It is well known that religious belief is declining in the United States at what appears to be an accelerating rate. According to Gallup, although 92 percent of Americans still believed in God in 2011, by 2022 the number had fallen to 81 percent. Pew Research meanwhile found that only 63 percent of Americans identified as Christian in 2022, when that number had remained above 90 percent as recently as the 1990s.
But polls (along with the fretful bombast of Republican politics) also show us how potent this rump religiosity is, both in its intensity and its nationalist nature. A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll released in February 2024 found that 55 percent of Republicans hold Christian nationalist views.
There are numerous examples of political rhetoric feeding, and feeding upon, this anxious sentiment. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), for example, has said that the United States is not a democracy at all but a “biblically sanctioned” republic. Donald Trump, America’s most unrepentant sinner and foremost Bible salesman, has amped up his God-talk of late, frequently ending his rallies with what amounts to a MAGA sermon. Meanwhile, in a February 2022 speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan, Florida governor and former 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis urged the audience to “put on the full armor of God” to fight the Left. And at a National Conservatism Conference in September 2022 in Miami, U.S. Senator (and insurrection cheerleader) Josh Hawley (R-MO) said: “Without the Bible, there is no America.” He continued: “though the God of the universe could have accomplished his purposes entirely on his own, he chose instead to call us to do his work with him.”
By declaring themselves God’s chosen fighters, as they so often have over the years, these and other right-wing provocateurs are bottom-feeding their way to the front of a parade of desperation, building their brands by stoking and harnessing the most elemental fears and frustrations of the White working class. This tawdry and calculated (not to mention dangerous) politicization might make one think that the religion in question is not “real religion” at all but simply raw demagogic populism—in other words, tribalism. But if we think about “real” religion’s origins, we can see that the contemporary religiosity of the American Right is about as real, and as historical, as it gets.
Biblical Basis
First, we note that while all political factions are powered by a certain amount of “faith” (enthusiasm rooted in unreason and bias), this is especially true of the literally faith-based, science-snubbing politics of the contemporary Right. It is politics nourished not by empirical evidence but—to an extraordinary degree in the post-Trump era—by fantasy and misinformation, chanted ritually in the echo chambers of cable news and social media. This faith-based ecosystem, in turn, operates powerfully in right-wing brains due to its emphasis on ingroup loyalty and deference to authority, concepts that research has consistently shown are more resonant and more motivational to people on the Right than those on the Left. And once you’ve combined ingroup loyalty (tribalism) and deference to authority in a faith-based context, you’ve pretty much followed the recipe for creating “real” religion, just as it was first cooked up by our distant ancestors.
The religion of the Bible is political to its marrow. No attempt is made in its pages to distinguish religiosity from the political motivations that—along with ignorance of the natural world—gave rise to it. And biblical religion is also, of course, authoritarian. Traditional monotheism demanded deference to the absolute authority of a god, the Abrahamic version of which amounted to nothing more than the apotheosis of a tribal chieftain. And this religion’s shape was purely transactional: give God your blind, unwavering faith (i.e., loyalty) and he’ll protect you; he’ll be your hero and savior.
In other words, the religion of the Bible provides a perfect template for Trumpers and appears to have been dreamed up by similarly minded people.
Forging Factors
Clearly, the yen for this religion and its essential transaction can become supercharged in times of extreme stress, and just as clearly we can see that we are currently living in such a time. America’s right-wingers—increasingly panicked witnesses to our country’s immense cultural and demographic changes—crave deliverance and, ultimately, “victory.” They want God, or a man they can perceive as his anointed champion, to take charge. They want a two-fisted SOB who’s unabashedly on their side. They want someone larger than life who claims super powers and super intelligence: someone “strong” enough (read: insecure enough) to proclaim “I alone can fix it,” and to attack their enemies without regard to evidence or the rule of law.
Our contemporary GOP preachers, fanning and riding this foul wind, are thus like monotheism’s original prophets, whose followers faced existential threats from neighboring tribes, each possessing its own family of rival gods. We should not be surprised that they were served up a god similar in his stridency to Donald Trump. The prophets presented this deity not as the only god but as a “jealous,” combative god. Yahweh was literally a local tribal god surrounded by many others (Asherah and Baal, for example) in the ancient Middle East. Accordingly, he saw competition everywhere. He’s just like a strongman politician caught in a tough multi-candidate primary race. In the Bible’s first story, he ejects his own children from the garden, because he fears that their growing powers will make them into rivals.
