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Book review : The power worshippers: inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism

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Haynes, Jeffrey (2021) Book review : The power worshippers: inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Religion, State and Society, 49 (3). pp. 284-286. ISSN 1465-3974

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Abstract

Securing the votes of conservative - mainly white - Christians has been a key issue in US presidential elections since the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Before Donald Trump, however, no president was able to acquire and maintain the support - even adulation - of so many conservative, Christian voters.

What explains their support for, and in some cases adulation of, Donald Trump? What does he offer - politically, culturally, religiously - which led them to vote for him in the presidential election of November 2016? His victory reflected several factors, including tens of millions of Americans’ strong disaffection with the status quo – economically, socially, culturally, and politically - and the belief that America’s leaders had taken a wrong turn. Some at least believed that this was due to the country moving away from its foundational
Christian values.

The author, Katherine Stewart, is an experienced journalist, long interested in what she terms the ‘Religious Right’, by which she means Christian nationalists. Whilst researching The Power Worshippers, she travelled around the USA to encounter, interview, and chat with numerous people from the Religious Right. To a man or woman, they were avid supporters of Donald Trump. Many claimed that this was not because Trump is an exemplary Christian; instead, he was seen as the right man in the right place at the right time to do a difficult but necessary job: reassert the country’s Christian values, on which they believe the nation was founded, in order to ‘make America great again’, to echo his campaign slogan Stewart analyses the Religious Right as a political movement, one that seeks to gain power in order to impose its Christocentric vision on America.

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