The United States is witnessing the spiritual revival needed to face the threat to democracy and religious freedom posed by the Trump administration and Christian nationalism, according to Paul Raushenbush.
“I have become convinced that we are indeed experiencing what we so desperately need, a great awakening in our own time,” the president of Interfaith Alliance said in his Sept. 19 keynote address for the William M. Johnson Lecture Series at Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky.
“The great awakenings that have been identified throughout American history have taken place during times of great turmoil, distress and transition during which people catch a new spiritual vision which results in a new political reality in their time and place,” he said at the event livestreamed on BNG’s Facebook page.
But there is something unique about the current spiritual resurgence, he added. “Unlike previous examples of religious revival, our awakening is not attached to a single faith tradition or leader, but rather is a broad stirring inspired by a combination of a radical spirituality of nonviolent resistance, a named moral ethic of loving our neighbor, and driven by a promise of a democracy that can be made a reality by and for the people.”
Paul Raushenbush
But Raushenbush gave no impression that the threats to constitutional freedoms are abating or easily swept aside. On the contrary, the health of American democracy continues to feel tenuous and has greatly diminished since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year. “We are living in terrible times where there’s horrific heartbreak and pain too often at the hands of those who claim religious justification and sanctification for their crimes.”
The deterioration has been led by “Donald Trump and his accomplices” using well-known authoritarian practices designed to dismantle American democracy, he asserted.
“Over the past year and a half, they have radically expanded executive powers with the supine compliance of Congress. They have attacked the courts, threatened institutions of higher learning, made efforts to control freedom of the press, curtail freedom of speech and censor what we are allowed to read and to learn,” he said. “They have attacked corporations, demonized marginalized groups or pitted them against one another, passed a bill that radically gives more power to the rich while attacking the poor.”
The president and his allies are now intensely focused on ways to undermine and manipulate the midterm elections with the aid of a Supreme Court that has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, he added.
And religion has played a major role in aiding and abetting the process, Raushenbush said. “The slide toward autocracy has been carried out with the overt and enthusiastic blessing of a specific narrow-minded and extreme religious movement that carries much of the responsibility for the moment that we are living through. This comes as no surprise.”
“The slide toward autocracy has been carried out with the overt and enthusiastic blessing of a specific narrow-minded and extreme religious movement.”
It’s no surprise, he explained, because religion historically has been used by totalitarian regimes to grant divine legitimacy to authoritarian policies in exchange for religious monopoly and the opportunity to replace democracy with theocracy.
That’s playing out in the U.S. as Christian nationalists use Project 2025 to shape and implement Trump’s vision for an autocratic nation, Raushenbush said.
Although a relatively new term in popular usage, Christian nationalism has been present since before the nation’s founding, he said, expressed in white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia and beliefs in manifest destiny.
“It has been present in almost every regressive and oppressive moment in our nation’s history, including the genocide of indigenous people, a rationale for slavery, the oppression of women, the basis for the formation of the Confederacy, and certainly white Christian nationalists were the operating force of segregation and institutional racism and violence of Jim Crow that John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement struggled to overcome.”
Christian nationalists are again dominating the country with leaders in powerful roles, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson, he said. Trump has claimed God is on his side and often refers to his religious supporters as his Christians and has apparently adopted God “as some kind of divine personal mascot and partisan cheerleader.”
“ICE appropriates Bible verses in an effort to claim a religious sanctification and justification as they terrorize communities.”
Possibly the most dangerous demonstration of Christian nationalism is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the administration’s go-to anti-immigrant weapon, Raushenbush said. “In recruitment and propaganda videos, ICE appropriates Bible verses in an effort to claim a religious sanctification and justification as they terrorize communities, rip apart families and forsake due process, placing people in unregulated financially motivated concentration camps and shipping humans to countries that they have never been to, to prisons they may never leave.”
But there have been numerous signs of faith-based resistance to the president and his policies, including Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde’s controversial call for compassion for marginalized people during Trump’s inauguration, and pushback from Catholic bishops when Vance slandered immigrants and the work of the church.
Others include “Lutheran bishops who stood up to Elon Musk, the Black church that mobilized against corporations forsaking their promises toward increased diversity, equity and inclusion, the Jewish communities who refused to let the very real problem of antisemitism be used to suppress freedoms, the Muslim community who have demanded respect even as they are attacked and demonized, and Muslim and Jewish leaders together who have shown up side by side refusing to be pitted against one another.”
People of faith must join in the awakening to counter those who want to narrow the definition of what it means to be an American, Raushenbush said.
“Our founding document insists that the very fact of our being here, each one of us, by the fact of our existence, each one of us has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that no person and no government can take away from us.”