A number of observers have commented recently on a startling revelation growing out of the Jan. 6 attack on the seat of American government.
Not only was the Trump-inspired onslaught carried out by American citizens intent on overthrowing democracy and perpetuating an autocratic regime, the attempted coup was actually justified in the name of religion — not just any religion, mind you, but a significant swath of the nation’s dominant faith, Christianity.
Although the antidemocratic Christian coalition sympathetic to the storming of the Capitol is broad — it includes, for instance, conservative church-militant Catholics — the core activists belong to that branch of Protestantism characterized as evangelical (formerly fundamentalist); that is, denominations and unaffiliated churches dedicated to belief in the Bible as sole religious authority and to personal spiritual transformation. Membership is almost entirely white and predominantly (though not exclusively) Southern in regional identification; a New York Times report (1/12/21) indicated those who rallied for Trump and marched on the Capitol came from states like North and South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee, and tended to be Southern Baptists.
The religiously oriented neo-Confederates interviewed by Times reporters saw their cause variously as a holy war, a new Great Awakening, or a struggle of light against darkness — literally, a battle to save Christianity from its secular enemies, who, led by a satanic Biden administration, would throw out the Bible, erase God, and disappear the name of Jesus from American life. It’s an apocalyptic vision in keeping with the belief of conservative evangelicals in the coming End Time.
In a bizarre transposition, the church-going Joe Biden was viewed by one Christian-flag carrying insurrectionist as irreligious, while the amoral, foul-mouthed Donald Trump, who is rarely seen near a house of worship (the exception being his photo-ready Bible pose in Lafayette Square last June), was hailed as perhaps the last president to believe in Jesus!
The most jarring image emerging from the Times reportage was of those violence-prone Trumpian shock troops the Proud Boys kneeling in prayer before making their charge toward the Capitol bent on mayhem. They requested the Almighty’s aid and protection in securing the needed restoration of American values. The thuggish Proud Boys are really pious Crusaders. Who knew?
Luke Mogelson, covering the nascent second civil war for The New Yorker magazine (1/25/21), recorded similar scenes and testimony among the Bible-thumping antidemocracy demonstrators in Washington. In addition to reinstating Trump, their expressed motivation was to call on the power of the old-time Christian religion in opposition to “tyrants, the communists, and the globalists;” their obvious inspiration was the displaced chief executive, presumably sent by God to counter Satan. Trump, who discovered the potency of religion as a political blood sport in Lafayette Square, made no attempt to change the perception.
His followers, eager to do damage if they couldn’t get their way, seized on saving Christian America as the justification for acting out their frustrations and rage. A pro-Trump group called Patriot Prayer, Mogelson reports, identified the Antichrist: It was Joseph R. Biden, the well-known communist, sent by the Devil to subvert Western civilization itself; Bernie and AOC, mere socialists, can’t hold a candle to him in unadulterated evil.
It seems we’ve been down this road before. Liberal Thomas Jefferson, our first truly secular president — he was a Deist, not a Christian — was attacked during the election of 1800 on religious grounds by the conservative Federalist Party, which accused him of being an “infidel,” an atheist, and the Antichrist. If elected, opponents claimed, he would seize the Bibles of Christian congregations, plot to destroy religion, and introduce immorality to the country. Clergymen of the Calvinist persuasion pamphleteered against him. (Similarly, evangelical pastors were prominent among Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Jan. 6.)
In actuality, Jefferson endorsed the teachings of Jesus, but denied their divine origin and distrusted organized religion. That was enough to place him on the hit lists of both the religious and political rightists of the time — religious, because his freethinking attitude ran counter to the narrow and austere received wisdom bequeathed by the Calvinistic Puritans, which was in conflict with the Enlightenment values of tolerance, reason, and scientific inquiry he represented; political, because questioning ecclesiastical authority, as Jefferson did, undermined the aristocratic social and economic order his liberal, democratic movement was challenging.
The orthodox Christian churches of 1800, it’s been said, considered opposition to Jefferson akin to going to war against “political atheism.” There’s always been a nexus in American life between religious conservatism and political conservatism. Historian Eric F. Goldman elaborated on it in his groundbreaking narrative on liberal reform, “Rendezvous With Destiny” (1977).
The conservative interpretation of religion has served the conservative political cause, Goldman wrote, by sanctioning the status quo through two theological doctrines drawn from the Christian tradition: (1) the concept of the individual as a free moral agent, which sanctified opposition to social legislation since such legislation interfered with individuals rising or falling naturally according to their God-given abilities; (2) the concept that success or failure in life was foreordained by God (predestination), which sanctified great wealth or extreme poverty as part of the Almighty’s plan, thereby accepting inequality as a given. To oversimplify the matter, God favors laissez-faire, so butt out, liberals.
These doctrines extended deep into America’s Calvinistic past. They were absorbed by the spiritual upheavals (or “awakenings”) of the mid-18th and early 19th centuries that established a tradition of evangelical, personalized and individualized Protestantism stressing intense emotionalism over Jefferson’s deistic rationalism. In particular, the Second Great Awakening (ca. 1800-40), led by Baptists and Methodists, was a conservative frontier reaction against religious liberalism; it posed no troublesome dilemmas, demanding only unquestioning creedal conformity and strict adherence to scriptural literalness.
This sort of conservative evangelicalism proved an especially good fit for the American South, where it reinforced an acceptance of the antebellum slave system and, according to W.J. Cash (“The Mind of the South”), enlisted the support of rural and small-town clergy en masse for the Ku Klux Klan resurgence of the 1920s. Sadly, many of its adherents see salvation today through a fascistic movement against democracy.
Those adherents include evangelist Franklin Graham, son and successor to the famous Billy, who emerged in 2020 as a major supporter of Donald Trump. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2021
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us
PO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652