In the Bible’s second story, about the Great Flood, God goes full tribal, decreeing the descendants of Noah’s son Ham to possess inherited servant status, inherited inferiority: a concept—and an oft-quoted chapter (Genesis 9)—that proved central to religious “justifications” for slavery and, here in the United States, Jim Crow laws. In scripture, this purely amoral and self-serving concept framed innumerable conflicts between the Israelites and their neighbors the Philistines. Tellingly, the scriptures never explain what’s so bad or wrong about the Philistines. Their crime was simply that they were other people (allegedly descended from Ham) and worshipped other gods; they were “them” and not “us.” The god of the Israelites doesn’t even appear to favor the Israelites for any reason beyond the fact that they created him.
Real-World Effects
The Christian hope for salvation into Heaven likewise carries troublingly tribalist, monocultural, undertones. Heaven’s entrance requirement, after all, is that all new residents must believe the same things as the existing residents. For two millennia, in other words, Westerners have been taught that the best thing that can possibly happen to them is to spend eternity in a gated place where everyone thinks exactly alike. The residents of eastern Oregon currently seeking to move their state’s border with Idaho westward to create a new “Greater Idaho” are effectively right in line with this philosophy. So here again, we see how faithful the Right’s seemingly degraded religion is to the original article. As I said before: the scriptures read, unsurprisingly, as though they were dreamed up by people motivated by the same not-very-admirable feelings that motivate politicians today.
And when I say “not very admirable,” I mean just that. I don’t mean evil, and I don’t mean deviant. A desire for monoculture is totally normal—the most natural thing in the world in fact and as familiar as Thanksgiving dinner: we’ve all experienced how much more relaxing it can be to share Thanksgiving with a group of like-minded friends than with members of our ideologically far-flung extended families. But however natural it might be, the desire for monoculture is not something to celebrate or aspire to (especially when, pursued to its limit, as it often has been, it can lead to the use of genocidal violence against “the other”: an approach occasionally endorsed by the scriptural god of Abraham). It’s something we should be encouraged to rise above.
The monocultural impulse, if it runs too far, can be destructive not only to people but also to democracy (something that we are supposed to be aspiring to). A vital democracy, a democracy worthy of the name, requires engagement. It doesn’t ask us to love other people more than we love ourselves, which we can’t really do anyway. It asks us instead to grow up. It asks us to test and argue our views in conversation with those who do not think exactly as we do. And that, in turn, requires a willingness to listen and ultimately be honest about our own biases and ignorance.
This is hard to do, and it’s not something our Founders thought we’d be very good at. It’s when we consider what the Founders thought of us, and what they thought about religion—and freedom, for that matter—that we see how deeply disingenuous the rhetoric of the contemporary Right is.
What the Right Thinks Is Right …
People on the Right—and I’m thinking here of the White working-class base of the Republican Party—desire a return to traditionalism. Two traditions whose loss they lament are those of the great American blue-collar job and the great American pension, and with respect to these I sympathize with them. But the other “tradition” they’d like to recover is, again, that of monoculture. But historically, we never really had a monoculture; we merely had the appearance of monoculture, maintained through segregation and closeting. Their vision descends into absurdity when the Right tries to use the words God and faith to make their goal seem venerable or elevated when even the Bible’s authors themselves, as we’ve seen, never made their own monocultural, tribalist impulses seem the least bit elevated.
But things get crazier still when, in a further effort to associate their movement with something virtuous and time-honored, the Right’s politicians and pundits claim a spiritual kinship with the Founding Fathers and then, as if putting a cherry on top, characterize their movement, their caucus, as the embodiment of a quest for freedom. Why are the resulting rallying cries about Founders, faith, and freedom absurd? Because the Founders didn’t think very much of us. They also didn’t think much of the Bible’s authors, who also didn’t think much of us. And because neither the Founders nor the biblical “prophets” thought much of us, the one thing they did agree on is that we the people shouldn’t be given a lot of freedom or much of a voice in government.
