“How Donald Trump is Making Religion Great Again”
The most iconic photo of Inauguration 2025 may be the Tech Bros — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook — accompanying President Trump at Washington’s St. John’s church for Sunday services.
It was a stark contrast to President Biden’s conspiring in 2021 with Big Tech to censor dissent on COVID lab leaks and lockdowns.
And while derided as opportunist obedience by simple-minded critics, the iconic moment may reflect a profound inflection point in American culture.
As leading British historian Tom Holland argues, the West’s unparalleled success over the past three centuries is directly attributable to religion – in particular, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the earlier Hebrew prophets that helped inform it.
It was the Reformation that singularly unshackled the common man from the medieval tyranny of monarchs and Roman popes which, in turn, led to the Western concepts of liberty and individual rights on which the US was modeled.
The Reformation’s “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” egalitarian concept of individual liberty, argues Holland, birthed modernity: The enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions, the French and American revolutions, abolition of slavery and civil rights movements and nearly every other enduring idea that lifted humanity out of poverty and oppression which had been ubiquitous since antiquity.
But since the 1960s, faith has been under attack by the pseudo-intellectual secular theologians of the faculty lounge left who argued that institutional religion was anachronistic, sectarian, patriarchal, or otherwise oppressive.
As intellectual descendants of Franz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse — forerunners to the anti-Western left — these academics unsheathed new pedagogies of deconstructionism (getting rid of old ideas and institutions) not unlike Chairman Mao’s effort to rid mid-century China of the “four olds.”
This secular liturgy eventually formed the ideological basis of the post-modern progressive left: secure borders are masquerading bigotry; a new multibillion-dollar for-profit industry marketing irreversible gender-altering drugs and surgeries to minors, often without parental consent or proper scientific backing (notwithstanding a cleric’s recent chiding of Trump), is somehow enlightened; equal opportunity must be replaced with equal results among identity groups (“equity”); and that the most persecuted and slaughtered ethnic minority in history — Jews — should have no refugee, ancestral homeland because they are too “white-adjacent.”
Little of this abided by the common sense of Americans, nor withstood empirical scrutiny. But, as both myself and sociologist Musa al Gharbi have detailed, these luxury beliefs served to enhance the social capital of self-dealing intellectual elites that pushed them.
The decline of faith also coincided with the breakdown of trust in institutions, the rise of cultural nihilism, the dissolution of the family, polarization, and dramatic increases in isolation, anxiety, and mental disorders.
And this is the decadence that author Ross Douthat identifies as a marker of cultural exhaustion and civilizational decline. And it’s what fuels much of Trump’s populism.
Happiness expert Arthur Brooke reports that 60% of white progressive women under 30 have some form of mental disorder.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt documents how the new woo-wooism of post-modernism, identity narcissism, and social media addiction is rewiring young minds and accelerating widespread unhappiness and dysfunction.
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Pretty bad article with lots of interpretations and not facts. History is an ebb and flow of power relationships. People under dictatorship will always seek ways to change that power order and find freedom for themselves. Slaves never ask for more enslavement! Religion may have become the power base in society that bred revolt against the feudal oligarchs of that era but it still demanded totalitarian control of the people, It was within that cultist, rigid and highly corrupt structure that a schism formed which demaned more independence expressed in the Protestant Reformation. And while ideas develop from the contradictions of conditions it does not mean this is not a benefit. This article seems to come from the place of supporting rigid hierarchical structures with total obedience of the people. To even claim that religion is making a come back and it is opposing intellectual acumen is a purely supremacist, fascist concept.
The one thing about such social structures is that people are put into a non-thinking, passive state where they only have to follow someone else’s dictates and life will be good–even when it is not and cannot be beneficial for the development of people with the right to make choices about their own life free from judgement and punitive attacks.
What is missing is a loss of understanding what it means to live in a pluralist society with mutual respect and acceptance despite differences. The standards of human shared living are what seems to have gotten lost. Values such as personal responsibility for the harm done to others is lacking as empathy is not longer a skill or value. One does not need a church to teach this. And this article had to throw in a bone for Israel which is also a distraction, a strictly political lobbying point. Jews are also not the most persecuted people in history; there have been many other groups and Jews were just as much part of the fray perpetrating violence as they were recipients. Today there is a
State created with the support of white, surpremacist western States that imposes a foreign group into other people’s land and was always based on ethnic cleansing and genocide which we watch daily as it happens and it is American tax money promoting this all for geopolitical power–religion having nothing to do with other than the shield created to hide the real motives. It was white western, European people who happened to be Jewish that created Zionism in the 19c with the current colonial settler ideology of the day and they just wanted their piece of the pie. Remember, zionism is a political ideology, not a religion. It deserves scrutiny just as any other ideology and how a State manifests this ideology is absolutely open to criticism and rejection. As many Jews in the US note, Jews have never been so safe and economicly successful as they are in the US. However, the propaganda of Zionists, both Jewish and Christian would have you believe otherwise. Instead we can look at all the other form of bigotry that exist and the harm created from the very beginning of this settler colonial project called the US. The genocide against the Native Americans here has never stopped for 400 yrs! The racism which killed several million kidnapped Africans and then enslaved the survivors of the Middle Passage who died/were worked to death/lynched/re-ends laved under the 13th Amendment are some of the other US implemented persecution and genocidal programs of the US. Anti-semitism does exist but it is way over used as a cover to excusing some of the vilest bigotry and theft of land and resources we have ever seen. More religions is not the answer but a re-education of the human values of this society is well overdue.