Back in August 2015, when Donald Trump’s presidential
ambitions were widely considered
a joke, Russell Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern
Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Moore knew
that some of the faithful were falling for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate from New York City whose
lifestyle and views embodied everything the religious right professed to abhor.
The month before, a Washington Post poll had found that Trump was already being backed by more
white evangelicals than any other Republican candidate.
Moore, a boyish-looking pastor from Mississippi, had
positioned himself as the face of the “new” religious right: a bigger-hearted, diversity-oriented version that was squarely opposed
to Trump’s “us versus them” rhetoric. Speaking to a gathering of religion
reporters in a hotel ballroom in Philadelphia, Moore said that his “first
priority” was to combat the “demonizing” and “depersonalizing” of
immigrants—people, he pointed out, who were “created in the image of God.” Only
by refocusing on such true “gospel” values, Moore believed, could evangelicals
appeal to young people who had been fleeing the church in droves, and expand its outreach to
African Americans and Latinos. Evangelicals needed to do more than win
elections—their larger duty was to win souls. Moore, in short, wanted the
Christian right to reclaim the moral high ground—and Trump, in his estimation,
was about as low as you could get.
“The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to
fall for hucksters and demagogues,” Moore wrote in Onward: Engaging the
Culture Without Losing the Gospel, a book he had just published at the
time. “But too often we do.”
As Trump continued gaining ground in the polls, Moore began
to realize that the campaign represented nothing short of a battle for the soul
of the Christian right. By backing Trump, white evangelicals were playing into
the hands of a new, alt-right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of
white nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and
social-media propagandists who viewed the religious right, first and foremost,
as a vehicle for white supremacy. The election, Moore warned in a New York Times op-ed
last May, “has cast light on the darkness of pent-up nativism and bigotry all
over the country.” Those who were criticizing Trump, he added, “have faced
threats and intimidation from the ‘alt-right’ of white supremacists and
nativists who hide behind avatars on social media.”
Trump, true to form, wasted no time in striking back against
Moore. “Truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good
they stand for,” he tweeted a few days later. “A nasty guy with no
heart!”
In the end, conservative Christians backed Trump in record numbers. He won 81 per- cent of the white
evangelical vote—a higher share than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.
As a result, the religious right—which for decades has grounded its political
appeal in moral “values” such as “life” and “family” and “religious
freedom”—has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda. Evangelicals have traded Ronald
Reagan’s gospel-inspired depiction of America as a “shining city on a hill” for
Trump’s dark
vision of “American carnage.” And in doing so, they have returned the
religious right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain the
South’s segregationist “way of life.”
“The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious
right coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism,” says Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at
Dartmouth College. “The breakthrough of the 2016 election lies in the fact that
the religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual
predator, finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about
abortion or ‘family values.’ ”
For more than a generation, the Christian right has sought
to portray itself as a movement motivated principally by opposition to abortion
and the defense of sexual purity against the forces of secularism. According to
its own creation myth, evangelicals rose up and began to organize in opposition
to Roe v. Wade, motivated by their duty to protect
“the unborn.” Albert Mohler, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian, described Roe as “the catalyst for the
moral revolution within evangelicalism”—the moment that spurred the coalition
with conservative Catholics that still undergirds the religious right.
In fact, it wasn’t abortion that sparked the creation of the
religious right. The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early
’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University
and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It
was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization
of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder
Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.
By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump
effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy.
Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute and the
alt-right’s most visible spokesman, argued during the campaign that GOP
voters aren’t really motivated by Christian values, as they profess, but rather
by deep racial anxieties. “Trump has shown the hand of the GOP,” Spencer told
me in September. “The GOP is a white person’s populist party.”
Until now, the alt-right has presented itself largely as an
irreligious movement; Spencer, its outsize figurehead, is an avowed atheist. But with Trump as president, the
alt-right sees an opening for its own religious revival. “A new type of Alt
Right Christian will become a force in the Religious Right,” Spencer tweeted on the morning after the election,
“and we’re going to work with them.”
To alt-right Christians, Trump’s appeal isn’t based on the
kind of social-issue litmus tests long favored by the religious right.
According to Brad Griffin, a white supremacist activist in Alabama, “the
average evangelical, not-too-religious Southerner who’s sort of a populist” was
drawn to Trump primarily “because they like the attitude.” Besides, he adds,
many on the Christian right don’t necessarily describe themselves as
“evangelical” for theological reasons; it’s more “a tribal marker for a lot of
these people.”
