Unholy by Sarah Posner
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Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump
By Sarah Posner
Random House, 2020
One of the evils of Donald Trump, alongside his physical cowardice, his domestic cruelties, his compulsive lying, is also one of his oldest and most insidious evils: the ability to suborn. For 50 years, he has been the living embodiment of the pitch you can’t touch without being defiled. Experienced financial managers commit embezzlement with barely a recordable urging from him. Savvy New York lawyers who certainly know better will find themselves taping clients and coercing tenants at his mere association. Kind-hearted charity directors will coarsen into habitual four-day-a-week creatures of the Manhattan legal system because that’s where he brings them. Proud and even arrogant politicians find that they have become cringing underlings with hardly a nudge from the man they once scorned and now fawn upon. Upright people become liars in echo of his lies; intelligent people become stupid in echo of his stupidity.
This pattern, once almost exclusively the province of New York, New Jersey, and Las Vegas, has since 2017 been written on the national and even international stage. One of the more garish examples has been the craven hypocrisy of the American evangelical leadership, which for decades has claimed the moral high ground from which to hector an increasingly liberal and secular population. This leadership has embraced Donald Trump literally and figuratively, declaring as God’s anointed a lying, lecherous, miser who is also almost certainly the country’s first truly atheist President in modern times. There is no traditionally Christian value Trump doesn’t soil on an almost daily basis, and yet the evangelical community has lined up to praise him.
This hypocrisy is the heart of Sarah Posner’s new book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, and since Posner is a well-respected journalist, it’s important to note that another garish example of Trump’s ability to debase is the American press. Despite the fact that Trump has called the press “the enemy of the American people” for years and openly incited his followers to physical violence against reporters, most segments of the mainstream press have nevertheless been suborned by Trump. They routinely use wormy euphemisms when writing about virtually everything connected with him; his lies are called “inaccuracies,” his stupidities are called “indiscretions,” his autocratic fascism is called “unconventional.” And all of this is done for the most sordid reason: to skim the profits and clicks and revenue of Trump’s audience while pretending to hold him accountable. One after another “Trump book” has therefore been every bit as revolting an example of Trump subornation as anything seen in the well of the Senate or the pulpits of megachurches. A wary reader might glance at Posner’s book and expect the worst, because any book that discusses honestly why the American evangelical community has embraced Donald Trump must lay waste to both sides of that relationship - a thing virtually no mainstream “Trump book” has been willing to do.
This one does. Posner gives a brief and very skillful overview of the growth of the modern American marriage of fundamentalism and conservative politics and then moves straight into deeper detail about how faith leaders could so readily make common cause with “a thrice-married philanderer who talked about dating his daughter, paid off a porn star to keep quiet about an affair, and was terrible at God talk.” At the heart of this collaboration, she rightly notes, is naked transactional expedience:
Trump’s ascent was not an ideological aberration, despite his deviations from Republican free market and foreign policy orthodoxies. For the Christian right, Trump is a culmination of five decades of political organizing. On the surface, the Christian right is saturated with rhetoric about “faith” and “values.” Its real driving force, though, was not religion but grievances over school desegregation, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action, and more.
Those grievances - against modernity, against compassion, against every kind of equality other than the equality of the male heads of households in white suburbs of the Deep South - are the hard, bitter kernel of Unholy’s story. Posner never loses sight of them, never calls them by anything other than what they are, never insults the importance of her subject with euphemisms. And she’s equally frank about some of the results of this bargain:
In defending Trump from criticism, religious right leaders have given moral cover to the president’s racism and white nationalism. With each tweet excused or rationalized, with each racist utterance waved off as misunderstood or manipulated by “fake news” to make Trump look bad, with each rejoinder that it is Trump’s critics who are fomenting divisiveness, Trump’s evangelical loyalists have helped make the unthinkable - an overtly racist American president - a reality.
Evangelical support for Trump has scarcely lessened a fraction even during a botched pandemic, and his cynical debasement of their interests has become a literal matter of life and death, with Trump urging governors particularly to open churches and fill them with the faithful. In the past, the people suborned by Trump and then discarded when he was finished with them or bored with them would often wear a dumbfounded expression, as though they couldn’t quite figure out how or why they had ruined themselves for somebody who could scarcely remember their name. In this case, those crowds of evangelical faithful will be lucky if such disorientation is the highest price they pay.
Unholy is very pointedly not written to pander to such people, which is intensely refreshing. And if any of those people should happen to read it and allow it to change their devotions, so much the better. It might actually save their life.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.