Why Is Christianity so hard to find in the Trump administration?

But what’s notable about this administration is how wide the religion gap is. When the Trump administration cut foreign aid programs, which often reflected overtly Christian humanitarianism, some religious conservatives welcomed or made peace with the cuts. However, apart from the trans issue, more “right-wing” religious priorities have not received much attention from this administration.

He kept a conspicuous distance from the anti-abortion movement. He offered symbolic moves at best to address the spread of vices (pornography, drugs, gambling) that evangelical Christianity in particular had once fiercely opposed. Nor has it yet provided serious responses to new religious concerns about falling birth rates.

And it has done little to address Christians’ growing concerns about the dehumanizing effects of the AI ​​future. If the right’s coalition is split between a donor class that supports AI and a potentially AI-sceptical base (with Steve Bannon as its spokesman), the Trump administration has strongly backed the side that wants to build the Machine God.

Management to have He offered plenty of general rhetoric about the value of Christianity to American civilization, as well as presidential complaints about Christian persecution abroad and pious social media posts on Catholic holidays. But in the absence of catechistically informed policymaking, this sometimes feels more like an exercise of Christian politics than a full reality.

In offering this analysis, I must emphasize that sincerely Christian policymaking can go badly astray (when it comes to the Middle East, I prefer Donald Trump’s pagan transactionalism to George W. Bush’s evangelical idealism) or simply become unpopular (I don’t think a war on porn would significantly increase Trump’s approval ratings).

And sometimes the Trump administration’s priorities, especially those that are not religious, simply reflect what its supporters want. The right’s coalition is more secular than in the past, and even many church-going conservatives appear to be more concerned about immigration than abortion. Many of those very online are more invested in meme wars than moral laws. And religious fears about AI remain nascent: there is no clear “traditional” alternative that will outpace the Chinese.

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Still, I think a more Christian policy could serve the White House on three fronts. In policymaking, a Christian social vision will help government solve the fundamental social problem of our age, the substitution of temporary hedonistic evils for permanent commitments. In politics, public rhetoric infused with more Christian charity could win an increasingly unpopular administration some much-needed friends.

And morally, in some concrete cases—from the treatment of detainees we sent to a prison in El Salvador to the fate of drug traffickers whom our missiles allegedly left helpless at sea—a little more Christianity in its nationalism might prevent this administration from doing bad things.

This article was first published on: New York Times.

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