"The Greatest Threat Posed By Trump"

Written by an Evangelical Christian.

David French:

"But most consequential of all is the religious response to Trump. On Dec. 20, The Economist reported on the astonishing number of Christian Republicans who believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Writing in The Times just a few weeks later, my colleagues Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported on the ways in which, during the Trump era, evangelicalism has become more cultural and political and less pious, theological or concerned with church attendance. Graham and Homans spoke, for instance, to a retired corrections officer named Cydney Hatfield. “I voted for Trump twice, and I’ll vote for him again,” she said. “He’s the only savior I can see.” Capitalizing on sentiments like these, Trump himself shared a blasphemous video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.”

The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”

But in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.

For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve long appreciated that quote, and not because I believe that one must be religious to be moral or that religiosity invariably leads to morality. That’s obviously untrue. Rather, I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.