Dozens of times in The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison expressed their disdain for the people’s “passion”—our ignorant hotheadedness—and the destructive influence they expected it to have on our republic. The Founders’ distrust of the great unwashed majority explains why nine of the original thirteen states joined the union with property requirements on their books for voting and why, throughout the early decades of our nation, in about half the states even propertied voters were not allowed to cast ballots for presidential electors, who were chosen instead by the state legislatures.
Regarding the House of Representatives, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison that “a house chosen by [the people at large] will be very illy qualified to legislate for the Union.” Therefore, even with the House electorate limited in most states to property-holding White men, it was felt that a Senate would be needed to temper the “violent passions” of the House. And with that mission in mind, it was thought that the election of senators, as John Jay put it in The Federalist paper number 64, should be left to the judgment of “the most enlightened and respectable citizens.” And that’s why senators (in all the states) were originally elected not by the people but by the state legislatures (right up until the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913).
Today, in contrast, the people not only directly decide who wins places in the Electoral College and the senate, but, through our farcical primary contests, they decide who gets to run, effectively making them the authors of the parties’ platforms, with the candidates and pundits all the while doing everything in their power to make sure these authors are driven by blind fury. There’s probably no way out of this situation at this point—no way to restore the kind of political and journalistic gatekeeping we benefitted from during much of the twentieth century—and obviously, things are not going well: desperate citizens are nominating demagogues and grifters who govern poorly, triggering more desperation. The Founders would not have been surprised.
The Founders didn’t respect us very much, and their disrespect for the Bible, being scions of the Enlightenment, has been so well-established there’s no need to detail their opinions here. It is true that the Founders often publicly said that they thought “religion” important for public morality, but it’s clear from their private letters that the religion they had in mind was a simple carrot-and-stick (Heaven and Hell) doctrine of rewards and punishments. In other words, they thought of us as children who would need to fear God’s punishment to be kept in line, given that in a republic we would no longer be controlled by our fear of a domineering king. The Founders’ lack of faith in us, in this sense, went hand in hand with their desire to limit our freedom, our voice in government.
Meanwhile, the Bible’s relentless anticipation of an apocalypse and God’s return is, if anything, even less respectful of us. The authors of these ideas address us literally as children. The god they created views the Earth as a room with no adults in it, a room that is predicted to collapse under the collective weight of our depravity (despite all the freedom-limiting thou-shalt-nots), so that Father will have to come back and run things personally.
The civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.
… And Where It’s Wrong
To sum up: The authors of the Abrahamic bible had little faith in us. America’s Founders felt the same way and, therefore, wanted to limit our freedom, our agency, our voice. The moral that our ever-moralizing right wing should take from this is that the pedestal they pretend to stand on doesn’t exist: you can’t elevate or dignify yourself by associating yourself, or your quest for untrammeled freedom, with prophets and Founders who looked down on us and didn’t trust us with freedom.
Besides, quests for untrammeled freedom don’t smell so good when they’re only untrammeled from the perspective of one tribe. The House Freedom Caucus certainly isn’t looking to extend the freedoms of the LGBTQ community, to expand anyone’s freedom to see a doctor when they’re sick, or to keep us free from the threats of gun violence or environmental collapse. And here again, the religion angle fails to elevate, to dignify. As I’ve said, the tribalist religion that today’s right wing is stirring into their politics is “real” religion all right; that I will grant them. But that’s not a compliment; theism can’t uplift anything in the political arena. There’s no point godwashing a tribal quest; you can’t dignify rank tribalism by associating it with religions that in their original form were openly tribalist, written by jerks like us who didn’t even try to make tribalism look good.
