10.6092/issn.2611-2752/13507
Since the founding of the Northern colonies and the creation of the United States, conservative Christianity’s involvement in the political realm has followed cycles of activity and subsequent retreat into passivity. Donald Trump’s presidency, and the support he gathered from major religious right’s organizations as well as conservative Christian voters, represent the latest of such cycles of involvement and withdrawal. But if his defeat signaled the end of yet another participation cycle for the movement, Trump’s figure managed nonetheless to usher in the white Christian nationalist revival some his voters were longing for.
application/pdf
2611-2752
13507
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Chiara Migliori
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
Populism
“A Robin Hood Taking Over the Empire”: Donald Trump’s Revival
Text.Serial.Journal
https://usabroad.unibo.it/
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Essays
2022-04-07
2021-09-02
2022-04-07
2022-04-07
17-28
USAbroad
Chiara Migliori
2022/04/07
10.6092/issn.2611-2752/13507
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Freie Universität Berlin
2611-2752
Populism
en
28
“A Robin Hood Taking Over the Empire”: Donald Trump’s Revival
https://usabroad.unibo.it/article/download/13507/14075
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Essays – peer-reviewed                                   USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 5 (2022)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/13507                                                              ISSN 2611-2752




“A Robin Hood Taking Over the Empire”: Donald Trump’s Revival

                                                    Chiara Migliori

                          Submitted: September 2, 2021 – Revised version: November 10, 2021
                                   Accepted: November 15, 2021 – Published: April 7, 2022



                                                         Abstract

       Since the founding of the Northern colonies and the creation of the United States, conservative
       Christianity’s involvement in the political realm has followed cycles of activity and subsequent re-
       treat into passivity. Donald Trump’s presidency, and the support he gathered from major religious
       right’s organizations as well as conservative Christian voters, represent the latest of such cycles of
       involvement and withdrawal. But if his defeat signaled the end of yet another participation cycle
       for the movement, Trump’s figure managed nonetheless to usher in the white Christian nationalist
       revival some his voters were longing for.
       Keywords: Religious Right; Donald trump; Religion and Politics; Protestantism; Populism.




Chiara Migliori: Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)
 chiaramigliori@yahoo.com
Chiara Migliori obtained her PhD in cultural studies and sociology from the Graduate School of North American
Studies of the Freie Universität of Berlin. For her research, she conducted individual as well as focus-groups
interviews with both ordinary Trump voters and members of Religious Right’s advocacy groups, and she attended
gatherings of conservative activists in the US. Her dissertation was titled “ ‘We’re Saying Merry Christmas Again’:
Donald Trump as the Savior of White Conservative Christian Identity,” and will be published as a book by Palgrave
in Summer 2022, with the title “Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics: Donald Trump, Intergroup Threat,
and Nationalism.” Her current research interests focus on the development of forms of religious or christian
right in western democracies in the twenty-first century, their reactionary public and political discourse, and the
resonance that their conservative, authoritarian narratives has among their potential constituency.



Copyright © 2022 Chiara Migliori                                                                                        17
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




1 Introduction
On June 1, 2020, as the streets of Washington, D.C. were filled with people protesting the murder of
George Floyd and the plague of police brutality against African American citizens in the United States,
Donald Trump left the White House for a photo op holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal
Church nearby. As unexpected and out of context this event appeared to be, it was perfectly in line
with the rising white Christian nationalism (WCN) Trump had tapped into since the beginning of his
campaign in June 2015.1
    Much to the dismay of several religious public figures and ordinary citizens, during the 45th presi-
dent’s mandate, the names of Trump and Jesus were mentioned in the same sentence more often than
a part of the Republican establishment was comfortable with. Christian symbols and words were also
prominently on display on January 6, 2021, when a demonstration against Trump’s defeat in the 2020
presidential election rapidly turned into a horrifying act of what the FBI deemed domestic terrorism.2
    This paper provides the context in which the figure of Trump, as the savior of Christianity and of
the United States, arose and developed. The following paragraphs will retrace the growth and decline
of religion’s involvement with politics throughout the country’s history, with a closer look at the twen-
tieth century and the changes within the religious realm that occurred during those cycles. This will
clarify Donald Trump’s crucial role in the latest occurrence of the relationship between conservative
Christianity and right-wing politics in the United States, and delineate the major characteristics of this
relationship in the twenty-first century.



