% to 18% across the same time frame.
When asked whether they thought Trump acts ethically in office, 34% of white Catholics said yes, down from 39% last year. Pew found a larger disparity between Hispanic Catholics’ current opinions of Trump’s ethics — 14% approval — and their views last year, when 22% were confident that the president was acting ethically.
Similar trends emerged when Pew analyzed Catholics’ approval of Trump’s job performance, finding that 52% of white Catholics currently say Trump is handling the presidency well, compared with 59% who said the same thing last year. Twenty-three percent of Hispanic Catholics have positive views of Trump’s job performance, compared with 31% who approved of him in early 2025.
White evangelical Protestants are the religious denomination most likely to support Trump’s agenda in 2026 (58%), while black Protestants — a largely Democratic-leaning group, according to Pew — are the least likely (6%). White evangelicals are also the most likely to have confidence in Trump’s ethics, though their trust has fallen by 15 points since last year (40% vs. 55%). Pew discovered that evangelicals are the only large religious group that has a clear majority approval of Trump’s job performance.
Pew also found that across most religious groups, Trump’s approval ratings are significantly lower than those from February 2025 but generally consistent with ratings given since April 2025.