It’s three weeks since Donald Trump won the 2024 US election to take the reins of the most powerful country in the world as the 47th President of the United States. Of course, his mandate to do so is unimpeachable having secured a big majority of the Electoral College (including all seven of the so-called swing states) as well as over 50% of the popular vote. The Republicans have secured the control of the Senate and a slim majority in the House of Representatives.
Trump was already claiming at a victory rally in West Palm Beach in the early hours of the morning after the polls had closed, that he had earned ‘an unprecedented and powerful mandate’ to do entirely as he pleases in a way that will meet little constitutional friction. He went on to say in the same speech,
‘I said that many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together.’
In the light of this fact many in the US and across the globe are now anxiously casting their eyes over the Project 2025 document – a 900 page right wing manifesto produced by the Heritage Foundation who have been shaping Republican policies since the early 80s and who boasted that a year into Trump’s first term, the White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals. Their proposals cover four areas of American life: dismantling the administrative state; defending the nation’s sovereignty and borders; securing God-given individual rights to live freely; and restoring the family as the centrepiece of American life. In respect to this category, the manifesto proposes the department of Health and Human Services “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”.
Leaving aside the extent to which this document will actually shape policy content (it is already shaping the public discourse) what is clear is that religion is being summoned – indeed instrumentalised – in the service of Trump’s MAGA vision. The flip side of this perspective – which will also play out over the next few years – is the extent to which religion can act as a force for resistance against co-option.
This is a question for all faiths, but especially Christianity whose reputational future in the global North (including the States) is likely to take a massive hit because of its close ties to MAGAism. Trump talking about being God’s appointed leader of America will mean that political analysis and practice of his term will need to be refracted as much through a theological framing as it will be political and economic science ones.
The Power State
A number of theological tropes spring to mind. The first, watching Trump’s acceptance speech on the morning of the 6th November, was William Temple’s idea of the Power State. In his 1928 volume Christianity and the State Temple is reflecting on the liminal space in European history when a fragile peace was beginning to take hold at the end of World War 1 at the very same time when the first drumbeats of fascist nationalism were presaging the full horror of what was to emerge in Germany and Italy. The European nation state, in Temple’s view was at a pivotal crossroads, with a stark choice of directions of travel.
One was what Temple called the Power State – or the ‘idea of the State as essentially Power – Power over its own community and against other communities’ (1928, 70) This is the totalitarian and authoritarian state of the dictators – men who rely on a semi-divine cultic mythos of both themselves and their nation as a means of persuading the citizens of those nations to give up their hard-fought human rights and freedoms.
Along this trajectory lay the threat of another imminent European and global war. This description seems to appositely describe the nexus of authoritarianism, hyper inequality and fake (read propaganda) news that we see emerging from the court of King Trump and his entourage of sycophantic courtiers like Elon Musk, Nigel Farage and somewhat randomly Sylvester Stallone.
The other trajectory Temple identified was the Welfare-State, whereby the State is ‘the organ of community, maintaining its solidarity by law designed to safeguard the interests of the community’ (1928, 170). On this path lies the road to peace and human flourishing and the basis of a just social order and which he went to fully articulate in his book Christianity and Social Order published in 1942. The Foundation remains committed to arguing for this positive and hopeful vision for society, however hard that vision is to hold in the current climate.
The State of Exception
The second theological trope which will make an unfortunate comeback is Carl Schmitt’s political theology (that again emerges from this unquiet inter war period of the 1920s) that refers to the ‘state of exception’. Schmitt reflects that the State’s ability to decide to suspend or transcend its own laws is in effect akin to a secular divine miracle as the State imbues itself with God-like powers to override human structures.
From the famous opening lines of his Political Theology (1922) ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (p5) follows the key reflection that ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ and that ‘the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology’ (36).
Giogio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life (1998), notes Schmitt’s subsequent endorsement of National Socialism and argues that the only place a doctrine of State exception leads is ‘a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations … are deactivated’ (168-169). When the state of exception becomes the rule Agamben says, we become exposed to ‘the camp’ (exemplified by Nazi death camps) as ‘the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ (181). These chilling images are set to return to the ‘home of the free’ if Trump attempts to implement his policy of rounding up millions of illegal migrants in the US (as opposed to those with criminal records) and sending them to deportation camps. These truly will be spaces of exception where all legal rights are suspended, and one is condemned to the bare life.
A Confessing Church
All of which makes one wonder the extent to which the sight of men but especially women and children being rounded up in their thousands into hastily constructed and doubtless filthy immigration processing camps and centres will be a trigger for mass civil unrest, both violent and peaceful. How much of this will the American public (especially those ‘floating voters’ who voted for Trump) be able to stomach?
I know from pastor colleagues in the States that strategies of civil disobedience and stand off are being discussed and will include no doubt the time-honored tradition of offering sanctuary to innocent citizens in danger of being deported as well as protesting outside the camps themselves.
It reminds us powerfully of historical precedents (perhaps too few) where the Church and other faith traditions have pitted themselves against the State’s blasphemous creation of spaces of exception and bare living.
For example, the South African Council of Churches through the leadership of figures such as Desmond Tutu and Brigalia Bam spearheaded the struggle against apartheid in South Africa via the Rustenburg Declaration of 1990. This affirmed the church’s role as an agent of social justice by denouncing apartheid as a sin and condemning the discriminatory laws as unjust. It further affirmed the role of the church to seek justice through compassion and co-responsibility.
The other example, given the parallels between our present geo-political instability and the 1930s, is the emergence of the Confessing Church in response to Hitler’s attempt to combine all the Protestant churches in Germany into a single pro-nazi Church called the German Evangelical Church. Key figures in this network of some 3000 dissenting churches were Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a leading light in the resistance movement, for which he was arrested in 1943 and executed by hanging in the last days of the war in Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945.
He also ran the underground theological seminaries that trained leaders and pastors for the Confessing Church from the mid-30s onwards, most notably in Finkenwalde. When that was shut down by Gestapo, he spent two years mainly in Eastern Germany as a single-person ‘seminary-on-the-run’ teaching and mentoring his trainee pastors.
Time to discover a new theology of resistance?
All these historical precedents I think leave us who identify as members of faith communities with a series of uncomfortable questions. Will Christian communities and other faith groups create alternative networks of mentoring and support for acts of peaceful resistance and sanctuary that are very likely to emerge in the face of these mass deportations? What level of persecution will they face from Trump’s new state of exemption and its compliant allies on the Evangelical and Catholic Right? Will churches and faith groups in the UK and Europe stand in solidarity with their US brothers and sisters? Could we ever foresee a time in the next few years when we are called to take a stand against an idolatrous state of exception closer to home when forces riding on the coat tails of MAGAism sweep into our own body politic? Is it time to now blow the dust from the covers of books like The Cost of Discipleship and begin to formulate a theology of resistance for the current times?
Some reading this will doubtless think I am over-reacting and indulging in gesture politics. An increasingly shrill voice in my head says you are right, and I am wrong. The gut clenching feeling in my stomach, and the expressions on the faces of my friends, tell me otherwise.
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