Religion and the Restructuring of American Politics

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, White evangelicals in the United States have largely aligned themselves with Donald Trump's Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement and the Christian nationalist ideas it promotes. But an active network of White evangelical leaders are resisting the influence of Christian nationalism in their churches and in American politics. What divides these evangelicals is not whether they are conservative or liberal, respectively, but whether they support Christian autocracy or pluralistic democracy. In this Presidential Address, I argue that the fault lines now running through the evangelical world offer insight into a larger restructuring of American politics that has been developing since the 1990s. I situate this post‐1990s restructuring in relation to the post‐1950s restructuring of American religion, which involved a shift in many White Americans’ primary religious allegiance from their denominations to their liberal or conservative religio‐political tribe. Where the post‐1950s restructuring was driven by the rise of the Religious Right, I argue the post‐1990s restructuring was driven by backlash to this same movement. An ensuing cycle of backlash and counter‐backlash radically transformed U.S. religion and politics, as the right‐left political divide that once shaped both was gradually replaced by a divide over the promise of pluralistic democracy itself.