Michael AvilaPresident Donald Trump has a vision.
On Easter Sunday, April 12 – about two weeks from now – he wants to see “packed churches” as Americans celebrate what he calls the “reopening” of the US economy and prepare to go back to work.
While the nation continues to be crucified by the relentless growth of the coronavirus, such a resurrection appears unlikely. Indeed, Trump has already modified his original statement to signal that such a miraculous rebirth might be restricted to “sections of the country.”
The virus of course, is not convinced by rhetoric, and does not recognize a distinction between Republican- or Democrat-controlled states. Nevertheless, the country is split; and for every state Governor who might be cautious about immediate next steps, others may offer the president some encouragement.
And while many church leaders were resistant to the president’s proposed timeline, insisting that in-person public worship will remain restricted during the national emergency, there will likely be some of his supporters who will be receptive to his ambitions. At Jerry Falwell Jr’s private evangelical college Liberty University in Virginia, for example, students were returning to campus this week while many other schools remain closed.
Who knows what might happen in the run-up to Easter if the president were to announce that it is somehow safe to abandon the social distancing policies that experts say are beneficial in slowing the spread of the pandemic.
While most Americans are undoubtedly desperate for a return to normalcy Trump appears to be grasping for a premature upside, prompted by an uncertain economy – with record unemployment numbers expected today – and a rollercoaster stock market, the strength of which is a key platform in his campaign for re-election.
Faith and the past
As we draw nearer to November’s presidential election, assuming it still takes place unhindered, the influence of faith – in particular evangelical Christianity – is one aspect of America’s political culture that makes it stand out from other western democracies.
Even compared to Northern Ireland, a place with perhaps the most cultural parallels on this subject, the US has its own approach to faith in the political sphere – an approach little understood even by Americans who are not members this community – that simply isn’t duplicated in other, even heavily Christian, nations.
In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won 80 per cent of the evangelical vote, a truly staggering number. For many observers around the world, religious or not, it was difficult to reconcile how these people could preach one thing on Sundays and practice another in public life.
I will attempt to explain how this is possible.
In the 1980s we saw the establishment of the Moral Majority, a group of conservative, predominantly evangelical Christians that supported Ronald Reagan, who ran a distinctly ‘moral’ campaign concentrating on issues of concern to conservative Christian families and culture. This was the origin of the embedding of American Christianity firmly within the Republican Party, who continued to hone in on conservative values that appealed to this voting base. This wasn’t so prior to the rise of the Moral Majority, as Christians across the denominations would have had representation in both major parties (think Jimmy Carter). The Republican Party has since taken a hard stance against abortion and gay marriage, while promoting “traditional family values”.
This matrimony between the Republican Party and conservative evangelicals has enjoyed a model marriage since the 80s and has seen little challenges to its union until, what many of us would have thought, the emergence of Donald Trump. However, to the surprise of many and despite his ‘less-than-Christian’ character, this union has continued and in some circles strengthened. How can that be? Well, a lot of it has to do with economics.
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s domination of the ‘Anglo-sphere’ of the 1980s saw the greatest de-regulation of the US and British economies since the Great Depression and this model was adopted and sometimes forced upon on a great deal of other countries. There have been few efforts since to ‘re-regulate’ the global economy in any kind of organised and constructive way and even communist counties like China have adopted the free market. If anything, the global economy has become more and more liberalized (the irony) in the years since. In fact, this has been our answer to every financial crisis since that time:
“Silicon Valley is in trouble? De-regulate! People are losing their jobs to China? Open up the markets more! The housing market has crashed? Bail out the corporations, but don’t even think about regulation!”
And this is where the churches have been guilty of the sin of omission. The area evangelical Christian ideology has been the most morally bankrupt on is economics and, once explained, it’s understandable to see how some Christians have been blind to this. Evangelicalism’s brand of morality has had little do with economics since it became more politically relevant in the Reagan years. While it is only fair that many Christians are concerned with issues of abortion and traditional family values (it’s not my place to say they shouldn’t be), it seems it is with the area of economics where ethics come to die. But, if it’s “money that makes the world go ‘round”, then wouldn’t it be intuitive that this should be an area of much concern to churches? American Churches have simply abandoned economic morality. Whether that’s by conscious choice or not, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t doubt that some church leaders have also been guilty of the sin of ‘commission(s)’, too.
