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Opinion | The Americanization of Religion


When Paula White-Cain, a television preacher and self-help author, emerged as Trump’s key spiritual advisor in 2016, Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore tweeted that White was “a quack and recognized as a heretic by every Orthodox Christian, of any tribe.” If Moore is speaking out for orthodoxy against heresy, in Trump’s time heresy is the stronger party: White issues his call to take office, Moore becomes a lightning rod among Baptists– Southern headlines for his anti-Trump stance and the idea that Christian conservatism should clear moral or doctrinal standards for its leaders has passed away.

While Trumpism is being fueled by right-wing heretics, Trump-era liberalism is finally being infected by paganism to a degree that even I could not have foreseen. The idea of ​​sobriety did not appear in “Bad Religion,” coming before a new wave of activism on campus, before Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and the age of diversity-equity inclusion. But the “Great Awakening” is a perfect example of the spiritual energy of Christianity being severed from mainstream belief – a version of Protestant revivalism that stripped away Protestant dogmas. , yet retains a fervor, an eloquence of conversion and confession and moral conversion, sometimes frantically pushing to remove evil and uncleanness.

Of course, social justice progressivism has a lot of influence. But it must be understood in part as a spiritual descendant of Puritanism, seizing the seat of Puritan power (old Protestant strongholds of the Ivy League and Northeast base), adjusting to the old spirit of moral perfectionism into a new set of problems and requirements.

So both to the right and to the left, the national framework of heretics still seems to be useful. But then, the question and challenge to my thesis now is exactly how far the decline of Christianity can go before a term like “heretic” is no longer analytically relevant. . Because at some point, perhaps, the influence of Christianity is merely genealogical, and you have to credit the spiritual experimenters who have reached distinct religious territory.

The core of Christian practice and belief in this country seems relatively resilient. But the idea of ​​a “country of heretics” has been embraced by many Americans with a loose relationship with Christianity – Christmas and Easter-goers who grew up with at least some ideas about the doctrine of faith. And it is those with loose links that have split the most in recent years, further diminishing the link between Christianity and its possible rivals or successors.

Although waking is a variant of the Protestant social gospel, it is clearly the most Christianized form; It’s fun to find allies in the Christian churches, but the spiritual projects themselves are more likely to involve the upliftment of indigenous, pre-Christian spirituality.

One prominent development of the Trump era was the emergence of a self-consciously post-Christian right – a Nietzschean or neopagan tendency, very online rather than actually politically significant, but still a a non-Christian novelty, and not a welcome one.

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