2 Covenant, Apostasy, and Revival
The Covenant—Apostasy—Revival Trope (CART), which was elaborated by Gorski3 to describe the
ebb-and-flow motion of conservative Protestantism in the nation’s political realm, is applied here to
the figure showing the impressive support obtained by the 45th president of the U.S. on the part of a
constituency known as white Evangelicals, the often mentioned 81%.4 The CART constitutes the basis
of conservative Protestants’ narrative of the history of the United States, including the colonial period,
as it

        recounts American history […] as a story in three acts: a primordial golden age of religious
        faith and social order (‘covenant’), which is followed by a period of religious apostasy and
        social decline, necessitating an age of religious revival and social restoration.5

     Expanding on the spiritual framework within which the CART trope was conceived, the rise of
Trump’s political career can be inserted into the long cycle of growth, retreat, and resurgence of the
entanglement of religion and politics. This clarifies that his success, albeit appalling, did nothing
but follow a prescribed, almost physiological, pattern. Trump was indeed considered by prominent
figures of the religious right to be an instrument sent by God to address the political, social, cultural,
and spiritual issues supposedly plaguing the nation. What should not be underestimated, however,
is the peculiarity of the figure of Trump within the relationship between religion and politics. If, on


1.   See Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New
     York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

2.   Considering the number of Christian symbols seen on that day, the event was also deemed a “Christian insurrection” of
     sort. See also Emma Green, “A Christian Insurrection. Many of those who mobbed the Capitol on Wednesday claimed to
     be enacting God’s will,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/evangelicals-
     catholics-jericho-march-capitol/617591/, last accessed on August 15, 2021.

3.   Philip S. Gorski, “Conservative protestantism in the United States? Toward a comparative and historical perspective,” in
     Evangelicals and Democracy in America, Volume 1: Religion and Society, ed. Steven Brint and Jean R. Schroedel (New York:
     Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), 74–113.

4.   Although the term Evangelical is present in the paper, I prefer to use the definition conservative Christians to indicate the
     Christian voters who supported Trump.

5.   Gorski, “Conservative protestantism in the United States?,” 79.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                      USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




one hand, Trump’s support on the part of mainly white conservative Christians was to be expected,
the disruptiveness of his persona forces us to reckon with the growth of white Christian nationalism,
a phenomenon that permanently altered the religious-political landscape of the United States.
    In four centuries, conservative Protestantism has transformed and evolved into one of the major
tools to advance reactionary identity politics exploited with success by right-wing populist figures such
as Trump. Through every cycle of exploitation for political purposes, fighting against modernization,
societal change and subsequent retreat, conservative Christianity has been depleted of its spiritual
elements and has been reduced to a handful of revengeful slogans to be deployed during presidential
campaigns. These catchphrases, tinged with authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, and populism, were
ready for Trump’s use when he announced his candidacy and during his mandate. But it was not only
his bombastic tone, bragging attitude and flaunted indifference to political correctness that made them
so powerful. The conservative Christian constituency that flocked to him was willing to receive those
slogans as a sign of his alignment with their fear for an identity and culture allegedly under threat.



3 From a City upon a Hill to a Retreat into Passivity
An account of the ways in which Christian religion, through sermons, Jeremiads, and the interpre-
tation of the Scriptures, was crucial in creating the narrative supporting the British colonization of
North America is beyond the scope of this paper. However, a few words are necessary in order to un-
derstand the role of religion, and especially religious rhetoric in public discourse, in spurring waves of
commitment and recommitment to the supposedly godly plan of the foundation of the United States.
    In the first decades of life in the northern colonies, sermons linked the fate of the colonizing en-
deavour to the history of the Jewish people. Pastors preached to the population that the uncertainties
and hardships of the new life surrounded by the wilderness were justified as necessary challenges to
fulfil God’s plan to create a new Jerusalem in the New World.6 On the threshold of the first Great Awak-
ening at the beginning of the eighteenth century, sermons began lamenting the evils that afflicted the
society established in the New World, already troubled by the spiritual impurity of its inhabitants, in
order to spur a longed-for renewal in the souls of the faithful.
    A leitmotif of the Jeremiads and of the preachers’ discourse, and one that is present to this day
among some conservative Christian circles, was a reprimand against sin, in order to prevent God
from unleashing his wrath upon the nation.7 Throughout the decades that accompanied the colonies
towards their future as a nation, pastors and religious leaders spurred citizens to repent of their sins
in order to fulfil God’s plans for the future nation. Spiritual leaders were increasingly linking the fate
of the land with the will of God, especially on the brink of the American Revolution.
    Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, Christian religion, symbols, and rhetoric continued
to be exploited to spur political action aimed at redressing injustice and addressing societal issues.
Primary examples of this were abolitionism and the temperance movement as well as the strain of
nineteenth-century social activism known as Social Gospel.8 At the beginning of the twentieth century,
however, the great controversy between modernism and those who at that time began to be known


6.   See Emory Elliott, Power and the pulpit in Puritan New England, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975); Philip S. Gorski, American
     Covenant. A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2019); Sacvan Bercovitch, The
     Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1975) and The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: The University
     of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

7.   This narrative and attempt at civic subjugation have been entrenched in the modus operandi of conservative religious
     leaders throughout the history of the country. One twenty-first century example of this is the infamous conversation
     between the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, two pivotal figures of the New Christian Right. In the aftermath of the
     World Trade Center terroristic attack, the two ended a broadcasted conversation by agreeing that the tragedy had been
     undoubtedly brought upon the country by those allegedly not adhering to a Christian lifestyle. As claimed by Falwell, “I
     really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying
     to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize
     America—I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen’.” Excerpt taken from the website: http://www.
     beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2001/09/You-Helped-This-Happen.aspx, last accessed on August 29, 2021.

