Reactionary Christians are pushing the country toward authoritarianism — and a Trump 2024 win, ethics professor warns

• An ethics professor told BI about his book "Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies."
• In it, author David Gushee warns that reactionary Christians are leading the US to authoritarianism.

As we head into one of the most significant election years the nation has faced in recent history, David Gushee, a Baptist pastor and professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, warns that democracy itself is facing a grave threat from an unlikely source: his fellow Christians.

In his latest book, "Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies," Gushee examines why the Christian right in America has been so powerfully seduced by authoritarian ideology from prominent GOP leaders like Donald Trump and why, if we're not vigilant about the threat he represents, Americans could be ushering in a democracy-free future with open arms.

What prompted you to look into Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, and democracy for your latest book?

This book responds to a crisis that I see, especially in the US — but not only here — and that is that democracy itself is losing support, either explicitly or implicitly, and that a lot of the people who are weakening their support of democracy or abandoning it entirely are Christians, and they were motivated by what they would consider to be Christian motivations. My dissertation was on the Nazi era and the Holocaust. I'm a strong believer in democracy, and I also have a lot of knowledge about what happens when democracy is abandoned, and it's not good, so I'm very passionate about protecting it.

Is there a particular incident or flash point that you see as of significant concern about the challenges that are facing democracy?

In the US, the immediate crisis is the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the strong conservative Christian support for Trump, which continues to this day. It went to a whole new level when he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and was determined not to leave the White House, and then helped to trigger a violent attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. And now in his campaign for the 2024 election, he's speaking in openly authoritarian ways. Some statements are even more alarming than things that he has said in the past. So you have a uniquely dangerous politician in the history of American politics, but you also have this stubbornly loyal base of support for this man from conservative Christians, and that is what I'm trying to explore in the book. What's the secret? Why the support? And I think I've got it pretty well figured out. And so that's what the book does, while also challenging it and saying: We got to do better than that.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the reasons that you've found why Donald Trump has such a significant base among Christian conservatives?

My hypothesis is that there's a reactionary dynamic on the part of many morally and religiously traditionalist people, which could be Christians, Muslims, or Jewish people. In historically Christian-dominated countries like the US, the basic formula is you have a population that is used to being in control of politics and culture. And they're losing or have lost that control because of political, legal, and cultural changes over many decades. The cultural changes that have happened in the US since the 1960s have not been accepted by many traditional Christians. These would be things like legal abortion, legal same-sex relationships, the feminist movement, and the sexual revolution. In different countries, it's different things, but for the US, that includes large-scale immigration from non-European countries and, I would also say, sadly, the significant racial backlash to a multiracial society with equal rights for people of color.

My hypothesis is that the constant liberalizing and pluralizing of American culture has evoked a rather fierce reaction on the part of a chunk of the population that you could put at maybe 25%, mostly conservative Catholics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and maybe some people of other religions too. The initial strategy of the politically active reactionaries was to re-evangelize the country through church work and then to partner with the Republican Party to elect politicians like Ronald Reagan who would advance their moral agenda. And then, in turn, the evangelicals, the fundamentalists, and so on would support Reagan and the Republican Party. That's the kind of traditional Christian right strategy that goes back to the 70s. My assessment is that Trump, in one sense, was just the latest product of that partnership. But in another sense, when they followed him right over the cliff to insurrection and authoritarianism, you're talking about an entirely new stage. So you've got the reactionary part, the authoritarian part, which is resistant to social changes that they don't like and so are galvanized by the authoritarianism of a man like Trump, and you have a percentage of people who are willing to sacrifice democracy to get what they want politically.

And what, from your perspective, would that look like if that's the sacrifice that's being made? What are the potential consequences there?

It would have meant that if Trump had managed to pull off a coup on January 6 and had managed to stay in the White House despite losing the election, they would have supported him. If Trump were to get elected again and propose abolishing the two-term limit, they would support that, too. It could also look like repudiating the First Amendment, which guarantees religious liberty and disestablishment of religion, and saying, 'No, we're going to officially enshrine Christian values into the Constitution.' It could include weakening the independence of the judiciary, throwing political opponents in jail, weakening all available checks and balances to the government, or intimidating the media so that you wouldn't have honest, critical reporting of what was going on. And in the book I talked about various strategies that have been tried in different countries. I also point out that there are these conservative Christian scholars who are so disillusioned about the results of democracy as we have it in this country that they also are supportive of a serious reconsideration of how we do democracy here. And they might favor some kind of return to an officially Christian state with Christian morality essentially dictated by law and Christianity being enshrined legally and in culture as the official source of the laws and values of the United States.

