American Redemption is Our Last Best Hope

In her latest Hot Type column, Heidi Siegmund Cuda urges Americans of faith to challenge Trump's Christian Supremacy and redeem the soul of America

Hats sold at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday 16 March 2024. Photo: Jessie Wardarski/Associated Press/Alamy

It never made any sense, how the most religious people I knew in 2016 became the most virulently anti-Hillary Clinton. More shocking was how they became ardent Trumpists. Church on Sunday, and MAGA-hatted all week.

We’ve told the story of how the Christian right embraced an amoral man many times on these pages, but we’ve never told the story of redemption.

If the soul of America is to be redeemed, it must start with people of faith.

True believers owe us. They’ve tortured the keyboards of many a great writer who tried to make sense of the senseless. 

How could a proper Christian support the man who mocks the disabled, calls war heroes suckers, allowed hundreds of thousands to die during a pandemic by preaching anti-science bullshit, praises Hitler and Putin, while making dick jokes about golfers. 

Have they no sense of decency?

I learned a few years ago that we had been asking the wrong question. Not why would they, but what do they get out of it?

In a startling new book, The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, religious scholar Dr Matthew Taylor gives the most clear-eyed analysis of what happened to millions of people of faith in America, and how we can help return them to the light. Whether or not we can do it in a week remains to be seen.