Trump the Redeemer

How can Christians support MAGA? Quite easily, it turns out. 

The overwhelming Christian support for Donald Trump seems, to many secular liberals and progressives, both confusing and confused: who, after all, is less Christian than him? What is less Christian than a project of bigotry and hierarchy? There’s a feeling that they must simply have not understood their own religion. Recent events, such as a contentious back and forth between J.D. Vance (an adult Catholic convert) and the pope, and the construction of what can only be described as idols by Trump supporters only add to this. 

Liberal bafflement takes various forms: Jesus would have hated modern Republicans, it’s said. The founder was actually a socialist, the true message of the religion is love and tolerance. Don’t they know Christian nationalism is a perversion of the faith, not ‘real’ Christianity? ‘No true Christian’ supports it. Sometimes this is said to score points, sometimes to feel intellectually superior (‘I understand your religion better than you do‘), sometimes out of confusion, and even, occasionally, in an earnest attempt to persuade.

Behind all this lies, I think, a liberalism that has not yet taken the measure of what it’s up against. The MAGA movement is a Christian one. The core of Trump's electoral coalition—not every voter, but the largest pillar of it—are white, conservative Christians. Their beliefs are clearly within an American Christian tradition. This doesn’t imply its opposite: far-right Christians are ‘real’ Christians, but they don’t define the faith. In American Christianity, there are also liberal Christians, the Black Church, reformers, and many others. Contra literalists (and some atheists!) they are ‘real’ Christians too. 

White Evangelical Christians will be my focus here however, and they overwhelmingly support Trump—at higher rates than any other Republican of the modern era. Church attendance, at least of this type of church, increases conservatism—regular attendees are even more likely to vote republican than occasional ones. The relationship also runs the other way: People who move to the far-right politically will often convert to Christianity as part of that process. J.D. Vance, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Russell Brand are all high-profile examples of this, but plenty of ordinary people do it too. They are not ‘good Christians’ tricked into going along with bad political values. Their bad political values have led them to Christianity.

But that’s all fake, right?

You never know for sure what’s in someone else’s head, but we shouldn’t reflexively assume that a proponent of both Christian values and MAGA ones simply hasn’t understood the former—or is being self-consciously insincere. Let’s start by clearing the ground of some of the surface-level reasons why this can seem like a contradiction.

For one thing, doesn’t Christianity care about having leaders who exhibit high personal morals? Yes and no. Conservative Christians went on about personal character during the Clinton years, then stopped caring in the Trump ones. Basically, it was a problem when our sexual predator was in the White House, but not when theirs was. Hypocrisy to be sure, but not core to their beliefs. Many, many Christian leaders have had sex scandals, or been accused of abuse and remained in perfectly good standing. 

Beyond that, the temperament of MAGA just seems unchristian. Put simply, you can’t imagine Ned Flanders at the January 6^th insurrection. This character though is much more informed by mainline Protestantism than evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals can present a friendly face, but we should recognise this as a recruitment tactic as much as anything else. These types of churches aggressively seek out new converts (it's literally in the name). As part of that, its members are asked to be ambassadors, to advertise the lifestyle, they are told to be ‘winsome’, to make a good first impression. That doesn't mean they don’t have a much harder edge to them. Even in recruitment, it is standard to use Paul’s ‘Roman Road’, which involves telling the prospective convert they’re a sinner who will burn in hell. 

American conservatism (of which Christian conservatism is a core part) in general has moved to a much more aggressive rhetorical position over the last decade or two. The reasons for this are structural, not temperamental: we are at the end of a long realignment in which those with a White Southern identity (a cluster of commitments on religion, racism, and gender roles) have moved from their ancestral home in the Democratic party to the Republican.

While this process was ongoing, politicians and public figures (of both sides) had to talk out of both sides of their mouths as their coalitions included both racists and anti-racists. This led simultaneously, to the rise of dog-whistle politics, the fetishization of bi-partisanship, and a general performative friendliness and civility. During the Obama presidency, however, that realignment quietly completed itself. Now anyone (by and large) for whom overt racism, sexism, or Christian nationalism was appealing was in the Republican Party. Anyone for whom it was off-putting was in the Democratic one.  There was simply no need to obfuscate one’s core commitments anymore—you could be much, much more direct, much more discriminatory, without consequence. Trump’s 2016 run did not create this new reality, it revealed it. 

