It was here that Pence resolved to cling to “tried-and-true” conservatism, he explains in What Conservatives Believe, his new book, published Tuesday. In doing so, he broke with his party’s leadership to vote against Bush’s flagship education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act. That moment would harden into a governing conviction: that Republican orthodoxy had been compromised, and that it was his calling to restore it.

In these benighted times, as the “siren song of populism” grows ever louder, the former vice president still dreams of that restoration: a nation that rises up and lives out the true meaning of its creed — low taxes, limited government, and unwavering support for Israel, America’s “most cherished ally.”

That this dream is shared by approximately 16 other Americans, the vast majority of whom constitute Pence’s extended family, hasn’t stopped him. This is an exaggeration, but only slightly. The truth is, that brand of conservatism — it used to be called fusionism, for combining free-market orthodoxy, free-policy hawkism, and “traditional values” — is quite literally dying along with the subscriber base of National Review.  

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What Conservatives Believe, Pence’s third book since leaving the White House in 2020, is yet another long-winded attempt at vindication. The book is framed as a statement of principles, rather than autobiography. It offers no insight into the internal machinations of the Trump White House, nor does it attempt a psychological portrait of the most powerful man in the country. It does not even advance a new or original critique of MAGA populism or progressivism — ostensibly the book’s central purpose. Instead, readers are treated to nostalgia politics and a catalog of policy prescriptions that would have seemed dated in the Bush era, let alone this one.

The new book does serve one important purpose, however. For all its denunciations of populism, Pence’s work is a powerful reminder of why Trump emerged in the first place. Before 2016, fusionism was the GOP’s governing philosophy. Its true believers — the likes of Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy — were seen as the future. Likewise, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and John Kasich were all serious contenders for the presidency. It was hardly a golden age — and yet, this is the world that Pence seems to want to return to. 

Trump may be an (extremely) imperfect vessel for working-class America, but he at least recognized that something was rotten in the old order. Pence, by contrast, refuses to grapple with that failure. If What Conservatives Believe reveals anything, it is that Pence still mistakes the consensus that produced Trump for the one that can succeed him.

There is something almost endearing about Mike Pence. A conservative “proudly out of sync” with the times, he is one of the rare few who practice what they preach. A devout Christian married for 41 years, the lifelong Hoosier has lived such a scandal-free life that his biggest “controversy” was converting from Catholicism to evangelical Christianity as a college student. To this day, he never eats alone with a woman unless it’s his wife, and he refuses to attend events involving alcohol without her by his side. (In the post-#MeToo era, many other politicians might have wished they’d adopted a similar approach.)

This rigidity also extends to Pence’s politics. Despite growing up in a Democratic household in which John F. Kennedy (a fellow Irish Catholic) was the poster boy, Pence began flirting with the GOP during that same period, and the opinions he adopted early haven’t changed. In What Conservatives Believe, he describes Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and proto-Reagan, as his intellectual hero. The young Pence found The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater’s statement of principles, “stirring and compelling.”

“Stirring” and “compelling” are not words that immediately spring to mind when reading The Conscience of a Conservative. Its didactic style, however, is clearly something Pence seeks to emulate in his own writing. He writes that conservatives “must begin with moral clarity”; they “must find commonsense solutions”; “they must have faith”; and, most important, they “must never forsake our constitutional principles.” It’s the kind of message that might have had some purchase 50 years ago, but in the age of Trump’s “weave” and rambling Truth Social posts, it struggles to register.

Unlike most other anti-Trump books, Pence’s work is different in that he is willing to take on his own side, even if his attacks on the president remain restrained. 

In Pence’s telling, the specter haunting America is the unholy alliance of progressives and Right-wing populists. He argues that the latter peddle “progressivism in disguise,” warning that they are “fellow travelers on the road to ruin.” Both dream of a collapse in the America-led international order, and seek to enlarge the state to such a degree that it crushes the economic freedom of Americans. No one is spared from Pence’s withering attacks — not even Marco Rubio, whose “common-good capitalism” is dismissed as a “warmed-over version of big-government Republicanism.” 

For Pence, the only answer to the problems of capitalism is more capitalism. He shows little willingness to consider that the system itself may have helped create the very populism he condemns. Across 264 pages, Pence devotes just one paragraph to the causes of the populist revolt in 2016, while Barry Goldwater earns 36 mentions. Though he concedes that globalization “left behind” some regions of the country, he blames big government — rather than trade, deindustrialization, or immigration — as the source of America’s ills. Beyond that, readers are served a steady diet of folksy maxims about how “populism is like a gust of wind” and hollow aphorisms such as: “Populists follow urges, not principle.”

Perhaps we should not expect much more from a man who once described himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf. Pence’s role during the first Trump administration was largely ceremonial; he was the inscrutable mute who nodded, smiled, and applauded on cue, but rarely spoke out of turn. Unlike JD Vance, who has carved out a far more visible role in foreign policy and other issues, Pence left office without a signature policy achievement to call his own. He surfed the populist wave all the way to the Number One Observatory Circle and never seemed quite sure what to do once he got there.

This is Pence in a nutshell. He was content to ride on Trump’s coattails, claiming the administration’s successes as his own, until the president turned on him on Jan. 6. Crucially, Pence mistook his elevated status in the White House for evidence that he represented a constituency that was loyal to him, rather than the president. In doing so, he misunderstood the movement itself: MAGA was never a coalition awaiting conservative stewardship, but a personal following organized around Trump alone. Pence’s failed presidential campaign in 2024, lasting fewer than five months, proved as much.

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If there is an heir to Trump, that person will not be a bible-thumping Christian who preaches a return to civility and fiscal conservatism. More likely, it will be a figure who best channels the values Trump claimed to represent: ending foreign wars, draining the swamp, and reviving America’s industrial heartlands. Trump may have failed in some of these promises, but he at least forced a reckoning on them. That his coalition grew, rather than shrunk, over three elections shows he had a far greater sense than Pence — or any Republican for that matter — of where the country was headed.

Pence, by contrast, believes the problems facing 21st-century America can be found in the 20th century, with the “provable” ideas of Ronald Reagan guiding the way. So how would the former vice president address the very modern problems of social atomization, the breakdown of communities, and the infiltration of technology into everyday life? Pence answers these thorny questions with grandfatherly wisdom: “social media often can feel like antisocial media,” “iPhones transform into what I call ‘iFOMOs’ because users suffer from a ‘fear of missing out,’” and the suggestion that the Founding Fathers might have prefaced the Tenth Amendment with “ICYMI.”

These sparkling insights may read more like a church newsletter than a political diagnosis, but they point to a broader truth. The world that produced Reagan — and the Republican consensus he embodied — has long since disappeared, replaced by economic dislocation, cultural fragmentation, and a crisis of institutional trust that Reaganite platitudes are poorly equipped to address. The tragedy of Pence is not merely that he was eclipsed by Trump, but that he still cannot see why Trump emerged in the first place. The world has moved on from Pence and his ideology; only Pence seems determined to remain behind.

The Church is in a desperate state. Covid was an absolute disaster. Being asked to close our churches — and to people in great need — sent a signal that we were not really there for our flocks in their hour of need. I was barred from entering my church to pray, but allowed in to check things for insurance purposes. So much for priorities. Understandably, people left in their droves. And many never came back. While the average weekly attendance in church rose by almost 5% in 2023 to 685,000, the third year of consecutive growth, we are still well below pre-Covid numbers. Might we recover? Perhaps. But it will be a struggle. Will the leadership heed my suggestions?

***

1. Burn down The Machine

Many of the clergy have burnt themselves out trying to arrest the death slide. In October, Dr Liz Graveling, senior researcher for clergy wellbeing at the Church of England, delivered a lecture to the Clergy Support Trust. The figures she outlined are staggering. More than one in five clergy is clinically depressed; one in three is mildly depressed. We are isolated, demoralised, knackered. We feel profoundly unattended to and are worried about our personal finances. As a vicar friend of mine commented with typical understatement: “It’s just not as much fun as it used to be.”

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A big part of the reason for the demoralisation is the fact that, under Welby’s tenure, the Church has reinvented itself as a top-down bureaucracy. Evangelicals, like Welby, have always thought they know how to do evangelism best, because they have a number of large and numerically successful suburban churches. Welby took his big business experience, allied it to his very particular evangelical zeal, and set out to impose it on the rest of us. The churches that subscribed to the Welby formula got central funding, smaller and less evangelical ones didn’t. The problem is: what works in London suburbs doesn’t necessarily translate well to Little Snoring, or indeed inner city Leicester.

Whereas the Church was previously a model of subsidiarity — vicars were little Popes in our own parish, as detractors might say — we are now the little people fronting a burgeoning machine of impenetrable complexity. Work that was once done on the ground is now done in distant committees. Churches used to be like corner shops, all managed locally. We are now in danger of becoming a chain. It is called Vision and Strategy and comes with a whole new grammar of administrative Christianity we are now expected to know by heart.

So much of the local energy — and money — that was once spent on the ground is now taken up responding to the demands of the centre. This is what Welby and his followers call “the work”. And “protecting the work” was the reason for his initial refusal to resign. He knows the next Archbishop may well burn the whole thing down, as well she should.

2. The next Archbishop should be a woman.

Credit where it is due, Justin Welby introduced female bishops as soon as he could. He also nudged forward on gay relationships — telling The Rest is Politics podcast back in October (and I paraphrase) that his own line was now that gay sex within a faithful and committed relationship is not some great moral or spiritual crime, and that same-sex blessings should be permitted in church. But he failed to make any of this church policy. The next Archbishop needs to complete this, and make it clear that the Church does not think gay sex is sinful, indeed that it is every bit a gift from God as straight sex. Conservative evangelicals will leave the Church over this, and so be it. We cannot remain in a twilight zone between condemnation and affirmation: it drains too much energy. We have to decide.

But, arguably even more important, this should be carried out by a female Archbishop of Canterbury. Watching yet another pale, male and stale company man in a purple shirt go on Newsnight to intone the party line is more depressing than I can possibly imagine. These men, their life force drained by time spent in artificially lit offices going through the minutes of the last meeting, have been terrible at communicating the excitement and phenomenal good news of the Gospel. And over the past weeks, they have been excruciatingly inept at dealing with this existential crisis. Many of them will have to go. And we need someone who can relate and be relatable. And also, crucially, someone who is trusted to deal with the safeguarding crisis.

My pick would be Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, currently Bishop of Chelmsford. “I’m not so comfortable with the language of ‘Vision and Strategy’ being deployed in the church,” she confessed to a congregation at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge a few months ago. Too secular in its thinking, too obsessed with growth charts, as if the success of the Church were down to us and not down to God. And way too powerful. In exposing all this before, the Bishop had received what she described a “slap on the wrist from central church” — after which the congregation burst into laughter and applause.

More than this, though, Bishop Guli has a compelling story. Her maiden speech in the House of Lords was described by Patrick Kidd in Politics Home as “a powerful and very personal debut from Chelmsford that had several peers wiping away tears and saying it was the finest they had heard”. Iranian born, Bishop Guli comes from high end Anglican stock: her father was a Bishop of Jerusalem, her grandfather a bishop in Iran. The family was forced to leave Iran after the revolution, after which Bishop Guli’s 24-year-old brother was murdered by Iranian government agents. Someone with this kind of background is unlikely to engage in the kind of cheap moral posturing we see all too often in the Church.

And women, especially mothers, must be more trusted to deal with Safeguarding. In 2004, Francis-Dehqani stepped back from full time church ministry to look after her children. This is not what you do if you are an ambitious cleric on the make. But the deep church establishment really doesn’t want her because of her hostility to “the work”. And they will almost certainly try and block her appointment. Unfortunately for them, there is no one else of the right age on the Bishop’s bench with the gravitas and relatability to do the job.

3. No more swanning around the world

Bishops — and Archbishops in particular — are far too busy. They have an impossible job, with a fire hydrant of problems spraying across their desk. Their capacity to deal with issues is thwarted by their penchant for foreign travel. Only this year, the Archbishop made a 12-day tour to Guatemala and Central America. He had just returned from Zanzibar. Between September last year and May this year, he clocked up 48,000 air miles (while regularly preaching about climate change), including two trips to the Middle East, to New York, to Armenia, to Rome (twice). He has also been to the Congo, to Pakistan, to Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, when the crisis was swirling, he was supposed to have been in Tel Aviv with David Lammy. But the Archbishop does not work for the Foreign Office. He should prioritise the needs of the Church of England. The clue is in the name. Too busy being a global statesman, he had no time to follow up the letters he received from survivors of abuse. This is what brought him down.

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Some will argue that the Archbishop is also the head of the Anglican Communion. This is true. Yet the Communion is a broken fellowship, with many thinking that the Church of England is already too liberal on matters of sex, while a third of the Communion don’t recognise his leadership. It is time, in short, for it to become a looser fellowship of Christians, each allowing the other a greater sense of — and I use the word again deliberately — subsidiarity. This was an idea actually invented by the Church, and one whose merits it has foolishly misplaced.

4. Shrink the Big Tent

Just as the theological diversity of the Anglican Communion cannot be held together by a strong centre (and so needs a weaker one), so too the Church of England has its own diversity problem. Traditionally, one of the best things about the Church of England has been its ability to include people from an astonishingly wide spectrum of theological opinion; from (to caricature just a little) deeply conservative evangelicals who take the Bible literally and warn darkly against sexual sin; to happy-clappy charismatics with their enthusiastic welcomes and unspeakable worship bands; to crypto-Catholics with their smoke and lace; to liberals who do social justice more than God. Broadly, we get along — though there are some exceptions. Liberals and conservative evangelicals really don’t get along, with the Church’s version of the culture wars still raging over sexual politics. This saps so much energy and turns the Church’s attention ever inward, which is a terrible look and contrary to the Gospel. While diversity is generally a good thing, this level of diversity is a problem. The next Archbishop must make it crystal clear that the Church of England welcomes gay people. And if you can’t cope with that, well there are other churches.

5. Lean into the weird

One of the most dispiriting things about the Welby era is the prominence it has given to church being normal, everyday, and relatable. Like a trendy schoolteacher desperate to be liked, the Church has been encouraged to think about its relevance — that achingly dull advice that has replaced the glorious other-worldly mysticism of saints and angels, Cranmer’s crystalline poetry, and Stanford in B flat, with crazy golf in the nave of cathedrals and overhead projectors. Jesus has been transformed from the Lord of Heaven and Earth, and the Judge of All, to my best mate, with all the gravitas of a crisps advert. Next year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, where Jesus was proclaimed by the Western Church as both fully human and fully divine. Christianity is by theological definition a tension between the immanent and the transcendent. In recent decades, the pendulum has swung too much in favour of the immanent — Jesus the social activist, Jesus the friendly listening ear, Jesus the comforting presence. We need to reclaim the difficult mysterious Jesus, the otherness of Jesus, the cosmic Jesus. Christianity needs to get just a little bit more weird and badass. More Caravaggio, less pastel. The Church exists to address the great mysteries of life — death, life, forgiveness, fear, passion, hope. Easy listening versions of these don’t make for a properly serious church.

***

I doubt the Church will consider doing any of this. During Welby’s tenure, the establishment has been captured by soft evangelicals, and the committee that decides the next Archbishop now has greater representation from the Anglican Communion. So Archbishop of Canterbury number 106 will be all too like his predecessor. Whatever the ructions of the Welby resignation, I fear the deck is already loaded in favour of a similar appointment: globalist and evangelical. The only way we will get the sort of person we need — and not another dreary “Vision and Strategy” company man — is for the revolution that unseated Welby to keep going. More resignations need to follow.

This, though, is simply my wish list. What I pray for. But it is not my prediction. That is best put by The Who: “New Boss. Same as the old Boss”.

