How the Religious Right Led to Trump

[rug]

Liberty University students pose for photos as they wait for a speech by Donald Trump at Liberty University. AP Photo/Steve Helber

Two new books on America's religious history provide key insights into the currents that produced one of the country's least religious and least biblically literate presidents.

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America
By Frances FitzGerald
Simon and Schuster

American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion From the Puritans to the Present
By Philip Gorski
Princeton University Press

SARAH POSNER MAY 3, 2017

Donald Trump’s conquest of the White House, buoyed by the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, has, for the moment at least, quelled the semi-regular pronouncements of the death of the religious right. As the numbers of non-white and non-religious Americans have increased, the demographic weight of white evangelicals has fallen. But rather than withering away, the religious right in its 2017 version seems poised to capitalize on unexpected access to power—a miracle, if you will. They are ecstatic over Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, and what they see as his steadfast protection of religious liberty and opposition to abortion. They also see trusted longtime allies in Vice President Mike Pence and at the helms of the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services; a co-religionist, climate-change denier as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and an opponent of public schools, long the movement’s “secular humanist” bogeyman, as secretary of education.

Americans have been puzzling over how the religious right made a Faustian bargain with one of America’s most boastful violators of the “values” that the movement claims to uphold. Given the unprecedented circumstances, it would be tempting to characterize 2016 as a fluke election in which a Kremlin-backed charlatan upended our electoral process. The religious right’s coattail victory would then be evidence not of a lasting resurgence, but of a temporary victory followed perhaps by an inexorable decline. After all, how can this movement, not even popular among all Republicans, keep going? Isn’t the rest of America—feminists, secularists, liberal Christians, religious minorities, and anyone who has yielded to hedonistic impulses—finally poised to prevail over the religious right?

Two new books, in very different ways, offer crucial insights into how we got here and why resistance to the enduring influence of the religious right is a long game, perhaps even a defining feature of the republic. The first, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, is a sweeping and vibrant history of white evangelicals in America from colonial times to the present—or, rather, up to the Trump presidency.

If FitzGerald tells us the comprehensive and often lurid tale of how white evangelicals shaped our politics, Yale sociologist Philip Gorski’s American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present offers an antidote of sorts. An ambitious account of American civil religion, his book explores the tension between “religious nationalism” and “radical secularism”—in other words, the culture war over whether America is a Christian nation or a purely secular one. FitzGerald shows us how white evangelicals shaped our politics; Gorski asks why their religious nationalism should prevail in a pluralistic republic.

http://prospect.org/article/how-religious-right-led-trump

[Mike Nelson]

1. I know some...

...white evangelicals. They share Trump's values. They think women are lesser than Man. God controls the weather and God is your best health insurance. Gays are going to Hell. Whites are superior... on and on. They share Trump's values.