Kaleidoscope: The Tumble of Theological Fragments Deployed to Justify Support for Trump

PLUS: An invitation to a live event with Rev. Jim Wallis on 3/12

Along with a panel of four other experts, I was recently asked by Chauncey Devega, the senior politics writer for Salon, to help his readers “make better sense of Trump’s claims of personal divinity, his fascist plans and use of Christianity.” Today, I’m sharing my response, where I talk about the jumble of theological fragments that are clumsily deployed to justify support for Trump. You can read the full article here:

I was glad to be included among these voices:

• Marcel Danesi is professor emeritus of linguistic anthropology and semiotics at the University of Toronto. His new book is Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective.

• Federico Finchelstein is a professor of history at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York. His most recent book is A Brief History of Fascist Lies.

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University. His new book, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy, will be published in April.

• Joe Walsh was a Republican congressman and a leading Tea Party conservative. He is now a prominent conservative voice against Donald Trump and the host of the podcast "White Flag With Joe Walsh." 

Here’s my answer to DeVega’s question:

By my lights, Donald Trump is in a stronger place with the GOP base than he was at this time during his initial rise to power. While he had serious challengers in 2016, he’s waltzing through the GOP primaries this year, largely due to strong support from white evangelical Protestants. Ahead of Super Tuesday in 2016, there was still a robust debate among white evangelical Protestants about whether people who had branded themselves “values voters” could in good conscience vote for a candidate like Trump. People like Russell Moore, then the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, made a robust case that they could not. Moore’s now left his post, in large part because of the conflicts between his stance and the flood of support for Trump among his former constituents.

There are virtually no prominent voices today in the mainstream white evangelical world making a theological or moral case against supporting Trump. Through it all — scandals, lewd behavior and crass language, a conviction for sexual assault, four indictments, you name it — Trump’s favorability rating has never dropped below 60% in PRRI polling among white evangelicals, with churchgoing evangelicals generally registering higher support. According to exit polls, their support for Trump went from 81% to 85% between 2016 and 2020. They are not holding their nose in order to vote for Trump. They are embracing him.

It’s no accident that the theological rationales for supporting Trump have been all over the map. He’s been cast as a modern-day messiah, as white evangelicals’ own King Cyrus, or — my favorite—as a “baby Christian.” This conceptual disarray is a clear indication that these are not rigorously developed religious rationales but rather theological fragments that are serving as backfill to support fealty to Trump. I think this is often missed. Most observers either take the theological language too seriously or dismiss it altogether.

But if you turn this kaleidoscope theology over enough, you can see that it is pointing to something bigger: the worldview of white Christian nationalism, the idea that the U.S. was designed by God to be a kind of promised land for European Christians. This week, PRRI released a groundbreaking survey of support for Christian nationalism in all 50 states. We found that two thirds of white evangelical Protestants — far more than any other religious group — support the basic tenets of Christian nationalism (e.g., that U.S. laws should be based on the Bible; that Christians should exercise dominion over all areas of society). We also found that support for Christian nationalism nearly perfectly correlates with vote for Trump in the 2020 election, particularly among white Americans, all the way down to the state level. Trump understands the power of this appeal, which he’s consistently deployed particularly with white evangelicals and other conservative white Christian groups.

Just last week, Trump told the leaders attending the conservative National Religious Broadcasters Association meeting, “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before.” And he wrapped his speech with a flourish: “We have to bring back our religion…. We have to bring back Christianity.” This broad appeal to transforming the country into a white Christian America — more than any particular theological assertion — is the glue binding white evangelicals to Trump.

I’d be surprised if anything puts a serious damper on white evangelicals' embrace of Trump. Even knowing what they know about Trump, in PRRI’s American Values Survey last fall, nearly half of white evangelicals who hold favorable views of Trump overtly declared there was virtually nothing he could do to lose their support. Six in 10 white evangelicals believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and two-thirds disagree that there is credible evidence that Trump committed serious federal crimes. Actual court convictions seem unlikely to dislodge these preemptive judgments. By promising to usher in a new era of white Christian America, Trump has already lured most white evangelicals into his alternative reality funhouse, and it seems unlikely that many will find their way out.

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Save the Date! #WhiteTooLong Paid Subscriber Live Event with Rev. Jim Wallis on March 12

Tuesday night (03/12/2024) at 7:30 pm ET, I’m hosting my second zoom event exclusively for paid subscribers: a conversation with my good friend Rev. Jim Wallis, author of the forthcoming book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.

**Stay tuned, there will be more live author events for paid subscribers throughout the year. Become a paid subscriber now and get access to all of them.**

I hope you’ll join us for this one-hour event. We’ll talk for about 40 minutes and then take questions from Zoom webinar participants for the final 20 minutes.

Here’s what I had to say about Jim’s important book:

Drawing on more than five decades of experience as a minister and activist, Rev. Jim Wallis sounds the alarm--arguing that the rise of white Christian Nationalism is not just another symptom of partisan conflict but a false white gospel that threatens to destroy both democracy and the integrity of white churches. At this hinge point of American history, this book is an important and urgent call for white Christians to undertake a new discipleship out of whiteness and to unequivocally declare their support for the equality of all.

How to register for the webinar (access for paid subscribers only):