I recently read Sarah Posner's new book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (NY: Penguin Random House, 2020). Reading it as Robert P. Jones's White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity comes out is in many ways a thoroughly depressing experience. I began reading Jones's book as I was finishing Posner's.
Sarah Posner's documentation — and historical account — of the rise of the religious right industry in the US in the last half of the 20th century, of the marriage of the alt-right and the religious right, an amalgamation now driving the Republican party, gives one the dismal sense that American culture and political life leave no room for hope any longer. The power of this industry, which grinds out lie after lie after lie, each one trumpeted by a wide network of online and traditional media, seems unshakeable.
If a solid set of Americans — nearly a half, poll after poll during the current presidency indicates — are still willing to believe that the party controlled by the alt-right and the religious right owns God and the bible and actually stands for anything remotely pro-life, then what can possibly open those folks' eyes, after this pandemic? And how this administration has responded to it? And if the leaders of white Christian churches including the US Catholic bishops are perfectly content bolstering the lies, where is hope to be found?
Here are some excerpts from Sarah Posner's Unholy that I'd like to share with you:
They had been waiting for a leader unbowed, one who wasn’t afraid to attack, head-on, the legal, social, and cultural changes that had unleashed the racist grievances of the American right, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education and persisting through the 1960s and ’70s in opposition to school desegregation and government policies to promote it—long before evangelicals made opposing abortion their top issue. Those grievances never went away; the conservative movement’s right flank perpetually groused that the Republican “establishment” had too often made concessions to the liberal political order that had stolen away the rights of Christians, of parents, of whites, and of churches, even America’s very foundation as a “Christian nation” (p. xiii).
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Although Weyrich is best known for launching the modern religious right, my deep exploration of the historical record shows how he and his New Right allies laid the groundwork not just for Trump’s union with the religious right but also for their attraction to his crude politics of white nationalist grievance (p. xvii).
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On the surface, the Christian right is saturated with rhetoric about “faith” and “values.” Its real driving force, though, was not religion but grievances over school desegregation, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action, and more (p. xvii).
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Trump, then, did not just deliver policy, in a quid pro quo with a voting bloc that fueled his election. He delivered power. And for that, he was not merely a reliable politician worthy of their praise. For the Christian right, Trump is no ordinary politician and no ordinary president. He is anointed, chosen, and sanctified by the movement as a divine leader, sent by God to save America (p. 8).
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The Trump-evangelical relationship represents an intense meeting of the minds, decades in the making, on the notion that America lies in ruins after the sweep of historic changes since the mid-twentieth century, promising nondiscrimination and equal rights for those who had been historically disenfranchised—women, racial minorities, immigrants, refugees, and LGBTQ people—eroded the dominance of conservative white Christianity in American public life (p. 9).
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Although their overall numbers are dropping, Trump’s presidency has given white evangelicals new life as the most influential political demographic in America (p. 11).
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Although evangelicals constitute far from a majority of Americans, the president’s bottomless support for them has enabled the Christian right to dictate administration policy, creating a tyranny of the minority that they see as a divine assignment and a last chance to save America. Trump’s white evangelical supporters, then, have chosen to see him not as a sinner but as a strongman, not as a con man but as a king who is courageously unshackling them from what they portray as liberal oppression (p. 11).
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Just like Trump himself, contemporary evangelicalism has been profoundly shaped by celebrity and television (p. 13).
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While previous Republican presidential candidates engaged in campaign outreach to televangelists in the hopes of garnering the votes of their significant audiences, Trump is the first to act like one—making up facts, promising magical success, pretending to solve complex problems with a tweet or an impetuous boast (p. 15).
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But as it turned out, Trump’s hard-line message was precisely what many white evangelicals had been waiting to hear. Even voters who supported another candidate in the primaries were grateful for his role in defining the terms of the coming election (p. 23).
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There have been other elections that the religious right has portrayed as tipping-point elections, but never has the movement so unreservedly backed a candidate—not even Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush—with the messianic zeal with which it has enveloped Trump. Never has another political figure been seen as the locus of so much prophecy, and never have so many political leaders openly given themselves over to believing in such things (p. 32).
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In defending Trump from criticism, religious right leaders have given moral cover to the president’s racism and white nationalism. With each tweet excused or rationalized, with each racist utterance waved off as misunderstood or manipulated by “fake news” to make Trump look bad, with each rejoinder that it is Trump’s critics who are fomenting divisiveness, Trump’s evangelical loyalists have helped make the unthinkable—an overtly racist American president—a reality (p. 37).
