"Rev." Donald Trump and the Christian Right — A Secular Transformation of the Great Awakening Heritage

Over the past five years, the curious relationship between Donald Trump and many conservative evangelicals has been at the intersection of US religion and politics. Explanations for this curious linkage include: • John Fea’s accent on the historical fear of evangelicals of the other. • Ben Howe’s claim that evangelicals have chosen power over values. • Whitehead and Perry’s articulation of a U.S. Christian nationalism. • Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s feminist critique of U.S. Christian masculinity. • Timothy Carney’s connection between social collapse and Trumpism. This paper argues that each of these arguments capture important parts of the Trump-evangelical nexus, but not the complete picture. Fea’s historical approach needs to be complemented by Whitehead and Perry’s quantitative approach and vice-versa. By synthesizing these arguments and well as others, this paper shows how Donald Trump and his evangelical partners have fostered a civil religion that secularizes the Great Awakening heritage. This is particularly evident in Trump’s rhetorical style, public policies, and the character of his campaign rallies. Paper Since the 1970s, faith-based organizations, especially of the evangelical persuasion, have become politically mobilized in reaction to what they have seen as the moral relativism that emerged from the major shifts in cultural norms in the 1960s. First as the Moral Majority and later as the Christian Coalition, these political advocates have had a major impact on U.S. politics, not just at the national level, but especially at the state and local level. Nevertheless, the embrace of Donald Trump by the Christian Right is quite striking. President Trump is not the first person who comes to mind in terms of being a paragon of moral virtue. He has never been known to be a regular church goer and his alleged sexual encounters with women would hardly qualify him as a Christian exemplar. Furthermore, in Christian terms, he has never been one to ask for forgiveness for his sins nor is he the humblest person in terms of personality. Yet, he has managed to gain a lot of support from evangelical leaders and voters. Indeed, in 2016, Trump received 81% of the evangelical vote in the general election. This support actually exceeded that George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney received in previous presidential elections (Fea 2018, 5-6). In turn, in the 2020 fall election, Trump gained the support 75-80% of white evangelical Christian voters as well as 57% of white Catholics (Schor 2020b). A growing number of journalistic and academic studies have explored this curious marriage between Donald Trump and the Christian Right. Ben Howe (2019) argues that in supporting Trump, evangelicals have chosen power over values. Katherine Stewart contends this pursuit of power is actually a political ideology that The 2021 Proceedings of the ASSR 76 can be traced to Rousas John Rushdoony’s works on pursuing Christian Reconstructionism, “a theocratic movement seeking to infuse our society at all levels with a biblical worldview” (2019, 103). Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry (2020) suggest that this nexus is rooted in a white Christian nationalism that is distinct from religious commitment. Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) argues in turn that this nationalism is steeped in patriarchal thinking and projection of the traditional work v. home roles for men and women. Sarah Posner (2020) connects white Christian nationalism to the growing impact of the alt-right. Robert Jones (2020) contends there is a long legacy of white supremacy in US Christianity, although the connection to Trump’s racist rhetoric is implicit rather than explicit in this study. John Fea (2018) maintains that the Christian Right’s embrace of Trump is connected to the longstanding history of evangelical fear of “the other. ” Finally, Timothy Carney (2019) connects Trump’s success at galvanizing conservative voters to communities whose economic opportunities and social intermediate institutions have collapsed and whose residents consequently feel “left behind. ” The “marriage” between Trump and the Christian Right also reflects James Davison Hunter’s culture wars thesis: that the liberal-conservative divide politically reflects a liberal-conservative divide in theology and philosophy. The liberal side is more open-ended and pluralistic in its conceptualization of the relationship of God to the world and tends to stress in political terms the pursuit of social justice. The conservative side, conversely, sees God in rigid, steadfast certain terms; it stresses the importance of cultivating personal virtue and politically what it sees as fundamentally evil threats, such as communism or relativists moralities (Hunter 1991). These competing spiritual imaginations increasingly have divided church communities (Radcliffe 2005). Trump’s appeal to the Christian Right is clearly on the conservative side