'A dynamite scare in church' (1886)

Newspaper clipping: Lancaster New Era, Mon, Mar 29, 1886, Page 1 — Newspapers.com

Image at top: Organ by Holger Schué, smoke by Pexels, both from Pixabay

What it looks like to interrupt a Nazi rally ('A Night at the Garden')

Marshall Curry's 7-minute documentary short, "A Night at the Garden," is on YouTube.

YouTube has age-restricted it, so you may need to go to YouTube to acknowledge the age-restriction before you can view it.

It shows a Jewish man interrupting a Nazi rally in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Learn more at anightatthegarden.com

By the way... "Who Paid For Millions of Fascist Pamphlets in the US in 1940?" Nazi Germany did, explained in ‘Prequel’ by Rachel Maddow. It's a 7-minute read on Medium. I've unpaywalled the link for you.

"Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz sought to link Donald Trump's Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City to a pro-Nazi gathering at the arena in 1939, suggesting the former president knows 'exactly what they’re doing there.'" — CNN www.cnn.com/politics/liv... [1/3]

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 2:54 PM

Walz is talking about this: tuckerlieberman.medium.com/ten-past-noo... [2/3]

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 2:55 PM

Today is a GREAT day to check out Marshall Curry's 7-minute documentary short, "A Night at the Garden," in which a Jewish man interrupts a Nazi rally in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1939. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9gF... Learn more at: www.anightatthegarden.com [3/3]

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— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 2:58 PM

Sartre's review of that rally:

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— L O L G O P (@lolgop.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 6:30 AM

Keep reading

This is all nasty shit but also a pretty clear sign that these people have no moves left. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

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— Drew Magary (@drewmagary.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 4:58 PM

Might be useful to remember that Miller was previously caught in leaked emails urging people to read “The Camp of Saints,” which is basically “The Turner Diaries” for the racist anti-immigrant right. Miller is a certified eugenicist piece of shit & his views are now mainstream Republican politics.

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— Dell Cameron 🦇 (@dell.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:18 PM

Miller presence aligns this entire procession with ideals firmly held by what used to be a fringe neo-Nazi element within the GOP. This is a Nazi rally.

— Dell Cameron 🦇 (@dell.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:23 PM

It’s just frankly not an exaggeration anymore. People really need to get over it. This is happening. www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-m...

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— Dell Cameron 🦇 (@dell.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:35 PM

They are staging a fascist rally in Madison Square Garden. This is not a drill. Do not sit out this election. The result of the election is absolutely consequential and will affect so many lives for generations.

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 5:47 PM

"It's just this amorphous group of people ... they are indeed the enemy from within" -- Trump is indulging in Infowars-level conspiracism

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 6:56 PM

USA Today headline doesn't reflect how racist this rally is. (Bluesky comment)

Could someone face consequences? (Bluesky comment)

One of the speakers, an apparently white man named David Rem, was arrested 33 years ago for riding a train with a suitcase with 40 pounds of cocaine, to which he pled guilty and for which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He claimed to be Trump's childhood friend; it seems he is not, but that doesn't stop the Trump campaign from lying about the friendship too. See:
The strange history behind Trump's “childhood friend” David Rem is speaking at the MSG rally. But how do they know each other? Marisa Kabas, October 27, 2024

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe Performs Wildly Racist Set At Trump Rally In New York City Hinchcliffe made a series of vile comments about Latinos, Jews and Black people during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden. Christopher Mathias, HuffPost, Oct 27, 2024

Vivian Jenna Wilson, the daughter Musk considers 'dead' just for being trans, has a few thoughts about that rally he was at.

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— Alex Andreou (@sturdyalex.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 6:30 AM

The best take I've seen on Trump's Nazi rally is that it wasn't intended to win anyone's vote but was an attempt by a candidate who knows he will lose to marshall his base for insurrection and violence. www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump...

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— Bryan Edward Stone (שָׁלוֹם) (@bestonetx.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 7:24 AM

NAACP Absolutely Slams Dr. Phil’s ‘Hard Work’ Claim At Trump MSG Rally: The civil rights organization called on the TV personality to “tell the WHOLE story” after his talk of America’s origins. Ben Blanchet, HuffPost, Oct 28, 2024

Authoritarianism Expert Breaks Down Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally: Ruth Ben-Ghiat also exposed the real purpose of one claim that was repeatedly made at the event. Lee Moran, HuffPost, Oct 28, 2024

Take a minute to read this excellent piece by @jamellebouie.net Gift link: That Revolting Rally Was a Sign of Weakness www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/o...

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— Kelly Barnhill (@kellybarnhill.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 8:15 AM

www.jta.org/2024/10/30/u...

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— Ron Kampeas (@kampeas.bsky.social) October 30, 2024 at 8:46 AM

Regarding what was said about Puerto Rico:

This “Island of Garbage” comment isn’t an isolated incident, and it goes beyond simple racism. Trump’s circle inherently does not consider islanders, those living outside the US Mainland, as real people. Anyone from Puerto Rico, Hawaii or US Pacific Island territories has seen this over and over.

— Robert Rath (@robertrath.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 9:25 PM

Note that in the very same rally, Tucker Carlson called Kamala Harris “Samoan-Malaysian.” That’s bizarre until you remember that American Samoa is—like Puerto Rico—a US territory. Many on the right fundamentally believe islanders, even in the State of Hawaii, aren’t “real” Americans.

— Robert Rath (@robertrath.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 9:31 PM

“Go back”: How Trump’s media allies have dismissed or denigrated “third world country” Puerto Rico www.mediamatters.org/diversity-di...

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— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) October 29, 2024 at 8:14 AM

A.R. Moxon:

...a speaker who I suppose we must refer to as a 'comedian' referred to Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage."

This was, in the eyes of those who control the platforms of communication, and in the halls of power, and in the minds of many comfortable and privileged people, beyond the pale in a way that none of the other things I listed apparently were. I find it interesting to ponder why. You might think that it was seen as beyond the pale because it was racist, but the entire Trump movement has been drenched in the most blatant racism from its inception. You might think that it was seen as offensive because Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, but everyone who was attacked from that stage represents some part of the United States. I think it was seen as offensive because there are a lot of voting Puerto Rican citizens living in swing states, so this particular instance of racist hate disrupted the one thing the press actually seems to think matters: the horse race of the election. It's not that it was racist or hateful or prefigured violence and death for real people—these sort of things are just business as usual—no, it's that it might actually swing the race, which means it was a gaffe.

