The country has been consumed with a pandemic, an economic collapse and an uprising in the name of racial justice. But instead of rising to the challenge of addressing these colossal problems, President Trump has helped make freedom of religion a battlefront in the fight to stop the spread of Covid-19 and in the response to the killing of George Floyd.
He has played politics with religion in a way that damages America's democratic norms and practices.
In March, Trump called for the reopening of the national economy and places of worship by Easter, citing the symbolic significance of the Christian holiday.
In April, he met with conservative religious leaders and praised evangelical minister Franklin Graham for declaring the coronavirus"is a result of a fallen world, a world that has turned its back on God."
In May, the president highlighted the political dimension of his religious messaging when he said churches "are not being treated with respect by a lot of the Democrat governors." Playing to the fault lines of America's culture wars, he also criticized officials who have "deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential, but have left out churches and other houses of worship."
And then on June 1, after tear gas and brute force moved peaceful protesters out of his way, the president walked from the White House to St. John's Church so he could be photographed awkwardly holding a Bible. That provoked a firestorm of criticism, but little of it focused on the ramifications for American democracy of a president's political use of religion during a national crisis.
Wariness about that kind of mixing of religion and politics has been a critical component of America's democratic experiment right from the start.
It is enshrined in the First Amendment's prohibition of the "establishment of religion" and its guarantee of religious liberty, and in the clause of the Constitution specifying that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust."
It also marked George Washington's presidency. His speeches contained many references to an "Almighty Being," or "the Benign Parent of the human race." Yet, believing it to be a danger to democracy, Washington opposed merging religion and public life.
Since then, American presidents have been more or less open about their religious beliefs — and their commitment to separating religion and politics.
Theodore Roosevelt offered one of the most explicit examples in 1908. "To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church," he told supporters who wanted to make a campaign issue of his opponent's religion, "is an outrage against the liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life."
Confronting such bigotry a half century later, John F. Kennedy, campaigning to be the first Roman Catholic president, assured voters that "I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."
Amid such cautions, religious leaders for much of the 20th century played key roles in various movements seeking to build a more equal and inclusive society — just as they had a century earlier in the struggle against slavery.
Yet today the politicization of religious differences is much greater, complicating faith communities' efforts to avoid partisan entanglements. Polarization and tribalism now dominate American politics and have taken on a religious flavor.
A 2016 survey uncovered stark partisan differences among members of different religious groups. It found that the Democratic Party attracts voters from various spiritual backgrounds, while the Republican Party is an increasingly theological party, dominated by white evangelicals.
And not only do adherents of different religions align themselves with different parties these days; they treat one another as enemies who threaten their faith.
Many Democrats see what they call Christian "nationalism"as antithetical to "the vital interests of the country." In turn, some Christian leaders describe contemporary Democratic leaders as the "greatest threat to the free exercise of religion in American history" because they are "attacking the foundation of America's goodness."
The institutions of democracy are endangered by such intense religious entanglements and deep religious chasms, because they are ill-equipped to resolve conflicts over life's ultimate questions. Moreover, respect for procedure and the spirit of compromise that democracy requires cannot thrive when each side in a political debate sees the other as a danger to their deepest values.
This is the context in which the president's stoking of religious animosities has occurred. It helps explain why Trump's photo op two weeks ago was so significant.
The event's iconography intensified polarization and endangered democracy. And it suggested an alarming presidential point of view: People protesting police brutality and systemic racism, in the aftermath of Floyd's death under the knee of a Minneapolis officer, were like the Democratic governors Trump has reviled for refusing to open churches during the pandemic. They would defile religion if not contained — despite the fact that some of the people forcibly removed from the area were parishioners of the very church where the president posed.
By politicizing religion throughout this period of pandemic and protest, Trump is following the lead of authoritarian leaders in other nations by using "religion to reinforce his image as a strongman defending a particular brand of tradition against infidels."
James Madison alerted Americans to the threat that mixing religion and politics would pose for their fledgling democracy. "A zeal for different opinions concerning religion," he wrote in 1787, "divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good."
The warning rings true today: To use religion to divide Americans is to fail to "cooperate for their common good." If Trump genuinely wishes to build on religious precepts in a way that does not damage democracy, he would do well to heed the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.