When Trump was elected President, people, for the second time in a row, thought "oh he won't be so bad".
He's been as bad as expected, and worse.
A large segment of the politically aware American demographic is wondering, nearly every day, "what on Earth is going on here" as the Trump administration does something odd day after day.1 A second group, his core MAGA adherents, ignore the oddities and assume that a lot of the nonsense about lurking Marxist must be true, and assume that Trump is doing what needs to be done to save the Republic.
Well, Trump is demented, which explains a lot. But there's something else going on. And that something else is Christian Nationalism with a strong Protestant Dominionist focus.
Round Head flag, English Civil War. Takinginterest01, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. There were several varieties of this standard, as there was no standardized Parliamentarian flag.
Trump himself isn't really a sharp enough tool in the shed to do what's occurring. quite frankly, and at any point in his life, he probably wouldn't be interested enough to care anyway, as long has people are praising him and he seems to be getting what he wants.. To the extent he has any deep thoughts at all, and he likely doesn't, many of his real thoughts and desire run contrary to much of what's occurring. Trump, after all, is nothing much more than a wealthy playboy. He likes money, women, and has bad taste. M'eh.
But Trump was savvy enough to know he needed muscle and backing to get into office and moreover back into office. The intellectual muscle has been provided by far right populist, Protestant Evangelicals and their fellow travelers, the latter of which will live to regret ever being associated with the movement. Trump supporting Catholics are going to come to particularly regret traveling on this bus.
We've often said here that the United States is a Protestant country, culturally. It's so Protestant that people who aren't Protestant often are, culturally. Right now we have a really good example of that in the form of Stephen Wright, who is Jewish by heritage and perhaps by practice, but who in views is a raging Calvinist. It's pretty easy to find run of the mill, and even some non run of the mill, Catholics in the Trump fold who likewise culturally looked not to Rome, and not even to Luther, but to John Calvin.
The very first religiously significant group of English colonist in North America were religious dissenters, something very much worth remembering. The Puritans were Calvinists, not members of the dominant and official religion of England, the Church of England. Their landing in 1620 came in the context of an ongoing struggle in England over what England was to be, in terms of its faith. The Anglicans were in control at the time the Puritans left for North American shores and they were also suppressed for their religious radicalism in their native land. England was now solidly Protestant, sort of, with latent Catholicism seemingly having been beaten down with the peasants losing the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, but whether England would be radically Calvinist or sort of looking back at its Catholicism with the Church of England had not been determined. That question would provide much of the background to the English Civil War in which the parliament sought to depose an Anglican king, while being lead by a Calvinist who would be declared the Lord Protector. Ultimately, Calvinism didn't sit well with the English, and while parliament won the war, the crown would be restored and playboy king seated on the throne, who would convert to Catholicism sometimes prior to his death.
Calvinist would flee to North America upon the crown being restored.
The early English colonies in North America were frequently religiously intolerant. They were commonly sectarian and aggressively enforced the religion of their founders. The Puritans did not come to North America for religious freedom in the manner in which so often portrayed in grade school when I was a kid, but rather to avoid suppression under the crown and enforce their version of Christianity where they lived. People living in Puritan colonies had mandatory worship requirements at the local Calvinist church. It's not as if, if you lived in one, you could sit that out, or for that matter declare that you were a Catholic and would worship elsewhere.
Mary Dyer, a Quaker, was executed in Massachusetts for preaching her variant of Protestantism in that colony.
Christian Dominionist look back to the Puritans and the 1600s for their concept of what the state should be like. Not to the 1770s to 1790s. They may not all do so consciously, but they do. When they say that the United States is a Protestant nation, they mean its a Puritan one.
We all know, of course, that 1st Amendment protects the freedom of worship. That text states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
When that law, and that's what it is, was added to the Constitution in 1791 the infant United States was much different that the loose group of sectarian colonies of the 1600s. Indeed, the mother country itself was much different than the one that had fought the English Civil War. Having endured that experience, and with its own history of sectarianism, what the drafters of the Bill of Rights wanted was to avoid there being a Church of the United States, which if it had been created, would have been a branch of the Anglican Church. The amendment protected the right of various people to worship as they saw fit, or not at all. Modern conservatives have decried the Courts for decades about this amendment being misinterpreted, but it isn't. The Bill of Rights inserted religious tolerance ito the law.
