Fundamentalism
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concerned to establish a ‘proper’ sphere and role for religion. A key feature of liberal culture is the maintenance of a public/private divide, a strict separation between a ‘public’ sphere of life regulated by collective rules and subject to political authority, and a ‘private’ sphere in which people are free to do as they like. The great virtue of this distinction, from a liberal perspective, is that it guarantees individual liberty by constraining government’s ability to interfere in personal or private affairs. However, it also has important implications for religion, which is fenced into a private arena, leaving public life to be organized on a strictly secular basis. In bringing about the ‘privatization of religion’, secularism has extended the public/private divide into a distinction between politics and religion.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES IN ACTION . . . DONALD TRUMP AND THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT
EVENT: On 25 May 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by the police in the US city of Minneapolis, sparking a wave of protests and civil unrest across the country and beyond. Seven days later, President Donald Trump issued his symbolic response to these developments. Having delivered a speech on law and order, Trump marched from the White House to Lafayette Park (from which peaceful demonstrators had just been cleared with teargas and rubber bullets) and stood outside St John’s Episcopal Church, which had been damaged in unrest the previous night. Silently, he then held up a copy of the Bible, posing for the cameras for a full eight minutes. SIGNIFICANCE: This incident underlined President Trump’s desire to shore up support among evangelical Christians, with whom he had forged a powerful ideological alliance. Trump had been hailed by leaders of the new Christian right in the USA as God’s appointed on Earth. Some even interpreted his election in 2016 as evidence of the Rapture, an ‘end of days’ event, in which Christ would return to Earth and escort qualified believers into heaven. Trump, for his part, made a commitment to a conservative religious agenda a key qualification for political appointment. His cabinet was, for example, stacked with devout Christians, among them Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, and Vice-President Mike Pence. Many, nevertheless, pointed out that the alliance between Trump – a thrice-married man, often accused of misogynistic behaviour towards women and not a regular church goer – and the evangelical Christian movement was an unlikely
one, only to be told that the Bible is full of stories about people who appear to be imperfect vessels for carrying out God’s will. And yet, the relationship between Donald Trump and the evangelical movement may be better explained in transactional terms than ideological ones. For Trump, the endorsement of evangelical Christian leaders was what made his bid for the White House electorally viable. Close to one- quarter of the US electorate describe themselves as ‘born again’ Christians, and turnout levels among such voters are typically high. The 81 per cent of white evangelical votes that went to Trump in 2016 was therefore probably decisive in ensuring his victory over Hillary Clinton. Trump, in turn, repaid the loyalty of evangelical Christians by providing robust support for their favoured conservative moral agenda, in which opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights featured prominently. Trump delivered on these issues largely by consistently making conservative, or ‘anti-choice’, appointments to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.
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