The headline is not a misprint: it is ‘Untied’ rather than ‘United’ States. There is growing speculation that if Donald Trump is re-elected, it is possible to envisage the USA ceasing to exist in its current form – maybe even splitting into two.
A whole raft of thinkers in a wide range of disciplines can be read online, in The Washington Post of 10 October 2022 for starters.
It is hard for most people in the UK to understand how Trump, found liable in May for sexually abusing columnist E. Jean Carroll (among many other shames to his name), is even remotely in contention for the Republican Party nomination in the US. That’s not to commend or endorse Joe Biden, of course: there are serious concerns about Biden’s mental faculties, as well as his stances on abortion and LGBTQi issues.
But it’s arguable Trump’s ascendancy is causing serious issues for the gospel in the US. ‘Do evangelicals think Trump is Jesus?’ asked Ed Kilgore in a long and thoughtful column for the New York Intelligencer (May 2023). It went on to document a ‘disturbing phenomenon going on among conservative Evangelicals’ – the emerging Christian nationalist movement in the US which sees Trump ‘as an irreplaceable figure whose political success is crucial to God’s plan for redeeming a sinful world’.
The situation is understandably placing evangelical pastors under huge stress. An article in The Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago by evangelical Republican Peter Wehner spoke of how everywhere they are coming under pressure from groups in their congregations on behalf of Trump. And just a few weeks ago Russell Moore – editor-in-chief of the US-based Christianity Today magazine founded by Billy Graham – said that in the current climate many Christian leaders are staying silent, or even making claims they know to be false, out of fear.
It is not hard to make the link between younger voters being more Trump-sceptical than older ones and the exodus of young people from evangelical congregations. Publicity for Moore’s new book – Losing Our Religion – says: ‘As greater and greater numbers of younger Americans bleed out from the church, even the most rooted evangelicals are wondering: can American Christianity survive?’
Pray for the US. No country is irreplaceable. Nations rise and fall. But a severely polarised US led by Trump again, perhaps even splitting into two countries, would seem likely to have a further negative impact on the prospects for the gospel, humanly speaking at least, among younger Americans.
