The Rise of the Evangelical Right
It wasn't particularly difficult to portray 1980 as a gloomy time for America. The spike in oil prices in 1979 had sent the U.S. economy into a tailspin and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was propelling the two superpowers into another cycle of Cold War tensions. Iranian radicals were holding 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage in Tehran, which produced a daily (and, thanks to Ted Koppel's Nightline reports, nightly) humiliation for President Jimmy Carter and his administration.
As the Republican Party's presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan responded to these developments by continually playing up the image of an America in decline. His grim vision of that American future cemented his ties to an ascendant right wing within the evangelical community. As early as 1971, intellectual historian Paul Boyer pointed out, Reagan claimed that "the day of Armageddon isn't far off." He was referring then to turmoil in the Middle East and the pivotal role of Israel there. "Everything is falling into place," he added. "It can't be long now."
Reagan was not exactly an easy sell to the Bible belt. Divorced and anything but a devoted churchgoer, he was closely associated in the public mind with that Sodom of the West Coast, Hollywood. In the 1980 election, he was also up against Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian who openly discussed his faith.
Admittedly, Reagan benefitted from the endorsement of the Moral Majority, founded by Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979, and he began playing directly to the religious crowd by establishing a new tradition of inserting "God bless America" into his speeches. But it was those repeated references to Armageddon that cemented his relationship with the religious right. Apocalyptic thinking is central to the worldview of evangelicals. Indeed, it's what principally distinguishes them from mainstream Christians. "The one thing that affects how they live their daily lives," writes historian of religion Matthew Avery Sutton, "is that they believe we are moving towards the End Times, the rise of the Antichrist, towards a great tribulation and a horrific human holocaust."
The mainstream media was shocked that Reagan then brought such doomsday rhetoric into the Oval Office. "It is hard to believe that the President actually allows Armageddon ideology to shape his policies toward the Soviet Union," the New York Times editorialized just before the 1984 election. "Yet it was he who first portrayed the Russians as satanic and who keeps on talking about that final battle." Reagan easily went on to win a second term. Later, George W. Bush would employ similar apocalyptic references to justify the invasion of Iraq and unqualified support for Israel, and it didn't prevent him from winning a second term either.
When Barack Obama became president in 2008, however, evangelicals suffered a significant drop in political influence. They continued to cling to Congress and a few Supreme Court justices -- along with their guns and religion -- but they had little leverage over a president that a majority of Republicans believed to be a foreign-born Muslim. (You're either with us or you're born in Kenya.)
Eight years later, the evangelical community faced an embarrassment of riches in the Republican primaries: a couple of born-again candidates (Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz), several evangelical Catholics (Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush), and even an evangelical Seventh Day Adventist (Ben Carson). In comparison, Donald Trump came up way short on the faith front. Many evangelicals were skeptical of him because, like Reagan, he did not fit the mold of an upstanding Christian candidate. He'd been divorced, indulged in high-profile extramarital affairs, taken pro-choice positions, came from that East Coast Gomorrah, New York City, and even refused to ask God for forgiveness. Once he won the party's nomination, however, Trump's approval rating rose sharply among evangelicals who represent one-fifth of the voting public. Seventy-eight percent of them now support him, according to a recent Pew survey.
Trump has triumphed among evangelicals in part by changing his views. For instance, he now claims that he plans to repent before God (in some unspecified future) and swears that he will help restore the evangelical voice to politics. He has become firmly anti-abortion and traded in a more even-handed approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict for the hardline position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that finds favor in the evangelical community. He has even convinced some evangelicals that his new relationship with Jesus has turned him into what James Dobson calls a "baby Christian."
Trump also appeals to a certain pragmatic streak among evangelicals. They have become convinced that only he can tip the Supreme Court in the right direction, roll back the nuclear agreement with Iran, and hold back a potential tide of social protest. "Trump speaks to the profound fears animating so many white evangelicals today," says R. Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. "Above all, the fear that they and their values are being displaced by foreign, immigrant, and Muslim forces as well as by domestic movements such as Black Lives Matter, gay rights, women's rights, and more."
However, this focus on the pragmatic desire of evangelicals to regain the kind of political influence and power they've lost over the last seven years only goes so far in explaining Trump's appeal. Far more important, on millenarian websites, Trump emerges as the mysterious weapon that God is now wielding to bring the righteous closer to the rapture. "God is preparing to shake the nations of the world," an evangelical blogger writes in a typical endorsement of the candidate, "and I believe he is going to use Donald Trump to do it." Another asserts, "I don't know if God will use Trump to push back the coming of the anti-Christ. However, I know that without Trump, the tribulation cannot be far away. Therefore, I have to support Trump."
Much millenarian support comes from a belief that God has anointed Trump the ultimate disrupter of the status quo, the human wrecking ball that will smite all the structures standing in the way of Christ's second coming. No one (other than the Donald himself) would confuse the candidate with the Messiah, but some evangelicals imagine him in the role of a John the Baptist gone slightly berserk.
Certain evangelicals believe that their candidate will avert an apocalypse spurred on by godless Democrats; others that he will hasten that apocalypse and so the second coming. Given that Trump is a mass of contradictions -- a bankrupt billionaire, the most elite of populists, a politician who has never held office -- it's no surprise that evangelicals can read into him almost anything they want, even if they then have a difficult time interpreting his "revelations."
Against the Globalists
The film Amerigeddon, released this year and directed by the son of right-wing actor Chuck Norris, illuminates in graphic detail the paranoid worldview of what has come to be known as the alt-right: the tech-savvy, anti-globalist, anti-immigrant movement that hitherto lurked on the fringes of the Republican Party.
"The greatest threat to our freedom lies within our own government," Amerigeddon proclaims in its trailer. In the film , traitors inside the Beltway have joined up with global terrorists and the United Nations to bring down America. It's a movie with everything a survivalist could ever want: outsiders using an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) to disable the U.S. power grid, big government imposing martial law, gun owners saving the day. If you could take only one DVD to your reinforced concrete bunker, this would be it.
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