8.   George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
     Company, 1991).



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                           USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




as fundamentalists, saw the public defeat of the latter, and the subsequent retreat of conservative
Protestants from the public arena.
    In July 1924, in Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial (The State of Tennessee v. John
Thomas Scopes) was held in which the American Civil Liberties Union recruited a Tennessee teacher
to test the recently-passed Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.
John Scopes, a biology teacher, agreed to violate the act and was, therefore, charged and condemned.
The trial is best remembered for the fight between a supporter of evolution, Clarence Darrow, who
was Scopes’ attorney, and the conservative Christian, William Jennings Bryan, the plaintiff’s attorney.
Scopes lost the case and was condemned to pay a fine (the ruling was later reversed), but the worst
defeat was the one suffered by fundamentalist Christians, who were ridiculed by Darrow during the
confrontation.
    After the battle against the teaching of evolution, Evangelical Protestants withdrew into a state of
“quiescent politics,”9 characterized by an avoidance of engaging in overt political action. This time was
defined by a focus on the local level of evangelicalism caused by a widespread disillusion in the state of
American culture and society. While surely limiting their presence in the public scene, conservative
Christians who had fought to erase evolution from public school curricula began to establish new
educational facilities and set out to expand their presence in religious radio programs.
    In public discourse, the shift from the term fundamentalist, which started to be used with a positive
connotation but later acquired a derogatory hue,10 to the term evangelical occurred in 1942 with the
founding of the National Association of Evangelicals, or “the first Washington lobbyist group.”11 This
also signaled the end of the self-imposed isolation of the evangelical world. The detachment began
to dissipate also thanks to the work of world-renowned preachers like the late Billy Graham. In those
years, conservative Protestant activism began to resurface and believers were prompted once again to
openly take part in the change of the nation.
    The anti-communist orientation of the 1950s religious right saw a renewed involvement of reli-
gious citizens in civic and political matters, but this too waned after a few years.12 By the end of the
1970s, the mobilization efforts of the New Christian Right became more focused and systematic, and
allowed for the beginning of the third ongoing wave of activity of the movement seeking to bring God
into the public square.13



4      The New Christian Right and the Grand Old Party
On August 21, 1980, during a campaign speech held at the National Affairs Briefing, Ronald Reagan
addressed the audience gathered in Dallas with the following words:

         Since the start of my presidential campaign, I and many others have felt a new vitality
         in American politics. […] Religious America is awakening perhaps just in time for our
         country’s sake.14


9.    John C. Green, “Seeking a Place,” in Toward an Evangelical Public Policy. Political Strategies for the health of the Nation, ed. Ronald
      J. Sider and Diane Knippers (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 15.

10. See George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub-
    lishing Company, 1991).

11.   Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. Robert
      Wuthnow considers 1943 and the creation of the National Association of Evangelicals as “[one] of the first steps toward forg-
      ing a national movement around the idea of evangelical Christianity.” See Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American
      Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 173.

12. Clyde Wilcox, “Laying Up Treasures in Washington and in Heaven: The Christian Right and Evangelical Politics in the
    Twentieth Century and Beyond,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, 17(2003): 23–29.

13. In this paper, the names “New Christian Right” and “religious right” are both used to indicate the movement founded in
    the 1970s consisting of religion-based organizations, lobbies, and advocacy groups, such as the Moral Majority, the Family
    Research Council, and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

14. All quotes from Reagan cited here are from the transcription retrievable at: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/
    ronaldreaganreligiousliberty.htm, last accessed on December 20, 2021.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




    This candidate, who had become the Republican Party’s nominee on July 17, was conveying two
messages. The first spoke of a newly-found purpose and a renewed commitment to the covenant,
which were all elements of the religious rhetoric of Protestantism in the United States that have been
passed down to political discourse.15
    The second trope the presidential hopeful was deploying was the urgency with which the recom-
mitment had to happen in order for the country to thrive and be successful again. The sense of im-
pending doom was also conveyed by the following statement introducing the extensively-deployed
trope of an attack to the Christian culture:

         Today, you and I are meeting at a time when traditional Judeo-Christian values, based on
         the moral teaching of religion, are undergoing what is perhaps the most serious challenge
         in our nation’s history.