From this moment emerged a potent modern revolution in evangelical Christianity, led by one of the Summer of Love’s most compelling refugees. Lonnie Frisbee was a gay, Rasputin-like mystic who believed in the transformative power of LSD; he would “party on Saturday night and preach on Sunday morning”. His story is counter to the Hollywood narrative of that summer in San Francisco — but, in its darkness, it is far more in line with reality.

The streets of Haight-Ashbury were certainly filled by girls with daisies in their hair and guys with outsized flares seeking to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” in the words of Timothy Leary, godfather of the hippy movement. But soon enough, the district’s new residents realised that “turning on” to free love gave rise to a widespread culture of rape; “tuning in” saw a spontaneous movement transform into a commercialised spectacle; and “dropping out” found free-spirited flower children sleeping on park benches. As one pamphlet put it, at the time: “Minds & bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.”

Now, a new film has arrived to both illuminate and further obscure the cultural effect of that summer. Jesus Revolution, starring Kelsey Grammer, portrays one of the most important evolutions in modern Christian history: the “Jesus People” movement (also known as the Jesus Movement or Jesus Freaks). Grammer plays Chuck Smith, the buttoned-up pastor of Calvary Chapel, a struggling Pentecostal church in California’s Orange County, who had a chance meeting with the teenage Lonnie Frisbee. A disaffected hippy, Frisbee was hitchhiking down the California coast after spending the Summer of Love tripping on acid and reading the Bible, having converted to Christianity in a San Francisco commune.

Based on the memoir of Greg Laurie — who worshipped under both Frisbee and Smith in the Seventies, and in turn became a prominent evangelical preacher — Jesus Revolution offers Frisbee a far more prominent role in contemporary Christian history than he is usually given. Yet as with other representations of Frisbee’s life, the film also writes him out at a convenient moment, long before his gruesome, lonely death from AIDS in 1993. His sexuality is ignored.

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Frisbee’s legacy is profound, but constantly overlooked — as is the wider movement. Jesus People probably couldn’t have happened at any other time or place than the beaches of Orange County, south of Los Angeles. It was a hotbed of internal migration in the post-war years, as families from the Midwest escaped the farms and factories hollowed out by the Depression. The region’s burgeoning defence industry offered entry into the middle class. Carrying little more than their hopes, faith and conservative values, these new arrivals helped transform the region into the seat of the modern evangelical movement.

These hard-working Americans seem to be at odds with the 19-year-old Frisbee, who attracted young people to Calvary Chapel with devotional music that could have been played on the stages of the future Woodstock. But Smith, according to the film, saw something in him that could bring young people like his daughter back into the fold. They found a new way of doing church, but their union was building on ideas that had started in Pentecostal churches in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, where renegades insisted — in something that was hotly resisted by church leaders of the day — that instead of waiting for the blessings of the Holy Spirit to work their miracles, believers could experience these wonders “on demand”.

Here was a Christianity that could find not only historical justification, but a home in the spirit of the Sixties and its growing consumer culture. Calvary Chapel was a place to feel good as well as feel God — an evangelical version of the Summer of Love. Frisbee’s magnetic appeal was the spark able to bring the masses to the movement. Described by some as a figure akin to the biblical Samson, Frisbee was uniquely blessed with the ability to speak to the moment, but ultimately brought low by temptation. He was, after all, still preaching to a congregation who were evangelical Christians, in both temperament and values; most of them weren’t hippies. His renegade style and personal life were only going to cut it for so long, and he was eventually cast out — of the movement, and the film.

Jesus Revolution moves onto Greg Laurie’s story here, but in real life a far more interesting character stepped up to fill Frisbee’s shoes. John Wimber, a fellow hippy who was in a Sixties rock’n’roll band called the Paramours — which went on to become the Righteous Brothers, of whom he was the manager — was at that time described as a “beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible study”.

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Wimber became a central figure at Vineyard, a church affiliated with Calvary Chapel, where he helped mould the energy of Frisbee and the sensibility of Smith into a more far-reaching and coherent Christian revival movement. Today, they’re known as the Charismatic and Neocharismatic movements, or the second and third waves of Pentecostal Christianity, but labels aren’t that important. What matters is the way in which they spread like wildfire through churches in California, and eventually the world.

Wimber’s “power evangelism” — a term first associated with Frisbee, but now largely credited to his heir — is best described by the former rock’n’roll pioneer’s own formulation of doin’ the stuff. “When I worked for the devil, he let me do his stuff,” Wimber said. “But when I came to work for Jesus, they didn’t want to let me do His stuff. To tell you the truth, I joined up to do the stuff!” The stuff is the direct experience of the signs, wonders and miracles of the Holy Spirit promised in the Bible, such as faith healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues. In the old days, you had to go to your preacher for that. The genius of the former hippies was to change that, satisfying the cultural desire to have direct experience with the stuff. As anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann put it: “If God is present in a literal sense, you no longer need to turn to intermediaries to learn what his wishes are. You can ask him yourself.”

This kind of Christianity spoke to cultural icons of the hippy era, up to and including Bob Dylan, who went to Wimber’s Vineyard bible school in 1978, after the singer felt Jesus as a “physical thing” and began to tremble in his hotel room. “The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up,” he later said. But Dylan was a late adopter to what was by then Wimber’s movement, which was drifting a long way from Frisbee’s ideals. The Jesus People movement, which was now Charismatic Christianity, was beginning to look more McDonald’s than McCartney. The direct descendants of this movement can be found in churches such as Hillsong, the Australian megachurch that has recently seen an almighty fall from grace. Earlier this month, it was accused of failing to report $80 million in profit, while its founder, Brian Houston, was alleged to have spent $150,000 on a luxury family holiday in Cancun, as well as many more thousands on “the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian”. This fully corporatised church would be unrecognisable to even the most disillusioned Haight-Ashbury refugees.

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Frisbee has been written out of not only the Jesus Revolution film, but Wimber’s six published books. A gay party animal, even in 2023, is an unappealing saint for the average believer. In Wimber’s version of the revolution, the person who transformed evangelical Christianity with his New Age power evangelism is only briefly mentioned as “the young man”.

Nevertheless, Frisbee and his Jesus People’s profound effect continues to be felt today. At a time when church attendance is in decline in the United States, those more broadly described as Charismatic attend the most. Theologian Dale M. Coulter recently wrote that the two major features of the Charismatic spiritual tradition are “narrative and journey” — hinting at the way evangelical Christianity has found new relevance since the Sixties. They modernised salvation, created personal relationships (He died for me) and turned the Lord into a mate (Jesus, minus the Christ). Waiting around to be saved by God was no longer a thing, because hippy Jesus became a consumer choice — a massive festival, where you can enter the tent for a guy who looks and sounds just like you. Today, the heirs to Frisbee, Smith and Wimber’s movement are largely doin’ the stuff through a one-click checkout; to survive the capitalist age, evangelism has commercialised.

But there are hints of a spiritual revival. The recent Asbury Revival, which attracted tens of thousands of GenZs to a mass pray-in at Kentucky university, proved that there’s a new generation who are still attracted to this Christian message. Young people are regularly attending services, from Lagos to London and New York City, and they’re joined by modern cultural icons, including Premier League players, rappers, and various Kardashian-Jenners. They hold church in commercial theatres, and attract devoted followers, among them TikTok influencers and hardcore conservatives. All are looking for something they can believe in, and a relationship with God that they can control. Most of these believers won’t even know Lonnie Frisbee’s name, but they certainly feel his legacy. And that is, quite simply, that you can be a Christian in a secular world. You can do the stuff and not have to go without. And as Jesus Revolution shows, a lot of the stuff involves telling a good story that doesn’t entirely reflect historical reality.

Their belief that their imaginations, combined with good vibes, could change another human being’s life channelled Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 self-help classic, The Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living. Peale was a Protestant clergyman, but his ideas have had an influence far beyond the American Church. The book has inspired not only football fans, but also prosperity preachers, presidents, new age spiritualists, celebrities and, now, TikTok influencers. Key religious texts aside, Peale’s guide, which has just celebrated its 70th anniversary, is arguably the most influential book in the world today.

Peale’s philosophy is a direct descendant of the 19th-century New Thought movement, promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other thinkers of his day, which held that a healthy mind led to a healthy body and spirit. His “system of creative living based on spiritual techniques” was an instant success, thanks to his simple formula of prayerise, picturise, actualise. According to Peale, the “spiritual energy” of mind-power is on par with the science of atomic energy, and his simple three-step technique ensures that readers won’t be “defeated by anything”.

Peale knew his audience. Preaching out of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, he spoke to a 4,000-strong congregation filled with successful, business-minded types, including a young Donald Trump, whose tyrannical father Fred lapped up the belief that a winner’s mindset could achieve anything. “It is appalling to realise the number of pathetic people,” Peale writes in prose that sounds jarring today, “who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex.”

Trump became a life-long advocate of the so-called “law of attraction”, which Peale summarises: “When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.” Speaking of his time in Peale’s church in 2015, Trump said that the pastor, who presided over his first marriage, would “bring real-life situations” to his sermons, and that “when you left the church, you were disappointed that it was over”.

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Peale’s preaching may have been exceptional, but it was also representative of a fundamental shift in American theology. Positive Thinking was the final stop on American Protestantism’s journey away from Calvinism, the austere form of Protestantism that promoted the idea that we’re all degenerates and only God can determine who will be saved. As Europe and Asia smouldered, in the Fifties it felt like America’s time had come; there was no appetite for negativity, even in church. A new band of evangelical leaders began taking a greater role in mainstream American life, equally encouraged by the spirit of the times and fearing the spread of communism to their shores.

The Pentecostal movement, a branch of evangelicalism that was particularly strong among the working classes in the South and Midwest, had already experienced a theological revolution with the Latter Rain movement in 1946. Instead of tarrying, or waiting for the blessings of the Holy Spirit to fall upon them, they decided that they could receive God’s gifts on demand. “Ask and ye shall receive” was a mantra that encouraged a wave of faith healing — a practice that has an awful lot in common with manifesting.

More radical shifts were to come. In the Fifties, preachers such as Oral Roberts began to popularise the prosperity gospel: the idea that God rewards you for giving money to your church and pastor. In “seeding” these donations, followers plant an act of faith that then grows a material harvest.

This idea thrived in large part thanks to the highly respectable Peale presenting them in a wholesome package. Kate Bowler, author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, calls Peale the “principal prophet of this generation” — one who transformed “abstract theology into workable wisdom”. With a syndicated newspaper column that attracted 10 million readers, and radio and television programmes that stayed on-air for decades, his message was broadcast across the nation. The Power of Positive Thinking stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for three record-breaking years, selling a million copies.

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Bowler believes that Peale’s “synthesis of upward mobility with religious buoyancy matched the postwar mood, turning a man into a movement”. An energetic new generation of evangelists, such as Kenneth Hagin and Reverend Ike, heard the call. They, too, used new media such as syndicated radio to take this relatable, optimistic form of Christianity to the masses.

According to prosperity preachers, God cared about the size of your pay packet at the end of the week. Christ was actually wealthy, they claimed. A donkey was the equivalent of a Cadillac back then; Baby Jesus was famously bestowed with gifts; His guards at the crucifixion were a sign if his high status.

While only the boldest evangelists in America, such as Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, continue with this line of preaching today, the prosperity gospel has real currency elsewhere. Neocharismatic Pentecostalism’s rapid expansion in Asia, Africa and Latin America is thanks in large part to the promises it makes, of health and wealth. In the slums of Sao Paulo and Lagos, the idea of one day reaping the rewards of giving a little money and having a lot of faith is the only opportunity to succeed that most people can imagine.

And, just as there are some health benefits to seeing the glass half full, there’s a growing body of evidence that adherence to the prosperity gospel sees an uplift in people’s circumstances. Research in Latin America has found that people who have experienced poverty, violence and addiction have a greater chance of escaping those cycles by joining an evangelical church. In Brazil, researchers found that when the GDP goes down, attendance at evangelical churches increases, and that the support networks available at those churches further support a politics that says people should seek a hand up, and not a hand out.

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Of course, this phenomenon is far from limited to the faithful poor. In the United States alone, the self-help industry rakes in around $10 billion annually, with Peale’s work something of a Rosetta Stone for a field that relies on good vibes. But it was Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne who reintroduced The Power of Positive Thinking to a new, global audience in 2006 with her film and book, The Secret. Though Byrne claimed inspiration from Wallace Wattles’s 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich, “the secret”, we find out, is a familiar three-step solution: “ask, believe, receive”. A sexier version of Peale’s prayerise, picturise, actualise, in other words, and more than an echo of Matthew 21:22: “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”

The secret also employed Trump’s favoured “law of attraction”, whereby positive thoughts attract positive things — in Byrne’s case, that included selling more than 35 million copies worldwide, endorsements by Oprah Winfrey, and a reported $300 million fortune. She also has the honour of being the person who introduced the concept of “manifesting” thoughts into things to a mainstream audience. In one chapter on the body, Byrne writes that “it is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight”.

Whereas most of Peale’s case studies were about people gaining confidence and finding success in life, Byrnes’ focus appears to be much more centred on realising material goods, like better cars and houses, or more money — reframing self-help for a new audience who had come increasingly to define themselves as consumers. Now, you didn’t even need biblical justification, or New Thought virtues. You could simply “ask, believe, receive”.

A toddler can prod the premise with a stick and see it fall apart. What if everyone who buys a lotto ticket imagines themselves winning it and says a prayer? Has no one who has died from cancer ever sincerely wished it away? But Byrne, who says that “the secret” has been understood by everyone from Buddhist monks to Shakespeare and Einstein, was, much like Peale, the right person at the right moment.

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A “spiritual but not religious” type in a secularising world, her suspicion that elites were hiding this great truth from ordinary people appeared to be prophetic. Byrne came to prominence shortly before the 2008 financial collapse, which destroyed Americans’ faith in something that had been a fundamental: the idea of an ever-growing housing market. Many turned to Byrne’s renegade optimism as a result.

It should come as little surprise, then, that the next great global shock saw a resurgence in “manifesting”. In March 2020, as the pandemic locked most of us in our homes, videos about “369 manifesting” began appearing on TikTok, amassing hundreds of millions of views. The idea here is that people need simply write down what they’d like to manifest three times in the morning, six times during the day, and nine times at night. Pop star Lizzo is one of many celebrities who preaches the benefits of thinking your way to success; she told one interviewer that “you can manifest your life and speak things into existence, if you have positive goals and affirmations for yourself”.

TikTok manifesting has launched a variety of new techniques, including “wouldn’t it be nice” and ”the law of assumption”, which provide new ways to ruminate on getting what you want. The practice appears equally popular with men and women alike, with not only Lizzo but also hopeful Liverpool fans and manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate getting on board. For young people who feel cheated out of two important years of their lives, and conventional job and housing opportunities looking evermore slim, the resurgence in positive thinking is easy to understand. Having the right mindset might be the only thing they feel they have control over.

And crucially, the practice is flexible. You can call it positive thinking, the secret, or manifesting. It can be spiritual or religious, or dressed up as pop psychology. A variety of activities can fall into its remit, including journalling and vision boarding, and there is a wealth of new manifestation practitioners offering podcasts, coaching and online courses — almost always cutely priced at numbers like $2,222, given that manifesting and numerology seem to go hand-in-hand.

That manifesting has taken a turn for the capitalist is telling. The enduring influence of The Power of Positive Thinking points to an essential human trait: we seem hard-wired for magical thinking. But it also reveals something far grimmer. The closest that we can come now to divining the will of God, or the energy of the universe, is by noticing who gets what they want. And the closest we come to practising devotion is to imagine getting it.

