Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called “Trump’s apostle” for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in 2021 that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line had, “perhaps,” been crossed.
Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA candidates cost Republicans their prophesied red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a post-Trump religious right.
But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.
It’s almost as if the foundational premise of their worldview that pervades their thinking (specifically: that incredibly complex natural mechanisms, interactions, and relationships can and should be explained with the reductive aphorism of “because god made it that way”) is not a good fit for navigating literally anything outside the realm of theological debate.
I mean, I’m not sure its even good for that. I would make an arugment that the foundation premise of their worldview is structured subservience as a power conservation strategy.
Effectively, if they support to a ‘higher’ authority, this gives them arena over those of ‘lessor’ authority. Its pretty much baked into abrahamism. It empowers those who support an authoritarian power dynamic, be it fascist or religious. In religion, ‘god’ has power over the church, the church has power over the head of the family (almost exclusively through subservience to patriarchy), the father has authority over the family, the wife has authority over the children, the children authority over what creatures simple and slow enough they can capture and abuse. Its consistent across all threads of abrahmic lineages, and it has direct portage to fascism. We shouldn’t’ consider that to be a coincidence what-so-ever; fascism has its roots in religion, after a strong dose of technocracy.
If society is structured to reflect that world view, its an excellent framework for navigating that world.
Liberal (in the traditional definition) democracy is in direct opposition to this framework, and has represented the only material threat to authoritarianism at scale since the dawn of the enlightenment. The empowerment of individual people, the recognition that governments and societies are ‘of the people’; these principals are in direct opposition to that authoritarian structure.
There was always going to be this fight for the ability to live in a society where your voice matters and you have agency. Its a fight we’ll have to continue having forever to maintain liberty.