Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics

In 2016, amidst national and global bewilderment, Donald Trump won the presidential race against Hillary Clinton. Thanks to the narrative of rights’ curtailment propagated by the Religious Right and cooperating candidates and presidents since the end of the 1970s, the fears of the white conservative Christian constituency have been tapped into, extracted, and rebranded as rightful concerns for one’s own constitutional freedoms. Displacement and resentment, mainly deriving from economic disruptions and cultural changes, have been capitalized on, stripped of their racial and gender-based attributes, and transformed into the fuel motivating the fight to protect Christian morals, values, and identity. The frame of the triangular relationship between Trump, the Religious Right, and white conservative Christians, allows to overcome potentially reductive explanations relying on single decisive factors, such as economic dissatisfaction or political partisanship, polarization or the left-behind theory. Furthermore, it helps retrace the common factors of the support granted to Trump by different actors, such as the exploitation of individual rights to express grievances and dissatisfaction, and it provides with a more complete understanding of the political phenomenon under investigation. This book tells the tale of Donald Trump, supposed protector of the values of a threatened identity: white, Christian, and middle-class.

Youngstown, northeastern Ohio, is striving to recover from the industrial collapse of the end of the 1970s. The city is a renowned battlefield between Democratic and Republican candidates during electoral campaigns. In 2016, Clinton managed to maintain control over the area, albeit only for a few percentage points, while the whole state was consigned to Donald Trump. Here, in October 2017 and April 2018, I met with groups of white Christian citizens, who voted Republican in 2016, to ask them how their religious values informed their political choices. The voices of the Youngstown residents who participated in this study tell us of a disillusioned population, increasingly disconnected from the Democratic-leaning political tradition of the area. In Donald Trump they saw an honest, reliable figure who could have fixed the several economic, political, and social issues affecting the country. From these interviews emerge rage at the two mandates of Barack Obama, who seemingly worsened race relations in the country and made the United States look weak in the eyes of the world. A pervasive annoyance also tinges the words of these interviewees for not being able to publicly express their faith and their religious identity anymore, without being labeled racist and bigot.

Rather than a direct threat to the material well-being of a group, what is perceived as far more dangerous is the supposed imperilment of status privilege, resulting in heightened authoritarianism on the part of the group feeling threatened. If in intergroup threat we can find the root of the feelings of displacement and resentment displayed by the interviewees, in authoritarianism we can identify the behavioral response to such threat, both at the societal level, in the words of the participants, and at the political one, in the figure of Donald Trump. This chapter points us in the direction of reading Trump’s success as an attempt to address feelings of ethnic and cultural displacement and status-loss resentment. The words of the interviewees let us understand that the fear for the loss of status privilege is real and deeply rooted in their mentality. The out-group that links grievances for race relations to those stemming from loss of status of Christian culture in the country is that of Muslim citizens. Muslim people, moreover, were usually brought up in the discussions as the category of citizens who are granted rights and privileges that Christian people are not, mainly regarding prayer in schools or workplaces.

A strong predictor of whether voters will cast their ballot for the Democrats, or the Republicans seems to be the frequency of church attendance and orthodoxy. However, what Trump’s support on the part of white self-identified Christians has shown is the spread of the category of “Christians in name only,” or those for whom religion is, at best, a mere identity and boundary marker. Also in this case, the voices of a group of Youngstown inhabitants can help the reader make sense of the phenomenon at hand. Religious values and politics do not influence each other only among local-level voters. The intermingling of Christian religion and conservative politics is an element characterizing the United States’ political culture officially and systematically since the end of the 1970s. Allegedly fighting for the soul of the nation since the Supreme Court made abortion legal in the country, the Religious Right’s presence on the national stage is an assured, cyclical phenomenon accompanying every presidential campaign. The long-standing movement cannot hide its foundational paradox: the constant struggle against a supposedly interfering government, coupled with the necessity of working in close contact with vital allies of that government itself.

