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James Fishback is a different kind of Republican candidate. At appearances across the state of Florida, where he is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, he fluently uses Gen Z slang and leans into a memeable form of religiosity. At a recent event, Fishback, a Catholic, stood before a cheering crowd of young men as he kissed an icon of Christ the Bridegroom. “I will never kiss the wall,” he said, referring to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. “But I will kiss our Lord and Savior.”
It’s hard to imagine a member of the Moral Majority-era religious right doing the same thing. But Fishback distinguishes himself from conventional politicians by asserting his Christianity in baroque and confrontational terms. He does not just invoke Christian themes. He draws a line between Christians and non-Christians, as in his comment about the Western Wall.
Fishback’s religious rhetoric is part of an emerging form of Christian identity politics. Like a number of prominent influencers, he interlaces elaborate expressions of Christian piety with criticisms of Jewish supporters of Israel. Many of these influencers are “trad Caths,” Catholics drawn to the traditional Latin mass and alienated from the church hierarchy. They are creating a religious right distinct from the one that was once led by evangelicals.
Candace Owens, for example, attends the Latin mass and spins her anti-establishment and anti-Jewish fantasias while sitting in front of an ornate crucifix and a gothic reliquary containing a stone associated with the cult of St. Michael the Archangel. (She recently said that she has not yet been confirmed in the Catholic faith with which she publicly identifies.)
Megyn Kelly, another Catholic, has likewise grown more demonstrative in her piety as she has grown more critical of pro-Israel Jewish commentators such as Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin. In December, she announced to the world that she was about to pray the rosary “like virtually all Christians do.” (About half of Christians are non-Catholic.)
This political Cathsploitation has turned Fishback, a financier with a history of legal and money troubles, into a rising star of the online right. His opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds, is favored to win the August primary. But a February poll found Fishback drawing support from 32 percent of Republican voters age 18-34, compared with just 8 percent for Donalds. With millions of TikTok views and a young and enthusiastic following, Fishback is poised to thrive as an antiestablishment influencer.
Far from being a sign of resurgent faith, Christian identity politics is a symptom of religious decline. As one observer has noted, the fact that Americans are growing more secular and less religiously literate has made religion more salient as a marker of political difference, even as invocations of it become less informed.
This irony was already evident during Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and term, in his unidiomatic citation of “Two Corinthians” (most Christians would say “Second Corinthians”) and his decision to hold up a Bible in response to public disorder in 2020. (When a reporter asked, “Is that your Bible?,” Trump memorably replied, “It’s a Bible.”)
But the new Christian identity politics differs from Trump’s fairly conventional civic religion. Fishback kisses an icon rather than lifting a Bible. He punctuates his remarks not by saying “God bless America” but by proclaiming “Christ is king.” Like Owens and Kelly, he seems to prefer distinctive and striking expressions of belief to the familiar and reassuring.
It isn’t a coincidence that all these figures have thrived on video-based platforms in the age of social media. Visual media incentivize more striking and extreme displays of religious identity. In the 1970s, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan remarked on how people had come to look down on religious figures who tried to blend in by wearing everyday clothing, “the plain-clothed priest or plain-clothed nun.” Instead, he said, young people wanted “massive costumes and vestments” — the kind of thing traditional Catholicism specializes in — because they prized the “far out” and “very unconventional.”
Something similar is true today. Holding up rosaries at rallies and kissing icons on the campaign trail is a form of religious expression optimized for a culture based on images rather than text. As Americans spend less time reading and feel less reverence for the written word, the Bible will lose ground to non-textual expressions of faith. This is partly a story of Catholic devotions replacing Protestant piety. But the new Christian identity politics also break with the understated style of older Catholic politicians like Jeb Bush. It has less to do with fine points of doctrine than with a general attraction to the outré.
Even the richest expressions of faith can be used as little more than badges of belonging. Wielding Christianity in this way is likely to unsettle non-Christians, but it will be no less distressing to many believers. Like taking the Lord’s name in vain, it is misuse of a holy thing. Viewed in this light, Fishback’s problem is not that he is too religious. It’s that he isn’t religious enough.
The post The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics appeared first on Washington Post.