All over the place, Republicans and journalists scrambled to walk it back and restore balance to the Force. When a Democrat makes a gaffe, the thing to do is report on it for several weeks in massive fonts. When a Republican makes a gaffe, the thing to do is to find a Democratic gaffe to counter it, and if one can't be procured, to make one up."

— A.R. Moxon, Apology Not Accepted, The Reframe, Nov 3, 2024

See also: Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally Was Even Worse Than You Think Social media posts from Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist, gave a behind-the-scenes look at Trump’s big rally. Christopher Mathias, HuffPost, Oct 30, 2024

Jack Posobiec explicitly says that "Antifa" dates back to the Weimar Republic, explicitly acknowledging that this administration is opposed to those who resisted the arrival of Adolf Hitler in Power.

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— CrimethInc. Ex-Workers' Collective (@crimethinc.com) October 8, 2025 at 3:10 PM

Psst — see this photo on Bluesky, February 2026. A large banner of Trump's face drapes over the outside of the RFK building housing the Department of Justice while masked military police patrol the street.

"Why would the state protect Jews (the default assumption here is “white Jews”) if it doesn’t protect Black people (some of whom are Jews) or working people (some of whom are Jews) or trans people (some of whom are Jews)?

It won’t."

“Give Me the Names of All Your Jews” Is this a prelude to asking for the names of all Black people on campus who could have experienced or witnessed racism in the workplace? Or all women, queers, or trans people? Probably not – that would be woke DEI and critical race theory stuff. Daniel Spector, Portside.org, April 8, 2026

Metacognition and faith

I stumbled across an old note to myself. It was Stanley Fish's 2009 review of Terry Eagleton's book, in which examples of "theological questions" are proposed, such as: “Why is there anything in the first place?” “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” Eagleton's position (as Fish portrays it) is that these questions are valuable as a sort of art form. They are not intended to address matters factually and attain an instrumental goal; we have science for that. Religion is not after facts. It is trying "to tackle what is at stake” (in Eagleton's words); it has something to do with humility and hope that properly ought to come prior to the search for facts.

It occurs to me that a question like "Where do our notions of explanation...come from?" is difficult to answer by any method — never mind the science-vs.-religion debate — because it is an attempt to use consciousness, reason, and language to interrogate and defend itself. A living being can't pick itself apart to learn more about how it thinks and moves. It has to take certain basic parts of itself for granted.

I wonder if what is being said here is that religion pursues a type of metacognition? and that "faith" is a type of humility that exposes the metacognition we do or don't have and can or can't develop? Here is "metacognition" explained by Tom Nichols:

Students who study for a test, older people trying to maintain their independence, and medical students looking forward to their careers would rather be optimistic than underestimate themselves. Other than in fields like athletic competition, where incompetence is manifest and undeniable, it’s normal for people to avoid saying they’re bad at something. As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong. * * * The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. — Tom Nichols. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press, 2017.

(Overestimating one's own ability has been called the "Dunning-Kruger effect," but independently of the psychologists who studied it, it might simply be called a lack of metacognition.)

But often these primary assumptions cannot be questioned very thoroughly or for very long, and what we end up with as the product of "faith" is not humility but arrogance. Partly because: We begin with certain identities, and as a result we see what we want to see in the world. Even when we say we're trying to interrogate our beliefs, sometimes all we're doing is massaging data to reaffirm them, and we are deluding others and perhaps even ourselves.

Another passage from Nichols' book:

...a 2014 study of public attitudes about gay marriage went terribly wrong. A graduate student claimed he’d found statistically unassailable proof that if opponents of gay marriage talked about the issue with someone who was actually gay, they were likelier to change their minds. ... It was a remarkable finding that basically amounted to proof that reasonable people can actually be talked out of homophobia. The only problem was that the ambitious young researcher had falsified the data. ... As Konnikova put it in her examination of the fraudulent gay-marriage study, confirmation bias is more likely to produce “persistently false beliefs” when it stems “from issues closely tied to our conception of self.” These are the views that brook no opposition and that we will often defend beyond all reason, as Dunning noted: Some of our most stubborn misbeliefs arise not from primitive childlike intuitions or careless category errors, but from the very values and philosophies that define who we are as individuals. Each of us possesses certain foundational beliefs — narratives about the self, ideas about the social order — that essentially cannot be violated: To contradict them would call into question our very self-worth. As such, these views demand fealty from other opinions. Put another way, what we believe says something important about how we see ourselves as people.

The "foundational beliefs" might be some identity, intrinsic or cultural. They might be tied to an organized religion. But, I imagine, they might also be a set of assumptions that are harder to pin down to any one "thing." We sometimes try to prove a point for the sake of proving a point, and the way it forms and buttresses our identity is a downstream effect.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

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Faith: Its purpose and limits (Quotes from others)

Hegel said: “With this possibility of knowing God the obligation to know Him is imposed upon us.”

But it may well be impossible to know God.

Some people say that faith is a type of certainty. An Israeli man quoted by Amos Oz: "You cannot separate faith and certainty. They are one and the same. In my vocabulary they are synonyms." Simone Weil: "In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God."

Others steer away from certainty. Jim Wallis, an evangelical pastor with the social justice organization Sojourners: "Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want: Easy certainty." Frank Schaeffer puts it this way: "atheism and fundamentalist religion," though "ideological opposites," nevertheless "often share the same fallacy: truth claims that reek of false certainties. I also believe that there is an alternative that actually matches the way life is lived rather than how we usually talk about belief. I call that alternative "hopeful uncertainty."

It isn't to the benefit of any ideology or practice to allow us to achieve certainty, for then we would abandon the quest it had assigned to us. If we achieved certainty in faith, religion would have made itself obsolete. "Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion..."

But what can religion do for us? Does it tell us that we are broken — and then try to fix us, or inspire us to fix ourselves, or give us the tools to make things better? G. K. Chesterton: "When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified not because her children do not sin, but because they do." As stated by someone Christopher Phillips quoted: "Socrates tried to do the right thing at a time when everyone else was doing the wrong thing. And you know they were all doing the wrong thing in retrospect, because their civilization crashed and burned. As long as just one person is willing to do the right thing amid a sea of badness, there’s reason to hope. Socrates’ life and death, from what I’ve been reading, were modeled on a sense of duty that was ‘faith-based’ — he had faith in people to do the right thing, at least over the long haul, even if over the short term most are acting foolishly. If we don’t all act out of a similar faith, how can we ever hope to see light again in dark times?"

