The Gospel According to Donald

They say that a crisis shows character, but the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare something else altogether: the evangelical right’s mutation into high-church Trumpism. When President Donald Trump defied all basic epidemiological reason by announcing that he was eager to get the American economy, and the American workforce, back in full-deployment mode, he made sure to dress up his perverse mandate in spiritual rhetoric. “I would love to have the country opened up and raring to go by Easter,” Trump told Bill Hemmer of Fox News. “That would be a great American resurrection,” Hemmer replied.

At the same time, a key leading light of the conservative Protestant establishment was already acting in the spirit of the president’s altar call, as Jared Yates Sexton notes in The New Republic. Jerry Falwell Jr. announced that Liberty University, the powerhouse evangelical institution founded by his late father, would indeed be welcoming students, faculty, and staff back on campus as virtually all other institutions of higher learning remain shuttered in the face of horrific spread of the coronavirus. “Let’s get them back as soon as we can,” Falwell announced, without bothering to note that, in this context, “back” meant “directly in the path of the modern plague.”

At the heart of this magical thinking, Sexton writes, is one of the defining alliances that has reshaped American politics: “These events, like so many others that seem irreconcilable based on our current understanding of politics, history, and American religion, fit into the same puzzle that was fused together from nationalism and capitalism decades earlier.”

The elder Jerry Falwell played a key role in the modern consolidation of this gospel. Galvanized into political activism by the rise of desegregation in his home state of Virginia, Falwell senior parlayed his power into the founding of the Moral Majority, a key formative alliance between the evangelical right and the more worldly Republican Party establishment. Like today’s Trump-enabling corps of true believers on the right, Falwell and the other founders of the religious right discovered an unlikely, imperfect vessel for their world-changing message: President Ronald Reagan, like Trump a dilatory-at-best Christian worshipper and a divorced, worldly avatar of American celebrity culture.

But as the elder Falwell and his allies knew, God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Reagan was able to mint a fanciful interpretation of U.S. history by a crank occult thinker named Manly P. Hall into a central article of faith for the nascent evangelical right. Hall maintained that an angel from God helped preside over the signing of the Declaration of Independence and that a cohort of spiritually elect thinkers and leaders joined forces to anoint the fledgling American republic a vehicle of divine providence, poised to become an empire of liberty and knowledge for God’s chosen people.

This high-octane brand of spiritual delusion helped transform Reagan into a favorite son of the religious right—just as it’s helped seal today’s Trump-evangelical alliance in strikingly similar terms. Trump, like Reagan, has preached a gospel of sanctified capitalist growth at all costs and a vision of militant American exceptionalism in a dark and fallen world. And like Reagan, Trump has stepped forward to serve as the great redeemer figure for the imperiled white nationalist Christian gospel in America, as Sexton writes:

Even now, as the coronavirus pandemic is growing, strange memes and messages are being posted in white-identity, evangelical circles, the roots of which can be traced back to Falwell and the Confederate Christian ideology. They see Trump as standing firm against dark, evil forces. They see the pandemic as a plague from God. A sign of the End Times.

In other words, as the rest of the world is frantically working to stave off disaster, the evangelical right is hailing the augurs of deliverance. Be afraid.

—Chris Lehmann, Editor