Before the election, Griffin worried that white evangelicals
would find his “Southern nationalist” views problematic. But Trump’s decisive
victory over Russell Moore reassured him. “It seems like evangelicals really
didn’t follow Moore’s lead at all,” Griffin says. “All these pastors and
whatnot went in there and said Trump’s a racist, a bigot, and a fascist and all
this, and their followers didn’t listen to them.”
There is no way of knowing how many Americans consider
themselves to be alt-right Christians—the term is so new, even those who agree
with Spencer and Griffin probably wouldn’t use it to describe themselves. But
there is plenty of evidence that white evangelical voters are more receptive
than nonevangelicals to the ideas that drive the alt-right. According to an exit poll of Republican voters in the South
Carolina primary, evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims
from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the
Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals
told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice
the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.
That’s why white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s victory—they provided the numbers that the
alt-right lacks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s most influential strategist, knows that
the nationalist coalition alone isn’t big enough “to ever compete against the
progressive left”—which is why he made a point of winning over the religious
right. If conservative Catholics and evangelicals “just want to focus on
reading the Bible and being good Christians,” Bannon told me last July,
“there’s no chance we could ever get this country back on track again.” The
alt-right supplied Trump with his agenda; the Christian right supplied him with
his votes.
For alt-right Christians, Russell Moore is the embodiment of
where the religious right went wrong—by refusing to openly embrace racism.
Throughout his youth, Griffin says, he felt alienated by Christians like Moore
who were intent on “condemning racism.” He was only drawn back into
Christianity when he married the daughter of Gordon Baum, a far-right Lutheran
leader who co-founded the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a
virulently racist group.” Griffin says he joined the CCC, as well as the white
nationalist League of the South, because both groups embody the elements he
views as integral to his faith: They are “pro-white, pro-Christian, pro-South.”
Moore has become a popular target among alt-right
Christians. The white supremacist and popular alt-right radio show host James
Edwards, himself a Southern Baptist, regularly disparages Moore on his program, calling him a “cuck-Christian.” In June, after the
Southern Baptist Convention banned displays of the Confederate flag, Edwards hosted
Nathanael Strickland, proprietor of the Faith and Heritage blog. In a recent
post, Strickland had argued that white Southerners “have faced a widespread and
determined assault on our heritage, symbols, monuments, graves, and identity by
secular and governmental forces,” and likened such supposed attacks to what
Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf: that Germans faced “cultural
extermination and ethnic cleansing.” Edwards seconded that analysis, declaring
the Confederate flag “a Christian flag,” and arguing that to attack it “is to
deny the sovereignty, the majesty, and the might of Lord Jesus Christ in his
divine role in Southern history, culture, and life.”
Strickland recently told me that alt-right Christians see
“racial differences” as “real, biological, and positive,” a view he insists is
“merely a reaffirmation of traditional historical Christianity.” He argues that
many on the alt-right who consider themselves atheists or pagans only lost
their faith in Christianity “due to the antiwhite hatred and Marxist dogma held
by the modern church.”
Strickland considers himself a “kinist,” part of the new
white supremacist movement that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “uses the Bible as
one of the main texts for its beliefs,” offering a powerful validation to white
supremacists for their racism and anti-Semitism. Strickland sees kinism as a
successor to Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic movement dating back to
the 1960s that played a key role in the rise of Christian
homeschooling. The movement’s primary goal was to implement biblical law—including public stonings—in every facet of American life.
After Trump’s victory, Edwards ferociously attacked the
president-elect’s critics, Bible in hand. “The Bible says, ‘There shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ and I want there to be that,” he said
on his show. “Now is the time for retribution, and I want them to suffer. I
want them to feel the righteous anger of a good and decent people. I want Trump
to drive them into the sea.” He called on the “degenerates, perverts, and
freaks,” and other “criminals who shilled for Hillary” to “make good on your
promise to leave the country.” He added: “They can take Russell Moore with them
on the way. That’s for sure. Good riddance. Please leave.”