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During that span, Billy’s interventions in politics were purposely few (although he did openly support Richard Nixon over Roman Catholic John Kennedy). Above all, his priority was to remain neutral, so as to alienate none and reach many. His biographer Grant Wacker described him as the “Great Legitimator”, noting that Billy’s mere “presence conferred status on presidents, acceptability on wars, shame on racial prejudice, desirability on decency, dishonour on indecency”.

Billy died, at the age of 99, in February 2018, but he lived long enough to see his good work vanish. His ministry, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), is now ruled by his Trump-supporting, loud-mouthed, rabidly partisan son, Franklin Graham, whose name is synonymous with controversy in the United States — and, more recently, in the UK. The difference between these two men reflects how American evangelical Christianity has, like American politics, evolved — becoming more fractured and polarised.

Billy was the product of the consensus-building Fifties, when church attendance in the United States was actually rising and the battle for souls and donations, like the struggle against international Communism, was waged across party lines. An heir to the rambunctious, revivalist free-market tradition in American religion (the country has never had an established church, and the last state to financially support the Episcopalian church ceased funding it in 1833), Graham followed the example of the great 19^th century evangelists, Charles Grandison Finney and Dwight Moody. Both leapt on the technologies of their time — handbills and large outdoor revivals — to draw large followings; Billy had radio and television at his disposal.

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Franklin, by contrast, is a child of the late Seventies, when church attendance had begun to dip, and evangelicals became more radical. Young ministers such as Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell and televangelist Oral Roberts had begun to organise fierce opposition to the 1973 Supreme Court decision that women had a fundamental right to choose. It was opposition that increasingly aligned them — and their small but politically active congregations — with the interests of the Republican Party.

It’s not that Billy was uncontroversial. But his most talked-about interventions were always for the sake of unity, rather than division. Although a moderate in most respects, Billy, a native of largely conservative North Carolina, made waves during the late Fifties for welcoming black and white people alike to his revival events, at a time when many public venues in the American South were legally segregated. He also encouraged mainstream Protestants — Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians — to remain within their churches even after they absorbed his message of “accepting Jesus Christ as your personal saviour”. Knowing that curious “inquirers” would return to their churches with renewed enthusiasm, the leaders of these denominations were always happy to partner with Graham’s “crusade counsellors”, to promote his events and boost his attendance figures. Graham wanted to reach listeners, not sow discord within American Protestantism.

Most tellingly of all, Billy refused to join with ultra-conservative religious figures such as Falwell. He had no wish to tie BGEA to the culture wars of the Religious Right. If he ever lapsed into expressing the kind of social conservatism that the Christian Broadcasting Network might champion, he hurriedly recanted. After commenting in 1993 at a religious event in Ohio that AIDS might be a “judgment of God”, Billy retracted his words, stating a few days later that “to say God has judged people with AIDS would be very wrong and very cruel”. One of the myths about tolerance in America, tied to the myth of moral progress so popular here, is that the past is always benighted and bigoted compared to today. The story of evangelicalism in the United States, which played a key part in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century and women’s suffrage in the early 20th, proves otherwise. Billy Graham, in fact, represents the high-water mark for evangelical tolerance. His intolerant son has made sure of it.

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Unlike Billy, who graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois — considered the “Harvard of American evangelicalism” — and proceeded almost immediately into a star-studded career in preaching, Franklin took a more circuitous path to success. He dropped out of a Christian private school, and was later expelled from a small Christian college for staying out past curfew with a female classmate. After he finally graduated, instead of immediately working for BGEA, he became the president of Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian aid organisation. There, he came into his own as a prolific fundraiser.

A morally unimpeachable, thoughtful theologian he was not. But Franklin was representative of a new kind of Christian leader: the born-again crusader who could galvanise his own flock without building bridges outside of it. The parallels with politics are uncanny: where once Democrats and Republicans had fought for the voters in the centre, the stars of both parties have become more ideological and less accommodating since the turn of the millennium. Elections have increasingly favoured hardliners and zealots over bipartisan cooperators.

When, in 2000, Franklin was finally appointed CEO of BGEA, he wasted little time moving the organisation in a direction more consistent with the work of his contemporaries on the Religious Right. Billy Graham could win souls by the millions, but he could not secure Congressional votes by the dozens; younger evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed could, thanks to their hand-in-glove relationship with the Republican Party. As political science professor John Hicks wrote in 1996, this was a strategic decision with profound consequences: it gave evangelicals access to a network of support to influence elections and public policy decisions.

Franklin, however, thrived by continually provoking clickbait headlines. Following the 9/11 attacks, he declared that Islam was “a very evil and wicked religion”, and supported the resulting war in Iraq. Where his father might have recanted, Franklin doubled down in the face of criticism from more mainstream religious leaders, who pressured the Army into disinviting him from its National Day of Prayer at the Pentagon in 2010. “True Islam can’t be practiced [in the United States],” he told CNN in 2009, “because you can’t beat your wife or murder your children.” When asked by CNN in 2010 about Barack Obama’s religious background, he replied that “the president’s problem is that he was a born a Muslim”.

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In a 2005 interview about his son’s provocative comments, Billy made it clear that he didn’t approve: “Let’s say, I didn’t say it.” But he didn’t face the same challenges as his son. It is growing secularism that explains Franklin Graham’s shift away from his father’s nonpartisan approach. Like any actor in the marketplace of ideas, Franklin is keenly aware that his market, unlike his father’s, is shrinking. The religiously unaffiliated, or the “unchurched”, now account for a quarter of all Americans — a trend noted in Robert Putnam’s seminal work Bowling Alone, and which has only intensified in the past half-decade. Nowadays, 27% of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, and another 18% as “neither religious nor spiritual”. Aware of the partisan nature of his support and increasingly unable to grow the size of his flock, Franklin needed to motivate those who remained to donate, advocate, and vote on his behalf.

And so, he leaned into his divisiveness. In 2014, he — like Pat Buchanan, Rod Dreher, and a number of other American conservative leaders — praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for passing tough anti-gay legislation. More recently, he publicly chastised openly gay Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg during his 2020 presidential campaign. The same year, despite growing racial diversity among American evangelical Christians, he denounced Black Lives Matter and posted on Facebook that police shootings could be avoided through “respect for obedience and authority”. His followers, who back most of the same policies he does to a greater or lesser degree, recognise that Franklin speaks for them. If anyone doesn’t, Franklin told The Atlantic in 2017, they can “talk to God about it”.

His rhetoric, and appeal, is Trumpian. So it’s hardly surprising that Franklin explains in the same interview why he chose to hitch BGEA’s fortunes to those of Trump: “He did everything wrong… and he became president of the United States.” There’s “no question,” for Franklin, that God must therefore have been supporting Trump, a much-needed “Christian voice in office”. Throughout the ex-President’s two campaigns for office, Franklin included a few minutes of political material in each of his sermons, often opening by discussing how abortion is murder, how same-sex marriage is a sin, and, most importantly, how the increase in secularism will result in godless Communism.

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Recent research has found that the increasing percentage of Americans who identify as atheist or agnostic do indeed have a clear political affiliation: they make up 20.6% of Democrats, up from 11.8% in 2008. (In Republican ranks they constitute a mere 4% now, up slightly from 3.3% in 2008.) Not only that, but these atheists and agnostics are more likely than evangelicals to donate to political campaigns, attend political meetings, put up political signs, and attend political protests. Billy Graham devoted his entire career to pulling such people back into the fold. Franklin, by contrast, has focused on maximising the value of the devout audience he has left — even as Republican politicians focus on preaching to the converted rather than reaching across the aisle.

On Saturday, Franklin tweeted: “I loved this country, and I cannot vote for candidates or the party that supports abortion, defunding our police, or open borders.” In today’s midterms, many “too-close-to-call-elections” could turn on votes from either the Religious Right, who would agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment, or the growing minority of unchurched, who are likely to be disgusted by it. The irreconcilability of these two groups warns of further polarisation downstream. But some thinkers, such as Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, have argued that religion could again have a unifying role in the future of the American polity. It would take a great unifier like Billy Graham, not a sectarian divider, to achieve such a lofty goal. For now, American Protestantism, once considered the ecumenical moral bedrock of the nation, is diminished and enmeshed in party politics — and the America bound together by “common things”, for which Billy Graham so earnestly preached, remains an unrealisable fantasy.

Peters is one of a growing number of “MAGA-preachers” who use the pulpit to deliver hellfire warnings about the state of the nation. A rising star in the amped-up evangelical world, the founder of the Patriot Church became infamous as one of the preachers who addressed angry protesters in Washington D.C. on January 5, 2021. Convinced that President Trump had the election stolen from him — from them — these protesters would go on the next day to storm the Capitol.

The January 6 committee has already heard that the attack was the “culmination of an attempted coup”. While the congressional hearings are covering a lot we already knew — President Trump became detached from the reality of his election loss and surrounded himself with yes men; his key adviser Rudy Giuliani was hammered on election night — they have featured harrowing new testimony from people at the riot about the level of organisation and violence on display.

One police officer attacked by the rioters told the committee that the building was a “war zone” and said that she was “slipping in people’s blood”. Footage and testimony from a filmmaker on the scene said he saw hundreds of far-Right Proud Boys walking away from President Trump’s speech towards the Capitol, with the committee inferring that they may have been scoping out security weaknesses for an organised attack. This would imply that January 6 was not the result of the spontaneous actions of lone wolves — nor a false flag operation — as Trump supporters would have us believe.

On the surface, the storming of the Capitol might show how a man nakedly obsessed with winning chose to incite his febrile supporter base and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. But on closer inspection, the events of that day tell the story of the troubling rise of Christian Nationalism that is gaining pace in the United States.

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Christian Nationalism is the idea that America is defined by Christianity. This idea has been around as long as America itself, but until the mid-20th century, many evangelicals saw themselves as being above, or at least separate to, mainstream society. The desire to penetrate politics has steadily picked up pace since the Fifties, with the dial being firmly turned in the Reagan-era and again since the 2008 financial crisis and election of Barack Obama.

Proponents of this ideology — the 29% of Americans who believe that “the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” — aren’t seeking a Taliban-style theocracy. Rather, they propose using traditionally American means, from their own stockpiles of arms to a rigged Supreme Court, to impose a muscular set of values on Americans that are equally informed by culture and faith.

Needless to say, the God of Christian Nationalists is not Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, but a gun-toting, gas-guzzling, straight, white, native-born kinda guy. He looks and sounds a lot like the people who stormed the Capitol. Researcher and journalist Teddy Wilson mapped more than 850 individuals who took part in the Capitol riot, along with their stated motivations and affiliations. He found that: “Christian Nationalism, more than any other ideological beliefs, has played the most significant role both in the motivations of the defendants, the performance of the attack, and the attempt by the Right to rewrite the history of January 6th.”

Advocates don’t tend to use the term themselves, preferring words such as patriot and MAGA, but spotting their beliefs in action isn’t difficult. Uniting the adherents from the rural South to New York City, they target causes perceived to be liberal or progressive — and are employing increasingly violent ends in opposition to them.

Ken Peters is currently being sued by Planned Parenthood for holding services outside abortion clinics, with the one in Knoxville being shot up weeks after the church’s inaugural service on the 48th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision (Peters denies inciting the shooting and no one has been charged). Pastor Greg Locke, who joined Peters in preaching to thousands of would-be insurrectionists the night before the Capitol riots, delights his 2.2 million Facebook followers by conducting mass burnings of “demonic” Harry Potter books.

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The movement isn’t only being organised in traditional churches. True believers are being radicalised by extreme online preachers, and mobilising to take over school boards. Meanwhile, self-described “Christian Fascists” and patriot groups have tried to storm gay events across the country for Pride month. Preachers such as Peters and Locke are enjoying their newfound status as patriotic heroes, but their ideology is expanding their following beyond the pews and into partisan politics, fusing faith and the Republican Party in a way that makes the George W. Bush era look comparatively secular.

While the Christian Nationalist movement to date has been characterised by marches with tiki-torches and Viking hats to try to overturn the election, this is far from a fringe carnival for cranks and loners. For starters, many who participated in the Capitol riots weren’t cabin-dwellers or wannabe TikTok stars. They were self-styled prophets, tech CEOs and real estate agents who chartered private jets to the event.

They are very much the face of the modern Republican Party. Nearly half of today’s Republicans consider themselves born-again, a figure up from 37% in 1988. Yet between 2008 and 2019, the number of self-described evangelicals who attend church each week has decreased from 59% to 52%. In the same period, those who never or seldom attend church has grown 50% to almost one quarter of evangelicals. These changes are being mirrored by those they call “Godless Democrats”. In 1972, just 5% of Americans said that they had no religion, but in 2018, that number rose to 23.7%.

Being an evangelical has shifted from a practice of deeply-held beliefs to a political identity that is riding vibes. As political scientist Dr David Smith puts it, “the average evangelical is Homer Simpson, not Ned Flanders”. One way of looking at this phenomenon is that as America becomes more secular, its evangelicals are becoming more committed. Fuelled by conspiracy and feeling besieged by what they perceive as a liberal world closing in on them, America’s political Right and religious Right are morphing into one. Even those who we might call “cultural Christians” are embracing Christian Nationalist ideas — the kind of self-described evangelicals who don’t go to church but are happy to use biblical justification to crush their opponents.

That’s because they know that they have lost the democratic battle and the demographic battle. Republican power in the United States is largely gained through archaic, unrepresentative institutions such as the Electoral College and Senate, political appointments to the courts, and the gerrymandering of electorates. In a fair, democratic system, they aren’t winning, and would be forced to moderate their ideas to appeal to a wider slice of the electorate.

Not only is Christian Nationalism changing politics, it’s changing theology too. Three doctrines have become popular among the radical Right in recent years, shaped to appeal to people coming to Christian Nationalism from all angles.

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Joel’s Army merges religion, conspiracy, and patriotism, appealing to angry young men with the idea that their mission to rule over their countrymen is preordained. The Seven Mountain Mandate encourages believers to reclaim the seven spheres of influence on earth — including government, entertainment, and education — ahead of the End Times. For those invested in QAnon and other conspiracy movements, Spiritual Warfare holds that demons and evil spirits are present and intervening in our daily lives. Here, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden or the LGBT community don’t simply have policies you oppose — they are possessed with spirits; they are evil personified.

The theological shift is reshaping the Christian narrative from offering justice and salvation to one of conquest. In turn, this incendiary language is being picked up and amplified by Fox News hosts and Republican Party candidates — its God-given “mandate” helping to suppress doubt, and to inspire violence and fanaticism.

The changing nature of how faith is consumed is contributing to the rot, too. In the past, a small-town preacher might see congregations voting with their feet and wallets to leave hate-filled political sermons. But the ability to stream church services online — and the social media incentives to be polarising — has put an end to the idea of churches as throwing open the doors to all comers. Last weekend, Ken Peters boasted that the Patriot Church was expanding its house church network for people who can’t find “churches like ours” and don’t want to be a part of “woke church”. Like-minded folks gathered around YouTube in their living rooms will help spread the Patriot Church like “brushfires”.

Of course, divine rule looks a lot like power in the here and now. Beyond the outcome of the January 6 hearings, it is clear that Christian Nationalism is morphing into the unifying ideology of the right of the Republican Party, with or without Trump. As Ken Peters himself openly put it in his weekend sermon: the state can’t interfere with them, but they can interfere with the state. This might be placing Christian Nationalists in a minority in the United States, but they don’t care. They no longer believe that the ballot box is the source of power and authority.

A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat, I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future — one that was capable of inspiring people from all walks of life. Indeed, it seemed that ever since the 1980s, American liberals had gotten out of the vision business altogether. They redirected their energies from party politics to movement politics, focusing attention in particular on minority and gender identity movements.