This ideology has become so strong that, for some, freedom of thought – a concept ironically related to the enlightenment – has taken a back seat to political dogmatism. It’s a collection of political and national ideas that, if fully bought into, can do no wrong. To be a good Christian in their eyes is not solely to abide by Christ’s teachings, but also to be a good American and a good Republican – it is, in its truest from, religious nationalism. To them, being a Christian, an American and a Republican are synonymous and America is a capitalist country, so what’s to worry about?
And that’s how an evangelical can be so pious in their battle against abortion or gay marriage and amoral when economic policies (which have real life consequences) crush entire communities or national borders break up hard-working families. That’s how Trump can laugh off fondling women inappropriately, or have a raunchy sex scandal with a porn star, or just a plain disregard for rules in general. It’s how he can have no humility at something as humble as the National Prayer Breakfast. It is this zealous nationalism that Trump tapped into.
While the president – whose own religious practices remain opaque – toed a hard line on the social issues evangelicals hold dear, it isn’t what won them over. It was their particular sense of nationalism that he excited. This incorporates elements that resonate with evangelicals’ national, social, economic and spiritual identities to form one hell of a shibboleth of a religion. To doubt is the absence of faith and faith is at the core of their identity, which would be fine if politics hadn’t intruded on their spiritual lives and vice versa many years back.
The ‘captains of industry’ and their political henchmen, from the Bushes, to Cheney, to Trump and their lobbyists have used this particular brand of morality to achieve their economic goals. Economics never made it onto the moral agenda. Whether current economic principles are ‘Christian’ or not is not a topic of discussion in most churches, even if being a good American is. What’s even scarier is that the economic principles coming out of the democratic party aren’t too dissimilar when it really comes down to it, leaving little room for healthy dissent from economic trends over the last several decades, which turned quite a few democrats toward Trump in the last election as they were understandably sick of the political establishment.
Faith in the future
The writer Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule and The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore, paints Trump as a “faulty messiah” and describes the cleavage between the social justice aspects of Christ’s teachings and the identification among evangelicals with prosperity and wealth – what Sexton calls the “cult of the shining city.”
Trump’s personal spiritual adviser Paula White has been widely mocked for her devotion to the “prosperity gospel,” yet she remains a powerful weapon for an administration that includes deeply religious figures like Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And perhaps inevitably, there will always be well-placed evangelical pastors who connect the coronavirus with some kind of divine retribution for sinful behavior.
A new Pew study shows that “most Americans don’t see Trump as religious,” yet how religion impacts the political is undoubtedly something we should all consider as we move towards the coming US election.
This isn’t restricted to America. A similar phenomenon is happening in Russia as well, with the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church and its inter-workings in and significance to Putin’s politics. Poland’s ruling party is symbiotic with the Catholic Church and Hindi Nationalism is sweeping across India as its sizeable minority populations suffer its wrath. Religion motivates politics in a way that isn’t easily understood and it’s damn good at it. It can manufacture voters’ consent even among those that aren’t particularly devout. We’ve certainly seen what dogma can do in Northern Ireland.
So, if you know an ideologue as I’ve described, have some mercy on them.
For many, especially if they grew up in this background, the system manufactured their beliefs for them long before they had a chance to question it. In the US, most are just trying to be good Americans in the only way they know how. To them, they are living their lives like the man in the pulpit tells them to on Sunday, I’m just not sure they realise he’s also the man at the podium.
*Michael Avila was due to co-host Northern Slant’s event earlier this week on Northern Ireland’s transatlantic relationship, which we’re hoping to rearrange for later in the year.
See Also:
In Shadow of Virus, Biden puts Distance Between Himself and Sanders – March 18
Escaping the Coronavirus – Feb 9
Apocalypse Now? – Jan 31