Alt-right Christians like Edwards see their movement as part
of a global battle for ethnic nationalism. Days before the election, neo-Nazis
assembled at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to show their support for
Trump. Matthew Heimbach, an
alt-right Christian leader who founded the Traditionalist Worker
Party, told the crowd they were in a worldwide struggle for
the preservation of “ethnic, cultural, and religious integrity,” a battle that
has been joined by “nationalists around the world that are fighting the same
enemy.” That enemy, Heimbach said, is made up of “Jewish oligarchs and the
capitalists and the bankers” who “want to enslave the entire world.” He ticked
off some of the movement’s international allies: President Rodrigo Duterte of
the Philippines, who has overseen a Hitler-inspired campaign of extrajudicial killings,
and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has displaced and slaughtered millions of his own
citizens. To Heimbach, Assad “is fighting to defend his people against the
globalist hydra of Saudi Arabia, of the terrorist state of Israel, and United
States interests.”
Heimbach, who made headlines last March for shoving a Black Lives
Matter protester at a Trump rally, also draws inspiration from the far-right
Russian writer Alexandr Dugin, whose book, The Fourth Political
Theory, he considers “suggested reading” for all Traditionalist Worker
Party members. Dugin’s writings reinforced Heimbach’s belief, he says, that “we
must reject the failed and flawed concepts of democracy, capitalism, equality
of ability, and multiculturalism.” To alt-right Christians like Heimbach,
democracy itself is a failed and flawed concept.
Some, in fact, believe that Trump does not go far enough in
defending the faith. Strickland, for example, views Trump as merely a “civic
nationalist,” not a full-blown racial and ethnic nationalist like those on the
alt-right. “There are four legs supporting the table of civilization,” he says.
“Blood, religion, culture, and language. Civic nationalists only acknowledge
the last three of those.” In Strickland’s view, the alt-right must now become
Trump’s “loyal opposition,” prodding the president even further to the right.
“The alt-right’s job in the coming months and years will be to solidify
nationalism’s place in the Republican Party and push the importance of the
fourth leg—blood.”
With the religious right now at the service of the
alt-right, conservative evangelicals who opposed Trump find themselves at odds
with the movement they helped to build. Reverend Rob Schenck was one of the
leaders of the religious right’s war on abortion, famously getting arrested in 1992 at a women’s health
clinic while carrying “Baby Tia,” a preserved fetus he claimed had been aborted.
Through his organization, Faith and Action, Schenck has long provided spiritual
counsel to top Washington officials, including
Supreme Court justices and members of Congress like Mike Pence. Trump,
he says, has no spiritual side whatsoever. “He has no facility in the language
of faith,” Schenck told me in November, a week after the election. “At all.
It’s not natural to him. It’s not even known to him. It’s alien.”
Two days before we spoke, Trump had announced his selection
of Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist. To Schenck, the religious
right’s support for the appointment was another
“screaming alarm to American evangelicals that we must do some very deep
soul-searching.”
But such soul-searching does not appear to be forthcoming.
So far, President Trump has drawn little but praise from religious right
leaders. From his first days in office, he moved swiftly to shore up their
support. He quickly brought back George W. Bush’s “global gag rule,” signing an executive order that bars federally funded
groups not only from providing abortions to pregnant women, but from even discussing
abortion as an option. And his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court
thrilled even Russell Moore, who hailed the selection of “a brilliant and articulate
defender of Constitutional originalism.” Trump’s strategy makes sense: He’ll
keep evangelicals happy and unified by moving some of their key priorities
forward—and use their support to push for what is ultimately an alt-right
agenda.
Schenck fears that “Trump and his gang” have exposed an
evangelical culture “that doesn’t know itself.” Sitting in his Capitol Hill
townhouse, Schenck picks up his copy of Ethics, by the anti-Nazi
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, he says, argued that because Jesus
was a “man for others,” Christians are called “not to hold the other in
contempt, or to be afraid of the other, or contemptuous of the other.” Yet when
Schenck visited evangelical churches during the Obama years, he lost count of
how many times he was asked, quite earnestly: “Is the president the
Antichrist?”
Schenck still holds out hope, as does Moore, that a new generation of evangelicals will
ultimately reject what Trump and the alt-right represent. “I do think something
is going to emerge out of this catastrophe,” he says. “It’s going to help us to
define what is true evangelical religion and what is not.”
But for now, he concedes, the religious right has forfeited
its moral standing by aligning itself with the alt-right’s gospel of white
supremacy. “Evangelicals are a tool of Donald Trump,” Schenck says. “This could
be the undoing of American evangelicalism. We could just become a political
operation in the guise of a church.”
This article was reported in partnership with The
Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Sarah Posner has reported on the religious right for more
than a decade and is the author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the
Republican Crusade for Values Voters.
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De NEW
REPUBLIC, 20/03/2017
Ilustración de
Brian Reedy
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