A powerful rhetorical weapon stands out in the arsenal the Religious Right can count on to fight their ideological battles: the rights talk. In the conservatives’ discourse based on the supposed protection of constitutional individual rights, Christian citizens have become the species endangered by the reckless attacks of the left, the liberals, and all those refusing to adhere to supposedly traditional moral standards. Exploiting concepts such as the freedom to live according to one’s own sincerely held beliefs, surrounded by a virtually universal consensus and guaranteeing a prompt mobilization, the rights talk facilitates the reduction of the political discourse on individual rights, such as those regarding marriage, sexuality, and reproductive health, to a discursive fight. The words of members of prominent Religious Right organizations are illustrative of the detrimental effects of the rights talk as a rhetorical tool crafting a nonexistent war between enemies and defenders of constitutional individual rights.

If the Religious Right is bound in an unofficially sanctioned relationship of mutual support and benefit with the Republican Party, it is in the support granted to Donald Trump by prominent actors and organizations of the movement that it is possible to appreciate the nature of the cooperation between Christian religion and conservative politics in the twenty-first-century United Sates. In an unapologetically shallow and sloganized exploitation of Christian symbols, Trump crafted his peculiar religious discourse, built on a rhetoric of revengeful status reaffirmation, identity politics, ethno-nationalism, and authoritarianism. To grant him the spot of the god-fearing Republican candidate and justify the controversial decision of backing a man characterized by an arguable public moral stature, the supporting discursive apparatus created by the Religious Right is revealing of the outright secular political aims of the movement. Trump compensated the movement by welcoming their attention and invitations at crucial events and basking in the adoration of spiritual and lay leaders.

The Religious Right’s discourse rests on the urgency to address the persecution of Christian citizens in the United States, but an analysis of their words reveals an ideology of ethno-nationalist and authoritarianism befitting the political persona of Trump. This religious rhetoric might have undergone a shift resulting from both the impending loss of majoritarian status in the country on the part of white conservative Christians, and on the movement’s allegiance to the figure of the 45th president. The rhetoric deployed is built on a lexicon rich in war and fight terminology, and those espousing a conservative Christian worldview are portrayed as the victims of an unjust system whose only aim is to eradicate every form of religious experience and expression from every corner of the nation. In this discourse, Donald Trump is the hero of the faithful citizen, and his efforts to protect Christians, Christmas, and religious freedom are recounted via his actions, as well as the merciless comparison with the person who is instead characterized as the archenemy of United States Christians: Barack Obama.

Satisfaction and relief caused by Trump’s presence in the White House emerge from the words of ordinary voters. The change was welcome, tangible, even dramatic, and it didn’t simply involve the political sphere, but the spiritual life of Christian citizens as well. Trump’s election had an uplifting effect on the spirit of citizens who were allegedly stripped of all their powers. One of the reasons of this change lies in Trump’s work of ushering in an era of renewed relevance and power for Christians, by placing people of faith in crucial public offices, such as the Supreme Court. Moreover, Trump suffered from the same apparent speech restrictions as they did, but he was showing them that they need not be worried of political correctness, and that they could express themselves as freely as they wished. The double characterization the President received in his supporters’ discourse is indicative of his portrayal as both the heroic figure that finally gave their identity and culture the supposed preeminent role they deserve within the societal hierarchy, and as the common man who would be able to achieve all the above-listed by merit of his being one of them.

Ever since his official descent into the political field to the cry of “Drain the swamp!”, Trump consistently reiterated his alleged alienation from a Washington, DC, swarming with corrupt politicians. The flaunting of his outsider figure allowed him to stand in stark contrast to his challenger. Despite winning the majority of the popular vote, Clinton was considered by many to be the direct representative of a lineage of professional politician; a category that, in populist discourse, is depicted as the most dangerous antithesis to the will of the sovereign people. The tale of Donald Trump as the protector of Christianity did not last long but was without a doubt one of the most heated political and societal occurrences of the last decades; from the kick-off of a surreal electoral campaign in June 2015 to the act of domestic terrorism with which his supporters protested his defeat in January 2021. The figure of Donald Trump galvanized his supporters, split religious leaders, and caused neighbors and relatives to look at each other with dismay. Although now come to an end, his presidency left the United States scarred and many people still looking for an explanation of how “he” could happen.