President Trump and Our Post-Secular Future by Dr. Steve Turley

Author:Dr. Steve Turley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dr. Steve Turley
Published: 2019-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

President Trump and Our Post-Secular Future

CHAPTER 4

President Trump and the Global Religious Right

By now we are all too familiar with the refrains resounding from the mainstream media that celebrated prematurely the inevitable landslide victory of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. One of my favorites was from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who predicted confidently a few weeks prior to the election that Trump would lose the election and the Republican Party would be destroyed. Zakaria went on to morally denounce what he called ‘white America’ and their support of ending mass immigration and preserving America’s Christian heritage.

Along with such ridicule and denunciation were comparably disparaging remarks about the so-called Religious Right throughout the mainstream media. Headlines before the election such as “How the religious right embraced Trump and lost its moral authority,” “Donald Trump made the Religious Right implode in less than a week,” and “The Religious Right’s Devotion to Donald Trump will End the Movement as We Know It,” confidently and all-too gleefully asserted the death of the defenders of traditional moral values with the demise of Trump’s candidacy.

The irony of course is that the electoral results on November 8 served as the occasion for the humiliation of these prognosticators and pundits. Far from imploding, the Religious Right made up over 30 percent of the voting electorate.{iv} According to the Pew Research organization, white evangelical Christians voted for Trump by an utterly overwhelming margin, 81 percent to Clinton’s 16 percent. And Catholic voters, too, supported Trump over Clinton by a 23-point margin, 60 percent to 37 percent.{v}

What accounts for the media’s fallacious and erroneous coverage? Among many other things, the media largely failed to recognize that Trump and the Christian Right faced a common enemy: globalists and globalization. Thus, while the media were fixated on the discrepancy between the traditional values of conservative Christians and Trump’s moral indiscretions, they overlooked the common globalizing concerns that both traditionalists and Trump shared.

Globalization is characterized as a worldwide social and economic system comprised of a capitalist economy, telecommunications, technology, and mass urbanization. It has been argued that such economic and technological dynamics have the power to arrest control of national economies away from totalitarian projects such as the former Soviet Union and communist China while simultaneously expanding economic growth and prominence among capitalistic nations.

However, what is crucial to understand is that built into globalization processes is what scholars have termed detraditionalization, or various mechanisms by which local customs and traditions are relativized to wider economic, scientific, and technocratic forces. It is no wonder then, that, beginning in the 1990s, representatives from the Religious Right began to see their domestic struggle with the ascendance of secular lifestyle values in far more globalist terms. Already in 1999, Harold O.J. Brown of the conservative Christian think tank, the Howard Center, delivered a speech at the Second World Congress entitled “Globalization and the Family,” where he explained the relationship between globalization and changing social relations:

Globalization is the concept or ideal that tells us not that small is beautiful but that small is pitiful and out of date.

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