Is the project always incomplete? Leslie Dewart: "For faith is always coming-into-being, it is never quite fully faithful, it is always on the way, hence never perfect and achieved. And if faith is a mode of existence, then Christian theism is a way of life."

And we are never introduced to the whole God?

Frederica Mathewes-Green: "People newly coming to church should have an unfamiliar experience. It should be apparent to them that they are encountering something very different from the mundane. It should be discontinuous with their everyday experience, because God is discontinuous. God is holy, other incomprehensible, strange, and if we go expecting an affable market-tested nice guy, we won't be getting the whole picture. We'll be getting the short God in a straw hat, not the big one beyond all thought."

We are always seeking? Deepak Chopra: "Many doubters have said that God was invented so that these ferocious instincts can be kept in check. Otherwise our violence would turn on us and kill us. But I don't believe this. The oldest hunter lurking in our brains is after bigger prey, God himself."

The quest is difficult. It is had to do what we are doing, to find what we wish to find, and to retain it and act upon it as if we really believe it. The character Pi says in Life of Pi: "Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

We don't always control the process. Cary Tennis: "faith can neither be argued into or out of someone but must arrive and depart according to its own capricious schedule."

And the history of religion and faith, too, is ongoing. Nicolas Berdyaev: "Everything existential is history, dynamic force, destiny, man, the world, are history, God is history, a drama which is working itself out." Working itself out, or perhaps not working itself out, or working itself farther into a hole, but in any case, ongoing.

Where do beliefs about God — God's existence or nonexistence or anything else we might think about the subject — come from? Do they spring from a preexisting philosophy? Or do religious opinions come first, and do those opinions produce our other kinds of philosophy? We don't know. Dale B. Martin: "It seems to me that all arguments about priority — that one's theology is simply a reflection of one's ideology or vice versa — are fruitless. How can we possibly know the answer to such a question? How could we ever sort out so exactly the intricate workings of another person's mind, when we can never be sure why we ourselves believe certain things?" It seems safe to say that everything we believe influences everything else we believe, even if we cannot identify a first cause. For that reason, we should be careful about what beliefs we cultivate. John A. Hardon: “[Vladimir] Solovyev's [1853-1900] fundamental premise was that Orthodox (true) doctrine about Christ is the only sound basis for truly Christian society. What a person believes about Christ determines his concept of the human community.” Judith Plaskow: “Once images become socially, politically, or morally inadequate, however, they are also religiously inadequate." The explorer Freya Stark said: "There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."

Sources

G. W. F. Hegel. Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953. (Originally 1837.) p. 16.
Amos Oz. In the Land of Israel. (1983) Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura. USA: Harcourt, Inc., 1993. p. 153.
Simone Weil. Quoted in Deepak Chopra. How To Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. Introductory quotation.
Jim Wallis, quoted in "Without a Doubt." Ron Suskind. New York Times Magazine. October 17, 2004. pp 46ff.
Frank Schaeffer. Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism). Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009. Prologue, p. xiii.
Ursula K. LeGuin. The Left Hand of Darkness. (1969) New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004. p. 72.
G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1925. p xiii.
“Tarah,” quoted in Christopher Phillips. Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2007. p. 173.
Leslie Dewart. The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age. New York: Herder and Herder 1966. p 64.
Frederica Mathewes-Green. At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. p 149-150.
Deepak Chopra. How To Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. p 14.
Yann Martel, Life of Pi, p. 297
Cary Tennis. Answer to the question "I'm a Christian turning agnostic" in his advice column "Since You Asked..." Salon.com February 24, 2006. Accessed February 25, 2006.
Nicolas Berdyaev. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. Foreword, 1944-45. p v.
Dale B. Martin. Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. pp. 145-146.
John A. Hardon. Christianity in the Twentieth Century. New York: Image Books, DoubleDay, 1972. p 182.
Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. p 135.
Freya Stark, quoted in the Columbia, Mo., Daily Tribune, quoted in The Week, Oct. 14, 2011. p. 21.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Ross Douthat's 'WASP nostalgia' NYT columns

"I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist."
— Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. p 182.

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Immediately after the death of President George H. W. Bush, Ross Douthat's column "Why We Miss the WASPs" (Dec. 5, 2018) was published in the New York Times. There was a swift and negative reaction to the column. A main problem was Douthat's assumption that such nostalgia is universal (when straight white male Protestants are a minority in the United States) and his use of the pronoun "we" to describe, for example, what "we feel" (when many Americans emphatically do not share his sentiments). Another problem was his fuzziness about the term WASP itself, an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant that he uses seemingly interchangeably to describe powerful people and a particular set of values.

What he said

Jumping off from two reflections he'd recently read in The Atlantic — that Bush was the last scandal-free, resentment-free president considered "legitimate" (per Peter Beinart) and that, reflecting on Bush's death, the public feels nostalgic for prep-school educated leaders who came from an "Establishment" (per Franklin Foer) — Douthat opined that what is missing today is "a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today." Douthat agrees, after Foer, that "the old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, [and] it had failures aplenty," and Douthat adds that "as a Catholic I hold no brief for its theology (and don’t get me started on its Masonry)." Yet he feels that the WASPs' "more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well." Nostalgia for WASPs "probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive."

I see two prongs to his comment, and there are vulnerabilities in what he is saying.

First, in the moral realm: Douthat is saying that the WASPish aristocrats weren't so bad, and that people in power today have basically all of the historic WASPish vices with fewer of their virtues. This is a difficult statement to unpack in part because Douthat doesn't clearly name or identify the vices and virtues he's talking about. He tries, referring explicitly to "discipline" and "a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety...a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success," as well as "a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety" since "for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists." This yielded "a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship." His explanation is inadequate because discipline, noblesse oblige, personal austerity, piety, service, and even "competence and effectiveness in statesmanship" first need to be defined, and there just isn't enough space within a newspaper column. It is also probably not literally true that bigots and non-bigoted, deep, scholarly multiculturalists existed in a 1:1 ratio among white Protestants, and that is anyway not a testable hypothesis. And when he says that WASP virtues were replaced by today's "performative self-righteousness and raw ambition," he is unclear if he believes those particular vices existed among the WASPs, too, or, if they did not, exactly what the WASPs' vices were. And there are plenty of people for whom buzzwords like "personal austerity" and "piety" raise red flags: queer proles ruled by self-declared holy leaders have always been menaced by these words that so often signal damaging, repressive policies. LGBT people, even if they can see how austerity and piety may be considered personal virtues, are not nostalgic for the influence of those particular "virtues" in politics.