While that shift was morally comprehensible, it made it harder for liberals to speak of the common good across group lines. It also ingrained the habit of forgetting large constituencies that did not fit into the liberal-Left identity narrative, such as working-class whites and evangelicals — the latter group making up about a quarter of the adult population. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. Otherwise you give your opponent the opportunity to, as Donald Trump did with great success.

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This movement politics mindset proved to be electorally suicidal. From the 1980s on we witnessed a massive transfer of political power, in large sections of the country, from the Democrats to an increasingly radical Republican Party. The most perverse consequence was that as Democrats ceded ever more geographical ground to Republicans, particularly in state and local governments, they lost the ability to protect the very identity groups they professed to care about — in particular, their right to vote. More than half of all African Americans, for instance, live in the deep red South.

Yet Democrats resisted the obvious lessons to be drawn from these developments: that you cannot help anyone if you do not hold institutional power. And you cannot acquire that power without a vision that transcends group attachments, without denying them.

Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them. Now that hopes of a Democratic landslide have been dashed and defeat is within the realm of possibility, the question remains as to whether they have drawn the right lessons from their electoral performance. The signs are decidedly mixed.

The good news is that Democratic politicians, party functionaries, and most importantly donors focused their energies on addressing the common good and capturing the political centre. They had seen that in the 2018 midterm elections the seats the party gained were mainly won by centrist candidates who focused on building a suburban base, particularly among white women.

They also realised that while minority groups make up an important part of the base, many of their members are culturally conservative. African-Americans, particularly older ones, are more likely to have reservations about the LGBT movement. A significant portion of Latinos oppose abortion due to their Catholic faith and have more conventional views about marriage and gender roles.

That seems to have registered, because in the recent election Democratic candidates generally avoided cultural and identity themes (apart from police reform), despite the efforts of Republicans and Fox News to provoke them into it. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran a rather old-fashioned campaign based on policy, competence, and basic decency, and pointedly did not portray the Democratic Party as a “rainbow coalition” of distinct groups. This bodes well for the future.

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By Gavin Haynes

The bad news is that the cultural Left is even more focused on identity than it was in 2016. In part, this is due to the Trump experience. What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda. It is tempting to want to fight fire with fire.

But over the last summer, other events revealed just how large the gap has grown between the ambition and tactics of political Democrats and those of the cultural Left. Here I am thinking of elites whose power base is in universities, the media, Hollywood, the publishing and advertising industries, the art world, and philanthropic institutions. It also includes young activists whose notion of political engagement is identity-based, confrontational, and social-media driven.

This cultural Left has been behind the so-called “Great Awokening” on race of the past five years or so. I speak here not of economic and social policies intended to improve the condition of African-Americans, which is a historical duty. Nor of legal protections for gay, lesbian, and trans people. I refer to the focus on symbols and gestures meant to display one’s conformity with enlightened opinion on such matters.

Consider the aftermath to the impressive early demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in May. There were massive, peaceful gatherings in cities and small towns across America (and the world). But very quickly the situation degenerated into conflicts over symbols. Countless cultural institutions felt compelled to make statements about racial justice, and some of their directors resigned after making acts of contrition.

Many businesses followed suit and announced requirements that employees attend “anti-racist” training sessions, run by highly-paid, self-declared “consultants”. Twitter mobs descended on people thought to hold impure views. Editors were fired for running controversial pieces, while a researcher was fired for circulating an academic study on racial attitudes. What began as a summer of civic solidarity ended with squabbles about “cancel culture” that contributed nothing to improving life for non-elite African Americans.

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A major force behind this wrong turn was the liberal media, which has fallen into bad habits during the Trump presidency. Feeling that they had not been hard enough on Trump in the 2016 election, reporters got used to calling out “lies,” of which there were plenty. But the distinction between demonstrable lies and differences of opinion has gotten lost in the process. The standard of journalistic impartiality is being jettisoned in the name of an undefined “moral clarity.”

Central to these efforts has been editorial pressure on reporters to emphasise the racial dimension to stories and to play an active role in rewriting the national narrative. For example, in 2019 the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project” to mark the date when African slaves first arrived in the United States. What began as a thought-provoking idea soon became a tendentious effort to make the crime of slavery the true founding of the republic. Historians complained about inaccuracies and the Times silently corrected them, while still standing behind the project’s editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize. Young reporters were left with the impression that such efforts will still help them to advance their careers.

While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas, it would be a mistake for Democratic leaders to pretend any longer that they don’t exist. Right-wing media will keep the culture war over symbols before the public eye, which can only help the Republican Party. That means that the Democratic politicians must explicitly distance themselves from ideological “anti-racist” rhetoric and political theatre, such as efforts to tear down statues of American presidents. And they must resist efforts to distort American history in our schools.

Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past. They also believe in fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion. They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way. No matter what the final results of this year’s elections, they desperately need to do some housecleaning if they hope ever to build a durable Democratic majority in our lifetimes.

It was founded in 2013 by a couple of comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, and achieved much initial success with large congregations and an international programme of ‘church planting’. At a time when religious belief is declining — at least in the West — this movement was widely hailed as a way of organising goodness and wonder at a local level, bringing people together for support and edification. “Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More”, was their mission statement.

A number of traditional religious believers were overtly hostile to the project when it was set up, thinking it ludicrous and inherently confused to ape religious practise whilst decrying religious belief. I was not one of those.

Yes, I thought it a little hubristic to assume that it should be a piece of cake to get people together for church-style assemblies, once the remnant of archaic belief had been exorcised. But the basic idea was so clearly well intentioned, it felt churlish to act all superior and sneer at this deep rooted desire to come together to celebrate the best in life. Two cheers for the Sunday Assembly, I thought. I might even pop along one day.

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So, no, I won’t rub my hands together and take pleasure at a report in The Atlantic which suggests that the movement is struggling – attendance is down; centres are closing. But I would like to offer some friendly advice, albeit from the perspective of a traditional Christian believer. After all, we have been doing this kind of thing for a very long time — my church has survived at the Elephant and Castle for 800 years — and we have picked up a thing or two along the way.

Several reasons have been suggested as to why the Sunday Assemblies have struggled. First, because many congregations were split between those who wanted to experience something of the charism of religious worship, just without the God bit, and those who wanted the Assembly to be a rallying point for a campaigning hostility to religious belief. I’m not sure that this is a fatal weakness – all churches need a big tent element, and will need to manage internal disagreements.

Second, though perhaps not unrelated, is that those who came together just didn’t have enough in common to sustain a shared experience. In traditional places of worship, religious belief — and in particular its traditions and Biblical narratives — serve as a common point of reference for an otherwise extremely diverse crowd. It is hard to see how something as nebulous as ‘celebrating life’ can function as a uniting force for what should be an otherwise unrelated crowd.

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This may be the reason that Sunday Assemblies do not feel very diverse in terms of class or ethnicity. In the absence of a shared point of religious reference, social sameness can easily become the focus for community instead of belief. And taking a look at the images used on their web sites, Sunday Assemblies do have the feel of a Boden catalogue convention, with smiley, well-to-do, middle-class people celebrating their own niceness.

And it is actually this niceness that takes us closer to the root of the trouble. It’s all very well celebrating the best of the world. But what about the worst. The real challenge for a God-less church is how it deals with the problem of evil. On one level, of course, they can do this just as easily as traditional churches. When something terrible occurs in the world, the Assemblies can of course analyse its causes, commit to making the world a better place, and take a collection to relieve the suffering of those affected.

But there’s another sort of evil: the darkness within. How do they address that? My acid test, then, for a godless church is this: how would they tackle the funeral of a paedophile? Or: what do they say at the eulogy for a racist?

In church we can say: “Lord, have mercy” and “Father, forgive”. But what is the atheistic equivalent? At the heart of the godless funeral – longer established than the Sunday Assemblies – there is commonly a celebration of the good qualities of the deceased: what they achieved, how much they were loved and admired and so on. But what if that person were an out-and-out rotter, someone about whom very little good could be said? What then?

Suggested reading

Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Here lies the problem at the heart of the godless movement. Belief is not really about being good and celebrating life and wonder. More importantly, it is about being saved. That is, it is a way of addressing some inherent brokenness about human beings, a brokenness that we are unable to fix by ourselves. The traditionally Christian way of describing all this is original sin – a term that has been overly associated with sex, but is better understood as a meditation on human failure and inadequacy.

The nearest thing a ‘secular’ organisation gets to this — and thus, I suspect, the most promising model for a semi-godless church — is Alcoholics Anonymous. In these meetings, no one is there to celebrate their niceness. Participants are broken and openly so. They have failed and messed up their lives.

People come from all walks of life and from all communities. What binds them together is their failure not their success. And the first thing they need to acknowledge is that they do not have the power to solve their problems by themselves (original sin). Some higher power is invoked to help them (be saved). Without this element — without some deeper acknowledgement of that sweaty panicky sense of failure that steals upon us in the dead of night — all churches, religious or non-religious, are undermined by lies and kitsch.

So my friendly advice to Sunday Assemblies goes something like this. Don’t worry too much about declining numbers. Don’t think of what you are doing as a form of showbiz or entertainment. The best churches, the ones that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, often have small congregations. And the worst, self-congratulatory churches often have big ones.

When numbers decline, a church is inevitably thrown back upon reflection of what they exist for – is it more than razzmatazz? Failure is often a much more intellectually energising experience than success. It forces you to ask what you really believe in, what you exist for. And there, I suppose, is the rub.

Other than as a glorified dating agency for lonely middle class metropolitans, no one really needs happy-clappy atheism. Because if you cannot accommodate failure – your own or that of your congregants – then you don’t have enough to exist for. And you deserve to perish.

So what was he to do with the family of four in the back of his cab? He had just brought them from Heathrow, he said. And they didn’t speak any English. Weary faces looked out of the back window, including those of a young boy and an even younger girl. These people had nowhere else to go. I said I would try and sort something out. As they got out of the taxi, I noticed that the mother was holding onto a small pendant containing the unmistakable, bespectacled image of Oscar Romeo. They were from El Salvador.

Oscar Romero was assassinated in March 1980, shot by a single bullet through the heart as he celebrated mass in the hospital chapel. To be murdered thus, in the course of celebrating the Eucharist, feels to this priest like the ultimate sacrifice – a reminder that the offering of the wine is also the offering of blood outpoured.

It was only last year, after much official consternation, that he was canonised. When Pope Frances conducted the ceremony he wore the very same cincture (a sort of liturgical girdle) that Romero was wearing on the day he died. It was still stained with Romero’s blood. For the people of El Salvador, it is the blood of a martyr.

Further reading

America 2025: a nation violently divided

By Michael Warren

Romero became the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977, a few years before the military dictatorship took power. The coup sparked 12 years of civil war between the military Junta and various groups of Left-wing, some Marxist, insurgents.

Paranoid about the threat of Communism on their southern doorstep, the United States under Presidents Carter and Regan ploughed millions of dollars into El Salvador, supporting the military Junta, and its brutal suppression of leftist opposition. It was under the ‘very religious’ President Carter that the US funded the Junta that, in turn, funded the death-squads that carried out the assassination of Archbishop Romero.

Romero was a conservative, with strong links to Opus Dei. The Vatican hoped he would respect the difference between religion and politics. But, as the violence escalated, and as the Salvadorian security forces began disappearing those who questioned their authority, Romero started to challenge the brutality of the oppression.

On the day before he was killed, he used his regular slot on the radio to call for the army to disobey their orders: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”

The week following his assassination, 250,000 mourners gathered at Romero’s funeral. The army placed sharp shooters on the rooftops overlooking the funeral procession. There were 42 people were shot that day, and over 200 were wounded. Things got worse. According to a UN Truth Commission, more than 75,000 people were tortured, unlawfully killed and forcibly disappeared during the internal armed conflict in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992.

Further reading

What if Trump played nice with the Democrats?

By Henry Olsen

No one was ever charged with Romero’s murder. Even the Vatican distanced itself from an archbishop they suspected of being too influenced by ‘liberation theology’ – a doctrine that blended Marx and Moses, and one that was an anathema to the viscerally anti-Communist Pope John Paul II.

From Washington to the Vatican, Romero the martyr was something of an embarrassment, and so he was carefully re-branded as something akin to a terrorist sympathiser. Even the Salvadorian church, brutalised by the Junta, with priests and nuns raped and murdered, fell into line. Throughout the civil war, journalists who asked too many questions were often intimidated into silence. And in 1993, after the war had come to an end, the Slavadorian authorities passed an Amnesty law, preventing any investigation of the atrocities that went on during the conflict.

Outside of the more conservative quarters of the Roman church, however, Romero was being held up as a hero of the faith. In 1979, the Queen unveiled 10 new limestone statues of Modern Martyrs over the main front door of Westminster Abbey; among them were Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Fr Oscar Romero.

In El Salvador itself, it was ordinary church people that kept the memory of Romero alive. He was a saint to them long before the present Pope – who had himself ministered under a military dictatorship in South America – resurrected his reputation.

The children of the family that got out of the taxi on my doorstep were too young to remember any of this. But they live in its shadow nonetheless. During the Seventies and Eighties thousands of Salvadorian refugees made their way to the United States, seeking safety.

Further reading

Why we should welcome the populist victory in Mexico

By Charlotte Pickles

Many of them gathered in the poorer parts of Los Angeles, the city of angels. Here a number of them came into contact with gang culture and adopted its ways. Here the notorious MS 13 and 18^th Street gangs were born, famous for their face tattoos and extreme violence, many of whom were deported back to El Salvador.

Returning to a country in which civil society had broken down which was awash with guns left over from the war, the gangs flourished. Oblivious to the fact that the US helped create the conditions that had so brutalised El Salvador, Donald Trump has described these people as “animals”. They feature prominently in his justification for the building of a wall on the Mexican border.

But the history of a nation isn’t just one story. It is the accumulation of many little family tragedies. And my new friends, standing alone with a few bags in a strange car park in south London, were one such story.

The Home Office helpline for refugees was closed for the weekend. First we went up to the Columbian restaurant at the Elephant and Castle for food. I found them some bedding and contacted a priest at the nearby Anglican church that has a Spanish speaking mass so he could come and interpret.

Slowly, the local church community rallied round. A collection was taken. The twitter community donated money. I bought them warm clothes. A family took them in for food. They joined us for Sunday mass. On Monday morning – credit where it is due – the Home Office agreed to give them temporary shelter while their asylum application was being processed.

This story had a successful outcome; if not, as yet, a finally happy ending. But many don’t. The Asylum Seekers Day Centre  receives many whose experiences – from Iraq and Syria, from Somalia and Eretria – tell of large scale political upheaval and of individual personal tragedy. And while our political leaders do not always distinguish themselves in response to the helplessness and pain of asylum seekers, it is worth noting that many ordinary people do – both church people and non-church people. Little victories count.

Further reading

The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

Back in El Salvador it is the evangelical churches that have developed a particular ministry among gang members. MS 13 employ a hand signal of ‘devil horns’ to signal their membership. For some, the only way to leave gang culture is through religion – gangs allowing members to quit only if they have a demonstrable commitment to faith. “The only way out is through Jesus” as one gang member put it.

There are all sorts of problems with this, of course. Is such a commitment real, we may ask, from the comfort of our own living room – as if salvation were merely an intellectual debating point. But for many, escaping the grip of gangs is precisely what salvation looks like.

Salvador means saviour. And that comes in many forms. For saints like Romero it meant following Christ to the place of execution. This week, for Christians in safer lands, it will mean the liturgies of Holy Week – which will also entail facing the cross and all its horror and abandonment. This too is a battle of good and evil. And, for Christians, one in which our salvation is also very much at stake.

“I have to ask you to go out and make sure that all of your people vote. Because if they don’t vote, we’re going to have a miserable two years, and we’re going to have a very hard period of time because then – you are just one election away from losing everything you have.”