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In a speech invoking evangelical favorites from the Book of Ecclesiastes to The Hobbit, Bannon pronounced evangelical and conservative Catholic turnout as “the key that picked the lock in North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin,” making the difference for Trump’s win (p. 57).
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By shielding Trump from criticism over his rhetoric and policies that most delighted the alt-right—casually racist tweets or statements, policies that banned immigrants and refugees, deported them, detained them, or otherwise mistreated them, including children and babies—Trump’s evangelical defenders were effectively solidifying the Republican base as committed to both Christian and white nationalism (p. 71).
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Throughout his presidency, Trump’s evangelical allies have made deliberate efforts to lend a religious sheen to his most abominable policies. They have tried to portray him as a unifying, benevolent strongman who loves all Americans and seeks to protect them from “invasions,” and as a victim of Democratic and media machinations to unfairly portray him as a racist (p. 71).
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The well-worn foundation story of the modern religious right depicts Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, Sr., as roused to action as a direct result of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, driving previously apolitical evangelicals out of the pews with a moral imperative to protect babies from slaughter. This mythology has cast evangelicals as historic heroes leaping to the defense of the innocent, and their movement as a righteous guardian of faith and family. But as much as abortion is now, four decades later, the centerpiece of the religious right agenda, the real story of the formation of this movement was not about protecting babies, families, or morality. Instead, it was a story of racist backlash against school desegregation and other civil rights advances, all cloaked in the language of freedom and religion. If today it seems a mystery how the movement of “family values” came to deify the irreligious, womanizing Donald Trump, this largely buried history shines a bright light on how they were drawn together by shared tropes—caricatures of social justice warriors and an overbearing government—to save white Christian America (p. 100).
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The resolutions of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) over this period show how evangelicals, pre-Roe, were in favor of legal abortion, gradually shifting into a more radical opposition as the religious right was being organized in the 1970s. In other words, the hard-line opposition to abortion followed the organization of the religious right, rather than serving as the impetus for it (p. 104).
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The unchallenged consensus of contemporaneous reporting on Falwell’s rise in the early 1980s made clear that abortion was not his or other evangelicals’ immediate spark for political engagement. According to the journalist Frances FitzGerald, who profiled Falwell for The New Yorker in 1981, Falwell didn’t say much publicly about abortion in the immediate aftermath of Roe, and he admitted that he and other evangelicals had not paid much attention to the abortion issue until at least three years after Roe.18 In 1976, three years after the Court’s decision, Falwell included abortion in a list of “America’s sins” in sermons and writings, but it was just part of a laundry list, not a lightning rod. He did not speak in any detail about abortion until 1978 or write at length about it until 1981 (p. 106).
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But just as the abortion spark is a myth, so is the claim that evangelicals were not political before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling. Fifteen years before founding the Moral Majority, Falwell had had no hesitation in opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, calling it a “terrible violation of human and private property rights” (p. 106).
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Weyrich consistently repeated this racial backlash foundation story through the 1990s, recounting to historians and interviewers the difficulties he had persuading evangelicals to join his anti-abortion cause. He told the historian Randall Balmar that it was the IRS action regarding schools, not abortion, that “enraged the Christian community” (p. 109).
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After white evangelical support propelled Trump into the White House in 2016, Balmer told me it showed the religious right had come “full circle to embrace its roots in racism” and had “finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about abortion or ‘family values’ (p. 109).
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As much as the Christian right of the twenty-first century is now fixated on abortion and sexual politics, the backlash against the efforts of the federal government to desegregate tax-exempt private schools is embedded in the movement’s DNA. The white evangelical attraction to Trump was not in spite of his extended birther crusade against Barack Obama, his racist outbursts in tweets and rallies, and his administration’s plans to eviscerate federal protection of racial minorities from discrimination in housing and education by eliminating their ability to show discrimination based on the disparate impact of a policy, as opposed to having to prove discriminatory intent. The Christian right movement was born out of grievance against civil rights gains for blacks, and a backlash against the government’s efforts to ensure those gains could endure. When Trump offers paeans to “religious freedom”—the very clarion call of the Bob Jones University defenders—or sloganeers “Make America Great Again,” he is sending a message that rings true for a movement driven by the rhetoric and organizing pioneered by Weyrich and Billings. Trump’s white evangelical admirers do not just see a leader who is making it safe to say Merry Christmas again, or holding the IRS back from penalizing pastors who endorse him from the pulpit. In Trump’s words and deeds, they see an idealized white Christian America before civil rights for people of color—and a meddling government—ruined it (p. 124).