    The speech was being held during a conference organized by, among others, Ed McAteer from
the Religious Roundtable, and several associated with the New Christian Right were present, the fore-
most among them was Jerry Falwell, creator of the Moral Majority. Under the guidance of its most
prolific strategist, Paul Weyrich, the unofficial coalition of religion-based interest groups was formed
to protest the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion more accessible in
the country.16
    Created during the favorable rise of neoconservatism, the religious right managed to capitalize
on the discontent of white citizens who felt that the Democratic Party had stopped representing their
interests. Until the 1970s, Americans had supported government programs aimed at helping econom-
ically disadvantaged citizens as well as the fight against racial discrimination. During the Johnson
presidency, most Americans welcomed initiatives such as Medicare, which provided medical care to
citizens over the age of 65. In contrast, welfare actions aimed at the less affluent and, above all, at the
non-white population, such as Medicaid, Food Stamps and the Model Cities program, were mainly
looked upon with suspicion by white middle-class citizens.17
    Neoconservatism also spread as a reaction to the cultural revolutions that swept through society
in the sixties and seventies.18 Hence, if the first rallying cry of the newly founded religious right was
the fight against the right to abortion, the second strategy implemented by Weyrich was aimed at
rebranding “the right’s anti-pluralist ideology as ‘cultural conservatism.’ ”19 A new coalition of voters
was forming, which included white workers, middle class citizens, southerners, Protestants but also
Catholics, as well as wealthy Sunbelt inhabitants who were working for the chemical and aerospace
industries. What all these people had in common was their willingness to believe in the narrative
that the social decay and economic decline of the country were to be blamed on the low morality of
young people, on the advocates for the rights to abortion and divorce, on feminists, and in general, on
what was seen as an abandonment of the Christian values on which the nation had supposedly been
founded.
    Reagan, however, didn’t perform any concrete action in support of the movement’s claims. More-
over, during those years, the religious right’s reputation was severely tarnished by scandals involving
some of its prominent public figures, such as the pastors Bakker and Swaggart.
    Then Marion G. “Pat” Robertson enters, one of the few old-guard New Christian Right leaders,
who is still alive in 2022; he was a Christian Charismatic, a failed presidential candidate and the owner

15. See Loren Baritz, City on a Hill: A History of Ideas and Myths in America (New York: Wiley, 1964) and David C. Leege and
    Lyman A. Kellstedt, Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Books, 1993).

16. The real reason behind the creation of the movement, however, must be looked for in the Supreme Court’s decision on
    the case, Green v. Connally, 1971, which established that private schools still practicing racial segregation could not maintain
    their tax-exempt status. See William C. Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York:
    Broadway, 1996), Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament. How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and
    Threatens America (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

17.   Michael Schaller, Right Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

18. Rinaldo Petrignani, L’era americana (Bologna: il Mulino, 2001), 293.

19. Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
    2008), 387.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




of Christian Broadcasting Network. In 1988, Robertson lost the Republican presidential nomination to
George H. W. Bush. However, he found Ralph Reed and set out with him to revitalize the movement.
In 1990, the still-existing Christian Coalition was founded as the Christian Coalition of America. One
of Reed’s major accomplishments consisted in broadening support for the religious right, first, by
curbing efforts to court pastors, and then, by engaging in the mobilization of younger and more highly
educated voters.20
    When it was the Democrats turn at the presidency, the religious right set out to rebrand their
peculiar militaristic tone in order to adopt a more inclusive rhetoric, albeit always focusing on the
necessity of defending a traditional and heteronormative idea of family values. The arrival of George
W. Bush, who publicly declared his born-again identity and the fact that Jesus Christ was his favorite
philosopher, coincided with another internal change in the religious right’s ranks. The founder of
Focus on the Family and of the Family Research Council, James Dobson made sure that the Republican
Party understood that the religious right’s support, accomplished by the mobilization of prospective
voters, would have to be obtained through a political agenda strongly emphasizing the fight against
abortion and for the curtailment of LGBTQ rights.
    Once again, and despite his public attunement to the movement’s claims, Bush did not deliver on
anything really significative in the realm of pro-life policies. Moreover, same-sex marriage became
legal in Massachusetts in 2004, paving the way for the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2015 civil rights
case, Obergefell v. Hodges, legalizing same-sex unions in the whole country.
    From the second half of the twentieth century, the relationship between religion and politics has
been characterized by systematic support in favor of Republican candidates on the part of conservative
lay and religious leaders of the New Christian Right. This support, which eventually translates into
ballots cast on election day, was on the condition of a series of political promises made by the candidate
to the movement; however, these promises have rarely been maintained. What Wilcox observed at
the beginning of the twenty-first century, in spite of the election of George W. Bush, was that “never
before in American history has a social movement been so successful in elections and so unsuccessful
in policies.”21
    Since its inception at the end of the 1970s, the religious right has justified support for Republican
presidential candidates by the alleged necessity for a Commander in Chief who, by enacting conser-
vative social policies, would have restored Christian principles as the basis of American life to bring
the nation back to a supposed past greatness. This support translates into the depiction of the win-
ning candidate as the figure most attuned to the Christian values upon which the nation was allegedly
founded. As expected, and despite Trump’s far from genuinely faithful behavior and talk, the move-
ment followed the same script during his first campaign, in particular, after it became clear that he
would have won the Republican primaries.
    On their part, Republican candidates and presidents need to show their ideological alignment with
the cause of religion-based interest groups, and they do so by means of gestures of differentiation.22
Aware of his role as the GOP candidate, Trump did not hesitate in declaring his intended support for
the claims of self-identified, conservative Christian citizens. Before being elected, Trump created the
Evangelical Advisory Board and made the promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices a
theme in his campaign speeches. He also courted Catholic voters, a key constituency in Midwestern
states, by creating a Catholic Advisory Committee.23
    Once elected, Trump immediately reinstated the Mexico City Policy, preventing international or-
ganizations advocating for abortion rights from receiving U.S. funds. Throughout his mandate he
proceeded to nominate conservative justices both to lower courts across the country and to the high-
est court. Among the most prominent gestures aimed at pleasing the religious right coalition, were

20. Dan Gilgoff, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War
    (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008).

