The second coming of Donald J. Trump

My country, the United States, is quite religious, making it an outlier within the developed world. Generally, in nations where wealth and prosperity increase, piety decreases, but we Americans dramatically buck this trend. We are more likely to pray daily, to attend worship services and to say that faith is important to our lives compared to our economic peers throughout Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia and so forth.

This American strangeness around religion is attributable, at least in part, to the way the First Amendment to the US Constitution bars the “establishment” of any religion as a state-sponsored entity while protecting the “free exercise” of all religions. Combined, these two principles have helped create a two-and-a-half-century, free-wheeling culture of religious entrepreneurship and a seedbed for religious innovators, including Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam; L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement; and Billy Graham, global Christian evangelist.

To this list, we must now add one Donald J. Trump, reanimated president of the United States, who – though he is not personally overtly pious – has become an icon of many US Christians’ religious hopes and devotion. He has as much ridden the present-day wave of US Christian anger and fear as he has created it. But Trump is a singular figure in US history. Never before have Americans had a national political leader who was the subject of so many prophecies, elicited so many religious comparisons and inspired such fervent adoration. So what is the context around Trump’s religious appeal, and how did he come to revolutionise and radicalise a huge swathe of Christians in America?

Failed political goals

Historically, Christians have made up such a large segment of the US population that most political coalitions have contained believers of numerous stripes. However, this began to change with the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, when evangelical Christians coalesced as a voting bloc to bolster Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party to victory in 1980. Reagan’s presidency inaugurated a new era of conservative Christian activism around opposing abortion, curtailing LGBTQ rights, banning pornography and encouraging the teaching of the Bible and Christian morality in public schools.

But, by 2015, despite supplying incalculable support to the Republican Party, the leaders of the US religious right had accomplished few of their major policy objectives. The internet has made pornography more prevalent than ever. Abortion rights had some new state-by-state limitations by 2015, but the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs Wade decision – protecting women’s right to abortion until the foetus reached a point of viability outside of the womb – was still the overarching national policy. Government-funded schools were as secular and divorced from religious instruction as at any period in US history. And the icing on the cake came in June 2015 when the Supreme Court enshrined the legal protection of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

Compounding this sense of disgruntlement was the fact that, beginning around 1990, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian began to decline precipitously. Before 1990, surveys consistently found 90 per cent or more of Americans claiming the Christian label. By 2015 that had dropped to around 70 per cent, and it has continued to fall to around 66 per cent today. That kind of rapid secularisation in a population has huge cultural effects because every percentage point represents millions of individual Americans. From the perspective of conservative, politically active US Christians, 2015 was a nadir, a moment of frustration and even despair, as they surveyed decades of intense political investment with few notable achievements.

There was also outsized fear among many evangelicals that persecution was imminent in an increasingly secular and pluralistic society. A feeling began to rise throughout the right-wing Christian coalition that they needed a fighter, a bare-knuckled brawler, who would bring them back from the looming cultural periphery. And it was in the early summer of 2015 that Trump jumped into the US presidential race.

Compared to the crowd of more conventionally Republican and straightforwardly evangelical candidates in the primary, Trump was an oddity: thrice-married, a braggadocious New York real-estate developer and reality TV star with no experience holding public office. Moreover, in many of his early attempts to appeal to religious voters, Trump was buffoonish and silly. He told one interviewer that he could not recall ever asking God for forgiveness (something that is definitional to Christian identity). He infamously invoked “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians” when speaking at an evangelical university. He even mistakenly dropped some money in the communion plate that was being passed at a church, believing it was the offering plate.

So how did this ham-fisted, foul-mouthed, areligious (if not irreligious) one-time political neophyte become today’s icon of American evangelicalism? For that part of the story, we must look to Trump’s closest spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, and her coterie.

