The Donald is simply keeping it real. If you are a Seventh-Day Adventist, all other religions seem weird if not evil. If you are Jewish, other religions seem false. If you are Christian, other religions seem false. If you are Catholic, Protestants seem like heretics.
The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to find outsiders strange and threatening.
The United States was created by WASPs and their ethic ruled the country until the 1950s.
By MCKAY COPPINS
To him, if you’re not a mainline Protestant, you’re exotic, even sinister.
IT is no secret that Donald J. Trump’s ruinous rise in the Republican presidential primaries has been powered, in large part, by a naked agenda of religious division and fear-mongering — an agenda that will likely inform his speech today at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va.
But while his anti-Muslim provocations have rightly drawn the largest share of public outrage, Mr. Trump has in fact been using his bully pulpit throughout this election season to attack religious minorities of all stripes. He deploys this tactic on the campaign trail whenever it suits his political purposes, and his religious digs and dog whistles are often so cartoonishly retro that they sound as if they’re being delivered by a billionaire Archie Bunker.
In the Gospel According to Trump, there is only one blessedly normal, all-American faith: mainline Protestant Christianity. The Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists — those believers who once made up this country’s midcentury religious mainstream — are Mr. Trump’s “chosen ones.” He regards their customs and values as essentially as American as apple pie, while all other faith communities, even other forms of Christianity, seem to rest somewhere on a spectrum from exotic to sinister.
Take Mr. Trump’s bizarre speech last month to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he kept inexplicably returning to the same well-worn tropes that anti-Semites have been using for a century. “I’m a negotiator, like you folks,” he proclaimed to the crowd. Later, he sought to signal defiant distance from the Republican establishment by informing them: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”
While speaking to a crowd of Florida supporters in October, Mr. Trump publicly hinted that there might be something nefarious about Ben Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist faith. “I’m Presbyterian,” Mr. Trump said. “Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”
More recently, he tried to blunt Ted Cruz’s surge in the Iowa polls by using the senator’s Cuban heritage to exoticize his Christian faith. “I do like Ted Cruz,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Des Moines, “but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
There is an absurdity in seeing Donald Trump trying to play the role of 2016 religion referee. This is a man whose sincerest praise for the Bible is to deem it even better than his best-selling book “The Art of the Deal,” a man whose most famous religious experience is having reportedly struck up a romance with his second wife among the pews of a Manhattan church (while he was still married to Ivana).
But Mr. Trump’s religious posturing is not about theology, it’s about branding — and if his religious worldview seems impossibly dated, that’s by design. His entire message, right down to his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, is rooted in a gnawing nostalgia and economic anxiety that grips much of the country’s white working class. Mr. Trump’s target demographic is not America’s most devout, but its most anxious and aggrieved, and what he’s selling isn’t salvation, but a bygone era of plentiful factory jobs, robust pension funds and safe, monochromatic suburbs dotted with little white churches that everyone in town attended on Sundays.
By focusing his rhetorical firepower largely on minority faiths that have grown in size and influence in the United States over the past 60 years — displacing the old Protestant monopoly — Mr. Trump is stoking a tribal hostility toward those who worship differently, one that hucksters have seized on throughout history to infect and co-opt America’s faith communities. It is the same visceral force that animated the witch trials in Salem and set fire to the crosses in front of black churches.