The Democrats, he said, “will overturn everything we’ve done. And they’ll do it quickly and violently. You look at the anti-fa, you look at some of these groups, and these are violent people.”

Couched in his familiar inflammatory rhetoric was Trump’s concern that this reliable conservative base might not turn out because he himself was not on the ballot. It was pure Trump, of course, but it was also quite possibly true. In 2016, he had won 81% of the evangelical vote. In 2018, that number had dwindled, but only slightly. He is still viewed favourably by 71% of them – as opposed to some 45% of the American public.

But at that dinner, he seemed uncharacteristically worried that the evangelical turn-out would not compensate for his losses elsewhere.

More on the evangelical Right

Just how 'religious' are Trump's evangelicals?

By Giles Fraser

The baffling thing for many people, of course, was the fact that they even turned out in the first place. Here was a man who had supported abortion rights, and who lived a life antithetical to evangelical values. He was thrice divorced; he boasted about his sexual conquests and paid hush money to a porn star. He had also invested in gambling and incurred enormous debts, both of which were anathema to evangelicals. Further, he clearly knew nothing about the Bible.

History suggests the turn out may have had more to do with the party than the man. White evangelicals had been voting more and more Republican since 1980, at the point when Jerry Falwell and his fellows created the Christian Right as a reaction to events of the Sixties and Seventies, from the civil rights movement to the anti-Vietnam War protests, to feminism and gay rights. In the late Eighties, the white South had turned Republican, and later the Christian Right dominated 18 Republican state parties and influenced many more. Obama won the 2008 election, but white evangelicals continued to vote increasingly GOP.

From 1996 to 2000 over 65% voted for Republican candidates for president. From 2004 to 2012, their vote was in the mid-to high 70%. They had voted for John McCain, who had denounced Falwell, and then for a Mormon, Mitt Romney, whom they didn’t consider Christian. Today they make up about a third of Republican voters.

Trump and the evangelicals

Are you a performative prepper?

By Nigel Cameron

The surprise, then, was not that Trump had won such a large percentage of their vote in the national election – but that he had won 40% of their vote in the primaries, when he had faced several other Republican candidates who had excellent evangelical bona fides. Or perhaps it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. He was talking their language.

He had also won without the advocacy of the evangelical leaders, 50 of whom had convened in the spring of 2016 and decided to campaign for the Right-wing Southern Baptist, Ted Cruz. The people in the pews had paid scant attention to their spiritual leaders, whom they accused of mixing religion with partisan politics, and more to the man who they thought could address their concerns.

These concerns have been weighed up and elucidated by thoughtful evangelicals. It all comes down to something most of us don’t understand about evangelical culture: Trump’s tirade about the violent Democrats at his August dinner accorded with the Christian Right’s view that the world is becoming more and more wicked, and headed towards Armageddon.

Evangelicals, or many of them, now see themselves in an existential crisis. It has been building since the 1980s, only now the sense of crisis is more acute. It’s not, and never has been, about a single issue but always about the increasing secularisation of society, and their loss of control over the culture.

The Supreme Court, they feel, has been taking away all their rights, such as Bible reading and prayer in the public schools; it has legalised abortion; it has been giving “extra” rights to racial minorities; and it has even approved same-sex marriage. In the 19th-century, evangelicals were the majority, but now they are a minority in a society made up of different religions and races.

UnHerd's award-winning audiodoc

Believers in Trump

By Katie Harrison

They feel under siege, and are deeply anxious that white evangelical culture is passing from the scene. Their elected representatives, religious or not, were not taking their concerns seriously. Those fears are not without justification. White people are now only 62% of the US population, and the percentage of white Christians has shrunk to 43%. Their own numbers have also diminished. According to one analyst, white evangelicals made up 23% of the population in 2006 and make up less than 17% today. Nostalgia has always been the dominant emotion in the Christian Right. Small wonder, then, that Trump’s slogan “Bring America back again” resonated with them.

Many evangelicals over the years have learned that they need power within the Republican Party to arrest the secularisation of the country. They tend to vote at a higher rate than any other religious group, and they have grown more pragmatic. In 2011 only 30% said that an elected official who committed an immoral act in his personal life could behave ethically and fulfil his duties to the public. By 2016, the percentage had risen to 70%.

Further reading

White evangelicals can't be reading the same Bible as me. I'm ashamed they voted for Trump.

By Chine McDonald

Many Christian Right leaders say flatly that they voted for Trump in spite of his personal life. Robert Jeffress, a Houston pastor, and one of Trump’s earliest supporters, said after the revelation about the porn star, “Americans knew that they weren’t voting for an altar boy.” Peggy Nance, the head of Concerned Women for America, said, “We weren’t looking for a husband. We were looking for a bodyguard.” They and other sophisticates saw the relationship as transactional, but many in the pews plucked stories from the Bible to justify their choice: King Cyrus was a heathen, but he defended Israel; King David was an adulterer, but he was never impeached.

Some say they will lead Trump to God – an act one woman preacher compared to landing the white whale. Many evangelicals, however, like Trump and forgive him for what most of their co-religionist see as sinful. These are the populists, who despise the intellectual elites and the experts in Washington. They see Trump as one of their own, and believe that only a bully can push back against the evil that surrounds them.

Since his inauguration Trump has kept his end of the bargain. His vice president is an evangelical, and he has appointed at least six evangelicals to cabinet posts. He and Vice President Pence have made the White House a welcoming place for conservative evangelicals.

In his first year, he moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem – a gift to evangelicals, many of whom see Israel through the lens of the Bible and believe that Jerusalem is the hold city of the Jews. He has appointed two conservative Supreme Court justices, possibly putting Roe v. Wade at risk; he has banned refugees from seven majority-Muslim nations, and among other things, he has opened a “conscience and religious freedom” agency in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Further midterm reading

Why non-voters matter most

By Peter Franklin

But evangelicals don’t only vote on what they consider moral issues. Like most citizens, they also worry about the economy and national security. Trump’s immigration policies have angered the heads of many evangelical denominations who believe what the Bible says about welcoming strangers, and who also hope to recruit immigrants, mainly Latinos, to keep their diminishing numbers up. But the rank and file see immigrants not only as competitors for their jobs, but as people who would end white hegemony and white evangelical culture.

Hence Trump’s desperate pitch to evangelical leaders to keep spreading the word. Because, while Republicans may win them easily now, demographics do not bode well for the GOP in the future. Not only is the Republican party’s white evangelical base diminishing, but Latino and Asian evangelicals are increasing in number, and in spite of their social conservativism, over 65% of them vote Democratic precisely because of economics and Trump’s immigration policies.

Just as important, young evangelicals are quite different from their parents. First of all, there are fewer them. Only 8% of the US population under 30 identifies as evangelical, versus 26% of their seniors. Second, according to numerous surveys, younger evangelicals are far more accepting of gay rights and gay marriage than their elders. They care about abortion, but they are much more concerned about issues of social justice than their parents.

These changes haven’t yet shown up in the electoral statistics because Latino citizens don’t vote as much as other Americans, and the young don’t tend to vote as much their elders – although that may be about to change. So for now, the Christian Right, thoroughly integrated into the Republican Party, can pass laws restricting abortion and LGBT rights in many states. But the changes will materialise, at which point the Republican Party will have lost vast swathes of its base and a great many of its voters. No wonder Trump’s worried.

Vicky Beeching spent a great deal of her 20s singing about this good news to packed congregations of Christian churches throughout the American Bible Belt. “In this fragile world, You are the only firm foundation….”, she sang, standing on the stage, guitar slung round her shoulder.“Always loving, always true, Always merciful and good, so good, Yesterday, today and forever.”

It is this direct appeal to the heart that sustains so much Christian evangelical worship. And the congregations and Christian radio stations and EMI couldn’t get enough of this mild-mannered Christian girl from Kent. She was able to put into words and music some of their deepest spiritual inclinations.

Which was probably why, when she came out as gay in 2014, the reaction from the Bible Belt was so visceral. Almost instantly, the mega churches stopped singing her songs, the radio stations stopped playing them, and the recording contract was torn up. The word they often used, Vicky explains, was “betrayal” – though in truth, it was she who had been betrayed. God may be “always loving, always true”, but the same cannot always be said for Christians themselves. As they spat bile at her over Twitter, the good news became hate-filled news. And the story the Bible told about Jesus from Nazareth, and what He revealed about God’s nature, was turned on its head.

The importance of the debate in the Christian churches about homosexuality isn’t just about homosexuality. It goes to the heart of the question of whether Christianity is good news or not. Vicky knew she was gay at the age of 13. She tried to live as she thought God wanted, suppressed her feelings for other women, and became a pin up girl for evangelical spirituality. And the effort nearly killed her.

In the end, it was her body that couldn’t cope with all the stress of her divided soul. She was diagnosed with Morphea, a type of auto-immune disease, and ME. For her own health, she had to come out. So divided, her body had literally started to eat itself. A good tree produces good fruit, Vicky explains, referencing a Gospel teaching of Jesus. And her physical breakdown had been the fruit of a lie that she had tried too long to live.

Evangelicals, and other conservative Christians, read the Bible very differently on the subject of homosexuality. They think it obvious that the plain reading of scripture offers an unambiguous condemnation of homosexual activity. I think that is mistaken. The Bible writers knew nothing of permanent, faithful and stable gay relationships, many of which seek the ordering of marriage.

Even so, the debate continues, even within the Church of England. Last month, the Bishop of Litchfield wrote to all his clergy urging a warm welcome to all LGBT+ people in the churches of his diocese, referring to “the good news of God’s love”. But another more conservative bishop objected, suggesting some Christians should indeed be excluded from receiving the Eucharist on account of their sexual identity, reviving an old distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy” participation.

Further reading

Just how 'religious' are Trump's evangelicals?

By Giles Fraser

For the majority of people outside the church, this is the worst sort of theological debate, confirming all the least flattering perceptions of a church debating slender, technical distinctions and pronouncing negatively on other people’s happiness.

For me, however, the central question is still theological: namely, whether the church is preaching good news or bad news. Whether it believes in human flourishing and a God who loves all that He has made. Or whether we are the servants of some malign despot who requires human beings to sacrifice their health and happiness in order to satisfy His need to be obeyed.

I met up with Vicky to discuss all this and more. Listen to our conversation here

https://soundcloud.com/user-970100804/giles-vicky-interview/s-O1NBB

Further reading

Are we ready for an irreligious future?

By Douglas Murray

To make this concrete, for Christian conservatives his judicial nominations have been outstanding. His cabinet agencies, especially to the Department of Health and Human Services, have aggressively defended religious liberty and rights of conscience. The military has been effective in fighting ISIS, and by all accounts his administration has been responsive to concerns about Christian persecution abroad. In many important ways, then, Trump has delivered concrete returns to the constituency that did more than any other to put him in office.

At the same time, however, Trump’s character deficiencies have been on full display. Details keep emerging of an alleged affair with a porn star — and of hush money payments made just before the election. He launches vicious, deeply personal attacks against critics, lies with regularity, and continues to fend off claims that he’s sexually harassed or assaulted more than a dozen women.

A healthy evangelical movement could applaud the administration’s good decisions while still condemning his character defects. A healthy evangelical movement could apply the same standard to Trump as it does to Democrats who’ve engaged in similar behavior. In other words, a healthy evangelical movement could act as the conscience of the administration.

Yet we’ve seen something different. We’ve seen evangelical leaders go the extra mile to excuse behaviour they’ve once condemned. We’ve seen evangelicals flip from being the American population most concerned with character in political leaders to the population least concerned. In other words, time and again, when evangelicals are asked to choose between long-held moral and political principles and Donald Trump, they choose Trump.

Why?

I’d suggest the reasons are rooted both in human nature and in the unique character of the president. The human nature element is simple. People like to think of themselves as good and moral, and they want to be part of political movements that are good and moral. It’s one thing to vote for the so-called “lesser of two evils,” it’s another thing entirely to keep supporting a man you don’t like or respect. It turns out that evangelicals don’t want to be part of an “evil” movement at all — even if it is “lesser” than the alternative. They want to be part of something good and if Trump isn’t good in real-life, he can at least be good in their imagination.

Spend much time, then, in conservative Christian circles, and you’ll find a deep unwillingness to believe the worst charges about Trump combined with an eagerness to believe that he’s (deep-down) a generous and, yes, Christian man. So they’ll actively disbelieve the women who claim Trump assaulted them — even though they’ll willingly believe similarly-sourced claims against progressives. They’ll focus on mainstream media exaggerations and mistakes (and there have been many) to the exclusion of troubling evidence. And they’ll eagerly share stories from people who claim to “really” know him and swear that he’s a “young believer” or “deeply respectful” of the Christian faith.

The result is a picture of Trump in much of white evangelicalism that is utterly alien to most of the rest of America. To evangelicals, he’s a blunt, plainspoken and wrongly-accused man who’s had struggles in life but is basically good and decent. He’s flawed and colourful, to be sure, but he’s also misunderstood and under-appreciated. His actions are good, they argue. His tweets and insults? They’re “just words.” Pay them no mind.

But there’s also another force at work. When talking to evangelicals about Trump, you’ll hear a lot about “loyalty.” Trump demands loyalty, they say, and when you’re loyal to him, he’ll be loyal to you. No defences, no victories.

Think of the incentives here. The desire to be on the side that is good and holy makes evangelicals want to believe the best about Trump. At the same time, the knowledge that Trump values loyalty and punishes his enemies makes evangelicals believe that they need to defend Trump to maintain their influence. If they see Trump for what he is — and act accordingly — they may well lose the benefits from an administration they fought so hard to put in power. So they see him for what he isn’t, wrap both arms around him, and try their best to justify that decision to themselves and others.

There is a high cost to this approach. It’s driving a wedge between white evangelicals and Christians from minority communities — people who’ve felt the sting of Trump’s obvious racial divisiveness. It’s causing generational tensions within white evangelicalism, as younger Christians are less likely to overlook Trump’s many sins. And it’s increasing the already deep and bitter divide between Christian conservatives and secular America.

Some Christians are actually fond of comparing Donald Trump to King David — arguing that God used David in spite of his immense flaws. The comparison is laughable. David was flawed, yes, but he repented deeply of his sins. Where is Trump’s repentance? Where is Trump’s humility?

David’s story is instructive in other ways. When David was at his worst, the prophet Nathan had the courage to confront him. Nathan didn’t sally forth to the town square to describe word of David’s affair as “fake news.” He didn’t defend David as “no worse than Saul.” He didn’t tell the people of Israel that David’s philandering was less important than the king’s wondrous policies. He confronted a sinful man.

That’s the proper role of a Christian leader. It’s not to rationalise. It’s not to excuse. The Donald Trump temptation is proving too much for conservative Christians to resist.

From our #FreeMinds series

Free minds: Rod Dreher – an American conservative who realised liberalism was the enemy

By Giles Fraser

Most people know – because the media made a big deal of it – that the lower bible, in its protective box, was the one used at President Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861. The “Lincoln bible” is small – 6 inches by 4 – and bound in burgundy red velvet. It is an 1853 printing of the “King James Bible” (KJB), so-called because it was first published in 1611 during the reign of King James I of England (and VI of Scotland), and by his authority, “Appointed to be read in Churches”. Thus it was also known as the Authorized Version.

For three centuries, the KJB was the standard – indeed, almost the only – bible for English-speaking Protestants.

At the time of his own inauguration, Lincoln didn’t use his personal bible, but one kept for official use by William Carroll, clerk of the Supreme Court. When Lincoln arrived in Washington to be sworn, his personal belongings had not yet arrived. The bible remained with Carroll afterwards for a time, the Lincolns acquiring it only later. In 1928, the widow of Lincoln’s sole surviving son donated it to the Library of Congress, where it stayed until President Obama used it for the inauguration of both his terms (2009 and 2013).

