In God We Trust
Recently The Atlantic published an editorial about the current U.S. vice president, Mike Pence, and it starts like this: “no man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all.” Aside from being a well-constructed and evocative sentence it also neatly encompasses the spiritual crisis the American religious right has been experiencing since Trump took up residence in the White House.
Historically, the white, religious, conservative voting bloc, often called evangelicals, have been a powerful force affecting U.S. policy. This is due in large part to brilliant televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham and a Republican party mining for votes. Together they weaponized this voting bloc, allowing the religious right an unprecedented influence on the country. But currently, the movement is being faced with a difficult choice: moral righteousness or political influence.
As Trump feverishly reverses everything Obama ever created, irrespective of whether it will help or harm the country, the religious right needs to decide whether it can stomach supporting an accused sexual predator in order to enact pro-life and pro-gun laws (yes, somehow those two are compatible in this religious philosophy). Despite this predicament, it is undeniable that the evangelical right has had a gargantuan impact on American politics and American society in the past decades; they have exerted their authority in everything from Prohibition in the 1920s to the contemporary ‘Muslim-ban”. While it may appear that the evangelical right has their ‘own man’ in the White House under Donald Trump, in reality Trump’s first year in office has only exacerbated the ethical crisis for this powerful voting community.
The only thing the Bible and the constitution have in common is that President Trump has probably never read either of them. However, this has not stopped Trump from using both to their full potential in order to get into the oval office. Trump’s populist and inflammatory rhetoric played perfectly to the classic evangelical battle cry: religious conservatives are persecuted in contemporary America.
Evangelicals, who have consistently been single issue voters, especially in regards to matters like abortion, are adept at voting for politicians with the correct talking points and putting their head in the sand with respect to any other moral failings. Perhaps because of this ability, the self-styled white evangelical ‘moral majority’ which gave Trump a record 81% of their vote (even more than when Reagan was elected) appears to be going morally bankrupt themselves.
Trump has not been demonstrably religious in the past. He is an accused sexual predator, has allegedly had an affair with a porn star, and has used his twitter account as a way to stir resentment everywhere from marginalizing American Muslims to insulting North Korean dictators boasting of nuclear weapons. “The writing was on the wall. In 2016, white evangelicals went from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his or her performance in public office. So much for the Moral Majority.”
Trump appears to be emboldening a darker side of the religious right— one that is not afraid to aggravate the cultural fault lines America lies on. If the current trajectory of the United States is any indication, the evangelical right should perhaps more earnestly consider Mike Pence’s very own words, “it’s a good time to pray for America.”
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