21. Wilcox, Laying Up Treasures, 23.

22. Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
    Press, 1963).

23. Mark J. Rozell, “Donald J. Trump and the Enduring Religion Factor in U.S. Elections,” in God at the Grassroots 2016: The
    Christian Right in American Politics, ed. Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 3–18.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                               USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




the Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty, followed by the Executive Order
Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities in 2019. Both
orders were welcomed by conservatives as long-needed actions aimed at protecting rights to religious
freedom and free speech. Within the realm of the fight against LGBTQIA+ rights, in 2017, Trump
issued a Presidential Memorandum preventing transgender people from serving in the US military
(later revoked by Joe Biden).
     The highly symbolic as well as effective gestures of differentiation performed by Trump, punctu-
ated by the repetition of slogans exalting a supposedly imperiled Christian culture, characterized the
latest occurrence of a resurgence of the religious right’s public activity in the twenty-first century. The
momentum that the movement seemed to have gained, however, ended once again with the election
of a Democratic president.



5     From Protestantism to a Trans-denominational Populism
A cyclical pattern of action and passivity with regard to civic engagement is not attributable solely
to the lobbies and advocacy groups composing the religious right coalition. Steve Bruce described
the conservative Christian political commitment as a sort of continuous cycle, made of dedication,
delusion, retreat, and new dedication.

        Conservatives gradually come to be concerned about the moral, political, and spiritual
        state of America. They get off their verandas and campaign. When the campaign fails,
        they go back to the verandas to concentrate on preserving their own purity while America
        continues to slide down the tubes.24

     What happens after hopes have been left unattended to by the sympathetic president in charge,
can be described as a retreat into holy passivity, or “the idea that to be set apart as Christians entails
an abdication of active civic participation within the secular realm in favor of a purely transcendent,
spiritual form of political intervention.”25
     The historical phases of retreat into passivity on the part of conservative Christians have also been
linked to the inevitable emergence of religious particularism. In periods of relative social tranquil-
ity, the Christian population of the country seems to be counting on an unspoken consensus on the
so-called Judeo-Christian foundation of the nation itself, which corresponds to a private phase of
religious life.26 When an outgroup begins engaging in behavior that defies the moral tenets of the
conservative Christian citizenship, this cluster of the population reawakens from the passive state of
the, supposedly, shared consensus. At this point, religion goes public and politics becomes invested
in the role of protecting a supposedly endangered moral order.
     The cycle’s final step sees particularism among different denominations resurfacing, making be-
lievers realize the different views each denomination has over the issue that caused controversy in the
first place. This Christianity-internal disagreement has the potential to steal the momentum of the
mobilization of conservative Christian citizens. The consequence is a return to the privatization of
religion and the rebuilding of consensus until the next controversial issue presents itself; and so the
cycle continues.
     One of the major changes to have affected the relationship between religion and politics in the
United States during the twentieth century has been the broadening of the coalition of Christian be-
lievers who are ready to engage in politics. The years of the fight against abortion rights resulted in
the birth of the alliance between conservative Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, the creation of
the religious right to attract voters to the Republican party fostered the growth of a

24. Steve Bruce, Pray TV. Televangelism in America (London: Routledge, 1990), 167; see also Andrew Povtak and Ryan L. Claassen,
    “The Christian Right Thesis: Explaining Longitudinal Change in Participation Among Evangelical Christians,” The Journal
    of Politics 72(2010): 2–15.

25. Zachary Sheldon, “ ‘God Said, ’You’re Hearing the Voice of the President’: Citizenship in The Trump Prophecy,” Journal of
    Media and Religion, 19(2020): 94.

26. Ted G. Jelen, The Political Mobilization of Religious Beliefs (New York: Praeger, 1991).



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




       ‘trans-denominational populism’ [that] increasingly characterized American evangelical-
       ism, contributing over time to the erosion of theological, denominational, and regional
       boundaries that used to divide American Protestants.27

    Finally, in the last decades, a phenomenon began to affect conservative Christianity in the United
States, which prevents religious particularism from resurfacing and jeopardising the efforts of those
who exploit Christian symbols for political purposes. Starting with the last two decades of the twen-
tieth century, nondenominational Christianity has undergone exponential growth.28 Believers who
tend to gravitate towards churches unaffiliated with existing denominations (i.e., Methodists, Baptists,
Lutherans) find in nondenominational congregations the answer to their dissatisfaction with estab-
lished or traditional modes of worshipping.
    The rise of nondenominational churches caters to the sense of disaffection towards traditional
denominations and the need for an authenticity found in disestablishment. It is also true, however,
that the rise of nondenominational Christianity might constitute an additional weapon in the hands of
right-wing populist and authoritarian politicians for creating and spreading the image of the United
States as an inherent Christian nation, without having to acknowledge differences in denominations
and the degree of orthodoxy. This would greatly simplify their process of tapping into the sense of
resentment and ethnocentrism perceived by those mainly white citizens who identify with Christians,
but for whom Christianity is only an exploitable trait of identity politics.



