Trump’s Rhetoric Fuses Christian Nationalism With Counter-Terrorism

Donald Trump’s posing in front of St John’s Church in Washington DC.

On June 1, Donald Trump stood outside the White House to proclaim that the protests against police brutality, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, were not peaceful but “acts of domestic terror” and a “crime against God”. Having said he would end “American carnage” in his 2017 inaugural address, Trump promised to deploy the power of the National Guard and even the military to “end the riots and lawlessness that has [sic] spread throughout our country”.

Meanwhile, police acted on the orders of Attorney General William Barr to disperse protesters in Lafayette Park, the tear gas clearing the way for Trump to pose for a photo-op across the street at St. John’s Church. He held aloft a Bible in a spectacle that garnered both condemnation and praise from American Christians.

This was a crystallisation of events set in motion by the 2016 election. Trump’s performative piety was a cynical weaponization of Christian faith for political points..

But the show was more than this: Trump’s statements and performances were the combination of post-9/11 national security culture and America’s long investment in Christian nationalism.

Onward, Christian “Counter-Terror”

After September 11 and America’s War on Terror, “counter-terrorism” has been at the forefront of erosions of the nation’s civil liberties: the Patriot — later Freedom — Act; suspension of habeas corpus, permitting “enhanced interrogation”; expansion of the surveillance state, militarisation of the police.

Meanwhile, “terrorism” is not only applied to non-state rather than state actors. It is racialised. White, right-wing extremism is almost never classified or prosecuted as “terrorism”. By contrast, the term is commonly deployed against Arabs and Muslims, and has also been applied to Black Lives Matter, indigenous and allied protestors against oil pipelines, and now anti-fascist activists.

With this context, it is unsurprising that Trump reached for the language of “terrorism” in the face of protests against police brutality. However, it is equally unsurprising that he deployed the language of Christian nationalism: the tradition that draws on notions of America as a “Christian Nation” has been the decisive factor in voter support for Trump.

Mobilising images of war, conquest, and separatism to promote claims of cultural and blood purity, Christian nationalism reinforces social prejudices and grants support to claims of defending the social order. Trump’s portrayal of the protests as crimes against God and his bible-bearing photo-op fit this tradition, tapping into American Christianity’s long history of reinforcing racial hierarchies and enforcing projects of anti-black and settler colonial violence.

Infusing US counter-terrorism with theological fervour is not new. George W. Bush’s ill-thought characterisation of the War on Terror as a “crusade” is a telling, early exemplar. Subsequently, many academics have interrogated the theological undercurrents of America’s Forever War. But if the consequences of the conflict on American civil liberties and police militarisation are now well-documented, Trump’s application of these undercurrents to protests against police brutality carries potentially devastating consequences — not least because white evangelicals remain his staunchest supporters.

Trump The Demon-Slayer

Merging counter-terrorist and Christian nationalist language, Trump’s declaration about ending “lawlessness” adopts two meanings. The first is that of racialised policing, of Trump’s long-stated stance on “law and order”—a mantra, popularised by Richard Nixon, often wielded by the powerful in response to threats from below: popular insurrection, gangs, agitators, public disorder. The second, more theological, meaning is that of struggle against demonic evil. The Antichrist is often identified as the “man of lawlessness,” for example, and this association appears in many conservative evangelical framings of Trump’s opposition. Evangelicals have attributed negative media coverage, the 2017 Women’s March, and anti-Trump opposition broadly to demonic rebellion against divine authority, provoking civil unrest at Satan’s behest.

Drawing a line from the Ferguson uprising to the protests against white nationalism in Berkeley, evangelical author Joel Richardson claimed in early 2017 that Black protestors were driven by a demonic “spirit of rage”, an “irrational rage of Satan” now directed against Trump due to his role as God’s instrument. Despite criticism of Trump from some prominent evangelicals, similar language is surfacing today. Trump’s photo-op was hailed as signalling the “establish[ment] of the Lord’s kingdom.” Extrapolating from police statements about high-level organisation in the ongoing protests, evangelical TV host Derek Gilbert stressed the role of demonic “principalities and powers” in orchestrating protestors, who became their knowing or unknowing collaborators.

The language of both counter-terrorism and demonology target allegedly external actors: these are threatening, parasitic infiltrators who must be identified and exorcised. Combining the two, Trump uses a narrative about battling spiritual evil to justify the repressive mechanisms of state violence. Framing the protests as products not of ongoing racial injustice, but outside agent provocateurs and/or diabolic principalities, Trump and his supporters render them enemies in a cosmic war for national security and survival.

“Our country always wins,” the president declared, drawing a clear division between protestors and “us.” Not only does such language represent a dangerous refusal to address the causes of unrest, it potentially legitimises state brutality against citizens as a means of national restoration. This moment demands not only that we listen to and elevate those voices fighting on the ground for civil rights, but work to dismantle the social, political, and religious structures of systemic and direct violence that have led us here.

Jonathon O’Donnell is an Irish Research Council Fellow at the the UCD Clinton Institute