Trump’s turn to Christian nationalism
Donald Trump at the Memorial Service for Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona
President Trump’s second State visit to Britain raised a question: how, in a time of democratic decline, should we react to him and to his impact on the wider world? In a frank — and to my mind endearing — interview on the BBC Today programme on September 19th, Sir Max Hastings, the military historian and former editor of the Daily Telegraph, explained why he had actually marched against Trump’s visit at the age of 79. He also acknowledged that, as a private citizen, he did not have the obligations or responsibilities of the Prime Minister or the Royal Family, who must provide all the necessary pomp and flattery in the national interests “in the hope that the crocodile will eat us last”.
The President’s visit stimulated a flurry of attention to the danger to democracy posed by Trump. Far less attention was paid here in Britain to the spectacular five hour long memorial event for Charlie Kirk, Trump’s murdered ally and influential supporter, at the packed Phoenix stadium on Sunday 21 September. Oration after oration, from the President, Vice President and other senior members of the Trump Administration, fused their versions of Christian nationalism with the Trump project. Trump thrives on TV exposure and when he finally spoke for almost an hour his tone was almost avuncular, even Reaganesque. But the President did confess that — in contrast to Kirk’s widow Erika, who forgave her husband’s killer — he hated his opponents or “enemies”.
The dominant message from the carefully crafted tribute to Charlie Kirk — mostly implicit, sometimes explicit — was that here, assembled in pious memory before over 60,000 people, and worldwide, were the Christian leaders of the world, the US government defending the “shining city on a hill”. Here were the chosen representatives of the middle and working class victims of a “satanic” former Federal government, victims all, reflecting on the martyrdom of Kirk, a modern St Stephen, the first Christian martyr. By my own count, at least two speakers made this comparison. As far as anyone knew at the time — no trial has yet taken place — the assassin was a “lone-wolf”, motivated by a personal grievance, but repeatedly “they” were accused of being responsible for the killing. But “they”, of course, encompassed any or all who opposed Trump and the Maga project and who, by implication, rejected Christianity.
It is well known that many white evangelicals are Trump supporters, but this version of the relationship between Christianity and Trumpian politics was of a different order altogether. The two had fused. For five hours, in a country constitutionally requiring a strict division between Church and State, a quasi-State funeral, opening with military fanfare and national anthem, conflated the religious and political. Ayatollah Khomeini might have recognized the synthesis.
Trump’s humour and apparent spontaneity enchant his audiences. His turn to Christian nationalism is strategic as well as striking. But where does this effusion of public piety from the President, Vice President and heads of government departments come from? In Trump’s second term, unlike the first, a thought-through plan has momentum. This plan, attacking “woke” culture, gender diversity, the world of LGBTQ, Islam, globalisation and a rules-based international order, promoting America as saviour of Western civilisation, overlaps with popular feeling. So the question becomes: what are the origins of this wider Trump project?
Academic studies reveal that there are antecedents. When the Clock Broke: Con-Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism (Penguin 2024), by the journalist John Ganz, is one of the best. He argues that the disparate elements of the Trump project were already “on display” in the early 1990s. Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), the libertarian economist, for example, was calling for a stop to “all foreign aid” and “to reach out and whip up the masses directly”. The elements of far right-wing conservatism from the 1990s that Ganz details are brought together by Trump to Make America Great Again, itself an old political slogan. But neither religious beliefs nor Christian nationalism feature in Ganz’s index or text. The decline in democracy, rightly of great concern to academics, does.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, published in April 2023 to synthesise the aims of a hundred conservative organisations, set out an agenda which, on the whole, Trump has been following. And interestingly religion has a place in it. Christian nationalism, promoted by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, founder of the Centre for Renewing America, is part of “the transition” which should prioritise “marriage, family, work, Church, School, volunteering”. Charlie Kirk picked up on this and other ideas, right down to advocating that employers should respect Sabbath rest for their workers.
The President’s speech to the United Nations’ General Assembly on 23 September highlighted elements of Project 25 in inglorious technicolour. It was directed at mustering like-minded populist parties and bringing allies overseas to power. And in the UK that would include Tommy Robinson’s followers and some members of Reform.
Looking back for insights is one way to analyse forthcoming dangers, looking forward is another. In 2018, David Runciman, formerly Professor of international politics and history at Cambridge University, wrote How Democracy Ends (Profile). Trump had begun his first term claiming voter fraud, refusing to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote: “For the first time in [American] history the winner [the result of the Electoral College system] would not accept the result of a presidential election.”
Tackling the cataclysmic possibilities of the 21st century, Runciman’s book is deeply depressing, trying unflinchingly to answer the question it poses. Contexts, Runciman argues, are different and different contexts have different dynamics. As historians discover, origins and causes of events and ideas are not the same thing. He would probably give short shrift to those today who posit an analogy between Kirk’s assassination and the Reichstag fire in 1933, a turning point in Hitler’s rise of tyranny.
Runciman is not interested in antecedents. He is primarily interested in what may lie ahead — a brave ambition. “American democracy is neither cowed nor inattentive enough to allow him to stay in office beyond 2025,” he wrote. Thirteen weeks and counting. Christian nationalism was not clearly on his horizon in 2018 yet its expression at the Kirk funeral was not merely performative and opportunistic. In February 2025 Trump issued Executive Order 14202 Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias with wide remit and an impressive task-force drawn from different government departments.
One of Trump’s fiercest critics, the historian Professor Timothy Snyder (formerly Yale, now Toronto), insists in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) that “history does not repeat but it does instruct”. Snyder’s twenty lessons are, in the main, as valid today as they were eight years ago. Tyrants learned the lesson of the Reichstag fire: “one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission”. In Hannah Arendt’s signature understatement, confirming Snyder’s approach, the lesson for each of us, is: “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander”.
The future of democracy, the resilience of national institutions, of course, depends on enough people having the courage stand up in their defense. Like Max Hastings, citizens of democracies need to act before it is too late. Church leaders need to bestir themselves and, particularly, to counter Christian nationalism. Synder’s little book would make a good, if demanding, gift to young people to prepare them for life in a dangerous world.
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