6 The Internet: Conspiracies, Prophecies, and a Call to Arms
There is another sphere in which this need is catered to. The internet has magnified the power of
preachers and self-described prophets to spread their own vision of how the country would have been
saved by the figure of Donald Trump.

       In recent years, self-described prophets have proliferated across the country, accelerating
       in status over the course of the Trump era. […] Many are independent evangelists who do
       not lead churches or other institutions.29

    Graham also puts this in correlation with the growth of nondenominational Christianity. The
decline of mainline and Evangelical Protestant churches as well as the Catholic church has been crucial
in creating a free space detached from any traditional congregation for religious leaders to propose
their charismatic strength.
    Online prophets are a growing group, and their actions expand well beyond the internet. They
include Jericho March’s founder Rob Weaver, among the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” gathering in
Washington, D.C. in protest of the ratification of the Biden-Harris victory.30 As a matter of fact, many
of these figures were present at several pro-Trump rallies that took place at the Capital on January 5th
and 6th , 2021, such as The Rally to Revival, The Silent Majority, and March for Trump/Save America.
In those rallies, religion mixed with conspiracy theories amidst cries of a supposedly stolen election
and as a provocation to channel the 1776 revolutionary spirit.
    Internet religious and lay personalities played a role in the events of January 6, 2021 by spreading
the narrative of an actual war taking place in the country. A war in which their champion was clearly
being betrayed.



27. Steven K. Green, Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (New York: Oxford UP, 2015), 16.

28. Ed Stetzer, “The Rise of Evangelical ‘Nones’,” CNN, June 12, 2015. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/12/living/stetzer-
    christian-nones/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_
    living+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Living%29, last accessed on August 5, 2021.

29. Ruth Graham, “Christian Prophecy Movement is Hit Hard by Trump’s Defeat,” The New York Times, February 12, 2021.

30. Peter Montgomery, “Jericho March Leader Urges Pastors to Mobilize Followers for ‘Stop the Steal’ Effort,” Right Wing Watch,
    January 5, 2021, https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/jericho-march-leader-urges-pastors-to-mobilize-followers-for-
    stop-the-steal-efforts/, last accessed on August 13, 2021.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




       These leaders and media outlets inflated the stakes of Trump’s re-election campaign and
       post-election efforts to ‘stop the steal’ by portraying them as part of a spiritual war between
       good and evil. In their telling, Trump was the divinely anointed leader of the forces of
       light, and his opponents were agents of Satan bent on crushing religious freedom and
       destroying the American republic.31

     Among such self-proclaimed prophets is Frank Amedia, a pastor and the founder of Touch Heaven
Ministries and the Touch Heaven Church in Canfield, Ohio. Amedia is also the creator of the POTUS
Shield: “a council of prelates that is assembling to raise up a spiritual shield.”32 The pastor was among
those who prophesied the re-election of Donald Trump in November 2020. When this did not happen,
he released a podcast explaining the reasons why his prophecy had been wrong, and Biden was, in fact,
the man God intended to put in the White House. On February 21, 2021, after having recovered from
the incorrect prediction, Amedia explained to his followers that God could not have allowed pride and
haughtiness to dwell in Washington, D.C. Therefore, Trump’s defeat was the appropriate punishment
from God since American Christians had clearly elevated Trump above Him and had forgotten that
the Kingdom has importance above everything else. Finally, Amedia admonished his listeners that
they all must put God first in their lives. Then, and only then, will they be able to change things in the
country.
     Another prominent online prophet is Lance Wallnau, author of God’s Chaos Candidate (2016). In
his book, Wallnau makes use of the metaphor that became common during Trump’s campaign when-
ever anyone questioned his spiritual stature, which equated Trump with King Cyrus. “The useful-
ness of King Cyrus is undoubtedly found in the fact that the Persian ruler, despite being a pagan, is
described in the Bible as chosen by God and raised up to end the captivity of God’s people in Baby-
lon.”33 In Trump’s case, “Cyrus is no longer just a non-Jew, but also a non-Christian, one example of
many ‘wicked and ungodly’ who God not only has used but even ‘raised up’ for a particular purpose
[…].”34 Therefore, despite the comparison with a Biblical character, the King-Cyrus metaphor as ap-
plied to Trump points once again in the direction of the growth of nondenominational Christianity
for advancing the exploitation of a generalized religious identity and the expansion of white Christian
nationalism.


