The Most Evangelical President Ever

This week, despite Washington D.C. hitting a 30-year low in violent crime, President Trump declared a public safety emergency in the city, placed the D.C police department under federal control, deployed the National Guard, and called it “liberation.” He did all of this in the name of avenging a 19-year-old Administration staffer who was beat up by two 15-year-olds during an attempted carjacking earlier this month.

It’s interesting because the U.S. government doesn’t use the language of liberation to describe domestic policy. Nixon and Reagan’s “law and order” rhetoric was so successful in establishing the Right’s tough-on-crime politics from the late-1960s to the 1980s that it was adopted in electoral politics as conventional wisdom for the next 40 years - including by national Democrats like Bill Clinton in the 1990s and local Democrats like Gavin Newsom in the 2000s. The language of liberation has always been much more niche - appearing in American political culture either in the context of social movements (e.g. Black Power activists articulating the nature of their resistance to American oppression) or foreign policy (e.g. Bush’s “mission of liberation” in Iraq following 9/11). So, we’re in a different era.

The once-fringe, now-mainstream narrative among conservatives is that they are the vindicators of noble lost causes - whether of a physically assaulted staffer who lost a fight or their segregationist ancestors who lost the Civil Rights Movement or their confederate ancestors who lost the Civil War. The co-optation of “liberation” is an attempt to cloak their vengeance in redemption and valor. Evangelicalism - a religious movement that emphasizes submission to conservative politics as submission to God - became a dominant feature in American political culture in the late 1970s (closely tracking the aforementioned ascent of “law and order”), as the societal backlash against civil rights and Black power began. Within this movement, White, cisgender, heterosexual people became conceptualized as both persecuted by the legal and political recognition of oppressed groups and, simultaneously, dominant over oppressed groups by divine right. They wage war on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, in Jesus’s name.

Last week, redistricting - the process of drawing electoral districts after the release of census data - was the primary site of political conflict. States are bound by constitutional language and laws that dictate when and how redistricting happens, yet Trump declared that Texas Republicans are “entitled to five more seats” in Congress because Republicans lost the seats in 2024 that he wants them to win in 2026. Once every ten-years, redistricting maps are passed by state legislatures, and signed into law by the Governor. Like most states, Texas completed its process in 2021. But Trump told Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session and find five more seats anyway. Of course, the seats most at risk are concentrated in South Texas, Austin, Houston, and Dallas — areas where Black and Latino voters have historically turned out in large numbers for Democratic candidates. The federal law that governs whether this kind of political redistricting crosses the line into racist vote dilution and potentially stands in their way? The Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark Civil Rights Movement victory that conservatives will argue is unconstitutional in the Supreme Court this Fall.

A self-proclaimed Evangelical and “Constitutionalist” on X (formerly Twitter) recently went viral for saying - “Jesus did not primarily die for you because He loves you. He primarily died for His own glory.” That really sums it up perfectly. The seemingly endless barrage of conquest and self-glorification is not only fascistic, but deeply religious. The supposed sins of adultery, sexual violence, and predation are either hidden or excused so as not to jeopardize the thing God really cares about - ensuring that everyone stays in their proper place in the social, political, and economic hierarchy. Evangelicalism has never required a belief in anything other than manifest destiny - the expansion of exclusive dominion forever.