Second, in political theory: Douthat is pointing out that it might be "a contradiction in terms" to attempt to form "a more democratic and inclusive ruling class." Well, yes. When it does democracy and inclusion well enough, it will no longer be a ruling class. He quotes Helen Andrews to the same effect: Aristocrats can promote "ethnic balance" or "geographic diversity," but they remain aristocrats who have different "values" and "responsibilities" and are not "representative of the country over which they preside." OK, not everyone will get to be president, regardless of how the pool of applicants is widened. But we can't conclude that, when considering demographic access to power, we should be indifferent or deliberately restrictive; nor does it mean (to be more specific) that the white prep-school Establishment should continue to favor itself; nor does it mean that the existing values need to be propagated; nor does it mean that the individuals in power (who will always be small in number, by definition) need to think of themselves as part an aristocracy or an establishment and ought to interpret their own personal values as coalescing and gaining strength in a hive of meta-values shared by other powerful people. Douthat says "a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is," but this prescription is not obvious; perhaps, to the contrary, in the spirit of term limits or the theology of kenosis, a ruling class achieves more good in the world when it disavows some of its own power and attempts to empty itself.

He goes on, creating more problems.

He says that "in any scenario the WASP elite would have had to diversify and adapt," and that the WASPs themselves began to believe that "the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite," so they voluntarily "pre-emptively dissolved," which amounted to "self-abnegation" and "surrender." He is speaking out of both sides of his mouth here: white patriarchs really have to begin promoting diversity and interpreting talent differently, but when they actually begin to listen and make room for other people, they are shooting themselves in the foot and abdicating? In other words, he is saying that diversity is a value, but then he frames power as a zero-sum game. If he really wants to promote diversity, maybe he shouldn't describe it as win-lose for WASPs vs. others.

He says he wishes that these end-stage WASPs had not believed that merit alone could justify a leader but that they instead had followed "a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy" as part of their racial and gender diversification. But what on earth could such an elite-crafting strategy be, if not encouraging talented, motivated, meritorious people to rise in power and influence? Is he implying that he wanted the WASP Establishment to impose its idea of virtue on the up-and-coming meritorious leaders, to mold the new elite in the old WASP image? But that, too, is missing much of the point of diversity. The moral failures of bigotry and cruelty were not necessarily random occurrences that happened to coexist with virtues like noblesse oblige; they were its very shadow. The old guard does not have moral authority to impose WASP virtues on new leaders of diverse demographics (and likely won't succeed in that endeavor, anyway) if it has not yet examined what went wrong with those virtues such that their previous exemplars accommodated or enabled evil. The Establishment really does need to listen to new ideas especially when it has not yet fixed itself.

He wants today's leaders to pursue an "imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit." Even if individual leaders perceive value in piety and aristocracy (whatever exactly that means), why should they imitate the past, rather than being authentically who they are today and responding to the actual needs of others around them?

And then he said

Three days later, the New York Times gave him more space to clarify. The new column on Dec. 8 was headlined "The Case Against Meritocracy: An aristocracy that can’t admit it." He immediately denied that his argument was racist, and then he simply elaborated on his previous column.

He said that "ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other." Sure. This is understandable. You can admit, hire, or vote for someone based primarily on their identity group, or primarily on their track record, or both. If you seek a full, personalized understanding of someone's values and capabilities, you are probably looking at both their background and their merit. (Douthat certainly did it in the previous column where he used the term "WASP" to refer to a group of largely white male Protestants who fulfilled specific social roles and when he tied the demographic and collective track record together to imply something about WASP beliefs, values, and "competence and effectiveness." In the second column, he adds that WASPs tended to study "academia, finance, foreign policy," to be Republican, and to have "manners.")

He complains that meritocracy amounts to a brain-drain, "plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities," leaving "demoralized peripheries." But the solution — as I see it — cannot possibly be to take away the ladder to advancement, granting some people extreme power simply because they happen to be born in Washington while discouraging equally capable, motivated people from coming to Washington. If indeed geographic brain-drain is a problem, a more appropriate solution would seem to be the decentralization of power. He does not take up this line of thought.

He then says that the highest achievers in any system (even a supposedly meritocratic one) cannot help but pass on their own brand of privilege to their children. Today's meritocrats are especially prone to the "self-deception" that they are self-made due to their own achievements rather than to their aristocratic heritage, and thus they tend toward "ruthless solipsism." To avoid self-deception, he suggests that "an aristocracy that knows itself to be one might be more clearsighted and effective than an aristocracy that doesn't."

On this theory, it seems that the brain-drain affects only the first generation of high achievers (the ones with the most personal merit), who then migrate to large cities where their children grow up to become the second generation of high achievers (due more to their privileged, aristocratic upbringing than to their innate merit).

He says he supports diversity but not meritocracy, explaining that "the older American system was both hierarchical and permeable, with room for actual merit even without a meritocratic organizing theory." He also says that the original WASPs, the ones who were actually white Protestants, imposed their values: they "set a tone for the American upper class that was adopted by other groups when they ascended." However, he also describes non-white, non-Protestants who reached the upper-class as having merely "imitated" WASP culture, a word that is telling. He says that they lived "in the shadow of racial apartheid and residual anti-Catholicism." So the hierarchy wasn't that permeable, after all. Or perhaps the word WASP really does refer to an ethnic and religious demographic, such that one must be born into it; in this case, the verb "ascend" is wholly inappropriate, since it implies that certain ethnicities stand above others in the natural order of things. In any case, the demographically diverse people who reached the upper-class constitute an example, in his mind, that it is possible to "adopt the WASP establishment’s upper-class virtues without the ethnic and religious chauvinism." That remains unproven because he has not here examined the full range of virtues and vices and explained which ones led to chauvinism and which ones undid it.

He names "aristocracy’s vices" as "privilege, insularity, arrogance." (He also adds "duty" and "self-restraint" to the list of virtues given in his previous column.) He reiterates that today's leaders — those who exemplify the meritocracy rather than the aristocracy, as he defines it — exhibit aristocratic vices but not WASPish virtues.

