Is Trump Doing God a Huge Favor?
A pondering and a provocation.
Something strange is going on.
A few Sundays ago, after a successful coup by my daughters, I arrived at church alone. I was only a few minutes late but was directed to the balcony as the main sanctuary was completely full.
This had never happened before. What was our church doing packed to the gills on a random Sunday in February, I wondered.
I made my way up a narrow spiral staircase that seemed to keep winding further and higher than it should have. The view of the Cathedral, adorned with stained glass windows, was beautiful from up there, and we sat practically inside the pipe organ as it blared hymns.
A young couple in the row ahead of me seemed a little uncomfortable and unfamiliar, so I introduced myself after the service. They were first-time visitors, they explained, who’d just wandered in from the neighborhood to “check things out.” Given the uptick in attendance, they didn’t seem to be alone.
The week before, our priest relayed an anecdote about another young couple who’d come for a Lessons and Carols service during Christmas week. One of our ushers greeted them, and they explained that they’d never been to church. Any church. Ever. The usher made a note to check on them later in the service just to see how they were doing. He found them as the congregation sang “Silent Night,” with tears streaming down their faces.
I recently bonded with a new friend from my Thinkers and Drinkers group over our respective Evangelical upbringings. She asked me if I was still a “believer.” I tensed up a little considering all the baggage that word could carry but told her, yes, in essence, very much so. Was she? She said no. She left that all behind when she came out to her family. “But lately,” she said, “I really miss it.”
These are just a few personal observations, but they support a weird sense I’ve had recently that there has been a kind of fundamental energy shift when considering religious belief and practice, a kind of re-opening of hearts and minds to the possibility of God, and even Christ.
This could very well be a combination of my own wishful thinking and confirmation bias, and algorithms are quite good at serving up exactly what you most want to hear, but have you noticed an increase in serious “God talk” in your podcast feed recently? I have on Vox, NPR, even The Ringer, and plenty here on Substack.
Author Justin Brierley wrote a whole book about this phenomenon in 2023, “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God,” arguing that more and more “secular thinkers are considering Christianity again.”
So what does all this have to do with Donald Trump?
I think Trump has helped draw a sharp distinction between Christianity, the faith writ large, and American Evangelicalism, a socio-cultural-political phenomenon. We know statistically that “white Christians” ushered Trump to his second term, but we also seem to understand now that this coalition has about as much to do with Jesus as any of the European political parties that have the word ‘Christian’ in their name. In short, little to nothing.
“White Christian” isn’t a faith; it’s a demographic. It encompasses some very devout churchgoers but also a vast quantity of “cultural Christians” who have no church community and who’d be hard-pressed to articulate any historical tenets of the faith. This isn’t to say that no sincere Christian could possibly have voted for Trump. You might consider his policies tough but necessary, or you might have some serious beef with democratic positions. But if Trump is somehow part of your theology, I’m going to say at the very least that you’ve applied some of that post-modern relativism our pastors warned us about back in the 90s and 00s.
For a long time, it felt like the American Right was a speedboat barreling along with God in tow, bouncing harshly over the waves on a pair of wobbly skis wondering how he ever ended up there. Especially for left-leaning young people and those who just aren’t into politics, Trump cut God free from that boat so people might encounter him differently.
It seems we’ve started to distinguish between ‘Christian’ as a political stance and Christianity as a spiritual practice. And (praise be) we’ve started calling the “Christian Right,” the “Evangelical Right,” a term that better positions this faction as just one tiny, flawed iteration of a belief system that has taken myriad, (even more deeply at times) flawed forms around the world and throughout the centuries, and which acts as the foundation for Western ethical thought, whether we believe it or not.1
Christianity is once again being claimed from the margins, and as its base has migrated from Europe and the U.S. to the Global South, it’s become harder to call it a religion of white supremacy.
Jesus and Christianity have been misused and misappropriated a million times in a million ways. Trump is no Beast — let’s not give him that kind of credit — but he is a brute and a bully. And as those on the Right ‘lean into the mean,’ their disaffiliation with Christ becomes more and more apparent.
If you’re the type to believe in spiritual warfare, you might begin to suspect that Satan got a little cocky this time.
I think people are done being cynical. They’re exhausted. They’re longing for meaning again. And actually, I think both Trump and what’s generally called ‘Wokeness’ both have a religious element to them2 that betray a general longing for narratives that help us make sense of the world.
Oh, hey, I’ve got one of those. I think it tops both of those narratives. And it’s not close.
A friend of mine argues — convincingly — that what we call ‘Wokeness’ is (was?) ultimately spawned from the Protestant Reformation, but that’s a whole other blog post, and probably a whole other blog.
While Trump is very cynical toward the present establishment, he offers his devotees a hopeful vision of a prosperous, powerful America.
Very interesting phenomena, indeed, although I think it's far wider than only Trump, who is really just an outgrowth of American secularism (and New Thought, to boot) in all its obstreperous, variegated "glory." The reality is that secular culture is a Void. It is maybe THE Void, the abyss, and people are starting to sense that on some level. Once you've descended into the Void, you realize there is nothing there, and that nothing is within you; it cannot be paper over by wealth or material things, as it only devours.
Thanks be to God, there is an alternative to the Void. He's been there all along, although sometimes it's hard for us to detect his presence. And despite our too-human vacillations, he's not going away. Ever.