In the US, the immediate crisis is the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the strong conservative Christian support for Trump, which continues to this day. It went to a whole new level when he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and was determined not to leave the White House, and then helped to trigger a violent attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. And now in his campaign for the 2024 election, he’s speaking in openly authoritarian ways. Some statements are even more alarming than things that he has said in the past. So you have a uniquely dangerous politician in the history of American politics, but you also have this stubbornly loyal base of support for this man from conservative Christians, and that is what I’m trying to explore in the book. What’s the secret? Why the support? And I think I’ve got it pretty well figured out. And so that’s what the book does, while also challenging it and saying: We got to do better than that.
My hypothesis is that the constant liberalizing and pluralizing of American culture has evoked a rather fierce reaction on the part of a chunk of the population that you could put at maybe 25%, mostly conservative Catholics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and maybe some people of other religions too. The initial strategy of the politically active reactionaries was to re-evangelize the country through church work and then to partner with the Republican Party to elect politicians like Ronald Reagan who would advance their moral agenda. And then, in turn, the evangelicals, the fundamentalists, and so on would support Reagan and the Republican Party. That’s the kind of traditional Christian right strategy that goes back to the 70s. My assessment is that Trump, in one sense, was just the latest product of that partnership. But in another sense, when they followed him right over the cliff to insurrection and authoritarianism, you’re talking about an entirely new stage. So you’ve got the reactionary part, the authoritarian part, which is resistant to social changes that they don’t like and so are galvanized by the authoritarianism of a man like Trump, and you have a percentage of people who are willing to sacrifice democracy to get what they want politically.