You mention that there might be roughly about 25% of the population that's really kind of reactionary and committed to this authoritarian ideology. Since they're not a majority, how much damage could they do?

The thing about radical politics is you don't have to have 51% for a radical political strategy to prevail in a country. What you need is a significantly committed minority and then enough other people who are either intimidated or who are simply willing to go along because they don't quite see what is at stake or, on the whole, they prefer authoritarian politics, which has results that they might go for instead of democracy, which has results that they don't like. So you don't have to have a majority as long as you can combine your hardcore true believers plus people who are willing to accommodate it. If you look at the 2024 election, if Trump is the candidate saying some of the things he's already saying, all you would need would be, you know, 25 or 30% of the vote that is hardcore that go with him over a cliff, but then another roughly 20% who say yeah, on balance, I'd still rather have this outcome then the Democrats winning.

Based on what you've described, it sounds like the threat is not just limited to the idea of Donald Trump having another second term but really more existential to how our system functions.

Yes. It's an overall worldview. The worldview is that the kind of civilization we should want is Christian. Officially Christian. Robustly Christian. And they believe that the country will continue to decline and liberalize unless a Christian strong man comes in and says, 'No, this is how it's going to be here. You don't know what's in your own best interest. I am going to tell you what the laws are going to be and we, the Christian, traditionalist community, are going to tell you what the laws are going to be.' So that's not about Trump. It's about an aggrieved population that does not like what they see in culture or in law, and they think that democracy has failed because it doesn't have an adequate moral or religious basis, and it's just kind of spinning off into chaos.

It seems hard to argue against that ideology if it's a fundamental belief that the nation should be a Christian one in order to be a moral one. What's the argument against that?

Part of what I do in the book is to review the arguments of Christian dissenting groups in England and the early US, who argued for the separation of church and state, the disestablishment of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion, precisely on Christian terms. They said the state has no business dictating matters of fundamental conscience to people. That conscience belongs to God, not to the state. And they also said that when that kind of power is concentrated in the hands of political authorities, it is always abused. The early Baptists did not call on Christians to stop caring about the moral tone or direction of culture, but just not to use the coercive power of the state to enforce their vision. So these are some of the arguments that we need to recover because I think many Christians have lost contact with the dissenting pro-democracy strands of the Christian tradition that helped to create this country.

And how does Trump become the face of this movement if he's not what would be considered the typical embodiment of Christian values?

You don't need a strongman to be a good person if he delivers what you want. Vladimir Putin is a murderer. But Vladimir Putin has the support of a lot of conservative Christians in Russia because he delivers things that they want, like opposition to homosexuality, standing up against the liberal West, that kind of thing. What's interesting is evangelicals have had to learn how to hold their nose and support Trump. It wasn't an immediate reaction on the part of a lot of them. But what Trump had, compared to a more classic conservative Christian like George W. Bush, was a ruthlessness and transactionalism saying, 'Hey, go with me and I'll make Christmas great again, and I'll make America great again, and everybody will know that this is basically your country, our country.'

As you're speaking, I'm thinking about Donald Trump in comparison to Mike Pence, who seems to me to be someone who is maybe perhaps more embodying those traditional ideals. I wonder, though, because there has been such a disdain for Mike Pence that has erupted even among that same kind of faith-based community, what do you make of the cannibalization of Pence, who would otherwise seem to really embody those ideals?

Pence versus Trump is the great case study of what has changed. Pence was indeed the embodiment of old-school, Midwestern straight-arrow evangelical politics. But he actually believed in democracy. And when the electoral votes just didn't turn out how his team wanted, he wasn't going to violate the Constitution to block the certification of the election. And that was after lots and lots and lots of compromise with Trump. I mean, he bent over backward to try to be a loyal vice president. But he wouldn't do what Trump demanded on January 6, and then he tried not to say much about it. When he finally did say stuff about it, he spoke about it clearly. So, I think Pence got stuck in a tragic no man's land. The old Christian Right that's about values and character and faithfulness to one wife and all that is weakened, almost dead. The new Christian Right is about tribalism, Trumpism, and authoritarianism. He didn't fit. And so Pence was doomed. And what has gradually emerged is an amoral 'the ends justify the means' kind of politics.

