My nose felt stuffed with concrete, I had a hacking cough, a sore throat, and a fever as I moved on to Lexington, Kentucky, the morning after Tupelo. “What we do,” Snowden texted me in sympathy when I told him about my cold, “is not as easy as people think.” But everybody was going—Snowden and Roberts and Thompson and the Ohio boys; even Randall Thom was driving down from Minnesota—and now I was part of the show.
I did not, however, head straight to the arena. Instead I drove twenty-five miles outside of Lexington, past chichi horse farms with miles of perfect fencing, to a place called Cane Ridge. It was a Sunday morning, cold and bright, with big clouds scudding across the sky. I parked and wandered across a cemetery of tumbledown headstones spotted with lichen, their engravings weathered and now faint to the eye. “Polly Wilson, August 5, 1803, at age 37.” “Oscar B. Neal, Died July 4, 1865.” The cemetery stood on a slight rise, and rolling farmland fell away in all directions. I tried to imagine what it looked like at the turn of the eighteenth century, at the height of the Second Great Awakening—the American Protestant revival. Just downhill from the cemetery stood a modern, slightly church-like stone building. It turned out to be closed for the season, but peering through the glass doors, you could see a building within a building: a simple log cabin right out of a Daniel Boone film. The Cane Ridge Meeting House. It was here in August 18011 that a religious fervor that had been rippling through Kentucky in a series of camp meetings over the previous three years reached its apex, as twenty thousand settlers—nearly 10 percent of the total population of Kentucky at the time—came by foot and horse and wagon from hundreds of miles around to hear dozens of preachers’ graphic, visceral descriptions of hell and sin, a burning they’d all be subject to without dramatic soul cleansing. “My mind was chained by him, and followed him closely in his rounds of heaven, earth, and hell with feelings indescribable,” wrote Barton Stone, pastor of Cane Ridge, of one of his colleagues. The more frightening the sermons the better, and so gripping were the best that men and women fell down as if dead. “I turned to go back and was near falling,”2 wrote another pastor, “the power of God was strong upon me. I turned again and, losing sight of the fear of man, I went through the house shouting and exhorting with all possible ecstasy and energy, and the floor was soon covered with the slain.”
“The scene to me was new3 and passing strange,” wrote Stone. “. . . Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state—sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered.” In these revivals,4 listeners spoke in tongues, and “their heads would jerk back suddenly, frequently causing them to yelp, or make some other involuntary noise. . . . I have seen their heads fly back and forward so quickly that the hair of females would be made to crack like a carriage whip.”
“The noise was like the roar of Niagara,”5 wrote a participant. “The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm.”
I had been trying to untangle the various strands that pulled people to Donald Trump, and everywhere I turned stood God. Al Kocicky back in Minneapolis was the first person who told me Trump was “heaven-sent.” Dave Thompson and the prayer leader in Tupelo then echoed that same idea. In Dallas, Christine Howard said the rallies were like church. Religion was everywhere in Trump’s rallies; even someone like Rick Frazier, who never spoke like an evangelical or a fundamentalist, was deeply religious, it turned out. He had first learned to read by reading the Bible with his grandparents in Kentucky, and a few years ago a cyst in his lung had required surgery that reduced his weight by sixty pounds, leaving him more thoughtful about God and his place on this earth. That Trump had huge support from evangelicals was a given, though it had always been a mystery to me, since he was so morally compromised. Still, the depth and breadth of religion and God at the rallies had surprised me. But the more time I spent in the arenas, the more I began to understand that Trump was playing to a well-known archetype. He fit himself into the costume of a figure who was as iconically American as the cowboy: the fiery preacher who appeared at a time of great upheaval, usually outside of the established clergy, to preach fire and brimstone and reinvigorate a very specific and very American religious-political culture.
“Religion is the soul of culture6 and culture the form of religion,” said the Protestant theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, which was an idea that, as someone raised in a totally secular household, I had missed for a long time. I, like every American kid, knew the story of the Pilgrims, but the full weight of it had never hit home. The Puritans, the first founders of America, were fundamentalist, extremist Protestants who had broken with the Church of England in the sixteenth century not just for strictly theological reasons but also because of their rising mercantile wealth, the product of the “Protestant work ethic.” “Puritan social theory,”7 writes the religious scholar William McLoughlin, “dignified and sanctified trade and commerce, while Anglican social theory sought to regulate and impede its progress.” The men and women who came to America8 considered themselves “chosen by God for a special mission in the New World.” The country’s very founding rested on a certain kind of Protestantism, which itself was bound up with ideas about individual freedom and liberty and the freedom to make money. “I have expressed enough to characterize9 Anglo-American civilization in its true colors,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. “This civilization is the result10 . . . of two quite distinct ingredients which anywhere else have often ended in war but which Americans have succeeded somehow to meld together in wondrous harmony; namely the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. The founders of New England were both sectarian fanatics and noble innovators.”
