Opinion | Is There a Post-Religious Right?

During the 2016 Republican marketing campaign, watching Donald Trump shoulder his well beyond his extra pious rivals for the nomination, I remarked on the platform then often known as Twitter: “If you dislike the non secular proper, wait until you meet the post-religious proper.”

This apothegm has typically been quoted again to me, and this month Compact journal’s editor, Matthew Schmitz, quoted it to be able to provide a critique. My one-liner “captured a extensively shared assumption” that Trump’s rise signaled “the delivery of an irreligious proper animated by white racial grievance,” he wrote. But that’s not how historical past has performed out, Schmitz stated:

It is obvious now that this assumption was fallacious. The previous non secular proper could have suffered a deadly blow in 2016. But what succeeded it was not a post-religious racialist party, as some feared and others hoped. On the opposite: Donald Trump attracted greater charges of help from minorities than had the earlier Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. As the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has famous, between 2012 and 2020, Hispanic help for the G.O.P. elevated by 19 factors, African American help by 11, and Asian American help by 5. Since Trump’s emergence, the events have turn into much less — no more — racially polarized.

Meanwhile, religiosity has turn into a extra highly effective predictor of voting habits. Evangelicals, Catholics, and Black Protestants all supported Trump at greater charges in 2020 than in 2016, at the same time as Trump’s help fell amongst atheists and agnostics. Pundits who as soon as warned that Trump’s G.O.P. was getting ready to ascertain white supremacy now usually tend to denounce its ambitions as “Christian nationalist.” Whatever else one makes of this cost, it implies an acknowledgment {that a} post-religious proper has did not materialize.

All that is drawn from a First Things profile of J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, whom Schmitz portrays as a possible spokesman for a brand new non secular populism, distinct from the George W. Bush-era non secular proper however no much less influenced by Christian religion.

I like to recommend the piece, and I completely agree with Schmitz that Trump-era conservatism can have a spiritual face and that relative to expectations in 2015 and 2016, the white-identitarian aspect of Trump’s political pitch has ended up having much less affect on American political alignments than the pan-ethnic and class-based facets of his enchantment. And Trump’s transactional strategy to culture-war points ended up delivering extra for the non secular proper than might need been anticipated, yielding the stronger alignment in 2020 (and doubtless 2024) that Schmitz describes.

But when Schmitz says a post-religious proper has “did not materialize” I’ve to strongly disagree. There are varied types of post-Christian conservatism which can be clearly stronger right now than they had been 10 or 20 years in the past — as you’ll anticipate in a nation the place Christian affiliation and observance have considerably declined and the place the Republican Party has been dominated for nearly a decade by a person whose private religion a perspicacious author as soon as described as a type of Norman Vincent Peale-ian constructive considering wherein the Christian residue has “curdled into pagan disdain.” (That author was Schmitz.)