Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
So we’re checking in on all of this with Holly Berkley Fletcher, who covers right-wing Christianity on her Substack, A Zebra Without Stripes. Holly, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So before we get deep into Trump’s latest, can you just explain his relationship to evangelical Christianity—how he’s viewed as a very flawed vessel who’s nonetheless carrying out divine providence to realize Christian nationalist ends, all that?
And I think his appeal, and the Christian nationalists’ appeal, is rooted in their fear of cultural decline, accompanying their longtime sense, that goes back decades and decades, that they are sort of God’s chosen people and God’s chosen nation.
Sargent: And Trump is basically the guy who said, I will do whatever it takes to save the Christian America that you think is slipping away, basically.
Sargent: And as you said, he’s been hijacking long-running trends on the religious right, the move toward Republicans that really kind of took off in the ’80s and now is culminating.
Sargent: So let’s go to Trump’s remarkable moment on CBS. Speaking to CBS’s Ross Douthat, Trump first confirms that he hopes he goes to heaven. Then Trump is asked if he would be able to forgive his enemies in order to pass God’s judgment. The back-and-forth is long, but worth it. Listen.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, then I wouldn’t be real, would I? I mean, if I said to you, sure—the easy answer to that’s yes, I could forgive.
Trump (voiceover): The answer is no. I want to be honest.”
Trump (voiceover): Before the judgment. No, I think they were very bad people. And I dislike—I can use the word hate. I do hate some of my enemies. I think they’ve been terrible. Look what they put me through, the weaponization. I get indicted.
Trump (voiceover): I mean, it’s such an easy answer. All I have to do is say, yes, I can.
Trump (voiceover): That’s my—can I be honest? I probably cannot do that now. Because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.
But it’s a little remarkable for him to talk this way after such a dramatic national repudiation of him, isn’t it?
Again, whenever he puts them on the spot by just, like, countering explicitly a really foundational evangelical Christian belief, like loving your enemies, or repenting, or forgiving, these types of things, it really puts them in a very tough spot and sort of sends them scrambling.
Sargent: I’m going to float a theory, OK, and see what you think of it. I think Trump was essentially giving his evangelical supporters the middle finger in some sense. He knows they didn’t show up in quite the numbers that he needed in this election. We’ll get to that in a sec.
Fletcher: I don’t know that he’s that calculating. I think he’s, you know—again, he usually tells us what he’s thinking. I think he’s long worried about the eternal destination of his soul on some level. He lets that slip a lot of times. So I don’t know if he’s that calculating. But he’s got to be upset with them right now, you know. And we know he sort of lashes out when he’s upset.
Fletcher: I’m shocked, Greg. I’m shocked that you would say that? So yeah, no, I think he’s completely without belief of any kind. I think he’s amoral. He only believes in his own narcissism. And I think he’s been using religious voters this entire time.
They’ve been a very cheap date, and he’s taken advantage.
Fletcher: I think he thinks—I don’t know, sometimes I think he thinks that maybe he won’t ever die. I think he might be that narcissistic.
Well, anyway, a number of leading Christians took issue with this. Pastor Franklin Graham, who’s a leading Trump ally, posted a long response. He said this:
Holly, Franklin Graham didn’t exactly say he was addressing Trump here in that last line, but I think he was. And he’s basically telling Trump, you may not get into heaven, given not just your answer there, but also the state of your soul, Mr. President. What do you make of that?
He’s just an itty-bitty baby Christian and growing in his faith. But when he makes a sort of theological mistake, they often sort of gently correct the record, if not directly him. And so Franklin Graham has done that.
Sargent: Well, Denny Burk, a right-wing pastor and influencer, did say exactly that. He put this on Twitter: “Ross Douthat’s interview with the president is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen. Pray for the president.”
What we mean by that are sort of MAGA evangelical pastor-slash-influencer types who think they are the authority on all things Christianity. And Denny Burk is a well-known name in that world. So I thought that was more pointed than I’ve seen, for sure.
And there’s this right-wing Christianity element to it that’s sort of riding the MAGA train in some sense, but bringing all this religious talk to it. What is that world?
But they’re very much online, and they basically police their corners of the internet and their evangelicalism. They tend to really go after women in particular. One of their favorite targets is historian Kristin Du Mez, whose book Jesus and John Wayne, and now her latest book, Live, Laugh, Love, has been very critical of white evangelicalism. So they’ve gone after her quite a bit.
Sargent: There are these others as well who are sort of a little more in the post-liberal vein. I guess Rod Dreher is one of them. He’s a thinker in that world. He reacted very strongly to Donald Trump’s quotes to Ross Douthat there.
I mean, I think that’s exactly right. And what’s so striking about the Douthat interview is, when Ross Douthat confronts Trump directly on that point, he says to him, why are you so fucking crazy?
Fletcher: Yeah. Well, the answer is, of course, he’s a malignant narcissist, and they can’t take any sort of criticism.
Fletcher: Yeah. And I went and did the sort of basic math, looking at the raw vote numbers as well, to determine whether the actual numbers went down, or if they were just overwhelmed by turnout.
Sargent: Wow.
But comparing to previous midterm exit data in particular, they’re usually about a quarter of the electorate, which is huge. That’s why they’re so influential. They’re only about 13 to 15 percent of the population, but they come out like no other group in our electorate.
And they vote so much in lockstep. That’s why they’re the ultimate electoral prize for the Republicans: you have the combination of overwhelming turnout, overwhelming conformist support, and the immovability.
It looks like in the Senate race, about 5 percent of them actually did cross the aisle and vote for Adam Hamilton, which is not surprising really, because he codes really evangelical. His personal faith, the way he talks about his faith, is much more evangelical than, say, James Talarico’s. His church is the largest church in Kansas and has kind of a megachurch flavor to it, even though it’s technically part of a mainline denomination.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about James Talarico for a second. In this midterm, we saw Democratic candidates seeking to offer an alternative to white evangelical Christianity. James Talarico, obviously, right, running very emphatically on a liberal Christian vision.
Fletcher: Yeah, I think so. I think the importance for Democrats of including these more liberal Christian voices is to create kind of permission structures and comfort with religion. White Christianity has been sort of the driver of a lot of authoritarianism in our history, going back to pro-slavery Christianity and the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement.
And I want to say that the Black church has long been that. The Black church has long been a very strong voice for democracy and justice throughout American history. But unfortunately, religion and race have been so tied up in American Christianity that I do think, and I hate to say this, but white Christians need to see other white Christians putting forth this message. They’re used to not paying attention to the Black church, unfortunately. So kudos to the Black church. They remain a key bulwark for democracy.
Sargent: Well, this story hasn’t been written yet, but the Black church obviously played a very big role in this outcome. The Black church and the Black vote throughout the South was really instrumental in helping to create this enormous outpouring.
How do you see this developing going forward? What’s going to be the story of the Christian right from here on out, in 2028 and so forth?
I think that it’s almost better for their movement and their mobilization to have Democrats in power. So if they can have some Democratic enemies that do some things that they really don’t like—say on abortion, in particular in Texas, for instance—they will be back with a vengeance.
Their ability to rewrite the story, to make themselves the heroes, to never admit they’re wrong—I mean, this is a 200-year tradition, you know, and it is unmatched. I’ve never seen anything like it in our culture. So they will be back.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. Hopefully Democrats can be a bit smart and try to appeal to them, just to peel down those numbers a little bit here and there.
Sargent: That is the key. That’s what we saw. Holly Berkley Fletcher, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Fletcher: Thank you so much.
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