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The history of the New Right—and its deep and pervasive opposition to civil rights, desegregation, immigration, and other efforts at ending race discrimination—has been largely forgotten or erased. But that history demonstrates, in multiple ways, how the New Right, and its calculated alliance with white evangelicals, foreshadowed the rise of Trump’s coalition. The bloc behind Trump—a combination of the religious right, white nationalists and their sympathizers, and more “traditional” Republicans—had been mapped out by Weyrich decades before, fusing the ideas of New Right ideologues like Rusher and Whitaker with the grassroots activism of conservative white evangelicals and antichoice Catholics. Over the years, the coalition yielded to societal pressure to reel in its overt racism and opposition to civil rights advances for black Americans (p. 157).
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But once Trump brought white nationalism out of the closet, the opposition to civil rights and multiculturalism as elitist ideas tyrannically imposed on white Americans were familiar not only to the hard-core white supremacists of the alt-right but to conservatives and paleoconservatives steeped in the same grievances. These voters still harbored resentments that their rights and standing in American society had been somehow diminished by the civil rights movement—and that the “mainstream” conservatism of the two Bush presidencies had not represented their interests, either. Trump didn’t make an entirely new movement out of whole cloth. With his own televangelist gloss, he reactivated the fundamental driving force of the conservative movement in the second half of the twentieth century (p. 158).
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The Christian right’s religious freedom agenda isn’t just about holiday greetings and clergy endorsement of candidates. Most urgently in 2016, the leaders who met with Trump that day had spent the past eight years fighting some of the signature achievements of Barack Obama’s presidency: the passage of the Affordable Care Act, particularly its regulation requiring that employer-sponsored health care plans include full coverage for contraception, and the rapid and historic expansion of LGBTQ rights (p. 163).
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Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s smug audacity in refusing Garland even a hearing, along with Trump’s brazenly false claims of a landslide victory giving him a mandate, together opened multiple entry points for the Christian right to turn back the clock on civil rights advances (p. 181).
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The religious right and the alt-right are bonded together by shared grievances over a supposedly lost America in which Christians don’t have to bake cakes for gay couples and white people don’t have to bow to “multiculturalism” or “political correctness.” But this fused political bloc does not actually long for a mythical past of the formerly “great” America that Trump idealized for them. Instead, it envisions a future in which America, and the hard-won values it codified over the past seven decades—desegregation and church-state separation by the Supreme Court; laws passed by Congress to protect the rights of minorities such as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act; the advance of rights for women and LGBTQ people—loses its standing as a moral and political leader in the world and is transformed into a nativist power that accords different rights to different groups of people, based on race, religion, and ethnicity. For the ideologues of this bloc, America has so lost its bearings that they must look now to leadership outside of the United States to lead it out of an abyss. Their shared target: modern, pluralistic liberal democracy that is led by what they would disparage as “globalists” who are destroying “Western civilization” (p. 188).
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From the start, Obama’s adversaries on the religious right—from officials of the Catholic Church to leaders of antichoice organizations to evangelical celebrities—portrayed Obamacare as a socialist takeover that would force taxpayers to pay for coverage of abortion services. That was not true, but it proved a potent talking point, priming the base for outrage when the Obama administration, in early 2012, finalized a regulation under the act requiring employer-sponsored health plans to cover contraception without a copay. Even after the Obama administration exempted houses of worship from the requirement and offered religious nonprofits an “accommodation” that permitted them to opt out by signing a form that would put the onus of coverage on their insurers, the regulation triggered a series of overheated, Republican-led congressional hearings, activist protests, and years of protracted litigation (p. 202).
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The Christian right, driven by what it claimed was the undermining of Christian values during the Obama era, began looking toward the very same autocrats who had captivated the alt-right. These political figures were also using “family values” such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights as a means to merge Christian nationalism with ethnic nationalism, creating a potent bloc against European Union “elites.” These two parts of the bloc were further drawn together by the migrant crisis that escalated in 2015, which was caused, the alt-right claimed, by the needless wars in the Middle East launched by their ideological enemy, the neoconservatives. Because many of the migrants were from Muslim countries, the situation seemed to embody long-standing conspiracy theories in the Christian right about invasions of the West by Muslim hordes. For both the Christian right and the alt-right, the reaction of Europe’s xenophobes to an influx of refugees and asylum seekers served as a template for what Trump portrayed as an “invasion” on the U.S. southern border (p. 217).
