As Americans deal with the aftermath of their midterm elections, what is clear is the power of President Donald Trump remains unshaken.
Even though the Democrats have won the majority in the House of Representatives, Trump seems to be even more strongly cemented in his own power.
It is clear that he really is above the Republican Party – it now depends on him.
An interesting feature of Trump’s power is just how much support he draws from the Christian right wing in the US.
In 2016, polls after the election reportedly showed that Trump was backed by 80% of white evangelical Christians.
This was the case even though as an individual, Trump’s life is the antithesis of the kind of family and moral values many of the Christian Right proclaim to stand for in the US. It is not clear how much support Trump has amongst self-identified black evangelical Christians.
It is not surprising that white evangelicals supported Trump so much – as morally flexible as his own life has been, Trump campaigned on highly conservative politics.
In one television discussion during his campaigns, Trump actually implied that women who have abortions ought to be imprisoned.
This kind of hardline conservative attitude won over US Christians whose core political issues are anti-abortion, gun rights, unregulated capitalism and the supremacy of the US in world politics.
But of course, mostly importantly was that Trump was a white man who was talking “strong” at a time when white American racism was in re-surging unapologetically in public.
He was the kind of strong man that racist white Americans had been craving to re-affirm the idea of a white America.
White Christians in the US identify very strongly with this kind of white identity politics.
They see the technological and economic advances Western world and in particular, capitalism as the ultimate outcome of God’s blessing on European ‘Christian’ civilisation.
It is not just Christians who have revived this “West is Best” paradigm.
It has ironically been a mainstay amongst the pop culture atheist intellectuals like the late Christopher Hitchens, and more recently figures such as historian Niall Ferguson and psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Even though the pop culture intellectuals do not share the religion zealotry of the Christian Right, both these groups express an antipathy to what they call “political correctness”, the rise of “diversity studies” and other post-Cold War social justice and rights based activisms. For the secular intellectuals like Hitchens, the West is the product of the enlightenment; for white Christians, it is the outcome of God’s own favour.
Trump is the ultimate defender of the West – and this is why he can do no wrong.
This is important for South Africans to understand given how much American influence there is in our own evangelical Christianity. In 2005, there were South African evangelicals who actively preached that the George Bush jnr was “God’s Man for the Moment”.
Why would South Africans care about George Bush jnr being president? It is because so much of South African evangelicals are consuming far too much US-based Christianity. This happens through channels such as TBN, popular Christian books, and the affiliations many South African churches have with US mega churches.
It is clear that South African evangelicals are largely just importing and consuming American republicanism that is packaged as Christianity.
People like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and others are just all hillbilly Republicans who are selling their ideology to the world because they happen to be in the most wealthy nation in the world.
Even Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, was openly campaigning for Donald Trump.
I am not here implying that local Christians should not connect internationally, but it really is time for African evangelicals to question whether what’s moving them is the spirit of the Lord or the spirit of white republicanism...