Quite what President Trump intended by using the Lincoln bible is unclear, besides his obvious reverence for the man – Trump had, after all, been the presidential candidate of “the party of Lincoln”, as the GOP likes to be known (and from time to time needs reminding of). Some have speculated that choosing the bible that Obama had used was meant to be reminiscent of Lincoln’s words at his 1861 address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

It seems unlikely.

But what of the second, upper, bible? The media – even those two East Coast titans, The New York Times and The Washington Post – had nothing to say other than that it was a gift to the young Donald from his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, on the occasion of his graduation from church primary school in Queens, New York, in 1955. Trump, a Presbyterian, has said that he opens his bible and looks at it a lot. And, indeed, it is well worn.

The Trump bible is not, however, the same version as the Lincoln. It is the “Revised Standard Version”, which although much more recent that the KJB carries a good deal of “history”.

The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is an English translation published in the mid-20th century. While it traces its history to the English priest William Tyndale’s New Testament translation of 1525 – for which, inter alia, Tyndale would be judicially strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 – it is generally held to be a revision of the American Standard Version of 1901 (ASV), which was itself in some measure a revision of the KJB.

While, however, the ASV excelled in literal accuracy, this rendered it difficult to understand for the reader who was not well versed in the context of the original (Hebrew and Greek) texts. The RSV, on the other hand, is less accurate in its literal translation – or what is known technically as “formal equivalence” – but easier to read and understand, the translators being more concerned with conveying general, thought-for-thought meaning (“dynamic equivalence”). The translators had aimed for a good balance between the two, and one that maintained a degree of dignity in language (as in the KJB) while avoiding unnecessary opacity.

Recommended reading

White evangelicals can't be reading the same Bible as me. I'm ashamed they voted for Trump.

By Chine McDonald

The RSV was published initially in two tranches: the New Testament in 1946, and the complete bible, with the Old Testament, in 1951 (on St Jerome’s Day, appropriately – Jerome having first translated the Bible into Latin). The first copy to come off the press was presented to President Harry S Truman.

It is this 1951 edition that President Trump used at his inauguration.

So what?

The Master Stroke of Satan?

The RSV – particularly the Old Testament – was not universally well received, especially by fundamentalist evangelicals. The criticism varied, was sometimes scholarly, and although perhaps seemingly arcane, touched nevertheless on core issues of doctrine. For example, Isaiah 7:14, in which the prophet promises King Ahaz of Judah that God will destroy his enemies, and that the truth of this will be shown in a miraculous sign. Both the King James Bible and the American Standard Version of 1901 render this passage in words well known to lovers of Handel’s Messiah: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” – and thus the prophecy is linked to the coming of Jesus Christ through his birth to the Virgin Mary.

The RSV, however, disputing the original rendition in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures) of the Hebrew word almah as “virgin”, gives it instead as “young woman”.

This and several other disputed renderings, including some in the New Testament, troubled some even in the mainstream churches, but particularly in independent and fundamentalist congregations. The controversy added impetus to the so-called King-James-Only-Movement, which held that all recent versions were based on flawed linguistic scholarship and dubious texts (the RSV had made use of some of the early discoveries of the “Dead Sea Scrolls”). Indeed, Isaiah 7:14 became something of a litmus test in assessing new editions.

Some critics took to dramatic protests. Baptist Pastor Luther Hux, of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, delivered a two-hour tirade against the RSV, which he described as “the Master Stroke of Satan—one of the Devil’s Greatest Hoaxes”, and afterwards led his congregation out of the church, gave each worshipper a small American flag, and then set light to the pages containing Isaiah 7:14. There were other incendiarist pastors, although supporters of the RSV likened them to the burners of Tyndale.

For Trump to have decided to use the Revised Standard Version, therefore, is significant. It either suggests that this degree of literalism in the United States has abated, to the point that electorally it does not matter (Trump’s campaign continued, and continues, long after the election), or else he was unaware of the controversy.

It seems unlikely, however, that in his pursuit of the white evangelical vote he can been unaware of it, even if deciding that it is ignorable; he certainly didn’t try to disguise the fact that he was using the Revised Standard Version at the inauguration, for the words are clearly visible on the spine. So perhaps the lack of any apparent backlash indicates that it was a good judgement call. Yet why should he risk it?

Whatever the truth, the mere fact that President Trump’s choice of second bible has gone wholly unreported in a nation with such sophisticated media may be something to ponder on.[1.  In 1957, at the request of the US Episcopal Church, the Deuterocanonical books (considered by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches to be part of the OT though not present in the Hebrew Bible – loosely, the “Apocrypha”) were added to the RSV. Minor modifications were further authorized in 1959 and incorporated in the 1962 edition. In 1989, the US National Council of Churches published a full-scale revision – the New Revised Standard Version – which used gender-neutral language, thus drawing even more criticism from conservative Christians than the 1952 RSV.]

Check out the full documentary here

Believers in Trump

By Katie Harrison

And now look at them all fawning over Donald Trump, the foul-mouthed, pussy-grabbing pagan president.

And be filled with righteous contempt; file this love-in under ‘evangelicals doing what evangelicals always do’ … and move on to more interesting topics?

The world has tended to. But brilliantly and thoughtfully, in the audio documentary and in articles across this site, the mapping of a more subtle view of the white evangelicals’ love for Trump has begun.

It needs to be said loud and clear: white American evangelical Christians are not all hypocrites. Again and again, in my many years reporting around the USA for the BBC, I met evangelicals who were not just decent people but committed to helping and loving those around them. I had no personal brief for them – I am an atheist – but in soup kitchens, in prisons, in places where most Americans do not go, I met them and talked to them and came to admire them. They believe things and live by them and those values led them to pull the lever for Trump and, mostly, not regret it.

Faith, after all, is about belonging and culture as much as actual religious prescriptions and proscriptions.   Sometimes, indeed, it is about little else.   On the other things: the actual teaching on abortion, or homosexuality, or the right balance of distributional justice, some evangelical Americans have very strong views, but it’s their sense of community – of ties to one another – that create the strongest feelings.

So with that in mind let us revisit 2016.  Was it so strange or hypocritical for white evangelicals to vote as they did?  As Michael Wear – a former adviser to Barack Obama on faith – says in the documentary, they found in Donald Trump a candidate, “who was not cut from their cloth but who nevertheless insisted that he was the one to protect them that he’d be a bully for them.”

And boy they felt they needed a bully. It is difficult to over-emphasise the degree of dripping disdain that trendy metrosexual citizen-of-nowhere America has for these rubes. The smugness of the liberal elite who have been telling Americans what they can and cannot say, what they can and cannot believe, how their bathrooms should be labelled, how their lives should be led; that smugness is matched only by condescension. In news coverage from the main networks. In comedy shows. In academic commentary.

They felt they were done for if Clinton won. Nothing they valued would be valued any more.

The one thing every evangelical knew (and it was true) was that a new Supreme Court Justice needed to be chosen, and probably a second as well before the end of an eight-year presidential term.  This would (will) alter the balance of the court and as such it would change the social mores of the nation. Perhaps forever.  In these terms, 2016 just wasn’t a difficult choice.  In fact I slightly differ with those in the documentary who express surprise that the religiously literate Hillary Clinton did not do more to woo white evangelicals.  I think, deep in the heart of her soulless, joyless, data-driven campaign, they knew these voters were lost. Even those who had voted Democrat as recently as 2012. As Michael Wear points out in the documentary:

“Barack Obama won 26 or 27% [of white evangelicals] in 2008; he won 23% in 2012 as the first major candidate to support gay marriage after the Catholic Church had accused him of a war on religion …. Hillary Clinton won 7 points less which accounts for millions of votes.”

What made the difference between 2012 and 2016? It was the Supreme Court: that single fact that candidate Trump promised to appoint a conservative justice was enough to swing it for a huge number of evangelicals.  They felt – quite rightly I think – that they were about to be cut out of the place where all the long-term decisions are made that reflect America’s sense of itself. Justice Scalia, the conservative whose death caused the vacancy, had been their spokesman. He had often lost, but as Peggy Noonan of the Wall St Journal had noted:

“With his fierce dissents Scalia helped people accept decisions with which they disagreed. At least our view is spoken. At least it’s respected by someone.”

Flattening, or being ready to flatten your opponents is never a good look in a democracy. It can come back to bite you.  As it did with Trump. Arguably it did in the UK with immigration concerns too quickly conflated with racism and dismissed as such.

But having made the mistake, do the Democrats have the intellectual and political flexibility to learn from the catastrophe of 2016? Or do they just wait? Sitting it out, assuming that demography is still on their side.

An alternative view

White evangelicals can't be reading the same Bible as me. I'm ashamed they voted for Trump.

By Chine McDonald

The second of those options is deeply dangerous.   On a trip to Texas last year I was struck by how vocal many Hispanic people were about why they had not voted for Hillary Clinton, or had done so with misgivings. Almost always those misgivings were about social liberalism. Hispanics are indeed the coming wave in American politics – they may well make up 30% of the population by 2050 – and one day that wave will break. But how? Can anyone be sure about how these people will vote? Demography is unclear destiny.

So how about good old compromise? Big church stuff. Run firebrand socialists in San Francisco but keep the gun-friendly candidates in Montana. Find a presidential candidate who can knit them together. And Bob – and Billy Joe – is your uncle.

Ah: would that it were so simple.  The problem is so much deeper than running from the centre. You have to be there. You have to walk the walk. And that walk needs to appeal not just to the white evangelicals but more widely to others who feel that America is leaving them behind.

I sat on a porch last year in the tiny Texas town of Luling, famous locally for its watermelon pip spitting competition.   Luling was once the toughest town in Texas, made rich by railways, then by oil, but now left behind by both. And what comes next? Nothing.   The modern economy and the media outlets that reflect modern values are all based miles from Luling. There is huge wealth in America and huge energy but none of it is coming to Luling or a thousand towns like it.  For me it’s the biggest question in modern American politics: how do you knit together a nation in an age where nothing needs to be local.

Answering that question – or having a go – will take the Democrats back to the people of Luling and they’ll hoover up some evangelicals on the way. Repent! Atone! And, in 2020 or 2024, win…

Justin Webb contributed to UnHerd's first audio documentary

Audiocast: Is our news industry undermining the West?

By Tim Montgomerie

Why did 80% of these defenders of biblical values vote for a man whose treatment of women, in particular, was similar to that of President Bill Clinton, of whom the same churchgoers – just one generation ago – had been so critical?

Katie Harrison went to the US in search of answers – from both critics and supporters. In her conversations with the latter, she found no attempts to excuse or defend the character flaws of the man that the Bible Belt has put in their country’s highest office. Instead, she saw an overriding determination – 40 years after the US Supreme Court made its infamous Roe Vs Wade ruling – to overturn the judgment that women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Abortion is not the only factor motivating white US evangelicals. The documentary itself, and companion pieces in the series, explore other motivations, as well as considering why almost no black churchgoers backed Mr Trump.

“Believers in Trump” is UnHerd’s seventh documentary. Listen to our five other audio docs here; below is Liam Halligan’s film profiling a transformational but largely unsung anti-monopolies campaigner of late 19th century America – Ida Tarbell. Sean Glynn produced them all.

An inspiration to challenge the monopolies of the 21st century

The unheard story of Ida Tarbell. Our video about the journalist who tamed the big businesses of her time

By Liam Halligan

Why would this group of Christian believers throw their support behind him? And why didn’t other religious groups do the same?

Our new documentary, Believers in Trump, hears from evangelicals who champion Trump’s presidency, those who abhor it, and from a handful of the uncomfortable millions who tolerate his place in the White House because he delivers on a couple of issues close to their hearts.

This note summaries the key reasons why white evangelicals supported Trump.

He‘s not Hillary

We met with Greg Smith of Pew Research Center, who told us of open questions asked in 2016 to establish the reasons for their support for Trump: “One third of all white evangelical voters that we talked to back in 2016 said that the main reason they support Donald Trump for President is that he is not Hillary Clinton.”

Their vitriol for her is intense, and very different to the impression we in Europe had gained. Her history with her husband’s Presidency, her email thing, all of that. But the two main reasons were that she made no effort to engage with them and she insisted on a pro-abortion campaign.

Michael Wear, author of Reclaiming Hope and a former Obama staffer, says she could have been the most religiously literate Democrat candidate in a generation but blew it. The “deplorables” comment (video below) was the tip of the iceberg. He says she made no attempt to engage with this statistically significant base (26% of the votes cast in the 2016 election were by white evangelicals):

“She could have gone to a Christian college and given a speech about the complexities of religious freedom in the 21st century. She could have given a speech about her lifelong passion for adoption and how that matched with the faith community and particularly with evangelicals but there was no outreach. No interviews with major Christian publications…. not bringing on a faith staffer – someone to reach out to religious communities – until late in the campaign and so it just wasn’t there. It wasn’t, when they looked at key populations when they looked at what they thought was important in running a presidential campaign, religion did not figure into that calculation.”

He promised and delivered a social conservative on the Supreme Court

Justice Scalia died in the same year as Barack Obama’s successor was to be decided and the Republican-controlled Senate made it clear that they would not let the outgoing president choose a liberal justice to replace the Supreme Court’s most conservative member. Composition of the USA’s highest court, which had been politically polarising since 1973’s Roe vs Wade ruling, became central to the presidential election.

Professor Joe Loconte, who does not support the Trump presidency said:

“Much of it boils down to the Supreme Court and the idea that now so much of the cultural debates, cultural fights we’re having are going to be decided in the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, Christian conservatives have kind of bought into that narrative and so getting “the right court nominee” – a Neil Gorsuch in this case, someone who will defend the original intent of the constitution, this became a crucial bellwether moment for evangelicals because they knew they weren’t going to get a good nominee from Clinton of course and it seemed that Trump was going to be willing to appoint that nominee.”

And when evangelicals talk about the Supreme Court…

…they mean access to religious freedom, which many interpret to be the tension between holding religious beliefs about same-sex marriage or transgender expressions which are at odds with the social and even legal mainstream.

…But they mostly mean abortion.

We spoke to Tim Goeglein, Vice President at Focus on the Family and former aide to George W Bush:

“In 1973 our Supreme Court legalized and some would say imposed abortion, legal in all nine months up to and including the birth of the child in the Roe versus Wade decision. This in large numbers brought American evangelicals into the public square.”

From being a rather separatist cohort for much of the 20th century, the 1970s brought white evangelicals out of the woodwork. According to Jim Wallis of Sojourners, the black evangelicals had been in the public square ahead of them:

“Remember the black churches were at the core of the civil rights movement. Without the infrastructure of the black churches there wouldn’t have been a civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist preacher not just a civil rights leader…The most holistic expression of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in America is always been from the black churches, always. Not white evangelicals, always black churches.

But it took Roe vs Wade to get this group onto the frontline. And now, almost 40 years after Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, his son is a regular in the White House and commonly held to be a close adviser to the President. It only took a generation to bring this group from active disengagement to being the voting segment which holds so much power.

He protects their way of life

In his rhetoric on immigration, security and the Middle East, Trump plays not only to the white evangelical base but to the flyover community more broadly. Millions of people live in the states which many decision-makers see only from the sky as they fly from coast to coast for meetings and vacations with fellow elites. Hillary was firmly placed with those elites, as far as our interviewees were concerned.

But for the people described so beautifully in JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which recounts life in dysfunctional white working-class Kentucky, who worshipped two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America, Trump has delivered. To be fair, all the white evangelicals we spoke to were professional middle-class people. Unlike the families described in Hillbilly Elegy, they weren’t routinely posting bail for family members, using food stamps or visiting relatives in rehab. But the flyover states are bigger than just one demographic. There are plenty of God-fearing, nation-loving, hardworking, plain speaking Americans of all classes in that middle strip of the USA.