At the end, he claims: "I don’t want to bring back the WASPs; if I had the magic wand to conjure a different elite, it would be a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile." His undefended preference for Catholicism should present a concern for the 80 percent of Americans who aren't Catholic. Exactly who does he want in power: local Catholics who happen to have been born in Washington and weren't brain-drained from other cities, and who absorbed their American values (but not their theology) from Protestants, and who cultivate those values to make up for whatever merit they might lack? His comment helps non-Christian readers see more plainly that his references to "piety" and "discipline" are indeed coded messages to Christians. People who weren't raised with Protestant or Catholic definitions and appreciations of these terms are, perhaps, not meant to understand exactly what he means by them. But, then, there is a problem: How can "we" feel properly nostalgic for an aristocracy that operates by virtues that aren't ours? Are we meant to perceive neo-WASPs as competent and effective while not understanding the divine Christian mystery (alien to us) by which they achieve it? Are we encouraged to convert to Catholicism so that we can begin to understand what makes them so special?

This, all of it, is a problem. Both columns.

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I don’t say this to be provocative or trollish: this column, which I have now read multiple times, does not make sense. I am at a loss as to its point. I am open to other readers suggesting what they got out of it. https://t.co/ilW41jrWcP

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 9, 2018

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Related to this subject, please see also my Goodreads review of Robert P. Jones' book The End of White Christian America and my year-old blog posts, "Will organized religion 'take ownership' of the President?" (Dead Men Blogging) and "Reaction to Mark Lilla's 'The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics' (Disruptive Dissertation)

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Also, on January 29, 2024, Douthat tweeted with an implication that the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce is “a sweet thing to watch and maybe the last best hope for America, we need them to marry and procreate.” Mike Duncan suggested on Bluesky that this is “basically just the 14 words expressed in 19 words.”

See where he ended up in January 2025:

I hope that the meteor really destroys everything. I don’t want future archaeologists to know we were saying stuff like this

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— New York Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 9:34 AM

In June 2025, this feels related:

God of the Gaps by Robert P. Baird. Ross Douthat’s usual contrarian approach, in his recent book Believe, leads to a curiously impotent, watered-down account of religious experience. January 15, 2026 issue.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, you can become a member of Medium, where I publish many of my essays.

Will organized religion 'take ownership' of the President?

Thoughts on this book:

The main learning I took away from Stephen Mansfield's Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him (Baker Books, 2017) was the personal influence of Norman Vincent Peale over Donald Trump as a young man. Apart from this biographical detail, I struggled with complex reactions to this book. It didn't hit the nail on the head but neither did it have fatal flaws.

Mansfield appears to tread a fine line between heavily criticizing President Trump for transparently ridiculous behavior that cannot but be criticized and yet grasping for biographical details — if only, perhaps, in the interest of fairness or charity — that make Trump seem like a heavyweight who can coherently assume, if not deserve, the mantle of the President of the United States. Most readers will probably feel that the author goes too far in one direction or the other in its opposition or support for the President. Mansfield acknowledges says the book he's written is "dangerous" (at least for its publisher) because it "critiques a sitting president" yet also "takes [the president] seriously" when he is deeply unpopular. This nebulous idea of taking the president seriously makes the book a little maddening or bewildering. What exactly does it mean to take Trump seriously? He is a wealthy celebrity who has made high-stakes business transactions throughout his life and got elected president. He has a biography similar to others who grew up in a wealthy family. He has psychology and motivations that, like any other human's, can be examined, analyzed, and interpreted. In that regard, the book takes him seriously. But I am not certain that the book — which doesn't mention global climate change or the North Korean nuclear tensions — fully and directly engages the extent of the influence the president has on others and the lasting damage he can do to the nation and the world.

On a related point, the author does not directly reveal his own religious and political beliefs. (At his most explicitly theological, he writes of "the good that courageous voices of faith can do. If they will set themselves to tell the truth, if they will remember that they are emissaries from another land, they can remind leaders — who are too often mired in the temporal — of higher purposes and surer boundaries. They have the power to fix vision upon the eternal.") What peeks through occasionally is a form of political moderateness that rings either a bit insincere or underinformed. For example, on “the all-important issue of race,” he says that the president has delivered “at least racially inappropriate if not outright racist statements on many an occasion.” If one really believes the issue is all-important, the president's well-documented outright racism should be easy to call out. "Inappropriate" is far too mild a word, unless one believes that racial justice and race relations are mostly about being well-mannered (and thus not genuinely all-important). For another example, the author describes the record of Barack Obama on LGBT rights and the position of Hillary Clinton on abortion rights as “extreme.” It is hard to tell if that is his personal view or if he is reflecting how he thinks many religious people perceive them. But, again, if you really believe in LGBT rights and abortion rights, defending them is not "extreme." Trying to toe some kind of moderate line in these contexts doesn't work very well, especially if you don't attempt to explain what your view is and exactly why you believe it to be fair and good despite its avoidance of the "extremes" of nondiscrimination and liberation movements. Mushing around the topic results in a kind of diplomacy that, while trying to be polite and reassuring, achieves the opposite. This undefined moderate stance, perhaps attempting to represent neutrality, does not help the reader understand the author's view and therefore it muddies his moral portrait of the president because it is hard to understand exactly where his points of disagreement are.

The analysis ends at events that happened shortly after the January 2017 inauguration, but the book was not released until Oct. 3. The details of Trump's tumultuous first year in office could not have been anticipated, so Mansfield does not address how bad the presidency really is, and therefore the book will strike many readers as a little tone-deaf. For example, the problem of the president's persistent falsehoods is ever more serious and means something different as he approaches a year in office. The Washington Post counted "1,628 false or misleading claims" through mid-November. We are no longer mainly interested in evaluating his character to know whether to vote for him or to predict how he will govern; we are (or should be) interested in how the government is now being run and how foreign relations are being conducted. We have passed the point where his character flaws are impacting people's lives and causing lasting damage.