‘A spiritual assignment’

White-Cain is a charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor in Florida. “Charismatic” here refers to the miracle-seeking, speaking-in-tongues kind of Christian; think Pentecostal but less inhibited. In 2002, she received a phone call out of the blue from Trump, and at first thought it was a joke. Trump had seen her preaching on TV, and he called her up to say, “You have the ‘it’ factor.” Her half-tongue-in-cheek response: “Sir, we call that the anointing.” They hit it off. She invited him as an occasional guest on her televangelism show, met with him when she was in New York, and eventually bought a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower. She felt that God was showing her that Trump was “a spiritual assignment” for her.

So when he entered the presidential race years later, Trump turned to White-Cain for help with one of the most vital aspects of his campaign, asking her to “be in charge of reaching out to the evangelicals”.

This presented an interesting quandary. White-Cain was part of the nondenominational, charismatic sector of evangelicalism. This energetic, immersive, technologically savvy but diffuse world was up and coming. Both in the US and globally, it’s the fastest growing segment of Christianity. About half of all self-identified evangelicals in the US participate in this charismatic spirituality. But like Trump at the time, charismatic leaders like White-Cain were the scrappy, populist outsiders on the American right. Some of them don’t even have brick-and-mortar churches but have built itinerant, online ministries with podcasts, YouTube channels and prophecy conference circuits. These preachers might have millions of followers, but much of the American public viewed them as the wild-eyed, tongue-talking, televangelist-fraud part of the church – the lunatic fringe. And more conventional evangelicals treated them at the time as embarrassing country cousins – distantly part of evangelical culture, but of the low-brow variety.

But Trump likes people who like him, and these people liked him. By the fall of 2015, White-Cain was arranging meetings between the would-be president and charismatic religious leaders. These were strange events. Eclectic groups of big-haired televangelists, self-described prophets, megachurch pastors and Messianic rabbis would gather with Trump in New York, listening to the real-estate mogul’s agenda, laying hands on him and – crucially for what was to come – offering prophecies about him. Many of these leaders embraced “dominion theology”, an assertive theological framework that Christians are supposed to “take dominion” as quickly as possible over every nation, ruling in Christ’s name and restructuring societies around their reading of the Bible. Others were extreme Christian Zionists, believing the modern state of Israel (alongside the US, of course) to be God’s ordained vehicle for initiating the end-times return of Jesus. Many in these meetings also practise intense forms of what they call “spiritual warfare”, praying and prophesying against elaborate hierarchies of demons they believe hold the US in spiritual bondage.

A central figure in these early meetings was a pastor and business consultant named Lance Wallnau. He is one of the chief proponents of this “dominion” idea, with millions of followers globally tracking his prophecies and teachings. Wallnau declared to Trump in their second meeting that he had received a new prophecy: Trump had a “Cyrus anointing” and was God’s choice to be president of the US. In case the reference is lost on you, Cyrus was an ancient Persian emperor who, in the sixth century BCE, sent the Jews back from their exile in Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem. In Isaiah 45, God speaks of Cyrus as a mashiach (messiah, anointed one) for Israel. So Wallnau was proclaiming Trump a sort of secular messiah for US Christians. He might not be a good man, but he’s God’s anointed for the purpose of delivering us from cultural exile.

Two practical outcomes of these 2015 meetings are still impacting US politics today. First, many of these previously fringe leaders became the inner core of Trump’s Christian advocates, with White-Cain acting as gatekeeper for their access to Trump. Under her watchful eye, every one of Trump’s various Christian advisory councils (always chaired by White-Cain herself) has been stacked with half or more nondenominational charismatics. This has created a new power centre on the American religious right, bringing a potent, albeit eccentric, group of outsiders into positions of prominence. In the space of a decade, a growing cascade of local charismatic evangelical activists – pastors, prophets, Christian parents angry over pro-LGBTQ school curricula – has rapidly taken over the landscape of the religious right. They have targeted state legislatures, local school boards and city councils, getting their candidates elected, and are now attempting to infuse more Christianity into every institution over which they can gain control.

