A decade ago, it would have been difficult to conceive of Donald Trump as a key figure in America’s Christian image of itself. Yet the Religious Right’s support of his candidacy, followed by continued loyalty since he took office despite numerous scandals, has shifted the nation’s traditional boundaries. Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. have not only defended Trump but have cast him as a godsend to the country. While this allegiance has led many critics to decry the apparent hypocrisy and opportunism among white evangelicals, it is just another example of how a certain brand of religiosity and American conservatism have become connected at the hip.
This particular connection between patriotic evangelicalism and the American Right is of recent vintage: The Moral Majority’s ascension to the national stage in the 1980s was dependent on a marriage to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. “This party is our home; this party is where we belong,” Pat Robertson declared at the 1992 GOP Convention. But the attachment between explicit religiosity and conservatism goes back far earlier. Though the framers of America’s federal government sought a distinction between denominational influence and state power—so much so that evangelical observers critiqued the Constitution as a “godless document”—partisans quickly capitalized on the power of religious rhetoric in political debates. Indeed, in the 1790s, when the French Revolution seemed to toss the entire world into tumult, many American ministers and politicians came to envision their nation’s future as intertwined with Christian devotion. The resulting religious nationalism has rarely been challenged since.
In the Age of Revolutions, a period that began with the American Revolution and continued for several decades as revolts rocked both the Americas and Europe, individuals on both sides of the Atlantic were forced to reconsider the relationship between religion, society, and government. And despite the secular achievements of these developments, religion continued to hold sway with many. The famed French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, looked to Moses as the premier example for turning a “national body” into “a political Body” that lived together with stability and peace. Contemporary governments based on secular constitutions were feeble, he argued, while Moses’s was stable. Indeed, Rousseau’s primary critique of “modern nations” is that there are “many lawmakers among them but not a single lawgiver.” In his Social Contact, Rousseau insisted on the necessity of “a purely civil profession of faith” that, though steering clear of particular dogmas, helped instill “sentiments of sociability” shared by the entire nation. Similarly, in Germany, Friedrich Schlegel argued for a symbiotic relationship between religion and politics: “Politics (as the art and science of the community of all human development) is for the periphery what religion is for the centre.” If the two are incongruous, the entire system falls apart. Far from becoming inconsequential, religion only became more crucial to political discourse as nations were recognized as social constructions and expected to evolve in order to match society.