And, for you, as someone who's part of the faith, does that rattle your belief system seeing how this extremist ideology has co-opted this religious population?

I decided some years ago that American fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity was not my home. I did identify as an evangelical Christian for a long time, but I'm glad that I have left. There's something really toxic there. But that doesn't rattle my faith in that my faith in Jesus is not related to the malformed monstrosity that has emerged since, say, 2015. I understand it to be an aberration and a disastrous one. And I know lots and lots and lots of Christian people who also know it to be a disaster and who have rejected it utterly. I used to say to my students: there's no one version of Christianity, there's many versions. This is just a particularly disastrous one. It just needs to be called out for what it is.

And are you hopeful in our ability to overcome this disaster?

Going back to the political side, let's say the question is: will our democracy survive? We have strengths in our political system built in over 240 years, that are not easy to be overturned. A free press, separation of powers, the military not being involved in politics, an independent judiciary, watchdog groups, and the civil society we have. We have a lot of strengths, and Trump's best effort to overcome those checks and balances failed. I would hope that they would fail again, but it is still the case that a substantial number of people are telling pollsters that they would vote for him as if none of what happened in the Trump era has really registered. If we lose our democracy because Trump somehow gets reelected and then, say, he doesn't want to leave power, we would have earned it. We would have gone into it with eyes wide open as a country. I don't think it will happen, but I'm concerned about it. But again, because it's not only about Trump and because you've got a significant minority of the population that is seduced by the authoritarian temptation right now, then vigilance about this will need to continue long after 2024.

Do other politicians exhibit the same existential threat to democracy? And, if so, what does the battle against that look like?

There are state-level Christian theocrats who are in some ways implementing as much of an authoritarian reactionary Christian agenda as they can. But so far, they're doing it more or less within the limits of the democratic process; they're not staying in office after they lose or something. But then you have the people who are more like mini-Trump figures who ran on election denial and who would be all on board to do more of the same, but they tended to lose in 2022, which is encouraging. It does appear that, especially in red-state America, there are experiments underway to enforce a certain vision of Christian values. So the agenda is there. But there's not, I think, a single individual who has the combination of platform, charisma, and following that Trump has.

So what do Christian communities do now to push back on this creeping authoritarianism?

In the book, I named three traditions of Christian resistance to authoritarianism. One is the dissenting pro-democratic tradition as embodied by the Baptists. Another is the tradition of covenantal thinking, in which it is understood that a political community is like a community of people who are in covenant with each other, making a promise to one another to care about the well-being of everybody and to respect everybody's rights. So, the language of covenant. And then I mentioned the Black Christian, pro-democratic tradition in the US. For hundreds of years, Black Americans have understood better than anybody the flaws of our democracy and how hard you have to fight to have a real democracy. And so, all of us, people of all racial and ethnic identifications and backgrounds, need to study that tradition and listen to the current leaders like Reverend William Barber and others who articulate that tradition with vividness.

It seems like leaning on Black Christian leaders for guidance here might be something those reactionary thinkers who feel challenged by the civil-rights movement might not be willing to do.

One way to interpret what's gone wrong is that America's democracy was always damaged by white supremacy because of allowing and enshrining slavery and then allowing and enshrining Jim Crow, lynching, then segregation. All that has been protested by African Americans and their allies for hundreds of years. And when this ferocious backlash begins on the white Christian side, it's very tightly connected to the civil rights era. And so one way to focus on the racial dimension of the reactionary move is a certain percentage of white Americans who say 'no, we prefer 18th-century versions of democracy where white people are in charge. We don't like this thing where Barack Obama, a man of his background and race, could become president. This society belongs to white people.' To me, that is what Donald Trump has exuded most powerfully in his entire adult political career. And so it's either we either move forward into genuine multiracial, equal democratic citizenship or we are pushed backward into something like white ethnocratic quasi-democracy, and I think there are people who really want that.