In the course of my 73 years, Christmas greetings from governmental agencies always have been cautiously nonsectarian.
On a typical Sunday morning in the mid-1950s, half the population of the United States was in church, and more than 90% of the population identified as “Christian.” But with the nation’s 5 million Jewish citizens well represented in entertainment, politics, the legal system and academia, and the horrors of Nazi Germany in recent memory, most opinion leaders spoke of America as a “Judeo-Christian” nation.
The second Trump administration didn’t get the memo.
A Christmas message posted by the Department of Homeland Security read, “We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.”
The official website of the Republican Party announced, “Today, we remember that Jesus Christ is the reason for the Christmas season.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted, “Today we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced, “The joyous message of Christmas is the hope of Eternal Life through Christ.”
This coordinated messaging was likely designed to bolster the president’s sagging poll numbers by firing up the Republican Party’s white evangelical base. With only 62% of the American population now identifying as Christian and only 17% of Americans attending worship on a weekly basis, a dose of Yuletide Christian nationalism was sure to please the faithful.
The implication of this messaging blitz was clear: If you don’t identify as Christian, consider yourself a second-class citizen.
A week later, we awoke to the news that the American military had seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a massive military operation that had been in the planning stage for months.
At first glance, Christmas greetings and military operations appear to have little in common, but there is a common link. Fascist regimes shut down opposition by (a) demonizing the political competition and (b) bribing the dominant religious community with special treatment. These two initiatives are designed to be mutually reinforcing.
The Democratic Party was not briefed on the military incursion into Venezuela, and speakers at Trump’s morning-after press conference at Mar-a-Lago repeatedly emphasized that the raid had been undertaken with zero consultation with American allies or congressional Democrats.
Besieged by the unremitting drip-drip of the Epstein scandal, cratering poll results, the defection of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Indiana Republicans and fallout from the Jack Smith hearing, Trump needed to change the subject, and he did.
Fascist rulers brook no opposition, and Trump, as the past year plainly indicates, is a full-blown fascist.
How Samuel Francis wrote the playbook for American fascists
Sam Francis
For decades, a de facto species of fascism has enjoyed strong support in American conservative circles. Decades before he was fired from the Washington Times in 1995 for defending chattel slavery, Samuel Francis had identified a group of voters he called “Middle American Radicals.”
The MARS, as Francis called them, valued citizens over foreigners, the native-born over immigrants, majorities over minorities, Christianity over other religions, and local customs over universal ideals. All the MARS needed, Francis believed, was a leader bold enough to voice their concerns in simple language and live with the inevitable blowback from elite circles.
Patrick Buchanan, a disciple of Francis, built his 1992 presidential campaign around the fears, resentments and priorities of MARS voters. A quarter century later, Donald Trump rode the same political strategy to the White House. In his second term, the president rarely wastes an opportunity to show his contempt for anyone who doesn’t fit the Middle American Radical mold. No one else matters.
A war on Enlightenment values
American presidents always have claimed they represent all Americans, even those who voted for the other guy. Trump is plowing a different furrow. His wager is that the 51% of the electorate who voted for him despise the 49% who didn’t as much as he does.
The bizarre AI-generated meme of King Trump dumping tons of feces on No Kings protesters underscored this attitude. When, at the memorial service for the slain Charlie Kirk, he bragged about hating his political rivals, the king of MAGA was sending a similar message.
“Trump has intentionally surrounded himself with people who share his impatience with liberal democracy.”
The founding documents of the United States reflect a dedication to Enlightenment values. Human rights are God given and therefore are natural to the human condition. They are equal, applying to everyone. And they are universal, applying to everyone everywhere. Initially, the gap between the logic of human rights and social reality was painfully apparent, even to the founders themselves. But that gap has narrowed considerably over the first 250 years of American history.
Not everyone is pleased with this narrowing. In fact, the conservative movement in America and throughout the world, has grown hostile to the Enlightenment logic of human rights. Trump has intentionally surrounded himself with people who share his impatience with liberal democracy.
In this world of discourse, human beings are not natural, they are not equal, and they are not universal. The thinking on the right is increasingly hierarchical. In this world, white people of European origin are considered superior to people of color. Men are seen as natural leaders; women are not. Christian values are superior to non-Christian or secular values. Native-born Americans are superior to immigrants and naturalized citizens.
Stormtroopers holding German Christian propaganda during the Church Council elections on July 23, 1933, at St. Mary’s Church, Berlin.
A brief history of white Christian capitulation
White Christians always have been drawn to authoritarian regimes and hierarchical social schemas. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pope Pius IX and Benito Mussolini worked out a comfortable alliance. Mussolini was willing to make Italy an officially Catholic nation (for the first time in 68 years) so long as the papacy turned a blind eye to fascist policies.
We are more familiar with the total capitulation of Germany’s Protestant Reich Church (Deutsche Christen) to the Nazis. Christian leaders were given a special place in Nazi Germany so long as they gave unquestioning support to Der Fuhrer.