True, the purpose of the book is only incidentally, and not primarily, to do the three things discussed in the previous paragraphs — respectfully and seriously assess the president as a full human being who has lived over 70 years on Earth, project one's own moral beliefs to judge how he handles his current role, or concretely assess from a historian's viewpoint what he has accomplished since his inauguration — but rather to explain, as its subtitle announces, "why Christian conservatives supported him" in the election. This it does in a general sense. The answer provided is: Because they were angry and Trump's personality appealed to them. The book is far more about Trump than it is about the Christians who supported him. For a sociological study of those Christians, I recommend The End of White Christian America by Robert P. Jones, released four months before the 2016 election, a book that Mansfield unfortunately doesn't reference.

Trump's Character

First, this is a man who "has lived the life of a celebrated hedonist."

He developed a "juvenile" obsession with the size of the crowds who came to see him. "When he spoke at Liberty University in 2016, his first words had to do with breaking an attendance record. He was in a church service at the time."

He avoids taking expert advice. As a result, his wife Melania's inaugural speech was plagiarized from Michelle Obama's eight years earlier. Melania's interesting life story was "worthy of a great speech" and there was no reason for her to "borrow from the one person on the planet from whom she most needed to distinguish herself". Mansfield believes this was an accident due to incompetence, and he attributes it to Donald Trump's reliance on advice and assistance from a disordered family team where "[n]o one was put in charge." A professional speechwriter would never have made such a sophomoric error.

He also likes to fight. At school, he threw things and needed constant attention. He has asserted that his own "temperament" hasn't changed much since first grade. In second grade, he disagreed with a lesson and gave his teacher a black eye. In business, he said that "most people aren’t worthy of respect” and in Think Big he wrote, "You need to screw them back fifteen times harder...go for the jugular, attack them in spades!" At his campaign rallies, he incited violence.

Americans note his "almost complete lack of the character that is usually the fruit of sincere religion." Americans expect that a president's character is fixed by the time he or she is elected, unlike the Pope whose ordination transforms him, and, when considering Trump, a "deeply imperfect man" with apparent "deformities" and "oddities," the thought of him remaining the same "can be a disturbing experience."

Influence of Norman Vincent Peale

The famous religious leader Norman Vincent Peale was Trump's greatest personal mentor during formative years, and in return Peale called Trump his "greatest student of all time," Stephen Mansfield wrote. Even though this faith "largely failed him [Trump] as both a public and a private man," he returned to these roots in the 2016 campaign, revealing "a softening in religious matters". The nature of this softening is not clearly identified.

Peale was one of the earliest promoters of "the power of positive thinking" as demonstrated in his book of the same title. Mansfield sees limitation in this approach. As he explains it, adding what seems to be his own theological commentary: "Trump took from this that it is God’s will to carry him further in the direction he was already going. He did not understand from his time under Peale’s ministry that God empowers a man only after he remakes him."

Ignorance of religion

Speaking to pollster Frank Luntz, Trump was unable to name anyone in the Bible he admired, and, when asked for his personal beliefs about God, "he spoke at length about buying a golf course." Asked by a radio host to name a favorite Bible verse or story, he babbled and the only thing he could come up with was "an eye for an eye." He said he'd never asked God for forgiveness and was unable to say whether he preferred the Old or New Testament. To Fox News, he identified himself as "Presbyterian" but "also busy." In church, where he said he went mainly for Christmas and Easter, he seemed not to recognize a communion plate. Addressing Liberty University, he showed off his baptism photo and certificate but had no personal conversion story. Moreover, Mansfield believes, the students saw that Trump's vengeful attitude in business and past marital difficulties did not align with their idea of Christianity and they had hoped to see "'fruit,' evidence of a life changed by conversion and modeled on the message of Jesus Christ." "It was, in short, the worst presentation of religion by a presidential candidate in recent memory," Mansfield opined.

Yet Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Liberty University, in 2012 called Trump “the greatest visionary of our time.” This seems key to understand. Why was he elevating Trump, if Trump was so ignorant of religion? What did he hope to get? Mansfield addresses this.

Why religious conservatives wanted Trump

First, they

"were traumatized by the Obama years and fearful a second Clinton presidency would mean more of the same. They would back anyone who could win. They would take a nonbeliever. They would accept a candidate of doubtful morality. They were even willing to risk racial and gender offense on the part of their candidate. They could not endure more years of bombardment from a religious left intent upon remaking the nation."

Exactly how they thought liberals in power would "remake the nation," and why that was more exhausting or existentially more threatening to them than ordinary policy disagreements, is not made clear in this book.

They were angry — that much is made clear. They had a sense of being

"sidelined by history and feared their country as they knew it was slipping away. They wanted change, at nearly any cost, and they looked beyond more experienced candidates to set their hopes upon the sharp-tongued, hard-hitting, angry-as-they-were billionaire from New York. He won them by promising to give their country back to them and to win a future for their children. They believed him, largely because he spoke of faith like a crusader, like one who understood religion as a perpetual call to arms."

In 2016, voters wanted the angry candidate. They asked themselves: "Who best gave voice to our political rage? Who best channeled the anger that kept us up at night? Who was the standard-bearer of our wrath?" When they saw Trump, they felt "they would take him, flaws and all, if he would help them take their nation back."

Donald Trump publicly announced early on in the campaign that he felt he could do better with religious people than Hillary Clinton could. Mansfield wonders why Clinton did not pay closer attention to this and act on it. After all, she "possessed a deeper religious history and wider religious knowledge, and was more articulate in expressing her faith than her opponent" yet she managed to "neglect" those voters. Her choice to give her first speech after receiving the Democratic nomination at a Planned Parenthood event may have been principled, but it wasn't savvy.

Religious people were attracted to how Trump "speaks publicly in the same way that millions of Americans do around kitchen tables, at bars, and among their closest friends. Crass, insulting, bullying, sometimes ill-informed, always opinionated, usually prejudiced, Donald Trump is very much the private voice of millions of Americans." Mansfield continued: "When Trump declared at the 2016 GOP convention, 'I am your voice,' he meant it mainly in an economic sense. Yet he may have inadvertently stated a broader truth. He is a supercharged version of what America has become." This is well put, but it's not obvious what it has to do with religion. Plenty of people are ill-informed and have reason to be angry. Religion, in its most noble self-declared intentions, is supposed to do battle with the ego and replace it with humility and patience. Are white Christians angrier than everyone else? Why? And why do they think, more than anyone else, that Trump is the answer?

(One possible answer I found: Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, wrote in May 2017 that today's American Protestant evangelical "religious fervor...is not born of traditional, innocent faith" but is rather "intellectualized" and "highly politicized". They are suffering from "an alienating hyper-commercial culture" that breeds "emotional insecurity." Evangelical support for Trump is transactional; what they seek is "community and identity".)