7 Trump’s Orthodoxy and White Christian Nationalism
White Christian nationalism has been described as a “toxic blend of apocalyptic religion and imperial
zeal that envisions the United States as a righteous nation charged with a divine commission to rid
the world of evil and usher in the Second Coming,”35 Christian nationalism is not an invention of the
twenty-first century.36 However, under Trump it has been one of the “dark truths that underpin the
public face of Christianity in contemporary America,”37 which has been permanently brought to light.
The resonance and relative absence of speech constrictions on the web have, once again, to be credited
for it. Along with the numerous rallies, the internet was the place of connection between Trump and
his faithful followers. Up to January 8, 2021, Twitter provided Trump with unmediated interaction
with people who had already been extensively bought into the fake-news narrative.

31. Peter Montgomery, “The Religious Right’s Rhetoric Fueled the Insurrection,” The American Prospect, February 8, 2021, https:
    //prospect.org/politics/religious-right-rhetoric-fueled-the-capitol-insurrection/, last accessed on August 13, 2021.

32. https://www.potusshield.com, last accessed on August 26, 2021.

33. Hanne A. Trangerud, “The American Cyrus: How an Ancient King Became a Political Tool for Voter Mobilization,” Religions,
    12(2021): 2. See also: Hanne A. Trangerud, “The Trump Prophecies and the Mobilization of Evangelical Voters,” Studies in
    Religion/Sciences Religieuses, (2021): 1–21.

34. Trangerud, “The American Cyrus,” 15.

35. Gorski, American Covenant, 2.

36. Gerardo Martí, “The Unexpected Orthodoxy of Donald J. Trump: White Evangelical Support for the 45th President of the
    United States,” Sociology of Religion, 80(2019): 1–8. See also Gerardo Martì, American Blindspot, Race, class, religion, and the
    Trump presidency (Lanham, MA: Rowman&Littlefield, 2020).

37. Mathew Guest, “Tracing the Routes to pro-Trump Evangelicalism,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 36(2021): 164.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




    A wealth of excerpts from Trump’s rhetoric shows how his public behavior, proper actually more of
a TV personality than a politician, would have been enough to cause the demise of any other candidate
or president. His actions were regularly performed outside “the norms of the institution, [and] he
risked undermining its prestige, and therefore also its power.”38 Even though Trump’s figure dealt a
harsh blow to the institution of the presidency, all the hues of his questionable behavior had the effect
of making him more approachable by the public. Trump perfectly fit the role of the savior within the
white Christian nationalist narrative and his personal life did not constitute a deterrent for religious
voters. As a matter of fact, “Trump’s white Evangelical support [requires] an understanding of religious
orthodoxy that [includes] more than just individualist virtues.”39
    In this sense, Trump’s support from conservative Christians has also been considered as a prag-
matic choice:

        I believe that today’s Evangelical conservatives have given up on a spiritual revival as a
        means of change. […] The accumulated frustrations of not being able to ease their sense of
        religious decline, their continued legal struggles against abortion and gay marriage, and
        the overwhelming shifts in popular culture promoting much less religiously restrictive
        understandings of personal identity have prompted politically active religious actors to
        take a far more pragmatic stance.40

     Undoubtedly, the religious right’s major figures who came out in support of Trump sometimes
had to engage in impressive exercises of rephrasing and recontextualizing of the president’s words
in order to continually justify their support for such a controversial figure. Trump’s peculiar form
of orthodoxy is what permanently altered the public face of the relationship between religion and
politics, exposing the religious right’s agenda that was much more tinged by the desired enforcement
of reactionary and ethnocentric policies than by the purported need to save citizens’ souls for the good
of the nation.
     On the other hand, Trump’s regular Christian electors, or those not involved in the activities of
the religious right, found in him the figure they were looking for. Originating from the same dissatis-
faction with traditional denominations and the need for what seemed like an unaffiliated figure, this
support turned Trump into the prominent figure for the longed-for white Christian nationalist re-
vival. Specifically, Trump’s addition to white Christian nationalism has been a secular one. Although
detached from the traditional links to the Scriptures that accompanied American exceptionalism since
its inception, this made it even more appealing for his plethora of nominal Christian followers.41



8 Conclusion
In October 2017, Sebastian Gorka, a former strategist of Donald Trump, addressed the audience at the
Values Voter Summit (main annual gathering of the religious right held in Washington, D.C.), stating
that:

        on January the 20 [2017], it was a scrappy band of insurgents that moved into the White
        House. It wasn’t a schlep of a GOP establishment of a RINO candidate, it was the utter

