Religious believers breathed sighs of relief on Wednesday morning. Religious liberty was not a significant issue in the Trump campaign. But there can be no doubt that his administration will accommodate religious dissent, instead of using legal and bureaucratic pressure to enforce conformity to progressive dogmas, as did the Obama and Biden administrations.
However, there are deeper reasons for religious believers to be happy with the election outcome. Three generations ago, Theodor Adorno and a team of social scientists published The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a book that claimed to identify characteristics of people who endorse authoritarian demagogues. Among these characteristics were the acceptance of traditional moral norms, especially concerning sex and family life, and the willingness to follow the orders of authority figures. Although the study did not target religious believers, by this account, a faithful Christian who adheres to the Bible’s moral teaching and recognizes God’s authority as supreme would be considered a “proto-fascist.”
The framework developed in The Authoritarian Personality was widely accepted and shaped elite American opinion. Mainstream liberals adopted the presumption that an incipient authoritarianism lurked in the American populace. Many adopted the Manichean dichotomy of Karl Popper’s 1945 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Opposition to conservatism was seen as a decisive cultural struggle between backward-looking, close-minded “Middle America”—the Archie Bunkers—and forward-looking, open-minded progressives.
In this milieu, the older, rationalist criticism that religious belief lacks a foundation in reason gave way to the moral objection that traditional faith inculcates slavish obedience. It perpetuates patriarchy, homophobia, and other sins against the progressive ambition to dethrone old authorities and remove traditional barriers. Ardent faith came to be viewed as a dangerous threat.
I remember riding a New York subway shortly after Rick Santorum won the 2012 Iowa caucus. A young woman and her boyfriend were talking about him. In an emphatic voice, she announced, “He’s a very dangerous man.” It’s unlikely that she had read or even knew of the books by Popper and Adorno. But the ideas found in them had shaped her concern about Santorum. In essence, a religious believer who adheres to the Bible’s moral teaching and recognizes God’s authority is a “proto-fascist” who yearns for the security of a “closed” society. He is an authoritarian, an enemy of the diversity and inclusion made possible by an “open” society.
Trump manifests no deep religious convictions. Explicitly religious themes and figures played no significant role in his campaign. Nor did it play a role in the Harris campaign. The recent electoral battle saw the fewest references to religion in American history, aside from journalistic shills for Harris who trumpeted the dangers of “white Christian nationalism.”
Nonetheless, the disparagement of Trump and his supporters was in accord with the mentality that informed The Authoritarian Personality. Democratic politicians and partisan journalists regularly trafficked in accusations that Trump was a Hitlerian figure, a full-blown authoritarian who would violate the Constitution and undermine American democracy. Anne Applebaum and others represented him as the second coming of Hitler.
These hysterical evocations of 1939 were implausible as literal dangers. They were, however, predictable rhetorical responses to Trump’s role in early twenty-first-century American political culture. Three positions were crucial to his victory: restricting immigration, establishing trade barriers to protect American workers, and opposing transgender ideology. In other words, affirming and strengthening borders—between nations and between the sexes. This platform runs counter to ideals of an “open” society, and thus appeals, our elite assume, to the tendency that Adorno and his team identified as “proto-fascist.”
Trump’s victory was not a landslide. But it was decisive. And he won in the face of relentless accusations of authoritarianism and fascism. This outcome strongly suggests that the climate of opinion that portrays politics as a battle between the open society and its enemies is losing its currency. As a consequence, elite presentations of religious faith as dangerous and oppressive are also becoming unpersuasive.
Religious believers may or may not agree with Trump about immigration or trade. And they may have diverse views about how to respond to our society’s confusions about what it means to be a man or a woman. But they should welcome the general erosion of the open society consensus and its ready accusations of fascism and authoritarianism. In that regard, whatever one thinks of the man or his platform, Trump’s electoral success is good news for those of us who think that the highest, noblest, and most liberating act is to surrender ourselves, heart, mind, and soul, to God.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
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