Donald Trump and the Past and Future of the Religious Right
摘要
No sooner had Donald Trump announced his run for the Republican nomination for president in the summer of 2015 than political pundits began to argue that Trump’s success would mean the end of the Religious Right. A latecomer to the Republican Party with few conservative credentials, Trump also had a spotty personal life and an intemperate personality that seemed to make him an unacceptable candidate for religious conservatives. That Mormon and Catholic voters largely rejected Trump during the Republican primaries while evangelicals gradually, if somewhat begrudgingly, grew to support him only seemed to strengthen the arguments that the Religious Right was cracking apart. For forty years, conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons had largely voted en masse for Republican presidential candidates, but the splintering brought about by Trump’s rise suggested that this political trend had come to an end. However, Trump’s eventual victory, ensured in part by his winning a majority of Catholic, evangelical, and Mormon voters, repudiated this notion, even as it still raised questions about the nature of the Religious Right in the twenty-first century. In the end, Trump’s unexpected rise to the Republican nomination and his surprising win of the presidency raised real questions about the interfaith political strategies of the Religious Right—what they look like today and how we have understood them historically. Rather than signaling the end of the Religious Right, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and victory highlighted the Religious Right’s history of division and disunity even in moments of political victory. His ensuing presidency, the 2020 election loss, and his 2024 reelection reinforced much of the same. Yet that history has been overshadowed by a scholarly narrative that emphasizes the Religious Right as a monolithic power operating in relative harmony. As Donald Trump upended many prevailing notions about American politics and society, one of his most significant contributions was how he disrupted some of the most persistent myths about the Religious Right.