[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 73 (Summer 2021)]
Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind
Sarah Posner
ISBN 978-1984820443
Random House,
New York 2021
368pp Paperback
The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump
Ed. Ronald J. Sider
978-1725271784
Cascade Books,
Eugene, Oregon 2020
252pp
Paperback
The fact that Donald Trump was only elected President
in 2016 (despite losing the popular vote) with the
support of four out of every five white evangelical
Christians who made up a third of his electoral support
is quite well-known. But how has that support held up
and how important were their votes in boosting his
total in the 2020 election to the second largest vote
for a Presidential candidate in US history.
In 1984,
Ronald Reagan polled over 54 million votes, in 2004
George W Bush polled over 62 million votes and in 2008
Barack Obama polled over 69 million.
Donald Trump’s losing vote in 2020 was over 74
million, an astonishing total, and once again something
like four out of every five white evangelical Christians
voted for him. And, moreover, many evangelical
pastors have taken up the claim that the election was
stolen.
Indeed, at the Trump rally that preceded the
attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 proceedings
were opened with a prayer from Trump’s spiritual
adviser, Paula White, and many of those actually
taking part in the attack were devout Christians
convinced they were participating in a crusade to save
America from Satanic secularism. Most of their pastors,
it has to be said, subsequently condemned the
violence, many of them blaming it on Antifa.
This is so outside the experience of people in Britain,
both Christians and non-Christians alike, that it is
difficult to get to grips with, to comprehend: in the
most advanced country in the world, millions of people
believe in miracles as an everyday phenomenon, see
great wealth as a blessing from God, and regard the
country as in imminent danger of a Satanic takeover, a
takeover which they believe will lead to the outlawing
of Christianity and which will inevitably provoke God’s
wrath.
There is a long history of natural disasters being
ascribed to a vengeful God punishing the country for
tolerating abortion, homosexuality and other sins.
Hurricane Katrina, for example, was variously blamed
on a planned gay rights march in New Orleans or on the
city being the birth place of Ellen Degeneres.
Incredible as it might seem, for many people divine
retribution is a real fear, something that will happen
unless they do something about it and that something
was re-electing Donald Trump as President. A good
starting point for understanding this extraordinary
situation, how it came about and its political
implications is Sarah Posner’s new book, Unholy.
Posner begins by recalling how sceptical she had been
when Trump first announced his candidacy in June
2015. His constituency seemed to be the alt-right,
appealing to them with his ‘cruel nativism and casual
racism’. The fact that he ‘did not even try to tell a
personal salvation story’ or display even ‘the most
rudimentary Bible knowledge’ seemed to rule him out
as the candidate of the Christian right, already a
powerful force within the Republican Party.
What she describes as her ‘aha’ moment came when
she realised ‘that Trump was the strongman the
Christian right had been waiting for’. While the
Christian right might on the surface seem to be all about faith and values, its ‘real driving force was not
religion but grievances over school desegregation,
women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action and
more’. Abortion should be in there as well of course.
They saw Trump as someone who was not interested in
compromise, but who would fight their corner, would
save them ‘from the excesses of liberalism’. And under
Trump, the Christian right became, for a while at
least, ‘the most influential demographic in America’.
For the Christian right, Trump was ‘God’s Strongman’.
One thing she finds amazing is that even though Trump
has had innumerable meetings with what John Fea has
described as his ‘court evangelicals’, those pastors
who will lay hands on him and bless him for the
camera, ‘he hasn’t made more progress in speaking
their evangelical language’. She puts this down to him
being ‘a slow learner…a remedial student’. This is not
altogether convincing.
The fact is that Trump soon realised that to get and to
hold onto their support, he only had to go through the
motions of believing, holding up a Bible, for example,
because their support, as she herself points out, was
not really about religion.
As she insists though, one
man was crucial to reassuring the Christian right that
Trump was to be relied on and that man was Vice
President Mike Pence. He was his ‘Christian right seal
of approval’. And, of course, Pence was crucial to
filling the administration with stalwarts from the
Christian right.
Of particular interest is Posner’s discussion of the altright and its relations with the Christian right. She
writes of how Steve Bannon was well aware that the
alt-right was ‘too small to succeed electorally. That is
why, he said, he aimed his film Torchbearer at another
audience: conservative evangelicals and Catholics’. As
far as Bannon was concerned, the alt-right ‘would be
nowhere as a political movement without religious
conservatives’.