Be that as it may, there's no doubt that the country remained a Christian nation. Other religions made an early appearance, setting aside native religions, very early on, but they were a distinct minority. A Jewish house of worship existed in New York, for example, as early as 1654. But overall, non Christian religions were practiced to a very small degree. And early patterns of settlement meant that the sectarian nature of the colonies continued to reflect itself into the early 1800s, and even into the mid 19th Century, although patterns if immigration began to heavily impact that, particularly the immigration of Catholics, who were largely detested by everybody else for a very long time. Be that as it may, American culture reflected Protestant Christianity well into the 20th Century and still does today.
This began to break down, as so much in our modern culture has, in the 1960s with the Baby Boom generation. Baby Boomers, or at least many of them, outright rejected many of the basic tenants of Christianity and brought in the really loose cultural Christianity, although with a leftward tilt, that we see today. One religion was a good as another, Christianity was basically "be nice". The warnings that St. Paul had given in his letters were ignored.
Things decayed.
Enter (Evangelical) Christian Dominionism.
In 1975 Evangelicals Loren Cunningham and Bill Bright had a meeting in which they claimed to receive a divine message related to the culture. They were shortly thereafter joined in their infant movement by Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer.. They claimed a mandate from the Devine to invade and achieve dominion over the "seven spheres" of society identified as family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. The New Apostolic Reformation is informed by this movement. And this is the Evangelical wing that is active in the Trump Administration and which have heavily influenced Christian Nationalist.
Dominionist, no matter what they may say, are not democratic. They are part of the Illiberal Democracy movement, and in the United States, they are the very core of it. Believing that the culture has been hopelessly corrupted in the seven spheres, they do not seek to convert by example, but to seize control of the culture, force a reformation of it, and bring about a Puritan nation on the model, sort of, of the original Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Puritan flag of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This heavily aligns with the concept of Illiberal Democracy. You can have a democracy, the Dominionist and Illiberal Democrats hold, as long as it fully accepts the predominant cultural world outlook. No countering that is allowed.
Now, something careful observers will note is that this movement is now all over the European world. And some of the early Christian Nationalist are most definitely not Evangelical Christians. R. R. Reno is a convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church. Patrick Dineen is a Catholic, although he's notably moved away from the Republican Party and is now openly part of the American Solidarity Party. Rod Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism and then converted to Orthodoxy. He's also now moved on from the Republican Party to the American Solidarity Party. The head of the Heritage Foundation, which is responsible for Project 2025, is Kevin Roberts, who is Catholic. And of course, J. D. Vance is a Catholic convert.
How do we make sense of this?
Well, one way in which we can makes sense of this, although not in the case of Dineen, Reno or Dreher, is to admit that a large segment of Catholics are heavily Protestantized, although this notably excludes younger Catholics and recent converts who most definitely are not. Gen. Jones Catholics and Gen. X Catholics were often very poorly catechized and therefore you can find quite a few who have gravitated to the far political right and who will state very Evangelical views of things which they have picked up from it, sometimes theological views that Catholics don't hold at all. Boomer Catholics went through the entire Spirit of Vatican Two era and are sometimes pretty beat up by it, and the younger ones experienced the Kennedy betrayal of religious adherence which caused many Catholics to follow suit. Some Boomer Catholics were on the very liberal Church end as well to the irritation of nearly everyone else in the Catholic sphere, who are glad to see their waning influence, but who contributed to the atmosphere the same way that poorly catechized late Boomer/Jones/Gen X Catholics were, but with a certain added massive whineyness on some occasions.
Anyhow, while it happened later than the birth of the Dominionist movement, intellectual and younger Catholics have moved towards an increased conservatism for quite some time, and it is now really visible in the Church. Overall it's a very good development, because it's so Catholic, and it reflects the view expressed in the letter to Diognetus more than any Seven Mountain tract. But the decay in the culture, which is particularly evident from the much more informed Catholic perspective, has caused some intellectuals, notably Dineen, Reno and Dreher, to despair of the culture and, in the case of of all three, to openly maintain that liberal democracy is an experiment that has failed.2
They aren't dominionist, however. They're more in the nature of Catholic Integralist, a movement that long predates Christian Nationalism or Dominionism.
