During the 2016 Republican campaign, while watching Donald Trump push aside his more religious rivals to vie for the nomination, I posted on the platform then known as Twitter, “If you hate the religious right, don’t worry about the religious right.” Wait until you meet the right wing.”
This maxim has often been quoted by me, and this month it was cited by Compact magazine editor Matthew Schmitz to offer a critique. My passage “captured a widely shared assumption” that Trump’s rise marked “the birth of a secular right driven by white racial grievances.” he wrote But history hasn’t been that way, Schmitz says.
It is now clear that this assumption was wrong. The old religious right may have suffered a fatal blow in 2016. But what took over was not the post-religious racist party that some feared and others expected. On the contrary, Donald Trump received higher approval ratings from minorities than the previous Republican candidate, Mitt Romney. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini points out, between 2012 and 2020, Hispanic support for the Republican Party increased by 19 points, African-American support by 11 points, and Asian-American support by 11 points. Support increased by 5 points. Since Trump came onto the scene, the number of political parties has decreased, not increased. It’s racially polarized.
Religiosity, on the other hand, is a stronger predictor of voting habits. Evangelicals, Catholics, and black Protestants all supported Trump at a higher rate in 2020 than in 2016, even as Trump’s support declined among atheists and agnostics. Experts who once warned that President Trump’s Republican Party was preparing to establish white supremacy are now increasingly likely to condemn his ambitions as “Christian nationalists.” Whatever else one interprets this condemnation, it signifies the recognition that post-religious rights have not been realized.
All of this is drawn from the First Things profile of J.D. Vance, a junior senator from Ohio. Schmitz portrays him as a potential spokesperson for a new religious populism, distinct from the George W. Bush-era religious right, but similarly influenced by Christian faith.
I recommend this article. Conservatism in the Trump era may have a religious dimension, and compared to expectations in 2015 and 2016, the white identitarian dimension of Trump’s political pitch ends up impacting American political alignment. I completely agree with Schmitz that the impact was small. His appeal goes beyond his pan-ethnic and class-based aspects. And President Trump’s transactional approach to culture war issues ultimately paid off more than expected for the religious right, leading to stronger coalitions in 2020 (and perhaps 2024) as Schmitz describes.
However, I have to strongly disagree with Mr. Schmitz when he says that the post-religious right “didn’t happen.” Post-Christian conservatism comes in many forms, and they are clearly more powerful today than they were ten or twenty years ago. As you would expect in a country that has had a Republican majority for almost a year, Christian identification and observance has declined significantly. This man’s personal faith was once described by an astute writer as a form of Norman Vincent Peale-like positive thinking in which the remnants of Christianity “hardened into contempt for paganism.” 10 years by a certain person. (That writer was Schmitz.)
