Making America Exceptional Again: Donald Trump's Traditionalist Jeremiad, Civil Religion, and the Politics of Resentment

Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, racial equality). As such, his rhetoric legitimized the defense of white male privilege as a vital component of this restoration. While this use of civil religious themes emboldened those who harbor prejudicial views, it alienated others who interpret such rhetoric as an assault on the soul of the nation. Relying on a unique module within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that adherence to the tenets of American civil religion significantly exacerbated the effects of symbolic racism and modern sexism on support for Trump.

The Biblical Theme of Covenant and American Popular Culture from Colonial Times to Comic Books

American civil religion incorporates a nostalgic version of biblical Israel’s covenant with their patron deity, Yahweh, imagining the United States as a new Israel. This new myth reflects early Puritan hope for a new foray into a new wilderness of promise, while also promoting a romantic notion of the providential founding of the United States, national innocence, and national purpose, upholding an ideal of pure democracy and divine favor for establishing it universally. This form of Christian nationalism has a tendency toward a new form of imperialism in the modern era that is heavily supported (at least subconsciously) by a vast array of popular culture products. Yet some pop culture media (including comic books) occasionally call into question the concept of human beings living in a covenant relationship with a divine creator, as well as the validity of America’s status as a divinely chosen and divinely guided nation.

Winning by Threat of Force

Cliven Bundy has grazed livestock on federal land through the last three sagebrush rebellions. The story of the Bundy family ranch, northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, illustrates the frustrations that many ranchers had with evolving federal land management over the last fifty years, as they went from being the dominant users of federal rangeland to one of multiple, competing users. It also illustrates some of the dominant ideologies and arguments that drove the last three conservative rebellions against federal authority, particularly those rooted in American civil religion and popular constitutionalism. And it encapsulates the evolution of western rebellion, from a regional, political challenge to federal authority to one that drew armed support from across the national. Having faced down federal law enforcement with armed militias, the Bundy family continues to graze livestock on federal land without authorization.

This Land is My Land

This Land Is My Land traces three periods of conservative rebellion against federal land authority over the last forty years—the Sagebrush Rebellion (1979–1982), the War for the West (1991–2000), and the Patriot Rebellion (2009–2016)—showing how they evolved from a regional rebellion waged by westerners with material interests in federal lands to a national rebellion against the federal administrative state. It explains how Western federal land issues were integrated into national conservative politics, and how federal land issues became inseparably linked to a wide range of constitutional issues, such as freedom of religious expression, private property rights, and gun rights. As a result, federal land issues became flashpoints in conservative status politics and American civil religion, leading to armed standoffs between citizens and federal law enforcement officers in 2014, 2015, and 2016. These conflicts illustrate both the profound challenges in multiple-use management of federal land and the violent potential in American civil religion.

“Monuments of Folly”: Frederick Douglass, Charlottesville, and the National Religions of America

Heather Heyer’s murder at a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which was organized to defend a monument to Robert E. Lee, offers an occasion to reflect on Robert Bellah’s notion of “American civil religion.” Here I seek to reconstruct that concept in terms of “American national religion” to train scholarly attention on the privileged roles of nation and race in organizing the religion of Americans, as Americans. By looking at the material forms of this religion through the lens of Frederick Douglass’s writings about American national memorialization, I argue that we can better assess the actual as opposed to the ideal content of this religion. We can, further, avoid the Pollyannaish race-blindness endemic to the scholarly discourse on American civil religion. My reconstruction foregrounds a model of “hegemonic articulation” in which violence, power, and exclusion are taken to be the rule, rather than the exception, in defining America’s national religion.