Integralism argues that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society, wherever the preponderance of Catholics within that society makes this possible. It formed out of the chaos of the late 19th Century in Europe and was strong in traditionally Catholic Romance language speaking countries. It never supported the concept of a state religion, but rather subordinating the state to the moral principles of Catholicism, rejecting morality from the state, and, in its European form, favoured Catholicism as the proclaimed religion of the state
Integralism really fell away from Catholic thinking as a discussed topic after World War Two for a variety of reasons, one being that modern liberal democracies quite being hostile to religion, which frankly most had been before the Second World War. Indeed, over time, the Church increasingly disapproved of clerics being in politics, and ultimately banned it. But in 2014, with an essay by Dinneen, it started to reappear. It's adherents claim that its the official position of the Church, but fail to acknowledge that on many things the church's "official" position can be pretty nuanced. Even prior to the Second World War it had always been the case that integralist took the view that imposing a Catholic view of things on a population couldn't be done on a non Catholic culture. In more recent years the Church has really emphasized that there's a civic duty to participate in elections, which while not rejecting integralism, does demonstrate a view accepting democracies and requiring Catholics to participate in their democracies.
The revival of integralism came about the same time, however, that dominionism started to gain steam, and for same, but not identical, reasons. Dineen's essay came out in 2014, but the following year the Supreme Court issued the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and just as we predicted here, thing have really gone off the rails. Justice Kennedy's decision lead directly the populist outrage and right on to Donald Trump.
Obergefell was just a bridge too far for many Americans, but the drift towards societal libertinism it expressed had been going on for a long time. As we've noted, you can trace it back at least to 1953 and the release of Playboy, but savvy students of culture would point out that perhaps the signs were there as early as the very first movies, which took a run at pornography right from the onset until being reigned back in. Mass communications of all types, including mass media, had a big role in this no matter how much society attempted to restrain it. The moral shock of the First World War lead to the Roaring Twenties which foreshadowed the 1960s, interrupted only by the economic deprivation of the 1930s and the Second World War. At any rate, the decay had set in pretty deep even by the early 1970s.
Anyhow, Integralism and Dominionism are not the same thing. Pope Francis, noting a rising connection between Integralism and Christian Nationalist, approved a publication criticizing the drift in this direction. Catholics getting tied up in the far right Evangelical movement's goals are going to be in for a surprise when they learn that many in that community would not even regard Catholics as Christians. The re-Puritanization of the country would not be a good thing for Catholics, who after all hold a very broad view of Christianity rather than a nationalistic view of it, and who don't share the same millennialist views of things at all.
Dominionist, for their part, would be shocked to learn that Integralist hold a lot of things that Dominionist frankly accept as abhorrent. They may be united on abortion being evil and transgenderism being contrary to the moral law, but modern American Evangelical Christians would be surprised that the mass of the Catholic Church holds divorce to be a great moral wrong and condemns easy remarriage. They'd also be surprised to learn that Catholics condemn sex outside of marriage, including all sexual acts outside of the unitive type, to be grave moral wrongs, and that's the Catholic concern with homosexuality.
Rod Dreher, who seems to have joined the Christian Nationalist movement, or who had joined it (I'm not sure about his current position, given that he's a member of the American Solidarity Party), early on advocated a sort of walled in approach to societal moral decay in his book The Benedict Option. I criticized that approach here, and he seems to have retreated from what he seemed to indicate that book espoused. Anyhow, looking at the situation overall, this is a really dangerous moment in American history, but also one from which Western societies might emerge into something new, and better.
Much of this comes in the context of the collapse of the Reformation, and it stands to accelerate it. At the end of the day, holding Donald Trump as any sort of "Godly Man" is absurd. The direct attack on American democracy, which is occurring as we write, is highly dangerous, but probably won't succeed. Forces on the other side have taken forever to react, but are finally starting to, including a reassessment of the really radical and downright goofball positions the left has advocated for some time. The New Apostolic Reformation and Dominionist movement carrying the flag is causing "Christianity" to be condemned, but among thinking Christians is causing a reassessment of the Reformation churches and a massive movement away from them back into the Apostolic fold, as the theology of the Reformation churches simply can't be defended.
Roman society was reformed by Christianity, but not by operation of law, but by operation of the faithful members of the "one Catholic, Holy and Apostolic Church". We're in the death throws of the Reformation, of which this is all part. If that's right, it'll be a blessing in the end.
Footnotes:
1. In fairness, a lot of the odd things that Trump does is because he very obviously has dementia, which nobody is doing anything about. He's really not mentally stable enough to occupy the office he's in.
2. Evangelicals of the far right are particularly focused on transgenderism and homosexulaity, but just completely ignore almost all of the remaining actual Christian tenants on sex. Donald Trump, whom Evangelicals have really adopted, is a serial polygamist. White House "faith advisor" is on her third husband. Evangelical churches have pews fill up on Sundays with people who are living in what St. Paul very clearly condemned as states of mortal sin.
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