America Remains a Fundamentally Protestant Country
If the Charlie Kirk memorial service is any indication, evangelicalism has a strong hold over the American mind. Reportedly attended by over 275,000 people in and around State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, the service featured speaker after speaker praising Kirk’s life and presenting the Gospel to possibly the biggest audience in human history.
The saving news of Jesus Christ was not just offered by pastors and through song—key members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, discussed the Gospel, freely and openly. “I have talked more about Jesus Christ the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public office,” the vice president noted in his speech.
In her eulogy, Erika Kirk rightly forgave Charlie’s killer, while President Trump said that the assassin would nevertheless receive justice in the civil realm, which is a perfectly compatible Christian message. Private enemies need to be forgiven, while public enemies need to face the consequences for actions that upend civil society.
All of this, of course, is a deep irony in light of the constant claim from Big Eva elites over the past ten years that Trump and the MAGA movement would secularize the Right. But after hearing speech after speech at the Kirk memorial, where Christ was proclaimed, this is far from the case.
The deepest fears of the “Third Way” prognosticators have once again proven to be unfounded. Yet again, they’ve shown a complete inability to analyze reality with any degree of accuracy. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the people whose every action almost seems calculated to prevent the imminent takeover of the United States by Independent Fundamentalist Baptists continue to deeply misunderstand our political and cultural moment.
Instead, it’s becoming all too obvious that they’ve uncritically accepted a leftist framework in their attempts to police Christians on the Right. Like administrative capture theory, in which regulators become beholden to the institutions they were tasked with regulating, the highest echelon of evangelicals has become beholden to the very societal forces they were supposed to fight against.
This becomes obvious when considering what triggers them to post on social media. Donald Trump will say something nasty or outrageous, and they’ll quickly fire off a post that severely denounces evangelicals, attempting to hold them accountable for electing Trump. But when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, most were either silent or even apologetic about the ruling. Only a small number of evangelical elites praised the Court’s opinion in the Dobbs case without qualification.
More evangelicals should instead follow the example of Samuel James, who rejects the “Jesus is neither Left nor Right” rhetoric altogether. Instead, he argues that “biblical Christianity is deeply conservative in many (most?) of the ways that term is coded in [the] USA.” Despite the protests of major public theologians, a Christian cannot support the Left because they support numerous evils, such as trans madness, and are working to normalize violence against their political enemies.
Take the rhetoric of radical groups like the John Brown Clubs, which is becoming more mainstream on the Left. Millions of average Americans seem to support killing their political foes. A JBC distributed flyers at Georgetown that say, “Hey, Fascist! Catch!” with the subhead, “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.” This is the natural result of what happens when one side of the political aisle openly calls their opponents Nazis—dehumanization, and then killing and open celebration of death logically follow.
When you call your political opponents Adolf Hitler enough times, people on the Left are going to start believing you and decide to take action.
In American culture at present, orthodox Christianity is going to be seen as a right-wing phenomenon, which is why basing one’s entire model of ministry on trying to avoid being branded right-wing is counterproductive—and ultimately harmful to the spread of the Gospel in America.
Another interesting aspect of the Kirk memorial was the reaction to it from the laptop class. They treated it as if they were looking at a strange ritual of a foreign tribe—not the culture of tens of millions of Americans. While the Right remains awash in a culture that was mostly fashioned by the Left, it’s no surprise that most on the Left don’t have the first clue about how the other half lives.
Reviewing images of the memorial service, Atlantic staff writer Thomas Chatterton Williams noted that he never felt “so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement.” Having lived outside the U.S. for half of his life, he commented, “I just feel more at home in Greece than in these images.”
He didn’t mean any of this as a criticism but as a sociological observation about the vast gulf between his own class and the sensibilities of an almost wholly separate America. Williams’s response immediately brought to mind the reaction of our elites after they ventured into the hinterlands in the wake of the 2016 election, trying to figure out how Americans could have ever voted for Donald Trump. Like Pauline Kael’s famous statement after Nixon won in a landslide in 1972, American elites wondered how Donald Trump could have won when everyone they knew voted for Hillary.
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was more right than he knew when he argued during the 2000s that there are two Americas—only it isn’t money that’s causing the division. Instead, there are two fundamentally different peoples living in America. One is defined more by America’s historic folkways, and the other is far more akin to a secularized European country.
Another, far less charitable, response came from ardent NeverTrumper Tom Nichols. He commented that he “doesn’t recognize the places in my country that have been overtaken by cults of personality.” What Nichols fails to comprehend is that a thoroughly American form of public worship of God is seared into our country’s DNA. Contrary to his assertion, the service wasn’t about Donald Trump—who seems to dominate the minds of his most zealous critics far more than his most ardent supporters—but about publicly honoring the life of a martyred saint who has gone on to glory.
(Somehow, Nichols’s comment wasn’t as bad as Jemar Tisby’s, who put his narcissistic concerns about “white Christian nationalism” front and center, shoving Kirk’s assassination to the margins.)
Revival—which is distinct from revivalism, a point that Ian Murray has been at pains to make—has always been part of the American way of life. The famous skeptic Benjamin Franklin was in awe of the open-air preaching of George Whitefield. He noted the massive throngs of people who heard Whitefield, commenting in his Autobiography that the preacher had an “extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers,” and called attention to “how much they admir’d and respected him.”
The deeply Protestant character of America remains to this day. In an argument that was picked up by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat and the blogger Rod Dreher, Joe Rigney rightly made the case that Protestantism has shaped American expressions of Christianity, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy included, since the first boats arrived at our shores. “Watching these elected officials preach the gospel,” he noted, “confirms my longstanding belief that American Catholics are Protestants because they’re Americans.” There was no talk of Kirk being in purgatory (perhaps they thought he went straight to heaven because of his martyrdom) or paeans to Mary.
Catholic retreats for teens often feature an aesthetic and atmosphere that’s almost indistinguishable from a mega church service or a TPUSA gathering. America’s Protestant heritage is especially evident when looking at the culture of Italy, a country that is heavily indebted to the Roman Catholic Church.
None of this, however, should be taken to mean that Protestants should be triumphalist about this fact. If we don’t act with prudence, will, and determination, it is possible that American culture could gradually shift away from our Protestant foundations over the coming generations. But if the reawakening of the Protestant mind that we’re beginning to see is any indication—from the burgeoning resourcement project to a rejection of an over-realized understanding of the spirituality of the church—that possible future looks more remote by the day.