What Trump did was succeed in bringing the alt-right
and the religious right together. A good demonstration
of this was provided by the Charlottesville episode in
August 2017. Here Trump performed what she
describes as his ‘ongoing rhetorical dance with the altright’, reluctantly distancing himself but with a nod
and a wink, but more astonishingly Trump’s Evangelical
Advisory Board endorsed his stand with only one
member resigning: the African-American pastor, A R
Bernard of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn [She corrects my mistaken belief that there were no
resignations here]. This was in stark contrast to the protest resignations
from his various business boards that led to their
collapse. Those evangelical pastors who objected to
the racism and fascism of the alt-right and urged some
disassociation from them were marginalised.
One other interesting aspect of the US alt-right that
Posner reveals that was certainly new to this reader
was their admiration for Enoch Powell! Posner is particularly interesting and informative on these
people.
Posner identifies the Republican operative Paul
Weyrich as being historically ‘the most important
architect of the New Right and the religious right’ with
Mike Pence claiming him as both ‘a mentor and
friend’. In 1973 he co-founded the rightwing think tank
the Heritage Foundation, initially financed by the
Coors family but quickly expanding its billionaire base.
Today it has an annual income of $80 million. Weyrich
saw white evangelical Christians as a political force
just waiting to be mobilised behind the brand of hard
right populism that he championed and in 1979 he,
along with Jerry Falwell, had founded the Moral
Majority, the first major Christian right political
movement.
Weyrich came from a Catholic background but had
embraced the breakaway eastern rite Catholic Church
because, in his opinion, Rome was becoming too
liberal. He was always concerned about abortion and
complained that the evangelicals did not take the issue
seriously. As he pointed out, on one occasion, in 1970
Billy Graham had actually said that nowhere did the
Bible even mention abortion! Weyrich always argued
that this was an issue that the evangelical Christian
right could mobilise around, but he was also absolutely
frank in admitting that it was not this moral cause that
brought the movement into existence.
The great issue that provoked the likes of Jerry Falwell
into political activity was opposition to the civil rights
movement and the desegregation of schools. Today the
Christian right itself claims that abortion was the issue
that called it into being, but this is a myth.
The Christian right came into existence in response to
the desegregation of schools and the denial of tax
relief to the hundreds of segregated Christian schools
that had been set up in response across the South and
West. Falwell himself ran a whites-only church (he had
George Wallace speak to his congregation on one
occasion) and had established a whites-only Christian
school.
In fact Falwell did not really show any interest
in abortion as an issue until the end of the 1970s and
into the early 1980s, until after the Moral Majority had
been founded.
As Posner points out, looking back on this period,
Weyrich often complained of the difficulty he had
getting abortion on the Christian right’s agenda. Today,
of course, no evangelical gathering takes place without
a condemnation of the contemporary ‘Holocaust’ that
is abortion, every year murdering millions of children,
something that God will surely punish.
One of the most impressive features of Unholy is its
exploration of alt-right and Christian right
internationalism. Posner does not dwell on evangelical
support for and involvement in Ronald Reagan’s
murderous policies in South America, but instead
focuses extremely productively, it has to be said, on
more recent connections. The Viktor Orban regime in
Hungary is regarded as in many ways showing the way
forward.
There is also Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ‘fascist
president’, who speaks the same language as the US
Christian right. When he visited the White House in
March 2019, he had a meeting with evangelical
pastors, led by Pat Robertson, who anointed him in the
name of the Holy Spirit. Robertson called on God to
‘uphold him. Protect him from evil. And use him
mightily in years to come’. As Bolsonaro told them, his
middle name was ‘Messias’. All this was shown on
Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.
Most interesting though is the Christian right’s
fascination with the Putin regime which is credited
with having restored Christianity in Russia, with having
reinstated the pre-revolutionary ‘Holy Russia’ of the
Tsars. Indeed, the likes of Weyrich have long urged an
anti-Islamic alliance between Christian Russia and a
Christian USA, something that Trump obviously found
tempting. The Christian right ‘has enmeshed itself in
the global wave of right-wing authoritarianism, and
evinces admiration for the same nativist despots who
have inspired the alt-right’. This is a compelling
insight.