Similarly, since his election in 2010, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, has lavished resources on cooperating churches while repressing all religious opposition. Orbán came to power as an atheist at a time when only 9% of the Hungarian population was attending Christian worship on a regular basis. Nonetheless, Orbán soon declared Hungary a “Christian democracy” and Christian churches, both Catholic and Calvinist, largely have celebrated this move. After generations of communist persecution, they welcome the elevated status Orbán has bestowed upon them.
The same process is unfolding in Russia. Less than 10% of Russians attend Russian Orthodox worship, but more than 70% identify as culturally Orthodox. Vladimir Putin uses the Russian religious heritage as a patriotic rallying point.
His thinking has been heavily influenced by Alexander Dugin, an Orthodox Christian who borrowed most of his ideas from the Italian Julius Evola (the architect of Italian fascism in the 1920s) and the German Carl Schmitt (the intellectual inspiration behind key aspects of Nazi ideology). In response, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has enthusiastically endorsed Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine.
Dugin speaks of imperial zones of influence. His fervent hope is that Russia will one day be the center of a Eurasian empire stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” He is delighted to cooperate with the Trump administration so long as the American sphere of influence doesn’t stand in the way of Russian imperialism.
In the wake of Trump’s military incursion into Venezuela, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and the president himself celebrated a return to the “Monroe Doctrine” which declared the nations of the Western Hemisphere comprised America’s sphere of influence. But Trump’s thinking has more in common with Alexander Dugin than with James Monroe. This explains why Trump speaks of Venezuela, Canada and even Greenland as if they were American protectorates and not sovereign nations.
In short, white Christians have spent the last century playing footsie with every fascist regime in Europe and white American Christians are merely following suit.
The critical role of white Christians
Of course, not all white Christians are on board with MAGA-style authoritarianism. But given a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris, 81% of white evangelicals, 60% of white Catholics and 57% of white Mainline Protestants opted for Trump. By contrast, only 21% of American Jews, 13% of Black Protestants, 25% of the religiously unaffiliated and 33% of the adherents of non-Christian faiths shared this preference.
“Fascists invent falsehoods to evoke an enemy.”
Trump and his enablers are determined to destroy, degrade, defang, defund and delegitimize every facet of American liberal democracy. And, for the most part, the white American church is doing what white Christians have been doing for the past century: playing footsie with fascism.
As Timothy Snyder argued at the beginning of Trump’s second term, fascism is primarily about the manipulation of words and symbols. Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt realized in the early 1930s that the truth or falsity of a leader’s words don’t matter. Fascists invent falsehoods to evoke an enemy. The truth is stubborn and limiting; lies are infinitely malleable. By this definition, Putin and Trump fit the fascist mold.
Priscilla Chan, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Corporate fascism
American fascists court the white majority by demonizing people of color, immigrants, non-Christians and liberals of every description. Trump wagers he can offend elite opinion leaders in academia, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry without surrendering popular support or losing corporate support.
Silicon Valley Tech Bros like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Andreesen and Mark Zuckerburg don’t fit neatly into the MAGA landscape. In this elevated social circle, the prevailing attitude toward the federal government is give us money and leave us alone. Trump’s willingness to oblige is evidenced by the fact that his second inauguration featured a bevy of tech billionaires and Silicon Valley’s favorite political philosopher, Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin imagines a world in which the United States is ruled by a corporate overlord. In this world, universities, having eliminated all courses in the humanities, will become tech and business schools. Government-sponsored social programs will be eliminated. And the nation, on an essentially feudal model, will be divided into competing city states.
Although Yarvin describes himself as “a soulless atheist” while Alexander Dugin is a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, their political philosophies are complementary. Although Yarvin regards Christian belief as rank superstition, he appreciates the role of religion in an autocratic state. When Elon Musk describes himself as “a cultural Christian,” he is following Yarvin’s lead.
Even atheists can be theocrats of a sort.
Not everyone gets to be Theo
As James Dunn famously said, “The problem with a theocracy is everyone wants to be Theo.” Since the 1980s, white American evangelicals, for reasons largely related to dispensational theology, have provided unwavering support to the nation of Israel. Among younger evangelical leaders, that support is waning. This is largely due to the influence of self-described neo-Nazis like Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
When Ben Shapiro used his address at the Turning Point USA conference to criticize Tucker Carlson’s softball interview with Fuentes, Meagan Kelly, Candace Owens and even Vice President JD Vance accused Shapiro of “cancelling” fellow conservatives. Since Fuentes and Spencer are fascists in good standing, their presence in the conservative movement must be tolerated, maybe even celebrated.
So long as Trump is the undisputed king of MAGA, American theocrats of all stripes have been willing to work together. Anyone willing to critique liberal democracy has a seat at the table. Trump is Theo, and everyone knows it.
But what happens if Trump slides into dementia, suffers a heart attack or is simply reduced to lame duck status? Then the knives come out. The remnant of the Religious Right won’t settle for Musk’s cultural Christianity, and vice versa. Pro- and anti-Israel conservatives will war against one another. Prominent preachers and corporate overlords will wrestle each other for control of the conservative movement.
Trump is determined to seize control of a one-party state while he still holds the reins. Strap in folks, 2026 is bound to be a wild ride.
Alan Bean
Alan Bean leads the nonprofit Friends of Justice and lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attends Broadway Baptist Church.
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