Sarah Posner

For the Christian right, Trump is no ordinary politician and no ordinary president. He is anointed, chosen by God “and sanctified by the movement, as a divine leader sent to save America.” Trump has manipulated the Christian right into supporting him despite everything, because he gives them everything they want. He gives their pastors direct access to the White House and the Oval Office, and they dutifully inform their flocks of how wonderful he is and how influential they are. In Sarah show more Posner’s hardhitting Unholy, support for Trump is total. The book is an apocalyptic view of American politics, not religion.

The book is a component by component view of how the Christian right is infiltrating the federal government, and changing it to its own worldview. It has been building up to this for decades – since the end of the Nixon administration. It has been a purposeful campaign to build “think tanks”, lobbies, Political Action Committees and ecclesiastic pressure, most visibly from televangelists. Their reward is government positions, selfies with the president, foreign influence in autocratic Christian hotspots like Hungary, Moldova and Ukraine, and money, from unconstitutional tax breaks to bookselling and everything in between. It’s the best time to be in the God business, the way Posner structures it.

It is all based on racism and white supremacy. It’s there, out in the open among the preachers of Trump as the anointed one:
-“(Historian Randall) Balmer told me the religious right had come ‘full circle to embrace its roots in racism,’ and ‘had finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about abortion or family values,’” Posner says.
-According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Christians’ rights are traditional, and natural. LGBTQ rights are newly manufactured and therefore of lower status.
-His predecessor at State, Rex Tillerson, moaned that promoting human rights and democracy abroad could often be an obstacle in advancing American interests.

They are all about autocrats, hoping Trump will take charge like the Putins, Xis and Orbans of the world. Anything that smacks of democracy is suspect. They applaud gerrymandering, closing down media that isn’t 100% with them, and building bigger government to accommodate and impose their program on the American people:
-Republican congressmen demand investigations into funds for democracy initiatives in eastern Europe, while praising the power grabs of Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, who figured out years ago that the harmless Christian church is the perfect tool for implementing their takeovers, and who have lavished funds on them to kick it all off and keep it going. There is nothing to criticize; they are simply bringing back traditional values.
-Despite the stated goal of small government, Trump has been placing religious zealots in key positions, such as the Office of Civil Rights of the Health Department, where Roger Severino has created a whole new division for protection of religious freedom (in health and human services). This allows Americans to deny healthcare to each other based on religion, sex and “conscience”. The new division pushes Americans to complain about infringements. It threatens to shut off all federal funding for the entire state if someone complains about hearing the word abortion, for example. All this is of course, the exact opposite of the stated purpose of the Office of Civil Rights. And goes totally against supposed Republican values of shrinking government.
-This is happening all over the federal government at Trump’s insistence.

They are all about taking power, and Trump, with no network of his own to draw on, fills judgeships, civil service posts and diplomatic postings with sycophants whom he knows will do his bidding, whatever that is as it changes from day to day. They will forgive everything he says or does that goes directly against the constitution, theirs or America’s, because they are thrilled to be in power at long last, according to Posner.

What comes through most strongly, at least to me, is that the alt-right, the new right, evangelicals and conservative Christians all look at the world as zero sum. There is only so much wealth, right and privilege available, and any raising of the levels for non-whites or non-heterosexuals somehow diminishes the rights and privileges of white Christians. This is the driving force behind anti-busing, anti-immigration, anti-civil rights, anti-Equal Rights Amendment, anti-textbook, anti-gay, anti-abortion, religious freedom for tax deductibility - and pro-Trump. No one is allowed to match the status of white Christians.

As Posner demonstrates ever more clearly and precisely, Trump and his unholy minions are heading the United States into a state of inequality it has never known. Different ethnic groups will have different rights from white Christians. Jews will have less rights than whites (Posner, an Ashkenazy Jew, has had her religion pointed out to her numerous times over the years of dealing with the right. It lessens her in their eyes and puts her on her guard). Muslims will have no rights at all, and gays could face the death penalty if some get their way. Different religious groups will also be demoted, perhaps nominal Christians falling somewhere below evangelicals but ahead of say, Mexican Catholics. This dystopian future is well on its way, and can be seen in various stages in countries like Russia, Hungary and Brazil, where the president has declared immigrants “the scum of the earth.” Bolsonaro and Trump praise each other to the skies.

