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Over the last few months leading up to the election, I’ve been writing about an ascendant fundamentalist religious movement whose leaders believe that the United States is a Christian nation, that the Constitution is based on the Bible, and that Christians are called to take over the government. These figures have found a powerful ally in President-elect Donald Trump. Just last week, days before the election, I attended one of his campaign events at a church in Georgia, where Trump promised the assembled crowd that he intended to put Christian leaders “directly in the Oval Office.”
He didn’t elaborate on what exactly that would look like, but my past few months of reporting on the Christian right have given me some ideas. Here are a few things I’ll be tracking as Trump’s second term begins.
Erosion of the Establishment Clause
At the Trump event for Christian leaders I attended, one of the most protracted standing ovations came after Kelly Shackelford, head of the Christian law firm First Liberty Institute, proclaimed that the US Supreme Court’s three-part 1971 “Lemon” test for the establishment clause, which codifies the separation of church and state, is “reversed everywhere.”
His hopes may be realized. A few months ago, I wrote about the creeping religiosity of the Supreme Court. In the 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, the court ruled that a public high school football coach who lost his job after he prayed during a game had been subject to discrimination. In the 6–3 decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that the court had “long ago abandoned” the Lemon test. In February, Justice Samuel Alito issued an unusual individual statement after the court declined to take up a case filed on behalf of people who had been removed from a jury because of their belief that gay marriage was wrong. Alito wrote that he worried “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.”
The crusade against the establishment clause will continue as myriad cases challenging the separation of church and state work their way through Trump-appointed judges to get to the Supreme Court.
Increased Funding for “Natural Family Planning”
Over the last few years, Christian anti-abortion groups have spread the false claim that both hormonal birth control and artificial reproduction techniques like in vitro fertilization (IVF) are unhealthy and unnecessary. Instead, they promote what they call an alternative method: “natural family planning.” Essentially, this is a rebranding of rhythm methods, in which women track their menstrual cycles to identify windows of fertility to either prevent or achieve pregnancy. The effectiveness of these methods depends on many factors, including how rigorously the users track their cycles.
During Trump’s last administration, the federal government promoted natural family planning. In 2019, my colleague Stephanie Mencimer wrote about a cycle tracking webinar hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). And just this year, as I wrote, Senate Republicans put forth a bill that would designate federal funds for “restorative reproductive medicine,” a loose group of therapies relying heavily on cycle tracking to help treat infertility without the use of IVF or artificial insemination. A press release about the bill on the website of Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith quotes Dr. Patrick Yeung, a St. Louis gynecologist who “supports the legislation, noting that the status quo of offering symptomatic (band-aid) treatment for pain, or IVF (that bypasses the problem) for fertility is not satisfactory for most women.” The press release doesn’t mention that Yeung is a Catholic anti-abortion advocate who has also referred to birth control as an attempt to “disinvite the author of life” from the “marital embrace.”
Over the next four years, watch carefully as anti-abortion groups shy away from explicitly opposing abortion and IVF—which has proven to be a poor political strategy—and instead promote these “natural” alternatives, while Tump’s HHS further champions these options.
Further Incursion of Religion Into Schools—and Defunding of Public Education as We Know It
Much of the recent press around explicit Christianity in public schools has focused on some states’ efforts to require Bibles and the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. While those initiatives are important to track, there’s another way in which conservative activist Christian leaders are aiming to blur the line between church and state. They tout voucher programs, which have spread over the past two years to 29 states, and redirect public school money to fund private schools—with religious schools receiving upward of 90 percent of that money. As I wrote a few months back:
In 2001, Betsy DeVos, who later became the secretary of education under Trump, framed her advocacy for voucher programs and other school choice programs as an effort to “advance God’s kingdom.” In recent years, a super-PAC run by the American Federation for Children, which is DeVos’ school choice advocacy group, has spent millions of dollars to defeat Republican legislators who oppose private school vouchers, according to reporting by Open Secrets. A prerequisite for students and their families to attend some of the schools that currently receive voucher money is that they accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.
Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me about other religious initiatives in the works. One of them is a suite of bills that would allow public schools to employ chaplains. And in Oklahoma, a Catholic school called St. Isidore of Seville is trying become the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The overarching goal of these initiatives, she says, is to “bestow a power and privilege on Christians in our country at the expense of all the other religions in America.” Meanwhile, public education is robbed “of the funding that it’s entitled to.”
For years now, conservative Christians, including DeVos when she was in charge, have been calling for the dismantling of the US Department of Education, and Trump has said he intends to heed their advice. In a conversation this week, Laser told me, “We can count on Trump to attempt to seriously undermine, if not destroy, the Department of Education.”
“We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”
Attack on Same-Sex Marriage
Chief among the Christian right’s values is “biblical marriage,” the idea that any union other than that between a heterosexual biological male and female is against God’s will. Charismatic Christian leaders repeat these ideas often, and they’ve made it into the political mainstream. Christian broadcaster Mario Murillo, who partnered with fundamentalist Christian superstar Lance Wallnau in hosting a series of pro-MAGA religious rallies, said at a Colorado conference of Christian leaders in 2022, “We should never have permitted gay marriage to be legalized in the United States of America.”
In the coming months, watch for an intensification of the campaign by leading right-wing Christian groups to reverse the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The powerful think tank Family Research Council says on its website, “Properly understood, ‘families’ are formed only by ties of blood, marriage, or adoption, and ‘marriage’ is a union of one man and one woman.” Perhaps most significantly, Project 2025—the blueprint for Trump’s second term that Trump supporters finally admit really “is the agenda”—calls for the US government to “proudly state that men and women are biological realities” and that “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” Naturally, another priority for these groups will be a continued attack on transgender rights.
Hawkish Israel Policy
During his campaign, Trump ran on promises to end the war in the Middle East, and exit polls suggest that some voters believed him. In the majority-Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, 42 percent of residents voted for Trump, while 36 percent voted for Kamala Harris and 18 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Yet the likelihood that Trump will help Palestinians is low, considering that many of his key spiritual advisers are fervently pro-Israel. Many of these charismatic Christians see Israel as the linchpin in their end-times scenario of choice. As Rabbi Jack Moline, president emeritus of the religious pluralism advocacy group Interfaith Alliance, recently explained to me, they want to “facilitate the gathering of the exiles back to the Holy Land…which will pave the way for the second coming.”
Trump’s spiritual advisers don’t believe that Palestine is part of that plan. In a 2019 YouTube broadcast, Wallnau excoriated the idea of a two-state solution. “Every time we have given land up of Israel, we have had a curse on our country,” he said. “You watch. Every time a president has taken something away from Israel, the judgment of God inevitably calls down.”
During this election, Wallnau has worked closely with the Trump campaign. In October, for example, he hosted then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance at an event and appeared with Trump a few days before the election in Georgia. In an October 2023 broadcast, Wallnau suggested that Hamas had attacked Israel as a form of retribution for the United States having abandoned Trump. In September, he lit into Harris on X for her support for a two-state solution. “This is why Trump said Israel won’t exist in 3-4 years,” he wrote. “AND that is why the US will be under judgment with President Harris in office.”
This week, the Times of Israel reported, Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko told an Israeli TV interviewer that Trump “wants the wars to end as soon as possible, but he wants it to end with a decisive victory” for Israel.
Meanwhile, you can expect to hear fundamentalist leaders insist that Christian nationalism isn’t real, that it’s a figment of the overwrought progressive imagination. Yet evidence to the contrary abounds. At the event in Georgia, Wallnau elicited whoops of appreciation from the audience when he declared, “In every state and every county…Christ will be glorified!”