38. Mary E. Stuckey, “The Rhetoric of the Trump Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 51(2021): 133.

39. Martì, “The Unexpected Orthodoxy of Donald J. Trump,” 2.

40. Ibid, 5.

41. As Gorski claims, “without that tether to tradition, WCN is free to drift even further in the direction of secular mes-
    sianism and political authoritarianism.” See Philip S. Gorski, “Why evangelicals voted for Trump: A critical cultural
    sociology,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 5(2017): 343. See also Philip S. Gorski, “Christianity and Democ-
    racy after Trump,” Political Theology, 19(2018): 361–362. In light of the increasing use of the definition “Evangeli-
    cals” as a political category rather than a religious one, scholars have begun to suggest the use of alternatives such
    as “cultural Evangelicals” (Penny Edgell, “An Agenda for Research on American Religion in Light of the 2016 Elec-
    tion,” Sociology of Religion 78(2017):1–8; “Trump Evangelicals” (Margery Eagan, “Are ‘Trump Christians’ really Chris-
    tian?” The Boston Globe, April 2, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/04/01/are-trump-christians-really-
    christian/loTMwQyqRBYgOoovmYA7eI/story.html, last accessed on August 6, 2021), or “Christianists” (Gorski, “Chris-
    tianity and Democracy after Trump.”).



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                                               USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




       outsider and his small band of merry men and women. […] He’s like Robin Hood, a Robin
       Hood taking over the empire.42

   Despite Gorska’s enthusiasm, as well as the victories Trump obtained in the realm of the Supreme
Court, his defeat in November 2020 seems to have left the religious right disappointed once again.

       Lacking organizational unity, the Christian Right does not have a collective view of what
       tactics and strategy are necessary to achieve a re-Christianization of America. […] The
       numerical decline of white Christians and growing liberalism of Americans on some social
       issues—make it implausible that a re-Christianization of America would occur through a
       large-scale, voluntary readoption of Christian conservative values.43

    The political and public persona of the 45th president forced the religious right to attune their ways
of communicating and mobilizing to Trump’s unashamed, openly authoritarian and ethnocentric
discourse. However, once the Biden-Harris ticket was inaugurated, the movement had to confront
the loss of an ally in the White House once more.
    Despite having opened and closed the latest cycle of the religious right’s activity in the country,
Trump drastically reshaped the relation between religion and politics in the United States. If he lost
the election because of his use of the “paranoid style,”44 it was this style that resonated with his most
ardent followers. If Sebastian Gorka’s words did not literally describe Trump’s inauguration, they
became a shocking reality on the day that Joe Biden was officially declared to be the new president. In
January 2021, a handful of citizens concretely attempted to take over another symbol of the nation’s
political power, Capitol Hill, refusing to believe that the person who they considered as the champion
of their freedoms had been legitimately defeated in the latest election. Moreover, in May 2021, 53% of
Republicans expressed their conviction that Donald Trump was still the president of the United States
while 61% continued to believe that Joe Biden had stolen the November 2020 presidential election.45
    Despite the impressive resonance of his words with their minds, we should not believe that
Trump’s supporters were unable to distinguish between real and fake religious commitment.46 What
we observed, during his campaign and presidency, was an unspoken agreement of mutual under-
standing based on the promise to glorify the supposedly traditional white, mainly male Christian
identity. It was not that Trump had the success he did despite his superficial treatment of Christian
symbols and language, but precisely because of this. His supporters were attuned to his treatment of
religion as a mere pool of the few, trite slogans that accompanied him throughout his run towards the
White House and his permanence within those walls. He was not willing to concede more than photo
ops with Evangelical leaders and participation in their gatherings, and his flock did not need more
than what he fed them. This, I contend, is the result of the phases of growth and recession of religious
involvement in the public and political sphere of the United States. The revival Trump was expected
to usher in was a revival of an identity that had lost its grip on the culture, society, and politics of the
nation. It was an ethnocentric, reactionary revival, seasoned with a few, symbolic Christian elements.
    White conservative Christians are a shrinking demographic group. What Trump represented is
the new face of the relationship between religion and politics in the twenty-first century. In it, old
and traditional elements still find their place, such as prophecies on the destiny of the nation, and
the idea that it must purge itself of all evils to prevent God from punishing its inhabitants. The most
important new element, which is not novel as much as it is now impossible to ignore, and which the


42. Sebastian Gorka, “VVS 2017: Dr. Sebastian Gorka.”      YouTube Video, min.     9:54, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
    Wd9RainURRw, last accessed on August 29, 2021.

43. Jeffrey Haynes, “Donald Trump, the Christian Right and COVID-19: The Politics of Religious Freedom,” Laws, 10(2021):
    2–4.

44. Roderick P. Hart, “Why Trump Lost and How? A Rhetorical Explanation,” American Behavioral Scientist, 66(2022): 7.

45. Reuter Poll,    May 24,      2021,    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/53-republicans-view-trump-true-us-president-
    reutersipsos-2021-05-24/, last accessed on August 1, 2021.

46. Bart Bonikowski, “Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment,” British Journal of Sociology,
    68(2017): 181–213.



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Donald Trump’s Revival                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




religious right movement, as well as the rest of the nation, will have to face from now on, is the spread
of a resentment-fuelled white Christian nationalism. This has now been established as the foundation
upon which the next cycle of religious-political activity will resurge.




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/13507                                                            28
