Trump presidency signaling rollback of secularism or rise of irreligious right?

Both supporters and opponents of Donald Trump see his election as signaling a changing of the guard in American politics and culture beyond that of his own proposed policies, even if both camps also share some uncertainty about the contours of those changes. When it comes to the role of religion in the new politics, there is uncertainty in spades, with some observers seeing a new role for traditional religion and others arguing that Trump himself embodies a “post-Christian” right. In his recent column in the New York Times (November 17), Ross Douthat writes that the post-Cold War consensus on what democracy, liberalism, and progress mean has been broken by both populist politics on the right and “wokeism” on the left. Without a mainstream of trusted institutions, such as the media, there is no “cultural forcing mechanism to make the radical and reactionary forces go away…We’re experiencing a more radical kind of informational fracture, with a variety of personalized info-bubbles and a much greater mystery to movements in public opinion and belief.”

    Former President of the United States Donald Trump     speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point     Action Conference at the Palm Beach County     Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida (© 2023     Gage Skidmore | Flickr).

Another pattern Douthat sees unfolding is the “leaving behind [of] a world where social liberalism is always at the vanguard, where the expression of cultural individualism is assumed to be identical with human progress.” While these forces are not about to disappear, there is “going to be a strong demand for alternative visions and strong selective pressure favoring communities that figure out some kind of hack or adaptation or escape from the individualist cul-de-sac…These hacks will include a turn to some forms of traditional religion: the dynamics of the 21st century will favor beliefs over secularism, Orthodox Jews over their modernized coreligionists, the Amish over their modern neighbors, ‘trads’ of all kinds over more lukewarm kinds of spirituality.” Douthat expects traditionalism to be in “competition with transhumanism,” the quest for radical life extension. “These are strange visions,” he adds, “but like the more radical political possibilities, they exist already on the fringes of our common culture and they have a special potency among the people (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) trying to engineer our technological future.” Meanwhile, in the left-wing magazine Jacobin (October), Dustin Guastella sees more secularism and a kind of paganism emerging on the political right than traditional religious inspiration.

Others have written about the secularization of the right, but Guastella gives names and faces to the youthful key players who are leading conservatives to “crank up the zealotry while abandoning even a nominal Christian commitment to compassion and love of the victim, the neighbor, the immigrant, and the poor.” Three of the most “viral anti-Christian rightists—Curtis Yarvin, Richard Hanania, and Costin Alamariu (better known by his pseudonym, Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP) all evince a disdain for the Christian emphasis on care for the weak, universalism, and equity. Far from endorsing Christofascism, some of the most influential figures on the hard right seem to hate Christianity.” Guastella argues that “these irreligious voices will continue to shape conservative thought. Indeed, in the coalition between gleefully chauvinistic Chads and conservative religious ‘trads’—an alliance perfectly reflected in both the Trump-Pence and Trump-Vance tickets—the Chads are the future. Trump himself seems to realize this.” Recently, when asked what he made of the Democrats’ charge that Republicans are “weird,” he answered, “Not about me,” and said the label applied to Vance. Guastella adds that the popularity of these anti-Christian conservatives coincides with the growth of the “nones.” Just as the decline of unions and union participation led to a more tribalistic and fragmented left, devolving into identity politics, he concludes that the drop in involvement in religious institutions and the loss of a spirit of cooperation and community are breeding social isolation and a cynical spirit.

(Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/)