Second, the new prophecies about Trump that began in these circles have continued to proliferate, giving rise to a spiritual mythos around Trump as an instrument of God. When he unexpectedly won the presidential race in 2016, it gave rocket fuel to this narrative, because the prophets and their followers saw his ascension to office as a miraculous fulfillment of their revelations. Millions of US evangelicals who 10 years ago would have disavowed belief in modern-day prophecy have now embraced the Trump prophecies. In fact, a series of surveys I helped conduct with the political scientist Paul Djupe of Denison University in 2023 and 2024 found more than 40 percent of American Christians (roughly a quarter of all Americans!) at least tentatively affirming a cluster of these previously marginal charismatic “dominion” concepts, including modern prophecy.

Prophets, pastors and Messianic rabbis

By the time of the 2020 election, there were hundreds of these Trump prophecies being posted daily on charismatic social media, discussed on televangelism shows and picked up at political rallies. When Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, his cohort of charismatic advisers began promoting a revolutionary and deeply anti-democratic message: Trump is still God’s choice, and Christians must persevere, protest and do spiritual warfare to see him reinstated. Some claimed to have visions of Satan orchestrating elaborate election frauds. This narrative of demonic sabotage dovetailed with the more mundane conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, fraudulent votes and other lies that Trump and his allies fed to the US populace after the 2020 election: the demons and the Demoncrats (one of their favourite word plays) were in league together.

There were many forces that fed into the 6 January insurrection, but Trump’s legion of charismatic supporters were a major factor. They did more than supply a theological rationale. Dozens of prophets, pastors, Messianic rabbis and “spiritual warriors” – including White-Cain and Wallnau – travelled to Washington DC to join the rally in person. At least six of these leaders have even been prosecuted for joining the physical invasion of the Capitol building.

Crucially, following Trump’s removal from office, when the Republican establishment was doing their best to distance themselves from him and the failed insurrection, many of the charismatic leaders stayed loyal, along with an increasingly radicalised evangelical base. If any doubt started creeping in, one event greatly helped lock in their fealty: in June 2022, the Supreme Court – to which Trump had appointed three arch-conservative justices – reversed Roe vs Wade and devolved abortion policy-making back to the individual states. This was, credibly, the most tangible and unmitigated success of the American religious right in the course of more than 40 years.

Trump went on to bulldoze through the 2024 Republican presidential primary, just as he had done in 2016. The choir of prophets and pastors, conducted by White-Cain, proved to be his most effective propagandists. They dismissed the criminal prosecutions against Trump as persecution, casting him as a righteous victim of sham trials and diabolical schemes, just as Jesus was. They presented the election as an apocalyptic showdown between God’s anointed and the united forces of demon-inspired secular and “woke” politicians who would ruin US Christianity if they remained in power (even though Biden is a devout Catholic and Kamala Harris was herself raised in a Black Pentecostal church and now attends a Baptist church). They prophesied that Trump would sweep back into power like the vengeful biblical king Jehu. Wallnau even stood up his own voter mobilisation effort, in league with the Trump campaign, to drive voter turnout in swing states.

The two failed assassination attempts on Trump helped to cement the narrative that he was specially protected by God. Many evangelical leaders who had previously been tepid in their support came forward to declare that God’s hand was obviously on the man. Trump even posted AI-generated images on social media of himself sitting alongside Jesus, asserting that God had spared his life to save the country. He also made repeated promises on his campaign trail to end “Christian persecution” in America.

Over a long decade in American politics, Trump has mutated from debauched reality TV star to evangelicals’ dark messiah. In his first term, he clearly prioritised the demands of his Christian base, appointing their preferred judges and foregrounding their culture war issues. If he concedes to even some of their demands this time around, it could profoundly undermine US democratic systems and realign the tenuous balance of church and state.

He also proved in his first presidency that he is mercurial, easily distracted and magnetised to self-enrichment above all. In his second administration, very little is predictable, but one thing is clear: Donald Trump has hitched his wagon to Christian rage and is remaking American politics. Whether that ends up finally initiating conservative Christians’ desired utopia, dissolving US democracy, or becoming another strange but passing moment in US religious history, none of us can truly foresee.

This article is a preview from New Humanist’s spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.