During the 2016 Republican campaign, watching Donald Trump shoulder his way past his more pious rivals for the nomination, I remarked on the platform then known as Twitter: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”
This apothegm has often been quoted back to me, and this month Compact magazine’s editor, Matthew Schmitz, quoted it in order to offer a critique. My one-liner “captured a widely shared assumption” that Trump’s rise signaled “the birth of an irreligious right animated by white racial grievance,” he wrote. But that’s not how history has played out, Schmitz said:
It is clear now that this assumption was wrong. The old religious right may have suffered a fatal blow in 2016. But what succeeded it was not a post-religious racialist party, as some feared and others hoped. On the contrary: Donald Trump attracted higher rates of support from minorities than had the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has noted, between 2012 and 2020, Hispanic support for the G.O.P. increased by 19 points, African American support by 11, and Asian American support by 5. Since Trump’s emergence, the parties have become less — not more — racially polarized.
Meanwhile, religiosity has become a more powerful predictor of voting habits. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Black Protestants all supported Trump at higher rates in 2020 than in 2016, even as Trump’s support fell among atheists and agnostics. Pundits who once warned that Trump’s G.O.P. was preparing to establish white supremacy now are more likely to denounce its ambitions as “Christian nationalist.” Whatever else one makes of this charge, it implies an acknowledgment that a post-religious right has failed to materialize.
All this is drawn from a First Things profile of J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, whom Schmitz portrays as a potential spokesman for a new religious populism, distinct from the George W. Bush-era religious right but no less influenced by Christian faith.
I recommend the piece, and I entirely agree with Schmitz that Trump-era conservatism can have a religious face and that relative to expectations in 2015 and 2016, the white-identitarian side of Trump’s political pitch has ended up having less influence on American political alignments than the pan-ethnic and class-based aspects of his appeal. And Trump’s transactional approach to culture-war issues ended up delivering more for the religious right than might have been expected, yielding the stronger alignment in 2020 (and probably 2024) that Schmitz describes.
But when Schmitz says a post-religious right has “failed to materialize” I have to strongly disagree. There are various forms of post-Christian conservatism that are clearly more potent today than they were 10 or 20 years ago — as you would expect in a nation where Christian affiliation and observance have substantially declined and where the Republican Party has been dominated for almost a decade by a man whose personal faith a perspicacious writer once described as a form of Norman Vincent Peale-ian positive thinking in which the Christian residue has “curdled into pagan disdain.” (That writer was Schmitz.)