Because most of us grew up during the process of realignment, we tend to view the political culture that it generated as normal, and our post-realignment politics as strange and unsettling. The reality is the reverse: in the broad sweep of American history, it’s the Reagan and Clinton eras that are aberrant, our current politics the norm. A buttoned up American Conservatism and a strait-laced but friendly conservative Christianity aren’t the true face of those movements—they are a mask that had to be worn during an unusual time. 

The Southern Identity

The ideology targeted by Republicans with the Southern strategy combines attitudes towards race, gender, and religion. Specifically, it is grounded in anti-Black racism, a patriarchal view of men as ‘head of the household’ and women ‘protected’ in the domestic sphere (and a deep hostility to those outside of that model, for instance gay and trans people), and finally, a conservative Christianity that stresses a literalist approach to scripture and hostility to non-Christians.

In the US electorate, these commitments significantly correlate: Racists are usually also sexist. People who attend an evangelical church show much higher levels of anti-Black racism than comparable people who do not.  In the poaching of this cohort from Democrats, Republicans made appeals to all three elements—race, gender, religion—often in interconnected ways. Coded appeals to segregationists—‘law and order’, ‘state’s rights’, and attacks on ‘welfare queens’ were clear enough for those who could hear the dog whistle. This racism was heavily gendered—‘law and order’ was often presented, implicitly or explicitly, as protecting white women from Black men. And gender was appealed to on its own terms—from Phyllis Schlafly to the modern manosphere.

All these appeals were also religious: women’s rights and the sexual revolution erred because they stepped outside of god’s law. Independent women, or LGBTQ people, had arrogantly rejected the divinely sanctioned form of relationship—a patriarchal nuclear family. The Black ‘criminal’, as we shall see shortly, was also conceived of in clearly Christian terms. Put simply, while the Southern strategy was certainly racist, it was also deeply gendered, and deeply religious.

Within the framework of conservative ideology these disparate elements appear as a complete and coherent whole. Conservatism, at its core, is a belief (often subconscious) in an extra-human origin of the social order. Put simply, human society works according to clear rules or laws. We did not create these laws, nor can we change them, but we can disobey them. Doing so will make things much worse for everyone. Distinct and defined roles for men and women are one such extra-human law, a social hierarchy or racial caste system another. Christianity is both another set of extra-human laws (go to church, pray, etc) but also the source of the laws in the first place. To exist within a ‘traditional’ racial and gender hierarchy is to live in accordance with God’s plan for us. 

This tight correlation of values is often presented as bigots ‘using’ Christianity to excuse their bigotry. The actual history is the reverse: The Southern identity did not find Christianity; Christianity created the Southern identity. 

Blood and Fire

In the aftermath of the Civil War, White Southerners faced an identity crisis:  They were a martial people, priding themselves on their manhood. God had been on their side, yet he allowed them to lose totally and humiliatingly. Why?  The actual answer is easy enough: While their inbred agrarian aristocrats had been larping as Roman Senators, northern industrialists were building factories that churned out modern munitions. 

White elites however, couldn’t face the reality that their way of life was both morally heinous and an economic dead end.  Instead, they drew on the central symbolism of their religion; that of a crucified god who suffers and is humiliated, before returning a powerful, triumphant monarch. The suffering of the Civil War was not punishment, it was a divine test before their restoration to glory. The country that was theirs by divine providence would be restored to them. Christ-like, the South would rise again. 

A system emerged in which “the secular and the sacred fused to create a Southern civil religion.”  Individual figures were cast as something more than men: Sam Davis, a Confederate spy hanged by the Union Army, became “a Christ figure to southerners.” His scaffold was described as ‘the Calvary whereon were exhibited the highest characteristics which belong to the southern character’”  ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s farcical end in a friendly fire incident became not just a martyrdom, but a picture of Christ-like atonement. Lee became an honorable man, reluctantly doing his duty, just as Jesus had accepted his fate in Gethsemane.

Another existential identity crisis for White Southerners was the presence of formerly enslaved Black people in their midst. In most White Southerners' despicable view of the world, it is dubious if Black people were even considered human. A Confederate veteran writing to his mother in 1875 was typical in ascribing to them an “animal nature . . . merely acting under the direction of blind and maddened impulse, of animal desires and passions.” Yet post emancipation, many immediately showed themselves confident, capable, and successful. This “violated white expectations of black people, confounded their feelings of superiority, and violated white stereotypes long assimilated into the white psyche.”