What they have in common is that they have been unheard for too long and when they chose to make themselves heard, not only did they tip the electoral balance, but they took the rest of the world by surprise – because we hadn’t been listening.

In his travel bans and his rhetoric about Muslims, Trump plays to the fear held by many white evangelicals that their religious hold on the nation is at risk. They fear not only for their physical security – survivalists prepare for terror attacks now, as well as the earthquakes and tornadoes for which they’ve always had drills – but for their spiritual safety. ‘What if we’re over-run by people trying to turn us away from the Lord?’ The anti-immigration narrative holds an additional layer of fear for many.

Make no mistake, not every white evangelical who voted Trump admires his record. Politically, of course, he doesn’t have a record, which is part of the attraction for an electorate bored and disillusioned by years of the same old campaign trail promises, rarely delivered. But he does have a clear and consistent track record of behaviour, and it’s not attractive to many people, especially socially conservative Christians who value faithful marriage and abhor vulgar talk.

There’s a very uncomfortable resignation among many of these voters; people are holding their nose and tolerating an aggressive, insensitive President for four or even eight years in the hope and even expectation of lifelong appointments to the Supreme Court. Even when it means, as it did for some of the parents we heard from, that they struggle to justify to their daughters why they voted for a man they wouldn’t want as a role model for their sons.

It’s a very UnHerd story. Here are a bunch of people – far more than you’d think – who hold some beliefs very deeply, and feel very strongly that their elected leaders don’t understand them. Between them, they were able to buck what they believed to be the liberal secular trend, and turn a nation in a different direction.

How far that will take them, and where they’ll get to, is another story. But the tale of how and why they decided to take the path is worth studying.

All articles in this series are being tagged by “Believers in Trump”.

Alisdair Macintyre once told the theologian Stanley Hauerwas that he regretted writing that famous last passage of his great 1981 work of moral philosophy, After Virtue. Nonetheless, it was that book, and its stirring final call to action, that summoned together a very diverse collection of admirers. To many of us, that last paragraph felt like a dark prophecy, a warning from history, and a vague, sketchy outline of what the coming resistance might look like.

In terms of its practical effect on me, it was the single most important piece of philosophical writing that I have ever read. And it remains so to this day.

We are entering a time of crisis, claimed Macintyre. The Enlightenment destroyed the idea that human life is imbued with purpose and direction. It took morality away from the community and made it a matter of individual choice, thus replacing morality with individual self-assertion. The final passage reads:

If my account of our moral condition is correct we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

Rod Dreher’s best selling The Benedict Option (2017) is the latest in a long line of reactions to this passage. Christians, he argues, have lost the culture wars in the United States. And a new form of resistance is called for.

In this country, Macintyre’s philosophical cry bounced around in academic circles during the back end of the 20th century, emerging into mainstream politics during the beginnings of this one. It was John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1991), heavily influenced by Macintyre, that led to the whole Red Tory then Blue Labour movements. It was Macintyre’s analysis that inspired the theologian Philip Blond to help persuade David Cameron to start talking about “the big society”. Likewise, the thinking of people such as the excellent Maurice Glassman still owes a great deal to the debates that a number of Cambridge theologians (including Rowan Williams) had in the 1980’s following After Virtue.

But Macintyre’s reception in the United States has been very different. Whereas in Britain, the political influence of After Virtue has been on those who have been seeking to bring new life to society in general, with the conservative Christian Rod Dreher (and with Stanley Hauerwas too), the After Virtue legacy has taken on a more sectarian and inward-looking turn.

Public culture has become irredeemable, Dreher argues, it has been captured by the forces of individualism and liberalism, and there is no way to build communities of moral purpose in such hostile territory. The Benedict Option represents a tactical withdrawal, an attempt by serious Christians to regroup in community, to construct an ark with which to ride out the storm and from there to present a challenge to mainstream culture.

This is why I admire Dreher: he is one of the few conservative Christians to recognise and publicly to admit that the United States is not really a Christian country at all, that it worships a god that has been made in its own image – that is, it worships itself. And that capitalism and a belief in the total freedom of the individual is not the unmitigated good that the Christian Right has so often trumpeted.

All this is very brave of Dreher. I just watched an interview he gave to Fox News explaining his position. The interviewer wore a look of total confusion, failing completely to understand how a conservative Christian such as Dreher could think of the United States as enemy territory. Such has been the elision of Christianity and American nationalism for so many.

As Dreher rightly argues, much that passes for orthodox Christianity in American life is really a moralistic version of Deism. And this pale reflection of traditional Christianity has itself been hollowed out by the continual march of market-driven acquisitiveness. It is good that conservatives are beginning to wake up to the fact that that the market is not their friend. And I don’t suppose the interviewer from Fox would be any better disposed to the Benedict Option if he were to discover that Macintyre was originally a Marxist.

Of course, things are considerably worse for religious believers here in Europe. Different, but worse. Iceland is now preparing to make circumcision illegal – and a survey out this week by the National Secular Society indicates that 62% of Britons agree with them. In France, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, the burqa has been banned. Ofsted the UK education inspection body, now wants to regulate what is taught at Orthodox Jewish schools in North London. Halal meat is being banned. Christians are sacked for wearing the cross as jewellery at work.

Throughout Europe, the state, under the increasingly confident influence of secular liberalism, continues a malign programme of interfering in the lives of religious believers and seeking to marginalise them from the public sphere. Perhaps more religious believers on this side of the pond, too, should wake up and appreciate that the modern liberal state is no longer a friend to religious belief. Liberal in both the social and the economic sense, the modern social consensus is built around the freedom of the individual.

That is why Christians in America couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. And they were right not to. But Trump is clearly not the answer either. Indeed, as Dreher rightly insists, Trump is just another symptom of the deepening problem. There are no good options left. And so all people of faith have to prepare for the dark days that are to come.

Dreher is wrong about a lot, though. Like so many American conservatives, he is creepily obsessed with homosexuality. His analysis of Freud is risible. And unlike the pacifist Hauerwas, he doesn’t understand that the greatest corruption of public Christianity in the US comes from the American war machine. Jesus didn’t care all that much about sex. And said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality. But he cared a great deal about loving your enemies.

The fixation that American conservatives have with sex is a convenient way for them to avoid a much harder and challenging question: the unchristian obsession they have with guns and bombs. I would prefer my Benedict Option to look a bit more like that proposed by the extraordinary Dorothy Day who founded a number of Catholic communities of resistance committed to non-violence and feeding the poor. But in the context of the scale of the incoming crisis, this may look like haggling over the details.

It is indeed odd that a socialist like me finds common cause with an American conservative like Rod Dreher. But the faith we share is under threat. We both diagnose liberalism as the common enemy. And opposition makes for unlikely bedfellows.

Another Christian thinker in this Free Minds series...

Free minds: Michael Schluter - the untiring advocate of an alternative to the materialism of Left and Right

By Tim Montgomerie

Coincidentally, he’s recently been on our television screens, reminding us of his history with Britain in the Netflix drama, The Crown. He made an appearance in the second series as pastoral adviser to Queen Elizabeth II, while she ponders the meaning of forgiveness. Her Majesty is depicted meeting him a couple of times, inviting him for a one-to-one shortly after she has was told of her uncle’s former affiliation with Nazis.

That Graham engaged in such a way, with such a public figure, was unusual. At a time when conservative evangelicals, especially those in ‘low’ churches, were averse to taking a role in public life, Graham not only met the British Queen, but also had a ‘bittersweet’ relationship with Nixon – and one which he later came to regret. His links to Nixon were messy and complicated – and very public. It deterred many people of faith from engaging in politics.

It was a while before white US evangelicals would leave their separatist lifestyles to engage again with public policy, and even then it was only through organisations such as Moral Majority[2. Moral Majority was founded by Jerry Falwell whose son, Jerry Falwell Jr, is now a regular in the White House and has the ear of President Trump] which concentrated on a small number of polarising issues.

Graham’s son Franklin has, however, been very vocal in his support for elements of the Trump presidency. While this will have gone down well with many of his humanitarian organisation’s supporters[3. Franklin founded the NGO Samaritan’s Purse, best known for its controversial Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes filled with donated supplies, along with proselytising tracts promoting Christianity], it hasn’t made him popular among more progressive Christians. He has been publicly criticised for his political positions by Jerushah Armfield, his niece and Graham’s granddaughter, who suggested he stick to his charity work.

Graham, though, would certainly not want to be remembered for his political engagement. Quite the opposite. He was widely praised for his humility and would frequently argue that his mission was to point people’s attention to Jesus, and not to himself. He wished fervently that his revival meetings could have been advertised without using his name: “I despise all this attention on myself…I’m not trying to bring people to myself, nor am I trying to interest people in me.”

His dedication to a simple faith, clearly expressed in an invitation to receive the forgiveness available because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, touched the hearts of many. He spoke to millions of everyday folk: people brought their friends, neighbours and colleagues to his tent revivals, city crusades and outdoor arena services.

“In the 2016 election, fully one quarter of all voters, 26% of everyone who cast a ballot, was a white born-again or evangelical Christian and that’s very much on par with what we’ve seen in recent elections…they are a very large, very consequential, very politically powerful constituency in the United States.”

Billy Graham had a huge amount of influence on this, now politically significant, group of people. But the only thing he wanted to do was to point them towards his understanding of the Gospel. Politics didn’t work out for him, and he never saw it as his game.

Graham had a simple unsophisticated message throughout his life, and a few years ago his grandson passed on to the world his grandfather’s simple understanding of the life that is to come:

“Some day you will read or hear that I have died. Don’t you believe a word of it. I shall be more alive than I am now. I will have just changed my address. I will have gone into the presence of God.”

We used to call it “the character issue,” and it was deployed by conservatives against liberals–as when George H W Bush, Bob Dole, and their allies suggested that Bill Clinton’s character disqualified him for the Oval Office. Conservatives lost that battle in a rout. Liberals posited a sharp distinction between private character and public affairs, and most Americans sided with them.

Over the last two years, we have revisited this political history mostly to examine the hypocrisy, or at least the evolution, of the Right. According to polls, conservative evangelical Christians have swiftly abandoned the conviction that “personal immorality” has any bearing on fitness for office.

Yet the character issue is nonetheless back. The most widespread and deepest criticism of President Trump does not concern the tax bill he signed, the Supreme Court justice he nominated, or even his immigration views. It concerns his character: his boorishness, his alleged mistreatment of women, his dishonesty, his impulsiveness. His personal traits are the main reason the public is giving him failing grades even in a time of reasonably solid economic growth.

That story isn’t being neglected, of course; it’s all around us. But what hasn’t been discussed as much is this: The character issue is back – but this time it’s being deployed by liberals. And with public support.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

Two-thirds of churchgoing white evangelicals have approved of his performance and many of their heavyweight leaders supported him. During 2017, we’ve seen some of those leaders back off despite the existence of his evangelical advisory board which claims to have his ear – a board which endures while other endorsement and advisory bodies disband.

But there is a price to pay.

Early on, Russell Moore questioned Trump’s approach. The Southern Baptist Convention, where he has a leading role, lost members and financial support as a consequence. Author and speaker Jen Hatmaker received death threats from what she calls the ‘Christian machine’, when she declared herself as Never Trump and spoke in favour of refugees, gun control, and same-sex relationships.

That may not be why one of the most widely respected conservative pastors and authors, Tim Keller (pictured above), waited until now to comment, as he did this week in the New Yorker but his timing is interesting.

First, the article itself. It serves as an explainer to help people understand the e-word. The etymology has changed rapidly within his own lifetime and he notes some important distinctions. But his explanation is passionate, and acknowledges criticism from the wider public of this increasingly influential group:

“Evangelical” used to denote people who claimed the moral high ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with “hypocrite”. When I used the word to describe myself in the nineteen-seventies, it meant I was not a fundamentalist. If I use the name today, however, it means to hearers that I am.”

And he pulls no punches:

“People who once called themselves the “Moral Majority” are now seemingly willing to vote for anyone, however immoral, who supports their political positions.”

As Keller notes, the development of the term in public usage is reflected in voter analysis. Exit polls in the US ask voters whether they are ‘a born again or evangelical Christian’. I work for ComRes, which is one of the UK’s leading polling and research agencies, and I can’t imagine the response pollsters would get if they asked that question in Britain…

His article is both a politely feisty take-down of the effect Trump’s regime has had on the reputation of evangelicalism in the US, and an attempt to redeem it by pointing to ‘successful’ evangelical churches which are meeting social needs, and bringing together people from diverse communities. He concludes by suggesting that the word ‘evangelical’ may not be particularly useful in common parlance any more.

But why say this now? He isn’t one to rush into public debate or to engage in highly politicised conversation, preferring to reflect for a while and write a book: Generous Justice outlines his theology of political engagement and social action.

In fact, just a week ago, he was challenged by Christian thought leaders including Rachel Held Evans for tweeting that ‘Jesus didn’t come primarily to solve the economic, political and social problems of our world. He came to forgive our sins.’

People who know him well tell me that it takes a lot for him to write this kind of piece. He is nearly 70 years old, and can look back on a full and fruitful life: establishing and leading large well respected churches, writing books which are read by millions, carving out a space for accessible thoughtful wisdom in an important sector of the church. Surely his legacy is not to be a Never Trump guy, but to pass to future generations the many words and actions of the last seven decades. He is undoubtedly the kind of person who has learnt to pick his battles.

Perhaps that’s the point, though. While Keller, and others like him, might prefer not to be dragged into the polarising debate about Trump, it may be that we’ve reached the point that saying nothing is considered implicit endorsement. It seems that, even in religious communities which don’t always like taking sides, to avoid criticising Trump is perceived to be championing him. And that’s just not tenable any more.

“But the whole town says you did it!” The comedian Tony Barbieri shouted as Moore attempted to address the church on the allegations of sexual misconduct against him. “The entire town? All the girls are lying?” he peppered. Police escorted Barbieri off the property; Roy Moore seized the opportunity.

He took to Twitter to articulate the message that has driven his campaign ever since women accused him of molesting them as teenagers. “If you want to mock our Christian values,” he wrote to Kimmel, “come down here to Alabama and do it man to man.” The meaning was clear: Kimmel’s stunt was motivated by his elite disdain for Alabamians and their love of Jesus. (86% of adults in Alabama identify as Christian.) And if Kimmel could pull such a malicious stunt, who’s to say that the Washington Post hadn’t acted in the same bad faith when they originally rolled out the allegations against Moore?

Kimmel responded on his show: “It doesn’t fit your stereotype, but I happen to be a Christian, too,” he said. “So if you’re open to, when we sit down, I will share with you what I learned at my church. At my church, forcing yourself on underage girls is a no-no.”

Yet Moore had already won, at least in terms of what matters at the polls. The moment crystallized one of the key ways in which Moore has maintained his base of support even as sexual assault allegations have brought down far more powerful men across America. Moore has successfully reframed this race as, quite simply, God versus Everyone Else.

In 2016, Trump captured the imaginations of Americans in both red and blue states not with policy prescriptions or lofty rhetoric, but by distilling his candidacy into the tidy narrative of us versus them. Gone were the days of pretending our politics were anything but tribal. Trump leveraged the power of victimhood, convincing many that the so-called establishment—in Washington, in the media—had been betting against them, and that only he could settle the score. It was basic, primal, and easy to digest. It was brilliant, if it wasn’t also unnerving.

Moore has copied Trump’s us versus them playbook, but he’s also raised the stakes for believers. In a November interview after the allegations surfaced, Moore’s brother claimed that the candidate was being persecuted “like Jesus Christ was.” Roy Moore was a godly man pursuing the Lord’s work, batting down lies from the media and Democrats and women who were probably “being paid,” as his brother put it. Indeed, Moore couldn’t have hoped for a better dust-up than the one with Kimmel: a Manhattan actor intent on disrupting a small-town church service. It didn’t matter that the actor had shouted questions about the sexual assault allegations, and nothing about Moore’s religion—this was an attack from an outsider on Christian values in such a visceral, literally made-for-TV way.