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Both the alt-right and Christian right claim to be saving “Western civilization” or “the Judeo-Christian West.” But what those slogans really mean is that America and the western European countries that dominate the European Union are already dead, having succumbed to “globalists” and “political correctness.” What both the Christian right and the white nationalist right are looking toward now—with or without Trump—is a new locus of power in the world, one defined by a rejection of the hard-won and fragile American values of democracy and human rights, and by an exaltation of authoritarian natalism, xenophobia, and homophobia (p. 218)
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Midway through his presidency, Trump had yet to name a nominee for fifty senior posts within the State Department, nearly a third of the total political posts requiring Senate confirmation. Trump’s base of Christian right and nativist supporters not only doesn’t care—it actively cheerleads the denigration of democracy and human rights, the rise of autocrats whipping up the grievances of right-wing populists, and disdain for what America once was (p. 242).
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In that alternate, conspiratorial reality, any scrutiny of Trump or his inner circle is cast as a plot, deeply rooted in “fake news,” George Soros–funded protesters, Clinton family machinations, or even Satan, to bring down God’s chosen leader of the United States of America. The religious leaders close to the Trump White House assist in his assault on reality by immersing their followers at church, on television, and online into a universe disassociated from reality and severed from even the most basic facts. Their alternative universe is instead permeated with narratives about how Christians and Trump are under attack, and about how only Trump’s heroic defense of their religious freedom saves them from the onslaught of godless secularism (p. 247).
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With his expanding relationships with evangelical and Pentecostal figures, Trump has been building a defensive line of protection against revelations about the avalanche of criminality and corruption that are engulfing his administration, using conspiracy theories to stoke panics of a secularist attack on Christianity. In turn, white evangelical voters have bought into the manufactured, Trumpian reality perpetuated by the evangelical leaders whose standing Trump has elevated in order to ensure their ongoing support (p. 256).
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Trump will not always be president, but he has elevated the conspiracy theory to a new high status in American politics. His evangelical allies, in turn, promote conspiracy theories about Trump the strongman, a fearless, anointed leader who is laboring heroically to save the Christian nation despite threats from socialism, the deep state, or George Soros. In return for their veneration, the life raft his presidency needs daily, Trump has given the Christian right new life, has spared them a Hillary Clinton presidency and a more liberal Supreme Court, and has given them unprecedented free rein in his administration and a defining role in the government of the United States. He’s the leader they’ve been waiting for—the one who has been prophesied—who will affirm their authority as long as they accede to his. And they were there for him when he needed them most—to be his shield against impeachment—armed not only with all of their adulation, but with the escalating and ever-evolving set of conspiracy theories that became the president’s only defense (p. 258).
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It is far too facile an explanation to pin this devotion solely on a personality cult around Trump. The conditions that first brought him to power and, later, led to a nearly complete Republican capitulation to his whims were set in motion by two religious and political transformations of the 1970s: the sprawling political and ideological infrastructure Paul Weyrich built in the wake of Watergate, and the proliferation of televangelism and its marriage to Republican politics. At this critical moment in American history, when the democratic experiment hangs in the balance, this totalizing political and religious culture, rooted in a white Christian nationalist political ideology, was tailor-made to go to the mat for Trump. For Trump’s white evangelical supporters, defending him became indistinguishable from defending white Christian America (p. 259).
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Trump’s willingness to stack the courts and federal agencies with Christian right loyalists, and to give them full authority to transform a secular liberal democracy into a Christian nationalist autocracy, has produced more gratitude for his presidency than for the presidency of any other Republican since the advent of the modern Christian right (p. 260).
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And so an untold number of Trump’s evangelical supporters believe that God has anointed him, God will protect him, and God will smite his enemies. However his presidency ends, the fundamental damage it has inflicted on our democracy will not be healed overnight. His “base” is not an accident of his unconventional foray into politics, or a quirk of this particular political moment. The vast majority of white evangelicals are all in with Trump because he has given them political power and allowed them to carry out a Christian supremacist agenda, inextricably intertwined with his administration’s white nationalist agenda. Conspiracy theories and lies about the core of our democracy—separation of powers, a free and independent press, and the dedication of public servants—run rampant through their print and social media, podcasts, and television programs. The depth and durability of their fervor have disproven the mantra “the religious right is dead” again and again—and their ability to sustain a presidency in the face of unprecedented scandal is the most compelling evidence against that mantra yet (p. 266).
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Trump’s white evangelical supporters make up an army of partisans decades in the making, and they will not quietly retreat in the face of defeat (p. 266).