This is very typical of dehumanising rhetoric: The presentation of an out-group as animalistic (or literally as animals) and the contradiction that comes from the fact that they are not. In some circumstances however, this contradiction can become a feature, not a bug, of racist worldviews. Possessing both human and animal characteristics makes the demonized group more terrifying, for the same reason that a werewolf is more frightening than a wolf: it poses both a physical and metaphysical threat.  Not only can it harm you, but its existence—both person and animal—violates established categories we rely on to process the world. To demonize is to construe the other as a demon—dangerous and unnatural. And White Southerners had a deep well of symbolism to draw on when applying this category: Christianity is a religion where demons are real.  The figure of Satan at once became the cause of Southerners' military defeat and identified with the unsettling presence of former slaves. Black men were constantly described as ravaging demons. This was reinforced by the New Testament’s linkage of slavery and sin.  Finally, in Christian symbolism white represents goodness, God, the divine. Black is the colour of sin, of darkness, and of the demonic.

Demonic entities are often imagined as posing, as part of their general physical threat, a specifically sexual threat. From this developed the core organising principle of the Southern identity: White women need protecting from Black men. This justified keeping the former securely in the domestic sphere and the segregation and violent repression of the latter. This obsessive ‘rape complex’ existed within a complex web of symbols that it difficult to fully reconstruct. At a minimum, we can say that in this narrative the White woman represents civilization (white, Christian, pure), the Black man its internal and external threats (non-white, impure, demonic). The White man, emasculated in military defeat, is hence still the martial, manly defender of all that is good. Thus, religion, racism, and patriarchy are fused into a mutually justifying whole. 

The generation after Reconstruction (1867-1877) saw an increase in the South in both religiosity and anti-Black violence. From 1877-1900 church attendance rose dramatically as the number of Black men lynched tripled with 1,615 such murders recorded in the last decade of the century. A significant minority of these—around 30-40% —were large-scale public events with a ritualized presentation: sites would be chosen carefully in advance—indeed the event might even be advertised in newspapers. Large natural arenas centering a tree or a wooden pole were preferred. Huge crowds of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, (including White women and children) would gather, and the violence was often preceded by a sermon. Rather than hanging, the killing would be done by first torturing the victim through cutting and dismembering with knives then burning alive. Relics—teeth, bone, charred flesh and organs—would be taken as keepsakes or sold. Afterwards the tree and surrounding site “became something of a shrine.”

A Massachusetts newspaper in 1899 wrote how “A civilised community numbering thousands” had gathered to watch such a ritual, one which was in their words “naked savagery of the primitive man.” Particularly shocking to them was how this was a “Sunday holiday in one of the most orthodox religious communities in the United States.” Many today also cannot let go of a sense of contradiction. This is little more, I think, than a persistent tendency to view Christianity as intrinsically good. We moderns can also fall into the trap they did of reading such events through a (racist) civilization vs. savagery dichotomy, quite at odds with human history. From the Assyrians to the Romans, European empires, and Nazi Germany, high state capacity is no guard against mass sadism. Often it is an enabler of it. 

These rituals were both profoundly sadistic and profoundly Christian. The motivation for them was Christian—the combatting of a demonic threat to their women, their communities, and to White, Christian civilization itself. The leadership and direction for these murders often came from ministers, they were described in overtly religious terms and served a religious social function. Finally, we may note that across history and cultures blood and fire are “ritual detergents” used to purify and consecrate. They are commonly used in religiously motivated killings by people who believe themselves, consciously or subconsciously, to be under demonic threat. Consider the close parallel to European Christians torturing and burning supposed witches ‘at the stake’, or to the ‘Moloch Sacrifices’ referenced in the Bible. Ultimately, despite the discomfort in this then and now, “there is no denying the profound religious significance these sacrificial murders had.”

Living History

All of this is still with us. And that should not surprise us. White ritual killings of Black men lasted well into the 1960s—living memory. What was created in the Solid South is alive in the MAGA right.

