University of Virginia professor of religious studies Charles Marsh on the ‘cosmic entitlement’ and ‘mental torment’ of the white American evangelical mind and why Donald Trump is Christianity’s ‘most influential grace pimp’
As I was watching the January 6th hearings, I kept thinking about your book, and white Christian nationalism and its psychological effects.
I mean, we’ve seen the evangelical commentary industrial complex crank out hundreds, thousands of stories on the strange, dangerous, shocking behavior of white evangelicals over the years, but I don’t think we’ve really understood or tried to understand the psychological shape of that worldview. One of the things that is not typically conveyed in all the stories about evangelical harm—and the dangers of the American evangelical project and its nationalistic or messianic ambitions—is that an evangelical childhood is a total mindfuck. I mean that in a multitudinous sense: it may have a kind of rapacious quality, but it also is exciting and thrilling.
It puts white evangelicals at the center of history, the center of the human story.
This kind of evangelical formation does create a profound sense of entitlement, cosmic entitlement. But I think it also has an effect of obliterating difference or of prescribing political and social strategies that obliterate difference.
Having supreme confidence in one’s intolerance—that sounds like a pretty good definition of Trumpism.
Honestly, I’ve asked myself, “What did Trump offer white evangelicals from a psychological perspective?” Well, he is quite obviously not a man troubled by doubt. Donald Trump is not a man who has any worries about the second coming of Jesus Christ or his eternal salvation. I mean, he may be a slow-moving apocalypse, but he is not worried about the Day of the Lord, right? And so he offers a kind of balm, a temporary balm, to evangelical anxiety of a certain sort. He speaks unapologetically to and beyond our deepest resentments and paranoia and cultural anger. He’s an antidote. Unlike [George] W., who may have tapped into white evangelical, global, militaristic ambitions, Trump is like Christian history’s most influential Grace Pimp. You know, “God not only forgives your prejudices and your nativist, nationalistic attitudes, but God loves them.” These nativistic beliefs have become like sacred dogma.
That’s amazing. I will forever refer to him in my mind as “Donald Trump, the Grace Pimp.”
I mean, I was part of the first fully integrated school system in Mississippi. We imagined that it was our mission as white evangelicals to preserve the purity of the sovereign, sacred South and to preserve the purity of the South’s attendant expressions of purity: the white woman’s body, the sexual body, the body of the church. This Jesus we professed and the idea of the Christian life was very much a projection of these cultural and psychological fears and anxieties.
In my mind, I always think that the number one value of fundamentalist Christianity is a certain conception of purity while the number one value of more mainstream Protestantism is a certain conception of justice or fairness.
Yeah. I mean, we saw race, we saw sexuality, we saw the federal government, we saw civil rights acts as defiling forces that not only would soil our cultural and regional ideals but would wreck us as men and women. It would unsettle us in the same way in which I learned that losing my virginity or losing my purity would bring about a profound and inescapable psychic ruin, that young people who had lost their purity had also lost something central to the integral self, to the self as a coherent functional unity.