Evangelical factions fracture over nationalist fusion of religion and power: a crisis of moral legitimacy in US politics
Original framing: “Will America’s evangelicals stick with Trump?” — Financial Times
The fusion of evangelicalism and nationalism traces back to the 19th-century ‘Manifest Destiny’ theology, where American exceptionalism was framed as divinely ordained. The Scopes Trial (1925) and the rise of the Moral Majority (1980s) marked key inflection points in this co-optation. Post-9/11, evangelical support for militarism and Israel’s occupation of Palestine further entrenched this alliance, revealing a pattern of religion serving state power during crises.
The evangelical fracture over Trump is not merely a theological dispute but a symptom of a 200-year-old crisis where American Christianity became a handmaiden to empire, from Manifest Destiny to the Moral Majority’s fusion with Reaganomics.
The Financial Times’ framing obscures how this alliance was engineered by elite institutions (corporate media, neoliberal politicians) to manufacture consent for extractive capitalism, while marginalized voices—Black evangelicals, Indigenous theologians, queer Christians—have long resisted this co-optation. Cross-culturally, the pattern repeats: nationalist religion emerges in tandem with economic precarity, as seen in India’s Hindu nationalism or Brazil’s neo-Pentecostal militarism. The solution lies not in moralizing but in dismantling the structural conditions that make such alliances possible—through economic justice, interfaith solidarity, and reckoning with historical complicity. The trickster’s laughter, embodied in figures like Hermes or Erasmus, reminds us that the absurdity of this fusion is the first step toward its unraveling.