In 2020, after years of Trumpian chaos, I asked a decades-long friend of mine if he was planning on voting for Trump a second time. During the course of that conversation, he not only confirmed his continued support for Trump, he described Democratic Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as “evil,” and said the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was “Satan.” As a devout Christian, his use of these words cannot be taken lightly. “Where in the world did that come from?” I asked him. Claiming he does not like to talk politics, I have yet to hear from him a reasonable answer to my dark question.
So I do what I do. In 2021, I wrote a column titled “Jesus Boots” in which I commented on two books that asked two related questions.*
“In The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, constitutional attorney Andrew L. Seidel asks: What happens when the political history of the United States is hijacked by a religious group laying claim to the idea that the precepts of their religious faith are synonymous with the precepts of the country itself?”
“In Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, history professor Kristen Kobes Du Mez asks the follow-up question: In turn, what are the ramifications when leaders of this same religious group encourage their followers to reshape the nation’s political, social, and cultural landscape; all based upon the imaginary history they have concocted for themselves?”
Four tumultuous years later, the answer to these questions is becoming clearer by the day. Don’t take my word for it. Just take a look at Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America (2024) by journalist and acclaimed writer Talia Lavin. This one comes very close to answering the question my friend refused to answer. It also clarifies for me how several others I know continue to support Donald Trump.
Over the past five years, I have followed several openly Christian friends on social media. While their posts often include the well-wishes of faith and hope in a fractured world, they also have increasingly associated prominent Democrats, the Democratic party as a whole, and any hint of liberal ideology with “evil” and “Satan.”
After studying her book, I have concluded that, not only does Lavin make a cogent argument to support her subtitle, she offers a vast body of evidence, backed up with 25 pages of extensive source notes, that the Christian Right is indeed taking over America.
“All around you,” she observes, “there are laws about schools, laws about teachers, laws about wombs, laws about doctors, laws about abortifacients, laws governing the gender of children. There are also laws governing the way history is taught in this country…” School boards are under siege. Books are being banned. The president of the United States has surrounded himself with Christian Right advisers. The vice president, the speaker of the house, several members of his cabinet, and scores of members of Congress openly interject Christian Right priorities into their rhetoric and the law. The judicial branch is increasingly looking at the Constitution, the law, and the powers of the presidency with an eye towards the openly expressed demands of the Christian Right.
This did not happen because of Donald Trump. His victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 seemed like a great storm had arrived; but history has shown us time and again that authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with a clap of thunder. It falls as a slow misty rain that almost goes un-noticed until the downfall finally picks up, the saturated soil has had enough… and then the deluge begins.
According to Talia Lavin’s fine scholarship, this storm began fifty years ago.
The backlash to the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s included the formation of conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family founded in 1977 and the Moral Majority founded in 1979. They simply could not stand by while, for the first time in its history, the United States had become a multi-racial democracy.
This reaction to newly gained civil rights for African Americans and women has regularly been associated with a sense of white supremacy and patriarchy. It was as if the fight for the equality of minorities and women was a zero sum game; that whatever gains were made must be offset by the diminishment of power previously held by others. Simply put, the Civil Rights Movement was a threat to white male hegemony.
While Christian Right organizing focused on the “moral decay” of American society and a return to respecting “traditional family values”—a message that gave us Ronald Reagan—these nascent organizations then lacked the power of the modern Christian Right.
It is over the past 40 years that national organizations such as the Christian Coalition of America and the Family Research Council coalesced around a demonstrative politically focused effort to transform our society.
Up until recently, modern American society has, among other social and cultural norms, supported female reproductive rights, welcomed non-white immigrants, opened up to gay marriage, and encouraged a critical examination of America’s history… warts and all. In opposition to all of these things, the Christian Right has raised generations of children to view many American liberties as sinful. Indeed, the Christian Right has intentionally raised their children on the sidelines of popular American culture.
“The world of the Christian Right is largely insular,” Lavin writes, “shunning worldly influence. It has its own schools and universities, its own movies, its own microcelebrities, its own methods of parenting and marriage, its own trends. It exists as part of the United States yet holds itself separate, because holiness demands separation from the profane.”
In chapters titled “Good Christian Fathers,” “Gentle, Smiling Mothers,” “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go,” and “And When He Is Old He Will Not Depart from It,” Lavin offers that Christian Right families raise their children as we all do; with our personal values in mind. Unfortunately, when these values—those of familial obedience and subservience to fathers and husbands—become a matter of politics and eventually the law that governs us all; well, then, these values become anathema to a free and equal society. This is the threat we face; a Christian Right theocracy with obedience and subservience to white Christian males at its core.
The most public display of Christian Right ideology has been expressed in the anti-abortion movement; intimately tied to issues over pre-marital sex and contraception. Lavin writes that, “Understanding the Christian Right’s fixation on pleasure having deadly consequences; its obsession with the chaste, pure female body; the militant upholding of gender roles; and a half century of propaganda about an unborn holocaust explains in part why holy warriors are avidly pursuing several legislative paths to a total national ban on abortion.”
Long in the making, and now facilitated by the ever-malleable Donald Trump, the repressive values held by the Christian Right are being foisted upon us all.
I—like many of you—struggle to understand how several of my friends, family, and neighbors continue to support Donald Trump. In 2016, I concluded that support for Trump arose from a right wing media assault on Democrats and Hillary Clinton; and this was certainly true. What I failed to understand is the enduring and diabolical nature of those attacks and the degree to which this has been orchestrated by the Christian Right.
The numbers have been remarkably consistent. Donald Trump has twice been elected as president with the electoral support of 80 percent of evangelical Christian voters. And, if his first term was a shock to the nation, the first months of his second has been a tsunami directed – and now predominantly led – by white Christian nationalists.
And when these evangelical voters venture into the more public space of social media, the future they wish for is reflected in images of Donald Trump as a messiah ushering in a new era as told in the Bible. As Talia Lavin warns us, some of these hopeful followers envision a great catastrophe striking down non-believers as the faithful watch from the skies above.
“When Donald Trump came to power,” Lavin writes, “many evangelicals, including members of his own cabinet, which consisted in large part members of the Christian Right, saw in him an echo of a figure presaged in biblical prophecy, the reincarnation of a monarch who had lived more than two millennia before… Cyrus was, in the words of the Christian Courier, ‘a pagan in sentiment and practice, yet… an unconscious tool in the hands of the Lord.’” Tool… indeed.
For many of these zealots at the center of American power, the chaos within our country and overseas is simply a part of that biblical prophecy. (If you see this as hyperbole, check out the video titled, “So God Gave Us Trump.”)**
For those who see Donald Trump’s second presidency as an existential threat to American democracy, as I do, it is important to note that it is not Trump, per se, that has emerged as the threat. Members of the Christian Right are not all zealots. “As in other social movements,” Lavin reminds us, “an extreme fringe prepared to enact violence works in concert with a much broader mainstream, working toward policy change at the local and national levels.”
What Trump has done is tap into the repressive views of tens of millions of Americans; views that have been cultivated for half a century. What you are experiencing and feeling about America’s eminent transformation has been percolating for a long time. They’re not all zealots but, as we have seen in their continued and seemingly unfathomable support, they don’t really need to be.
* “Jesus Boots” from Topanga New Times:
** “So God Gave Us Trump”
