The new religious right has turned against the old religious right.
Or, to put it another way, the focus of the movement is changing. I spent more than 20 years defending religious liberty in federal courts. Our objective was to defend liberty so that religious organizations enjoyed the liberty to do good, free from state discrimination.
Yet now the focus of Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, including by imposing its will on Christian organizations it has decided are woke or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.
Few things illustrate that reality more clearly than the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally — and often unlawfully — defund Christian organizations, including evangelical organizations, that serve poor and marginalized people at home and abroad.
In the first three weeks of his administration, Trump issued a series of stop-work orders and funding freezes that effectively yanked funding from religious groups that have been providing lifesaving care to many of the most vulnerable people in the world.
Caritas International, a confederation of international Catholic relief agencies, has warned that the cuts are “catastrophic” and said that the “ruthless and chaotic” way that the administration has made its cuts “threatens the lives and dignity of millions.”
The Trump administration’s cuts are immaterial to the deficit. U.S.A.I.D.’s foreign assistance constituted less than 1 percent of the federal budget, for example. All direct foreign aid (including the surge in aid to Ukraine) adds up to a mere 1.17 percent of total government spending in the 2023 fiscal year.
Yet cuts to foreign aid endanger people’s lives, including those of Afghan refugees who risked everything helping Americans during our longest war.
The cuts are also symbolic. They demonstrate the extent to which Trump is influencing the evangelical church more than the church is influencing him.
If you know a bit of history, the transformation is startling. When I started practicing constitutional law, federal and state governments were more hostile to religious free exercise than they are today. Time and again, government officials attempted to block religious organizations from gaining access to public facilities and public funds on an equal basis with secular organizations.
At the same time, there was growing frustration with the inefficiency of government services to the poor and marginalized. Private groups, including religious groups, were often more nimble and effective on the ground, but they lacked the government’s resources. The government possessed the resources but lacked the same degree of effectiveness.
The response was both legal and political. I was part of the legal response, and it meant a great deal to me that this was part of the overall humanitarian effort.
We couldn’t liberate government funding to support the poor most effectively until we laid the legal foundation. In lawsuit after lawsuit, we would make the same argument: Treat religious groups exactly the same as any other group. Don’t favor them, but don’t discriminate against them, either.
And in court decision after court decision, we won. Over decades, religious liberty proponents built a body of precedent that established a simple principle: When governments provide resources or funding for a secular purpose, they may not discriminate against religious organizations that have the same mission.
The Supreme Court case that best illustrates that principle, Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, is quite recent, decided in 2017. In it the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 (with Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer joining their five Republican-appointed colleagues in the result) that the State of Missouri could not discriminate against a Lutheran church when dispensing state grants for resurfacing playgrounds.
The case may seem low stakes (playground resurfacing is hardly an urgent national issue, though it’s not nothing, either), but the principle it affirmed was consequential. Even churches can receive direct government payments when they are engaged in programs that share and advance a valid government objective. Trinity Lutheran was hardly the first Supreme Court case to prohibit discrimination against religious organizations when dispensing government funds, but it was the capstone precedent.
As the courts issued their decisions, the political branches of government responded. From 1996 to 2000, for example, Bill Clinton signed a series of laws under the umbrella term “charitable choice” that allowed the government to fund aid by religious organizations.
In his first executive order as president, George W. Bush expanded charitable choice by creating the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the White House, and from that point forward, both parties poured money and resources into religious institutions that were doing lifesaving work.
No one would argue that it was done perfectly — or that there hasn’t been some waste — but for a time it seemed that service to the poor had moved beyond the culture war. The religious liberty argument yielded a political result that embodied the best of both law and politics.
So what happened? The answer is complex, but two factors stand out. The Republican Christian right made a hard turn against immigration and, in its most extreme political faction, is turning against empathy itself.
In 2020, Ryan Burge, perhaps the nation’s leading researcher of statistical trends in American religion, found that white evangelicals were the religious cohort of Americans most likely to support separating children from parents when their parents enter the country illegally. They were also the cohort mostly likely to support drastic reductions in legal immigration.
In fact, as Burge observed, immigration has become so important in political evangelicalism that white evangelicals supported Trump more because of his stance on immigration than because of his stance on abortion.
In 2024 that assertion was put to a concrete test. Trump watered down the pro-life plank of the Republican platform to an extent not seen in at least 40 years, and he still won an overwhelming majority of white evangelical voters.
In fact, according to exit polls, Trump slightly improved his performance with white evangelicals in 2024. He won 80 percent in 2016, dipped to 76 percent in 2020 and won 82 percent in 2024. The party’s more pro-choice turn under Trump did not hurt him at all, and no modern Republican has won the presidency without overwhelming support from white evangelicals.
At the same time, hard-right Christians began to turn against the very idea of empathy. Last year a popular right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, published a best-selling book called “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” This month, a right-wing theologian, Joe Rigney, is publishing a book called “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
These attacks are rooted in the idea that progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject. For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.
That’s one reason you’ll often see a shocking amount of derision online when anyone starts talking about the human toll of Trump’s decisions. His MAGA evangelicals are broadcasting that you cannot reach them with anything that looks like an appeal to the heart.
Last month in a Fox News interview Vice President JD Vance articulated a distorted vision of a Catholic doctrine, ordo amoris. He said, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
While there were Catholics who agreed with Vance and defended his argument, Pope Francis was not among them.
On Tuesday the pope published a letter attacking Trump’s policy of mass deportations that appeared to directly address Vance’s argument. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote.