City on a hill. Manifest destiny. American exceptionalism. I had always thought of those classic American tropes in secular, metaphorical terms, but I was mistaken. They were specific, Calvinist ideas about a special and very specific people destined by God. “At the heart of our culture are the beliefs11 that Americans are a chosen people,” writes McLoughlin,
that they have a manifest (or latent) destiny to lead the world to the millennium; that their democratic-republican institutions, their bountiful natural resources, and their concept of the free and morally responsible individual operate under a body of higher moral laws. . . . This individualistic, pietistic, perfectionist, millenarian ideology has from time to time been variously defined . . . but the fundamental belief that freedom and responsibility will perfect not only the individual and the nation but the world (because they are in harmony with the supreme laws of nature—and of nature’s God) has been constant. American history is thus best understood as a millenarian movement.
To many this movement was and always had been about white Protestants. It was never intended for everyone. Even the Statue of Liberty12 wasn’t really beckoning for everyone, but only for “people coming from Europe,” said Trump immigration official Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II in 2019. And it was in periodic religious convulsions around those ideals that America was jerked and yanked forward.
The Puritan Revitalization Movement of 161013 in England led directly to America’s first settlers. The First Great Awakening in the mid-1700s14 led to the American Revolution. The Second Great Awakening (of which Cane Ridge had been a part) cemented America together and fostered its expansion to the West. “Revivalism is the Protestant ritual15 . . . in which charismatic evangelists convey ‘the Word’ of God to large masses of people who, under this influence, experience what Protestants call conversion, salvation, regeneration, or spiritual rebirth,” writes McLoughlin, who called awakenings “the most vital and yet most mysterious of all folk arts.”
These great awakenings16 and the revivals that have long been part of them result at times of “critical disjunctions in our self-understanding,” McLoughlin goes on. “They are not brief outbursts . . . by one group or another but profound cultural transformations affecting all Americans and extending over a generation or more. Awakenings begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state.”
To read descriptions of revivals from the 1700s and the 1800s, in which the preacher painted such a dark portrait of sin that people died only to be reborn by their faith, is to read an only slightly exaggerated description of a Trump rally. Preachers, writes J. D. Dicky in American Demagogue,17 “knew that the power of the revival lay in its emotional appeal, tapping into people’s deepest hopes and fears, their ecstasy and misery.” Preacher Gilbert Tennent18 “turned to a familiar theme: the depravity of his enemies.” The shouts and screams of fans, Trump’s focus on the depravity of his corrupt opponents and the threat they posed to life as Americans knew it, all under a fellowship of bright lights—these were all familiar to millions of people in the form of American revivalist preachers; it was their communal historical legacy. Millions and millions of Americans had grown up going to camp meetings and revivals—not just in the South, either—and Trump and his exhortations were viscerally familiar. It was even common to see people buckle and fall to the floor in Trump rallies; in Sunrise, Florida, I watched two different people carried out on stretchers by EMTs in the middle of his speech.
It was in times of great social upheaval that those preachers and their message gained traction, and that was certainly true of America today. The world was changing; there were 1.3 billion Chinese who were every bit as educated and smart and hardworking as Americans, and their energy and manufacturing capabilities were cutting into American capitalist turf. The same with the 1.3 billion Indians, and Brazilians, and Indonesians, and Vietnamese, and so many others. Automation was rendering the brawn of men like James Mayhall obsolete, and with that died generations of expectations about gender roles, allowing new ideas to arise, such as nonbinary gender identity. Talk about “critical disjunctions in our self-understanding!” American blue-collar men and their partners were on the verge of becoming as obsolete as Asmat headhunters. And if all of those white Protestants who had created this City on a Hill had difficulty sharing the spoils with Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews (not to mention Black slaves and their descendants), how much more difficult was it now there were all of these other people, Somalians and Indians, Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, all claiming that they, too, belonged on that hilltop and that they, too, were in commune with God and that they, too, had a destiny in America.
Trump’s rallies played off so many iconic pieces of American culture, from their location in sports arenas to their use of rock and roll to their encouragement of tailgating. But in his appeal to fundamentalist evangelicals he was not just using policy—abortion and prayer in schools, for instance—but aesthetics and style regarding fundamental ideas of American identity and American cultural and religious experience. When he stood up in what was essentially a revival hall and said Make America Great Again, he was speaking a deep code that reached right back to the millenarian tradition of American religious history. “We live in a religio-slash-secular culture,”19 the religion scholar Martin Marty told me. “Underneath, in the depths of commerce and marketing and international relations, it turns religious, and forty percent of Americans call themselves evangelical. But what’s happening today is a betrayal. People like Trump and Paula White, his personal pastor—she evokes the symbols of evangelical Christianity, but it is hollowed out. If you follow the career of Hitler he evokes all the main things of what it means to be German and then turned them all on their head. That’s the trick going on here.”