There is also a massive fallacy underlying any attempt to apply a religion involving a messiah and an end-times philosophy in the political realm, because all such religions are built upon a tribal, my-way-or-the-highway mentality. They always involve the concepts of salvation and chosenness, an us and a them, and there is always a designated inferior place for Father to put them when he comes back: outside of the garden, the gates, the national boundary. This is why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had to keep Abrahamic philosophy out of his crusade for civil rights. He wanted equality for all, and he wanted it here and now. So, although he self-defensively labeled himself a Christian and spoke at times in Old Testament language of mountaintops and promised lands, he was in truth a straight Gandhian. He understood that in a real nation such as ours, there is no highway: none of us—of whatever persuasion or color—are going anywhere. We’re all stuck together in the same clown car, and we have to avoid categorization and eschew violence. We need to argue. We need to converse.
The Founding Fathers tried to force us to engage with each other by separating the branches of government and splitting the legislature. The one aspect of their legacy that is actually uplifting/elevating is the system of institutional controls and checks that they put in place to keep the passions of a single tribe from running amok. These controls are our best tradition, and they are exactly the thing that our (allegedly traditionalist) right wingers are now doing all they can to tear down, through the weaponization of government (via gerrymandering, the election and appointment of unqualified ideologues, election interference, disinformation, etc.) and through physical violence and threats of violence.
Anyone seeking to meaningfully elevate themselves should embrace debate, but the GOP base prefers to embrace God and guns: the ultimate my-way-or-the-highway tools, designed to thwart debate/argument/conversation. They are tools for people who are afraid to argue openly and honestly. And the truth is that there’s a vein of this cowardice that extends to both extremes of the political spectrum. Leftists may not be arming themselves or putting on “the full armor of God” at the rate that rightists are, but on the other hand they’re not meaningfully more willing to engage in open-ended conversations that are comprehensively honest and fair.
For example, on both the Left and the Right, even in the context of allegedly substantive debates, we see an overuse of rights-talk: transgender vs. cisgender women, guns vs. safety, and so on. On many issues, both the Right and the Left wield rights like stiff-arms—like blunt, absolutist weapons—to the point that they begin to resemble religions themselves (this is not to mention the Right’s increasing efforts to use the cry of “religious freedom” as a battering ram of nullification). We’d be better off if we spent less time squelching each other with rights-talk and more time arguing about how to make civilization civilized.
Granted, I frequently find the Left’s arguments more sympathetic than the Right’s, because leftists are more often standing up for traditionally downtrodden populations (or the Earth itself) and because they’re less likely to avail themselves of guns and God and to vote for pure thuggery and sensationalism. Still, they’re afraid to really converse, and they over-rely on rights. And they cherry-pick, sloganize, say things that aren’t true, and rely on late-night comics to answer the Right with caricature and derision, which does nothing but inflame sentiments further.
To move on and up from where we are, we need leadership, and we need the center, the center-Left, and whatever remains of the center-Right to get together and provide it. We need a somewhat sane and serious coalition to push the far Right (and, less critically at the moment, the far Left) into more public conversations in which everyone explicitly rejects the lies, cherry-picking, and derision reverberating in their respective bases’ echo chambers. If you want to pull out all the stops to prevent illegal immigration, then vote for someone with a realistic plan, not someone who tells demagogic lies about immigrants’ criminality. We need to witness conversations in which courageous participants begin by admitting their biases and ignorance and admit that there is no highway and also that we all do better when we all do better.
But where would the courage come from? Politicians and pundits are echo-chamber addicts because that’s where their constituents and audiences live: in monocultural bubbles, i.e., Heaven’s waiting rooms. Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News revealed how deeply some Fox News hosts hate and disbelieve Donald Trump and how dishonest they have been about it, but only about one in five Fox viewers said they trust the network less as a result, and most of those individuals have said that they continue to tune in.
We the people don’t want to think or compromise; we want to believe and belong. Our passions and tribalism daily validate the Founders’ worst fears about us. Our preference for rights-talk over real debate is troubling enough, and the Right’s embrace of guns and politicized gods represents an immense, and immensely disturbing, step in the same direction. It represents a fear-driven retreat from responsible self-governance at a time when much of the world seems to be regressing along a parallel track, following the siren song of authoritarianism back to the beginning of history.
It is well known that religious belief is declining in the United States at what appears to be an accelerating rate. According to Gallup, although 92 percent of Americans still believed in God in 2011, by 2022 the number had fallen to 81 percent. Pew Research meanwhile found that only 63 percent of Americans identified …