By occupation, Donald Trump is a salesman. In 2015, he shifted from selling products and condominiums bearing the Trump label to selling Trump directly: himself. And he has proved to be very good at it.
One of the main pitches he makes when selling himself is to present Donald Trump as a bulwark against the world’s evils. To a general population, that means that he focuses on how Democrats and President Biden and the media and communists and whoever are hellbent on uprooting American traditions and values. Every action is offered as a step toward the apocalypse, even as the apocalypse remains stubbornly distant from Americans’ daily lives.
To a religious audience, this presentation is more potent. A struggle between good and evil over the fate of the world is essential to many religious traditions and certainly to the right-wing evangelical Protestants to whom Trump most often tries to appeal. So when speaking to Christian conservatives — as Trump did on Thursday evening — the apocalyptic rhetoric and warnings of imminent doom carry an additional weight. Especially when Trump’s focus is on the threat to Christianity itself.
Trump’s speech carried familiar doomsdayism. The audience was told, for example, that the whoevers had “unleashed mobs of foreign jihadists to praise Hamas in our streets — they’re praising Hamas while they slander law-abiding Americans as domestic terrorists.” They were told that there existed legislation allowing newborn babies to be killed in an extension of abortion rights. They were informed that a second Trump administration would “take back our education system from the communists and the freaks that are destroying it.” The “freaks” here presumably include those advocating the “transgender insanity” he mentioned in the next sentence.
But his pitch was focused centrally on the need for Christians to rally around him and his candidacy.
“How any Christian can vote for a Democrat — Christian, or person of faith, a person of faith — how you can vote for a Democrat is crazy,” he mused at one point. “It’s crazy. They’ve got to stop.”
After all, he said later, Christians were under attack from the left. It was something he pledged to stop.
“I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias. It’s become a very big term anti-Christian bias. Not believable that you have a term like that, is it? When you think about it, it’s like, where did that come from? And it’s very, very recent phenomena,” he said. “Its mission will be to investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America.”
Where it came from, of course, is the evolution of the backlash against America’s declining religiosity — an evolution to which Trump himself has eagerly contributed.
The decline itself isn’t new. In 1976, Tom Wolfe wrote about the emergence of the “Me” generation, observing that, “since the late 1950s both the Catholic Church and the leading Protestant denominations had been aware that young people, particularly in the cities, were drifting away