Dealing with Whose Devil
If you've ever been to a wedding and not cared much for either of the people getting married you have two choices, depending on the bar situation. You can either roil in resentment and wonder who is worse, or you can raise a glass and say that they deserve each other.
From the frequently-repeating thinkpieces in distressed confusion over the Christian right's support of Donald Trump, it's clear that liberals have made the latter choice for entertaining themselves.
Sometimes the article takes the form of denouncing the right's hypocrisy for embracing the pharaoh and his cheap pyramids- and the outrage couldn't be phonier. There's not much point in that kind of consternation because they only people who read it already agree.
Other times the article is more analytical and ponders over what this means about the right's religion or religion in general. Addressing this, as much as Frances FitzGerald or Robert Jones could elaborate what Trump means within the context of American religious traditions and their future, I doubt there is that much to say about why some people choose to be partisan actors and what they do when they're not acting in that capacity.
Is there any more concise summary than the one provided by James Dobson, that the religious right keeps its moral judgments to one side of its calculations of what leader can achieve its ends? They sound different when they're in the their witch-burning moods is undeniable, and it's possible those alternatives will flip with the predictability of senators changing their minds about protocols of confirming judges.
In other words, they have set the terms of their cooperation. They've made a Faustian pact, and while it must irritate progressives that so many on the left can't or won't do this with the Democrats, that is not enough to give this particular political collaboration the sinister status it's often attributed.
This is only particular cause for alarm if you hold to a "civil religion" model in which the (white, mainline Protestant) church is the common ground of social politics. Now that common ground has become party territory.
This is a complicated theoretical debate, but to summarize what I think, religion in the US has never steadily guided consensus, not over the slavery, not over civil rights. Religion has been more plural and disjoint. It has been patterned into the tensions and fissures of American history, which have never been determined along religious lines alone.
So does the alignment of so many white people in the US who identify as Christian with Trump mean anything significantly sinister for them, or the rest of us?
To a certain extent, the religious right imagines us going back to some Julian Fellowes kind of society where you could wipe your feet on women and the poor. They romanticize this way of life by invoking dowdy values like forbearance and deference, thinking the patriarchs on top of it all were incorruptible caretakers carrying the greater good with pious concern.
The more their romance fixes on a person like Trump, our actual good ol' boy, they more the fantasy will be discredited, like propaganda outside its own country.
If we are worried about the punitive ideology the Christian right represents finding a powerful ally in Trump, there are real reasons. However, there is little novelty or characteristic insight in this rendition of Faust's bargain.