We see it in their extreme resistance to taking down statues of Civil War ‘heroes’: these are religious icons, modern-day saints. Simultaneously objects of veneration, assertions of white supremacy, a none too subtle threat to Black men and women, and an expression of faith in the central promise of the civic religion: the Old South will be restored.  

It is this promise, this Christian promise, that lies behind a modern Southern identity that positions American nationalism in opposition to the country’s federal government. We see it in the vengeful nature of Trumpism, the fantasies of executing opponents, of the violent purification of a land returned to its rightful owners. Christ redeems—literally purchases his followers out of slavery—the slavery of sin, of a corrupt world. Trump, likewise, will redeem the true believers in a land lost to sin, darkness, and the demonic. 

In Trump’s first term, I spent a bit of time scrolling the comments of MAGA Facebook Groups—mostly older White women with a Southern identity from what I could tell—to try and get a feel for the rank and file. One thing that jumped out at me was just how often things were described as demonic: trans people were demonic, BLM was demonic, Nancy Pelosi was demonic, the Disney Channel was demonic. Some of this is likely just rhetoric, but often it matches closely with the model of demonization outlined above: trans people, an obsession of the modern right, are portrayed as posing both a physical threat, specifically a sexual threat (women’s bathrooms) and a metaphysical threat (destroying gender boundaries, diminishing ‘real’ womanhood). 

Even where the word is not used, something like it, at some level of consciousness, is still clearly in people’s heads. When the right talks about ‘criminals’ they don’t mean people who commit crimes. Rather it is a (racialized) category of intrinsically evil, impure people. BLM protestors are ‘criminals’ regardless of if they violate the law. True citizens (White, Christian, Pure) should not be ‘treated like criminals’ even when they are. 

While lynching declined as its social sanction was removed, the use of Christian iconography in violence, or threats of violence, endured. Throughout the 20^th century the burning cross was displayed at Klan meetings, used to intimidate, and in opposition to civil rights. This heinous symbol is not, as is sometimes supposed, an attack on Christianity. The Klan was a devoutly Protestant organisation whose ranks included thousands of middle-class, educated ministers. Rather, it is an aggressive affirmation of Christianity. Christian symbols can be used offensively against the demonic: think of their uses in exorcisms or to drive out vampires in fiction.. 

The same aggressive use of Christian icons occurs in the new right: They love Crusader symbols and phrases (‘Deus Vult’). For a time ‘Jesus is Lord’ became a semi-coded way of attacking Jews. The insurrectionists who sacked the capital on January 6^th did so under three symbols—the Confederate flag, the gallows, and the cross. In doing so, these semi-literate petit-bourgeoise thugs showed a far better grasp of their ideology’s history than sophisticated liberals who ascribed their actions to ‘economic anxiety’.

True Christianity?

There is another story to be told beside this one. One of the abolitionists who opposed slavery because of their Christianity. Of the Christians born into slavery in the Old South. Of the Black Churches who stood against apartheid, political authoritarianism, and cultic violence. I have no doubt they were sincere in their faith, and in many cases morally improved by it, no doubt that their creed gave them the courage to take a stand against appalling odds. I do not hold, as the New Atheists did, that religion is always potentially dangerous. It’s worth remembering that in the story I have told the vast majority of victims were Christians. Many of the Black men ritually murdered prayed and sang hymns as they were tortured. 

The Christianity in both stories is ‘real.’  You can make a moral claim in favour of one, but not definitionally exclude the other. Jesus has been worshiped historically by both those enforcing hierarchies, caste-systems, and slavery, and those who sought liberation from them. The man himself (Jesus was probably a real person—an apocalyptic Judean prophet) likely did speak out against existing authorities and call for more to be done for the poor (this would be very ‘in character’ for a prophet in his tradition). I also suspect he would have taken slavery and patriarchy completely for granted. The biblical authors agree on very little, and had different conceptions of slavery, but none voiced anything like a modern abolitionist position. The first Christian documents we have—the authentic letters of Paul—provide an eyewitness account of the first generation of followers: small associations whose membership was a mixture of enslaved people, freedmen, free men and women, and enslavers. Paul wrote that there will be neither “slave nor free” in heaven. On earth, he returned a runaway slave to their enslaver. A generation after this, elite Greco-Roman authors would write ‘lives’ of the founder of this movement (those that survive are the Gospels). They likely not only owned slaves but worked with them to write these texts—giving dictation to a literate enslaved person who would take notes in shorthand then write them up making edits, corrections, and additions of their own. This duality is in the New Testament’s very DNA.

