The gospel according to Trump
The presidential hopeful has in fact been using his bully pulpit throughout this American election season to attack religious minorities of all stripes
It is no secret that Donald Trump’s ruinous rise in the Republican presidential primaries has been powered, in large part, by a naked agenda of religious division and fear-mongering — an agenda that likely informed his speech on Sunday at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia. But while his anti-Muslim provocations have rightly drawn the largest share of public outrage, Trump has, in fact, been using his bully pulpit throughout this American election season to attack religious minorities of all stripes. He deploys this tactic on the campaign trail whenever it suits his political purposes and his religious digs and dog whistles are often so cartoonishly retro that they sound being delivered by a billionaire Archie Bunker.
In the ‘Gospel According to Trump’, there is only one blessedly normal, all-American faith: Mainline Protestant Christianity. The Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists — those believers who once made up the United States’ midcentury religious mainstream — are Trump’s “chosen ones”. He regards their customs and values as essentially as American as apple pie, while all other faith communities, even other forms of Christianity, seem to rest somewhere on a spectrum from exotic to sinister. Take Trump’s bizarre speech last month to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he kept inexplicably returning to the same well-worn tropes that anti-Semites have been using for a century. “I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” he proclaimed to the crowd. Later, he signalled defiant distance from the Republicans by informing them: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”
While speaking to a crowd of Florida supporters in October, Trump publicly hinted that there might be something nefarious about Ben Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist faith. “I’m Presbyterian,” Trump said. “Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”
Target demographic
More recently, he tried to blunt Ted Cruz’s surge in the Iowa polls by using the senator’s Cuban heritage to exoticise his Christian faith. “I do like Ted Cruz,” Trump said at a rally in Des Moines, “but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
There is an absurdity in seeing Trump trying to play the role of 2016 religion referee. This is a man whose sincerest praise for the Bible is to deem it even better than his bestselling book The Art of the Deal. But Trump’s religious posturing is not about theology, it’s about branding — and if his religious worldview seems impossibly dated, that’s by design. His entire message, right down to his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, is rooted in a gnawing nostalgia and economic anxiety that grips much of the country’s white working class. Trump’s target demographic is not America’s most devout, but its most anxious and aggrieved.
By focusing his rhetorical firepower largely on minority faiths that have grown in size and influence in the US over the past 60 years — displacing the old Protestant monopoly — Trump is stoking a tribal hostility toward those who worship differently.
It is the same visceral force that animated the witch trials in Salem and set fire to the crosses in front of black churches.
Encouragingly, recent elections have suggested there’s room in the presidential arena to showcase America’s growing religious diversity. Yet, even before he became a candidate, Trump seemed sceptical that a new era of ecumenical progress might be seeping into US politics. When I interviewed him in 2014, he argued vigorously — despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary — that Mitt Romney lost in 2012 because many Christian voters were put off by his alien faith. Eventually, I had to interrupt him. “I’m actually Mormon,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. “You are?” He promptly recalibrated, telling me about a Jewish friend (“great guy, rich guy”) who had moved to Utah and fallen in love with the local creedal breed. “You know,” he said, “people don’t understand the Mormon thing. I do. I get it. They are great people!” But alas, not everyone was so enlightened as Trump. “There was a religious undercurrent there,” he told me, then hastened to add, “unfortunately.”