Posner certainly has the measure of Trump and his
evangelical allies. As she writes: the evangelicals
‘needed a savior; Trump was eager to oblige because
of his bottomless need for a worshipful retinue. Trump
and the religious right, then, are essential to each
other’s success’.
They have a ‘symbiotic relationship, in which Christian
right leaders regularly glorify Trump, and Trump in
return gives them carte blanche to radically reshape
law and policy’. Their success in this respect, for
which much of the credit or blame, must, one
suspects, go to Vice President Pence, has left their
adherents in a powerful strategic position inside the
federal judiciary right up to the Supreme Court.
This was always the deal. Trump’s judicial
appointments are ‘his most lasting assault on
America’s democratic institutions’, packing the federal
judiciary ‘with nominees who have espoused extreme
right-wing views on race, LGBTQ rights, abortion and
religion and state issues’. Where the Christian right
goes now that Trump is no longer President remains to
be seen, but Posner is likely to be an essential guide in
charting its progress [Her discussion of Christian right involvement on 6 January
2021 and of the recently formed Jericho March organisation is
available online here].
Of course, it is always important to remember when
examining the evangelical right that while four out of
five white evangelical voted for Trump, one in five did
not. Not only that, but throughout US history white
Christians have been involved in supporting just about
every progressive movement there has been. One
needs only mention Abraham Muste who played a
leading role in the 1919 Lawrence Textile strike, allied
with the American Trotskyists in the American Workers
Party in the 1930s and played a leading role in the
1934 Toledo General Strike, one of the decisive class
battles of the period. He went on to embrace pacifism
and to play a part in both the civil rights movement
and in the opposition to the Vietnam War.
But what of contemporary evangelical opposition to
the Christian rights’ idolatrous embrace of Trump?
Ronald Sider, in his edited volume, The Spiritual
Danger of Donald Trump, has put together an
interesting collection of responses, some of which are
extremely powerful.
One can, for example, only sympathise with Pastor
Daniel Dietrich’s bemused outrage when he opens his
essay, ‘Hymn for the 81%’, with the cold statement
that ‘In 2016, 81 PERCENT OF WHITE EVANGELICAL
CHRISTIANS VOTED FOR Donald Trump after hearing an
audio recording of him bragging about sexually
assaulting women’. He does not mention that a number
of leading pastors actually phoned Trump after the
release of the tape to offer him comfort and support!
Dietrich goes on to chronicle the multitude of other
abuses they have apologised for and reproduces his
anti-Trump hymn in the text. Dietrich urges that
Christians have to get involved in fighting ‘white
supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, sexism – all the
ways in which people are treated as less than the
Children of God that they are’.
And there is much more along the same lines.
Of
particular interest for this reader was Stephen Haynes
essay, ‘”If You Board the Wrong Train… American
Christians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Donald Trump’.
This discusses the Christian right attempt, led by Eric
Metaxas, to conscript Bonhoeffer, who was executed
by the Nazis, in their cause. Metaxas is, of course, a
leading Christian right ‘intellectual’, the author of the
appalling Donald the Caveman children’s books, and is
one of the founders of the Jericho March. As Haynes,
an biographer of Bonhoeffer, argues, the evangelical
right despite its attempted hijacking of Bonhoeffer is
blithely recapitulating ‘the mistakes committed by
German Christians in the wake of the Nazi Revolution’.
He concludes his extremely interesting essay by
insisting that the harsh reality is that Trump ‘has
succeeded in Trumpifying American Christianity’.
There are also useful essays by John Fea (‘What White
Evangelicals Can Learn about Politics from the Civil
Rights Movement’), by Christopher Pieper and Matt
Henderson (’10 Reasons Christians Should Reconsider
Their Support of Trump’) and more.
One criticism is that there is not enough consideration
of the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ as preparing the
way for Trump and effectively corrupting the
evangelical movement.
But let us end with Randall
Balmer’s powerful ‘Donald Trump and the Death of
Evangelicalism’. Balmer is a Professor of American
Religious History and an ordained minister, the author
of numerous books, and his considered assessment is
that after a long illness in 2016 ‘Evangelicalism Died’
as a religious movement, note as a religious
movement. He does, of course, add that a resurrection
might still be a possibility, after all Jesus did raise
Lazarus from the dead.
John Newsinger