To understand why Moore is still the hero of the show, it’s important to revisit the last sex scandal to shake the state.

In the fall of 2015, Alabamians learned that then-Governor Robert Bentley had cheated on his wife with a member of staff. It was bombshell news. When Bentley ran for governor five years earlier, he was exactly the kind of outsider evangelical voters had been craving—a small-business owner, a deacon at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa. Ultimately, someone of ironclad faith who could rescue the state’s corrupt politics.

Yet Bentley was no different, it turned out. Armed with fifty-plus years of marriage and a devotion to God, he still fell prey to temptation.And for many Alabama evangelicals, a collective fatigue took hold. Had they expected too much from their leaders? Was it time to drop these saint-like standards for candidates? Donald Trump’s soaring victory in Alabama suggested that electoral priorities were shifting. As one evangelical pastor rationalised his support of Trump just before the election, “I think as Christians we should vote for the platform and not the person.”

It’s tough to understate just how shocking a departure in tone this was from elections prior, when, among evangelicals, the best thing you could say about a candidate was that he was a “good man.” It wasn’t easy to start putting the platform over the person. Enthusiastic as Trump’s supporters in Alabama are, it’s hard to meet devout Christians here who didn’t struggle, even slightly, with their votes. Trump is a thrice-married adulterer, someone who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy. Important as his posture against the elites was, many would say privately, there was still something unsettling about the trade-off they were making.

This is what made Roy Moore such a blessing. For Alabama evangelicals, it was nice not to feel so tired, so compromised. Moore had long been something of a martyr in the state: in 2003, as Alabama’s chief justice, he defied a federal order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments outside the state’s judicial building. He was removed from his seat for it. He won the judgeship back in 2013, only to be kicked out again in 2016, when he ordered probate judges to ignore a federal ruling that legalised same-sex marriage.

In the minds of evangelicals, Moore was a man who’d lived his convictions in the public square, someone who always chose Jesus over political power. And there were no Access Hollywood-like comments lurking, no affairs to reconcile. Voters had a terrific platform and person in Moore; casting their ballot, for the first time in years, would feel good.

When the Washington Post report of Leigh Corfman’s allegation that Moore had molested her when she was 14 years old dropped, voters I interviewed from Gadsden – Moore’s hometown – sounded less shocked than they did exhausted. Slumped shoulders, long sighs.

“Well, you do have to wonder why this didn’t come out sooner,” said Craig Heald, the brother of Moore’s wife’s ex-husband. He sounded as though he were trying to convince himself that this all might, in fact, be a scam of sorts. A New York Times reporter had parked in front of his house for over an hour, even after his wife told the reporter they weren’t interested in talking. The reporter kept asking whether Moore’s wife had divorced her first husband because she was having an affair. Heald was upset by this: that hadn’t been the case at all, he said. But he interpreted the reporter as wanting it to be true. “It’s almost like they get more excited when they think something bad’s happened,” he told me.

Moore has exploited that suspicion to astonishing success. In the same way my conversation with Heald unfolded, Moore’s talking points have shifted from the veracity of the allegations to how much people outside Alabama hate the people inside Alabama. He’s waging a bigger war now, promoting his campaign as a vehicle for Christ. Communicating with his base as though they are disciples, imploring them to remember how heathens tried to obstruct Jesus’s path forward, too. “My soul is being tried and many of you have souls that are being tried,” he said during that Thursday rally. “…But Christians have a special courage.” In doing so he has symbolically flitted his hand at his accusers’ stories: who has time to debate those, his message goes, when there is much more urgent work to be done on behalf of Christianity?

Moore understands that his voters are tired, and that when voters are tired, they crave something that doesn’t take a whole lot of work to grab hold of. It’s God versus Everyone Else, Christian values versus sneering comedians, evangelicals versus the reporters who mock them, who stalk their front doors. And for many of Roy Moore’s supporters, that may sound suspect, just a little bit off, but they’ll flock to the polls on December 12th anyway, because one thing is for certain: No Alabama evangelical wants to feel like Judas.

One cannot understand American politics without grasping how fundamentally different American Protestantism is from its European cousins. Virtually all European Protestants worship in one of three broad traditions: the Calvinist or Reformed tradition, Lutheran, and Anglican. Each of these traditions has its roots in the early days of the Reformation, drawing their inspiration from events that occurred between in the early to mid-16th century. They differ greatly among one another in doctrine and practice, but they each share some common beliefs.

American Protestantism is quite different. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, fewer than five percent of Americans worship in one of what the study’s author label the “mainline” version of these three traditions. Fifteen percent of Americans belong to either other mainline traditions, primarily Baptist or Methodist, or to a denomination that is almost exclusively African-American in its makeup. Nearly 2% are Mormons, a denomination derived from Protestantism founded in the US in the early 19th century. Most importantly, about one-quarter of all Americans worship in the evangelical Protestant tradition, most of whom are either Baptists, Pentecostal, or non-denominational.

Evangelical American Protestantism is quite distinct from European Protestantism. Doctrinally, evangelical churches emphasize the authority of the Bible alone. They may note the decisions of the early Church councils, but their faith and their worship is centered on Scripture. To that end, they also tend to see Scripture as the literal word of God and believe that the Bible supersedes scientific teaching[1. Per the Pew Survey, 55 percent of evangelical Christians say Scripture is the Word of God and should be taken literally. Only 24 percent of mainline Protestants believe the same]. Thus, many evangelicals do not believe in evolution as Genesis apparently says that God created the earth and all living beings at one moment in time[2.  Fifty-seven percent of evangelicals believe that man has always existed in his present form  https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/interpreting-scripture/].

Evangelical churches are also independent bodies that set their own theologies. While many exist in some communion with other similar churches, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, they do not proclaim a communal authority to establish a teaching for the church as a whole[3.  As the official website for the Southern Baptist Convention says, “we recognize that in the New Testament there was no centralized ecclesiastical authority over the churches that forced the churches into any form of compliance. There was encouragement, exhortation, and admonition, but there was never enforcement. We strongly adhere to that principle. Jesus Christ is the head of the local church—we are not. Each church is responsible before God for the policies it sets and decisions it makes.” https://www.sbc.net/faqs.asp]. As such, they are both fiercely independent of one another and strongly distrustful of people or entities that seek to establish a regular rule for all to obey. Baptists, for example, were some of the leading proponents of religious liberty during the American Colonial period in opposition to those who sought to establish the Church of England or other denominations. These differences make evangelical Protestantism out of step with much majority opinion in the United States. America remains a much more religious nation than most in the developed world, with much larger numbers saying they believe in God and attend religious services at least weekly. But evangelicals stand out in their religiosity even by American standards. Fully 88% say they are certain in their belief in God, the most of any religious denomination. Seventy-nine percent say they pray daily, and 58% say they attend religious services at least once a week. These beliefs guide their views of morality too. Sixty percent say they look most to religion for guidance on right and wrong, more than double the share of mainline Protestants who say the same.

These views lead evangelicals, especially Southern Baptists, to unique political views on contentious issues. Sixty-three percent of evangelicals say abortion should be illegal in all or most circumstances, and sixty-four percent oppose same-sex marriage. Only 36% say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 66% of mainline Protestants and 70% of Catholics. In each case evangelicals are among the most traditional of any American religious group – and distinctly in the minority.

America’s cultural shift to the left has both emboldened and frightened evangelicals. Early moves to cultural modernity led to the creation of what became known as “the religious right”. These early figures, often rooted in the Baptist faith and almost always associated with evangelical Christianity, sought to mobilize “the Moral Majority” to roll back what they saw as attempts to override the will of the people to legalize pornography, abortion, and expand rights for homosexuals. Their efforts picked up steam in the 1980s and by the early 1990s these figures and their followers were important, even crucial, players, in Republican Party politics[4.  A European analogy would be the formation of Catholic and Protestant parties in the 19th Century to combat liberals in places like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany].

Despite this unprecedented mobilization, evangelicals have largely been routed in the culture wars. Abortion remains legal in all fifty states, state laws against same-sex behavior were struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 2003[5.  Lawrence v Kansas, 539 U.S, 2003 (2003)], and same-sex marriage was made the law of the land in the landmark 2015 Supreme Court case of Obergefell v Hodges[6.  576 U.S. ___ (2015)]. At the same time, the Obama Administration sought to require religious institutions to provide birth control, including those that induce abortion, as part of every health insurance policy, making many evangelicals scared that they would be compelled to act in opposition to their faith. This sense of fear was compounded by efforts to require Christian bakers, florists, and photographers to offer their professional services to prospective clients who were engaged in a same-sex marriage ceremony.

The sense that Biblical Christianity could go from essentially a protected status to an oppressed minority within one generation has taken hold of evangelical politics. While religiously devout evangelicals probably voted for Texas Senator Ted Cruz in last year’s Republican primaries, they quickly swung behind the thrice-married New York Presbyterian when he promised to appoint Supreme Court justices that would uphold their views of the Constitution, views that presumably could lead to overturning of the Court decision that made a woman’s right to an abortion a constitutional right. This sense of persecution has even led evangelicals to change their views on the relationship between private morality and public service. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, in 2011 only 30% of white evangelicals thought one could be privately immoral and ethically perform public duties. By 2016, 72% believed that.

Alabama happens to be perhaps the most religious state in America. Forty-nine percent of adults are white evangelical Christians, second only to neighboring Tennessee. And so far, Alabama Republicans are standing by their nominee despite continued proof that Moore sought ought the romantic company of teenagers and minors when he was a single lawyer in Gadsden, Alabama.

Moore’s political history as an ostentatious defender of evangelical Christian beliefs surely has helped him weather this political storm. He rose to national fame as the “Ten Commandments” judge, a justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who sought to establish a monument of the Ten Commandments on state-owned ground only to have his effort ruled unconstitutional by the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. His refusal to obey that court order led him to be removed from the state bench, only to see him return via election in 2012. The fact that in the eyes of his followers he has already demonstrated both his fidelity to their beliefs and been unfairly persecuted for that fidelity helps them believe his claims that the current controversy is simply another conspiracy to prevent him from winning public office.

More telling, though, is the response of Alabama’s Republican Governor, Kay Ivey. When asked about the race, she told reporters that she believed the women who had accused Moore of improper sexual advances. She nevertheless said she would be voting for him in the December 12 special election. “I believe in the Republican Party and what we stand for, and most important, we need to have a Republican in the United States Senate to vote on things like Supreme Court justices, other appointments the Senate has to confirm and make major decisions,” Ivey said. Even a woman who came to office because the former governor had to step down in scandal – he had illegally used state funds to cover up an affair with a much younger staffer – knows her political future would be over if she were to stand up for decency rather than enable an anti-abortion Democrat to win the seat.

The Moore controversy is important to understanding populism in the US. Donald Trump’s core appeal is akin to that of any European populist party that opposes immigration and globalization and gets more support from less-educated men, while the American left is seeing the same sort of critiques of economic neo-liberalism that characterize, in more extreme forms, European leaders like Jeremy Corbyn and parties like SYRIZA and Podemos. But it is nearly unique in the existence of other strains such as the anti-government Tea Party that swept America in the early 2010s and in this evangelical Christian populism. Understanding these unique elements is key to understanding both why cultural issues remain much more politically divisive in the United States than elsewhere and in how President Trump runs his Administration.

But Christian populism is important for leaders in other countries to understand for another, more selfish reason. Evangelicals have been radicalized in part by their continued marginalisation from political life. Their views are almost always defeated and ridiculed by elite opinion, and the fact that their most painful defeats have usually occurred by court edict rather than the democratic process has given rise to the idea that their views will never be permitted to win. British populists agitating for Brexit have similar complaints about the behavior of Brussels and the attempts of die-hard Remainers to keep the UK within the EU or render its departure of merely a legal import through the maintenance of free trade and migration post-exit. Continental populists note the prior history of referenda that are resubmitted to a nation if the version preferred by EU advocates is initially defeated. The idea that one cannot win in a democracy is usually the seeds for the belief that democracy itself is suspect. Keeping that sentiment from growing is perhaps the largest task our political leaders have today.

The news about the current crisis of violence and displacement seemed to come out of nowhere, when it burst onto our TV screens in August. But if you follow international – and particularly humanitarian – news, you had been hearing about it for weeks before, when the Myamnar regime threatened to refuse entry to UN investigators probing Rohingya abuses.  Last year, we saw similar violence and as many as 8,000 Rohingya were believed to be stranded at sea during 2015.

The religious and ethnic tensions go back a long way, and Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s often called by humanitarian organisations) has long been a difficult place for Muslims to live. The Rohingya people are famously homeless, being acknowledged neither by Burma or Bangladesh, and the Buddhist nation refuses to acknowledge their ethnicity in official tallies.  Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had headed the Rakhine Advisory Commission, which published a 63-page report noting that the Rohingya make up the world’s largest single stateless community.

We’re now seeing widespread criticism of Aung San Suu Kiu’s leadership, despite her having previously been lauded as a human rights champion, and even the former peace campaigner has been said to be disparaging about Muslims, allegedly grumbling last year that the BBC chose to send Mishal Husain to interview her about ethnic and religious tensions: ‘No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim’.

This explainer from the New Yorker’s Hannah Beech outlines the rocky road of Aung San Suu Kyi’s rise to, and fall from, public acclaim.

To spot emerging humanitarian stories, sign up to news bulletins like DAWNS Digest, subscribe to Reuters World emails, and take note of news coming from NGOs like Human Rights Watch or UN agencies like UNHCR.

And follow writers like UnHerd’s Ben Rogers for religious freedom news from Asia, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller for some of the best coverage of security issues (I recommend his 2015 analysis of Boko Haram , exploring the notion of a global grand caliphate), Ruth Maclean for Africa updates, especially relating to religion, AFP’s Jerome Taylor for pics and stories from South East Asia, and the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville for excellent Middle East commentary.

Trump and the (white) evangelicals

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Christians around the world, and in the US itself, about the strong links between Trump and some conservative evangelical leaders. In voting for him, they prioritised the pro-life issue over respect for women and arguably inspired Trump to issue executive orders on immigration which were perceived by many to be anti-Muslim. The link has become so entrenched that when Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy wing, criticised Trump for having ‘a track record that is unbelievably out of step with what gospel Christians believe’ his comments brought threatened withdrawal of SBC funding from 100 member churches.

Counterintuitive though this support may seem to those us outside the US, there’s a story spanning four or more decades behind it. Still within living memory are the times that US evangelicals interpreted Bible verses relating to being  ‘set apart’ to mean living in a much more separatist way than they do now, and engaging with politics was seen as ‘worldly’. It wasn’t until 1979 that Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, to mobilise evangelicals to campaign against the social and lifestyle changes which threatened their way of life, and it’s his son Jerry Falwell Jr who is often seen at Trump’s side. Within those two generations of the Falwell family, evangelical churches have moved from the shadows to being described as ‘the new super PACs’.

And there’s an emerging theology which validates this President, moving away from endorsing him on specific issues (with the exception of the travel ban and the Charlottesville violence,  which produced slight wobbles but also even louder support from Jerry Falwell Jr) towards an overall lauding of Trump as divinely appointed. The notion that he could be ‘used by God’ despite his well-known moral failings draws on Biblical parallels from the book of Daniel, where the enemy King Nebuchadnezzar inadvertently brings about God’s purposes and is described by God as ‘my servant’(Jeremiah 25:9, if you want to look it up). The new Christian Nationalism school of thought goes on to declare that God will protect the USA because Trump is President.

Read more about this narrative in a Twitter thread by Jack Jenkins.