As in Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, it is striking how low quality the players are. They are Nazis (some not even ex), fraudsters, crooks, sex fiends and hypocrites. They are mean and vicious. Posner says ex-con Jim Bakker told his televangelist crowd the day Representative Elijah Cummings died that God struck him down for leading the committee to impeach Trump. They all insist there was not the slightest pretext to impeach, that it was all purely a ploy to deny them, white Christians, their vote.

Posner has been living this beat for decades. She attends the conferences, interviews pastors and televangelists, and is generally well known in these circles. Not to mention well read. The result in terrific insight, rationally laid out for the reader to appreciate in its true depth. It is all politics in the world of Unholy. The quotes will not be disputed. Nor will the goals and ideals. There is an agenda, and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt in its implementation. It is clearly holy war, with Donald Trump shuffling the players on and of the board.

They are always the victim, and time is always running short. Influence is measured by the amount donated. Such is the Unholy world Sarah Posner has lived. And unless Americans change their votes in 2020, so will the whole country.

David Wineberg show less

Nothing observers of Trump's ascendance will find new and published prior to Trump's 2020 defeat with its concomitant (and ungoing call for) insurrection. What sets this book apart is its roll call of political and ('so called,' in my estimation) religious leaders who cant dangerously (and unapologetically) to the undemocratic right to grasp and maintain personal power. Chief among them throughout is conservative political activist Paul Weyrich whose 1980 observation that "I don't want show more everybody to vote....As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down" besets us as a nation now and illustrates the decades' long campaign to uncouple the United States from democratic norms. It is this long game that makes Posner's book so terrifying. show less

Like many of us, I really wanted a detailed understanding of why the evangelicals have embraced Trump, with such deep devotion and continue to do so. Posner has been studying the Christian right for decades and she lays it out perfectly here, explaining why this was a match made in heaven. Not always a pleasant read but an important one.

The challenge of history is always in perspective. Attempts at assessing the legacy of a person or an event anywhere near their lifetime is always premature. Consider how differently we have looked upon World War I since it happened: the "war to end all wars"; the pointless war that presaged WWII; now that WWII has all but passed from living memory, we can see WWII as the almost inevitable consequence of WWI, and how the latter broke European history and changed everything. The H1N1 pandemic show more which came at the end of WWI was not thought of nearly as much until another pandemic a century later. Sometimes it takes more than a century; witness the recent reconsideration of Reconstruction and its legacy.

And yet, even though short-term works of history lack perspective, they can serve an important purpose: to lay out the way things were and the connections which led to a given circumstance. To this end Posner's book on the relationship between Trump and Trumpism with white Evangelicals is significant.

The author does not hide her liberal bias. But she has been immersed in the world of white Evangelical politics for some time and is able to effectively strip the conceit away from the past five years: Trump was not an aberration, but the culmination of everything white Evangelical political machinations were working for over the past fifty years.

This book isn't really about Trump. Yes, he is mentioned often; his behaviors are described; his policies and decisions considered. But all are done with a view to look back at the ground prepared for this kind of presidency.

The author does well at showing how on issue after issue - religious liberty, immigration, economic policy, posture toward opponents, legal theory, matters of race - Trump became the embodiment of what the vast majority of white Evangelicals was prepared to accept and to look for. We hear the stories of the "prosperity gospel" advocates who latched onto Trump and have apologized for him. We can see how they attempt to wrap Trump up with the cross and with prayer whenever the news cycle turns dire. We see how the political agitation didn't really start with abortion - in fact, Evangelical postures about abortion were pretty shockingly pro-choice in the 70s - but with the threat of loss of tax-exempt status for segregation academies in the South. We learn of Billy Graham's political posturing and messaging. We see major figures in the development of the white Evangelical political machine - Weyrich and others - and while Trump might be more vulgar than they would have appreciated, his policy platform and general posture were exactly what was sought. We see the veneer of an attempt at racial reconciliation in the 90s which proved too costly to the white nationalist Evangelical masses in the 21st century. And we see a group of people constantly relied upon for their votes but rarely given much of a hearing and standing in the halls of power - until Trump elevated them. We see a whole cottage industry of zealots prepared for administrative work finally given an entrance since Trump was so odious to the Establishment. Prepare yourselves to hear about all kinds of backroom and bureaucratic decisions which took place that will shock and mortify when we hear of them.

They may not really be fans of adultery and vulgarity, but Trumpism is what white Evangelical nationalism has been yearning for and working toward for generations. That explains the past five years very well. And it explains why even though Trump has lost, and Trump has started to really disgrace himself, what he hath wrought will not go quickly into the night. show less