Moreover, Mansfield omits the early sexual harassment accusations against Trump and other politicians. The most he says is that Trump's "treatment of women was sometimes obscene" including occasional "disparaging" or "raunchy terms" for them. It seems he is mincing words out of a sense of propriety. The president has said worse things about women than Mansfield is willing to print. This is a book about voters, so everyone is over 18, and we need to address our adult issues head-on. If we can't call out big issues like this, then it is hard to figure out why people voted the way they did in the past; if we can't say what should be done differently in the future, then it is hard to know why we care why anyone voted the way they did in the past. Sexual morality used to be a matter of concern for religious voters. Now something has changed. Sexual harassment and the changing response to it has become part of the zeitgeist, such that the many women who reported harassment were named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2017. We need to understand the religious conservative response — or, more accurately, the lack thereof — to abusive behavior by men in the Republican Party. Why is it tolerated? Why don't such accusations hurt candidates at all today? (Marie Griffith recently called it an "extreme politicization of Christianity" and said that evangelicalism "has become so focused on power.")

Trump does like being gently challenged by people he trusts, and so the "reticence to urge him toward a broader faith and deeper character was unfortunate...The religious leaders who surrounded him in the 2016 campaign might have been just such teammates, had they been willing to take the risk of calling him to a more vibrant Christian faith."

Ed Simon wrote on Dec. 31, 2017 of the large majority of white evangelicals who voted for Trump and Moore that it is human nature to resist or abandon the demanding ”countercultural” commitment of Christianity and to betray the faith "for thirty pieces of silver." The irony he sees is that, since the evangelicalism of Reagan’s time, "many apocalyptic minded conservative Christians made a sort of prophetic parlor game out of conjecturing who the potential anti-Christ could be. Figures from Hal Lindsey, to Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and Jerry Falwell often fingered world leaders or liberal politicians as being in league with Satan. An irony since if the anti-Christ is supposed to be a manipulative, powerful, smooth-talking demagogue with the ability to sever people from their most deeply held beliefs who would be a better candidate than the seemingly indestructible Trump?" Simon does not wish to identify a "literal ant-Christ" but worries that so many Christians "seem to lack the self-awareness to identify something so anti-Christian in Trump himself. Or worse yet, they certainly recognize it, but don’t care."

Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic July/August 2020:

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

How much of our differences are due to religion and how much to race?

Words like “white,” “black,” “African-American,” “Hispanic,” and “race/racial” — used in their racial sense and not in other senses like “race for the White House” — occur, in total, about 75 times throughout the book. That is to say that the subject of race is addressed substantially but isn’t the main focus. The term "white supremacy" doesn't appear at all. Many people have come up with the answer that white people voted for Trump because they are white but this is not quite the same answer Mansfield finds. He recognizes that Trump supporters are mostly white, but he wants to focus on religion. It's fine if he has a different conclusion or passionate interest. The question for me is how well he makes his case. For an entire book focusing on how Christians vote, the words “Protestant” (6), “Catholic” (7), and “evangelical” (20), alongside “Jew” (8) and “Muslim” (8), seem relatively underused. And I am including the bibliography. (These demographics are critical to understand because, as Pew Research found, three-fifths of white Catholics and four-fifths of white evangelicals voted Trump over Clinton, but for Hispanic Catholics it was the other way around, and black Protestants preferred Clinton almost nine-to-one. The vote looks more predictable along color lines than along theological lines.) When I find myself searching an ebook I’ve just finished for keywords so I can retroactively piece together the themes, it underscores for me that something was a little off from my experience as a reader.

Johnson Amendment

As someone who likes to fight, Trump could not understand why clergy did not pick political fights from the pulpit even when they felt themselves "under attack in nearly every arena of American culture." Some clergymembers explained to Trump that they could not make political statements or endorse candidates due to an IRS restriction called the Johnson Amendment. Trump "saw an opportunity both to right what he considered a moral wrong and to unchain a vast army of influential supporters. The Johnson Amendment had to go." He announced this on stage in Dallas on Feb. 26, 2016. The crowd was elated to see an atypically secular candidate nevertheless recognizing their needs and rising to meet them. In so doing, "Trump could win support from some of the nation’s most powerful religious leaders." After his election, he told his evangelical advisory council: "The only way I’m going to get to heaven is by repealing the Johnson Amendment." (One of the members corrected him on that theological point.)

Joy-Ann Reid didn't mention the Johnson Amendment in Fracture in which she traces the current manifestation of racial/political polarization to Johnson's election to the presidency, ten years after the Johnson Amendment was passed. Johnson's rival, Barry Goldwater, was a racially polarizing figure. By the time of the election, religious leaders had been ten years' silenced about political campaigns, thanks to the previous work of Johnson, who was a Democrat, and the last Democratic presidential candidate ever to win a majority of white voters. He got 59 percent of the white vote, but his popularity declined while he was in office, and, in the next election, the Democrat got only 38 percent of the white vote. The man behind the Johnson Amendment may explain why, to this day, it is white evangelical leaders who object most vocally to this rule.

Neither did Robert P. Jones mention the Johnson Amendment in The End of White Christian America. He spoke instead about the broader issue of so-called "religious liberty," emblematized by the example of Christian bakers who are asked to provide wedding cakes for same-sex couples. This would allow the freedom to refrain from speaking or acting in the way ordinarily required by antidiscrimination law, whereas the repeal of the Johnson Amendment would allow the freedom to actively speak or act. These are different problems. The complete absence of the Johnson Amendment from Jones' book, plus the self-undermining assertion by Mansfield that most Americans, including the religious, "not only do not understand what the Johnson Amendment is but may not wish it abolished once they do understand it," makes me curious to confirm the importance of the Johnson Amendment in the minds of evangelicals today. If they don't know what it is, they can't be angry about it, much less be willing to negotiate its repeal in exchange for willfully discarding their fervently held beliefs about, say, sexual harassment and assault and public morality and piety for politicians. My sense is that Mansfield meant that it is mainly the religious leaders who are aware of and concerned about the restriction.

Christianity Today reported in December 2017:

"...overall, most evangelical leaders — and most people in the pews — did not want to see pastors endorsing politicians. Among the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 90 percent of its board of directors, including the leaders of major denominations and ministries, said they opposed pulpit endorsements in a survey conducted earlier this year.