“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted,” he said, is “love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Even if you agree with Vance’s formulation of ordo amoris, it strains credulity to argue that the United States isn’t prioritizing its own citizens when it spends such a small fraction of its budget on foreign aid — and when that aid provides concrete strategic benefits to the United States.
It’s also just bizarre to argue that describing the consequences of a policy is somehow emotionally manipulative when avoiding those consequences was the purpose of the program that’s being frozen or cut.
So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.
There are few things more symbolic of the decline of the Republican Party than this radical turn against humanitarian aid. And it’s not just a turn within the Republican Party; it’s a turn within the evangelical church.
It took a generation of legal and political argument (often from Christian conservatives) before the federal government began supporting Christian aid organizations. And now this entire edifice of humanitarian aid threatens to come crashing down.
To what end? Trump is not exactly focused on fiscal health. At the same time that he’s slashing 1 percent of the budget, he’s proposing a tax plan that would reduce government revenue by trillions of dollars.
Even if he’s fighting a war on woke, he could have cut discrete programs and grants that have objectionable ideological elements, at least to him or to his coalition.
Historically, many Americans have believed that we spend too much money on foreign aid. At the same time, however, Americans consistently overestimate how much we spend, and they mistakenly believe that private donations can make up for lost federal funds.
On Wednesday, I spoke to Myal Greene, the president of World Relief, a Christian agency that works in refugee resettlement, and he told me that “charity money is just not there to meet the level of need.” He said evangelicals tend to give away only 2 to 3 percent of their income for all charitable purposes and not simply relief overseas, a number that is far short of what’s required to replace billions of dollars in federal aid.
I understand the desire of many Americans not to fund ideological projects that run counter to their values. But Christians are turning on the programs and groups that they helped create. That won’t solve our budget crisis. It won’t end the culture war. It will, however, harm the people Scripture commands us to care for.
There is nothing woke about medicine or food.
Some other things I did
Steve Bannon inspired my Sunday column. When my colleague Ross Douthat interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, Bannon said, “Trump came down in June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at the San Diego Zoo.” This made me laugh. Here’s why:
Ever since Trump began winning Republican primaries in 2016, there has been a desperate effort to understand populism. JD Vance is the vice president in part because of that effort. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out shortly after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, was a monumental best seller because so many Americans — including liberal Americans — wanted to understand the culture and ideas that brought us Trump.
If you consume political media, you’ve no doubt seen the countless focus groups of Trump voters, and you’re familiar with the man-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters at Trump rallies. We’ve read books, watched documentaries and listened to podcasts.
And if you live in Trump country, as I do, you’ll find that Trump voters are very eager to explain themselves. This is not a quiet movement. They don’t exactly hide their interests and passions.
On Monday, we published my audio interview with Judge Jeffrey Sutton, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. I wanted to ask him to define originalism, the philosophy that guides a majority of the court. I also asked him to describe the court’s power to enforce its judgments:
French: Let’s talk about how judicial decisions are enforced. What are the tools at your disposal to enforce a decision? In my life, in my litigation career, I never really thought that through because once we got a decision from the court, everybody just did it. But what are the enforceability tools that reside with the judiciary? Do you have any real substantial tools?
Sutton: Well, not really. We famously do not have the power of the Treasury. We don’t have the power of the sword. We don’t have the military to enforce our decisions. We issue judgments, and those judgments are enforceable. We have U.S. marshals. So, for example, if someone is convicted of a crime, there’s a U.S. marshal to enforce the judgment.
But when you think about the court invalidating a state law, that’s a little trickier. All we can do is issue the judgment. And in fact, let’s just say it’s a provision in a state statute. We say it’s unconstitutional — it’s still there. There’s no power of erasure. We don’t take it off the books. It’s still sitting there. The question is whether someone relies on it.
I think the reason, at least historically, in the last 100 years people have relied on those things are twofold. One is trust and faith in the courts, which, of course, is really important. But the other is the self-interest problem that if you’re a government that refuses to follow a judgment, you’re going to get a lot of lawsuits.
You’re going to have to pay attorneys’ fees for all of those lawsuits. That gets very expensive very quickly. And then you might be sanctioned, which — contempt can mean going to jail if you’re an officer of a government, or sanction could be monetary.
So I think those are the reasons. But you’re right. And as a matter of American history, there have been times where individuals and even governments and president of the United States, in one case, are not willing to follow U.S. Supreme Court decisions. So it’s not something we want to have happen again.
Finally, I joined my friends and colleagues on “Matter of Opinion” to try to answer the question: Where is the resistance? I expressed optimism that the courts would remain independent, and as the injunctions against Trump’s actions accumulate, I remain optimistic:
But as a general matter, it’s just an empirical fact that the Supreme Court has rejected Trump and MAGA arguments just again and again and again. Even Democrats arguing in front of majority-Republican-nominated courts have done better than Trump did.
So I do think there is absolutely reason to think that the courts will uphold the basic constitutional structure. And in fact, there’s even more reason now to think so. Because some of the decisions that a lot of my friends to my left really don’t like, like the OSHA vaccine case or Loper Bright, which overruled the Chevron doctrine, actually had the effect of really restricting executive autonomy.
And so right now, we’re going into — Trump is exerting the most executive autonomy we’ve seen in the modern era. At the same time, as a matter of constitutional doctrine, our presidents have less executive autonomy, as a matter of law, than any time in the modern era. So we have a collision here.
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