Evangelical support for Donald Trump stands in direct continuity with the Christianity of enslavers, of global racial empire, and the Old South. I think when liberal Christians deny this, they are often more motivated to protect Christianity’s reputation than to protect Christianity's victims (‘yes, Trump support is bad, but it’s nothing to do with me‘). People outside Christianity often think dismissing Christian nationalism as not ‘real’ will be more persuasive: Christian nationalists won’t abandon Christianity, but perhaps they can be pushed into a better, truer, version of it. But it doesn’t work. Are we persuaded by them citing the Bible’s pro-patriarchy, pro-slavery, pro-death penalty, or anti-gay verses at us? Obviously not. For the same reasons, they don’t give it much weight when we cite one of the (one must admit, significantly rarer) verses that are good for liberals. Finally, being a progressive is about, well, progress. We believe in charting new ground, thinking new thoughts, in making a world, certainly informed by what has been, but better than anything yet realized. Appealing to original intent, or some inherent ‘real’ version of a doctrine we must return to, is an implicitly conservative standard. When we do so, we fight on their terms.

The argument against the evangelical right isn’t some definitional cleverness. It’s that they’re terrible people. Devout Christians can be God-awful human beings; people who disown their children for being gay, who fly the Confederate flag, who hate and fear those different to them. Look at a map of any negative social outcome in the US—child poverty, infant mortality, educational attainment, educational spending, drunk driving—and you’re looking at a map of where these people are a voting majority. They are not a response to the isolation and marginalization of their communities; they are the cause of it. 

I was born in Grimsby in the UK, an almost all-white, less-advantaged port town with similarly grim social stats. I recall listening to an older resident bemoan the loss of industry in the area. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking he meant coal mining, like Newcastle or Durham. No, no—whaling. He lionized the merchant sailors of old and engaged in a sort of collective self-pity for job losses no living person remembers. The Southern identity is every bit as preposterous as this, but much more intense, on a much larger scale, and fixated on a grievance infinitely less moral. The problem with it isn’t that it’s not Christian, it’s that it’s not healthy or normal to think this way. 

And that it's hurting people. And that it's dangerous, so incredibly dangerous. When we think of America becoming tyrannical, the idea we usually have in our heads is Nazi Germany. Immigrant detention facilities are called concentration camps by critics; we anxiously look to what the politicians of the Weimar Republic got wrong. There’s nothing wrong with this (in fact it can often be useful), but there are parts of American history we can look to as well. What is coming for us may not be gas chambers, but the cross, blood, and fire. 

Surely Toby, you’re not saying we might see a return of that today? Let me put the question back to you—why are you so confident we won’t? As I’ve said, an advanced state, technology, Christianity, and Whiteness are no guards against mass participation in evil. Indeed, at various points all have been enablers of it. A ‘cleansing’ of the country as its chosen people are restored is what they have been telling us they want for well over a century now. A few decades in an unusual party realignment obfuscated that, but the core beliefs remained the same. Temperamentally, there is something very, very sadistic about the new right, which is directly contiguous with American Christian history. Finally, we have the first and worst sign—a national leader who regularly refers to racial out-groups as animals.

Let’s not be like that Massachusetts newspaper in 1899—sputtering our confusion about how a ‘civilized’ Christian community could act like ‘primitive savages’. People are people. There’s not some ‘heart of darkness’ that beats within us all, suppressed by White Christian civilization. Rather, people anywhere can do terrifying and sadistic things when they believe they are under threat, that others are not fully human, and that they alone are entitled to rule. Their violence is not some inexplicable explosion of primitivism, it’s a logical consequence of these beliefs: If demons are real, demon hunters are necessary. Blood and fire are required to purify. 

That I think is the mental hurdle many liberals just can’t get over: that people really do believe these things. Maybe people in far-back history, or in other parts of the world, did. But your White suburban neighbour who owns a car dealership and has a Trump sign in his yard? Surely not him! He helped you with your groceries that one time. Yes, his church says some slightly crazy things, but isn’t that mostly posturing? 

He believes it. He sees the world so very differently to you. And in a very real and literal sense, he wants you to die. 

Featured image is Cross Lighting 2005, CC BY-SA 3.0