A LifeWay Research survey conducted during the 2016 campaign found that 73 percent of Americans with evangelical beliefs said pastors should abstain from endorsing candidates, and about 65 percent said churches overall should abstain."

Repealing the Johnson Amendment is not the only way religious people can feel powerful. Mansfield praises, by contrast, "the art of prophetic distance" through which a religious leader delivers a message and models right action to political candidates without endorsing any candidate over another.

Furthermore, Mansfield observes that, if the Johnson Amendment is repealed, then liberal as well as conservative clergy can become politically active. Indeed, most of them, Mansfield believes, "are more left-leaning and will become champions for the other side. Trump may be dealing both himself — if and when he runs for a second term — and other conservatives a difficult hand to play."

What does it mean to take ownership?

Mansfield believes that "the religious voices Trump allows a hearing" may be able to hold sway "between the better angels of human nature and the lesser spirits that lurk in the dark". He warns that for clergy "[t]o support Donald Trump without caveat, to extol him as chosen by God without identifying what is morally objectionable in his politics and behavior, is much the same as extolling American culture without expressing any moral reservation." If religious leaders are not "courageous" and "true," then "they may pay a great price and draw the ire of later generations for being cowardly and unprincipled — all while owning Donald Trump."

But what does it mean to "own" him? The word suggests to me that they already have a particular level of influence over him as well as the future ability to take credit and blame for his deeds. It also suggests to me that Trump has somehow insinuated himself into the religion so that the ownership is mutual. Mansfield does not pinpoint the level or scope of influence nor does he anticipate exactly who might need to apologize for what in the future or, more pressingly, who might be able to fix it. If there is a catastrophe and the best we can hope for is a public apology, then "owning Donald Trump" isn't a very high stakes wager for the faithful to take. This is what we really need to know: not only why white Christians voted for Trump, but what everyone is going to do right now as 2018 rolls in about the terrible mess we are in and how we are going to avoid a similar outcome in the 2020 election.

Updates

For more on the Johnson Amendment, please see the June 2018 blog post on Disruptive Dissertation.

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Here's Jeff Sharlet in 2023, writing about Peale's influence on Trump:

"Trump was impious, but he didn't reject faith. Instead, he returned it to the roots of Christian business conservatism, which is where he had been all along: Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. Since Trump announced his candidacy, he had been talking about Peale, 'my minister for years' (Peale died in 1993), but long before that--before he began declaring on the campaign trail that 'nothing beats the Bible, not even The Art of the Deal--the book that beat them all for Trump was Peale's. In Iowa, Trump held up the Bible his mother gave him, but it was Positive Thinking that Trump inherited from his developer father, Fred. In the books he claimed to have written, Trump invoked a personal trinity: his father, Fred, 'a rock,' who taught him 'toughness'; his mentor, Roy Cohn, the Red Scare mafia lawyer who taught him how to get away with anything 'without admitting any guilt'; and his childhood pastor, Peale. As a child, Trump has said, he watched Billy Graham on television 'for hours and hours,' but what he took from it was merely method, the hard sell presenting as a soft one. It was from Peale that Trump learned 'a very positive feeling about God,' he 'wrote' in his stream-of-consciousness campaign book, Crippled America, 'that made me feel positive about myself.' The point wasn't God; it was him, Donald J. Trump, alpha and omega. Peale, Trump boasted, 'thought I was his greatest student of all time.'

The irony of Trump's religion, mostly mocked as a campaign put-on, was that it was one of the few consistencies in his life. Of course, consistency doesn't equal depth, but then, to 'God's Salesman,' as Peale marketed himself, depth was a distraction. Positive Thinking--still in print and popular--'makes no pretense to literary excellence,' Peale wrote, 'nor does it seek to illustrate any unusual scholarship on my part.' 'Positive Thinking' isn't about serving God; it's about using God, through what Peale called 'applied Christianity,' to achieve 'a perfected and amazing method of successful living.' The method is like a closed loop, a winners' circle of the soul. 'The man who assumes success tends already to have success,' Peale wrote, a tautological spirituality as instantly recognizable in Trumpism as the drumbeat of his words: success, perfect, amazing. For Peale, and Trump, these were magic words..."

— Jeff Sharlet. The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. pp. 47-48.

In August 2025, he told Fox News: "I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole." Later in the week, he said: "If you’re not a believer, and you believe you go nowhere, what’s the reason to be good, really? There has to be some kind of a report card up there someplace, y’know, like ‘let’s go to heaven, let’s get into heaven.’"

In October, he again said "there's no reason to be good" apart from getting into heaven, and that this was indeed the extent of his own motivation to be good.

later that month,

"Fox News’ Peter Doocy on Sunday [Oct 12, 2025] asked the president on board Air Force One, as he headed to Israel, if he thought his plan for peace between Israel and Hamas “would help” him access the great beyond.

“I’m being a little cute. I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven, OK? I really don’t,” Trump replied."

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Read my essays on Medium by paying for a membership on the platform.

You may also be interested: Christmas Trees Are Not Pagan: a Brief History of the Christmas Trees, White Supremacist Propaganda, & Popular Related Lies, by Jewitches, Substack, Dec 11, 2025

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Maybe somebody at CNN can explain the difference here because I don’t qwhite understand it 🤔

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— Eric Haywood (@erichaywood.bsky.social) February 20, 2026 at 1:18 PM

A free tip for the dunces manning the Washington Post opinion page these days, when the third paragraph of your draft “There Aren’t Enough Evangelical Leaders” essay is “Some might say, who cares?”, that’s a good sign you should scrap it and blog something else www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

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— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:02 AM

As far as concessions go, “the people for whom I am advocating are objectively unable to do the jobs I want them to have, and also have a nasty history of disqualifying themselves with their own rank bigotry” is an incredible thing to have to write

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— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:07 AM

Yes, “low cultural impact” is the type of phrase that any halfway competent editor will be like, hang on, what do you mean by that

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— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) March 6, 2026 at 10:11 AM

Characterizing Hobby Lobby, who went to SCOTUS to preserve their right to not provide healthcare they don't like to their employees among other overtly political activities, as a business with "low cultural impact," is certainly a choice.

— Devon Unger (He/Him) (@devonunger.bsky.social) March 6, 2026 at 10:06 AM

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