of this divide. Although these studies are all extremely valuable, they either reduce the support given by the Christian Right to Trump to the different facets of the US culture wars since World War II or in Fea’s case, primarily focus on the historical antecedents within US evangelicalism. To understand the nexus between Trump and the evangelicals, one has to first integrate the historical and contemporary analyses. More than just an ideological or cultural political movement, the politics of the Christian Right is the latest chapter in a long history of how the evangelical revival tradition has articulated ideas that has led to the marginalization and persecution of “others. ” Second, one needs to grasp that not only has Trump tapped into this heritage, but that his political engagement of his supporters has secularized both the affect and effect of the Great Awakenings in U.S. history so as to foster a divisive civil religion. My methodology, pure and simple, is the interpretation of texts. My contribution is to integrate the contemporary focus of some of these scholars with the historical analysis of other scholars. I also draw from my own experience as a lay Christian liturgist to suggest how the format, ambiance, and effects of the Great Awakening revivals have been recast by Trump into political theatre. In turn, I am using the term “Christian Right” as an umbrella term for conservative traditions within U.S. Christianity. Although I will primarily be focusing on evangelicals, at times I will also make reference to the Puritans, fundamentalists, and even conservative The 2021 Proceedings of the ASSR 77 Catholics as being part of this larger Christian Right umbrella, both in history and present-day. I will present my argument in four sections. The first section will review the extensive entanglements between Trump and the Christian Right. The second section will review the studies that contend this nexus has to understood primarily in political ideological, not theological, terms. The third section will challenge this rendering by showing the theological concepts and historical antecedents that inform the Christian Right’s engagement of politics. The final section will explore how indeed the growing secularism of U.S. society has provided a backdrop by which Trump, especially in his campaign rallies, has secularized the Great Awakening heritage. The Christian Right’s Embrace of Donald Trump Several evangelical leaders have sung Donald Trump’s praises. Robert Jeffress, of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, supported Trump on the basis, drawing from Augustine and Martin Luther, that we needed a strong government to restrain evil (Fea 2018, 124-29). The Independent Network Charismatics supported Trump on the basis that a leader was needed who would lead the U.S. back to prosperity and extend “the dominion of Jesus Christ over all the earth” (Fea 2018, 133). Paula White, one of the leading preachers of the prosperity gospel – “faith, wealth, health, and victory” – has been an integral member of Trump’s entourage and actually claimed the president has had “a born-again experience” (Fea 2018, 136). In political terms, this curious marriage between Trump and the evangelical community lies in a legacy of liberal laws and federal court decisions over the past six decades that, from the Christian Right standpoint, have eroded the Christian ideals that supposedly have informed U.S. political life since its founding. Court cases like Engel v. Vitale (1962) removing state led prayer in public schools and Roe v. Wade (1973) providing for state sanctioning of abortion, at least in the first trimester of pregnancy, in the eyes of evangelicals, have encouraged a growing moral laxity and relativism in U.S. society (Fea 2018, 56). In the 1990s, the inability of conservative Congressional members to remove President Bill Clinton from public office on the basis of his sexual misdeeds with a White House intern signified to evangelicals to what extent U.S. politics and society seemed to be heading, so-to-speak, “to hell in a handbasket. ” By 2016, Hillary Clinton, both in terms of being emblematic of the post 1960s non-traditional woman, and whose advocacy of big government socio-economic policies that supposedly would further erode a Christian America, was in evangelical terms, “the enemy to be defeated” (Fea 2016, 71). Previous Republican presidents such as Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush claimed to have the Christian Right political concerns at heart, but did very little in actual policies to realize them. In the past, evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham, Cal Thomas, and James Dobson had been brought into White House circles only to realize that they were just being used by Republican presidents to get the evangelical vote. David Kwo, in fact, shares that evangelical leaders, when out of sight, were even disparaged as “’goofy’” by key advisors in the The 2021 Proceedings of the ASSR 78 Bush White House (Fea 2018, 145-52). In turn, liberal secular society often has had a disparag