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MAGA CHRISTIANITY AND THE RETURN OF RELIGIOUS COERCION  
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Steve Kennedy
August 18, 2026
The New Republic
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_ The right is increasingly embracing an anti-social version of the
Christian faith that favors restrictive control with none of the
underlying moral obligations. _

Donald Trump poses with a bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church.
, Shawn Thew/Getty Images

 

American revival movements have always contained two competing
impulses: the belief that all people possess equal moral worth before
God, and the belief that society must be disciplined into
righteousness whether it wants to be or not. That tension runs
throughout the history of American Christianity. It shaped the First
and Second Great Awakenings, fueled both abolitionism and moral
policing, and inspired democratic reform movements—all while
simultaneously justifying social hierarchy and coercion. If you’re
wondering how the MAGA movement can speak constantly in the language
of Christianity while bearing intense hostility to many traditional
Christian virtues themselves, we can look to this history, which is
now repeating itself.

There has been a great deal of discussion on the right in recent years
about whether the United States is experiencing some kind of new
religious revival. Church attendance remains historically low
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by many measures, most notably in the mainline churches
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that have historically fostered religious moderation and created
communities of believers from across the political spectrum. That
said, religious identity is also increasingly central to American
political conflict. Christianity, particularly conservative
Christianity, often functions as a marker of political and cultural
belonging on the American right. The result is a society that may be
becoming less religious overall while simultaneously becoming more
religiously polarized. To understand this moment, it helps to revisit
the Great Awakenings in U.S. history, when Americans renegotiated the
meaning of freedom, morality, and identity on a national scale.

The First Great Awakening
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of the 1730s and 1740s challenged older religious hierarchies by
emphasizing direct spiritual experience and personal conversion.
Revivalist preachers like George Whitefield
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insisted that ordinary people could experience God directly without
relying on established church authority. These ideas also intensified
preachers’ use of emotionalism
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and encouraged suspicion toward institutional authority that would
echo throughout American history. The emphasis on inward spiritual
experience eventually fed into later forms of American individualism,
including nineteenth-century Transcendentalism and the broader
tendency to treat authenticity and inner conviction as sources of
moral authority.

But it was the Second Great Awakening
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stretching roughly from the 1790s through the 1830s, that most
profoundly shaped American political culture. Massive revival meetings
swept across the early republic, with Evangelical Protestantism
rapidly expanding on the frontier and in growing northern cities.
Preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney
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taught that both individuals and society itself could be morally
transformed.

Critically, revivalists during this period did not generally
understand freedom in the modern liberal sense of autonomy or
self-expression. Instead, true freedom was liberation from sin. A
truly free person was not simply someone left alone by the state or
society, but someone morally regenerated and capable of living
according to God’s order free from vice. This meant that many
revivalists saw moral discipline not as a restriction on liberty but
as its fulfillment. To these revivalists, the purpose of society and
government was to guide people toward spiritual purity.

That outlook fueled some of the most important reform movements in
American history. Evangelical activism contributed to abolitionism
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prison reform
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women’s rights
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public education campaigns
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and more. Many abolitionists viewed slavery not simply as an economic
or political evil but as a profound moral sin incompatible with
Christian teachings about the equal worth of souls before God.

Yet the same worldview also produced deeply coercive impulses.
“Moral reform” often looked like regulating alcohol consumption,
policing sexuality, suppressing vice, enforcing Sabbath observance,
and attempting to discipline immigrants, Catholics, and the poor into
a particular vision of respectable Protestant life. Temperance
campaigns frequently blurred into broader efforts at social control
and anti-Catholic nativism. Southern revivalists, meanwhile, adapted
the language of Christian order and hierarchy into defenses of slavery
itself.

The Second Great Awakening was a diffuse, leaderless movement, and was
never ideologically uniform. It contained democratic and authoritarian
tendencies simultaneously, with universal moral aspirations alongside
intense paternalism and social discipline. But across the movement,
its conception of freedom remained fundamentally different from
today’s ideal of individual autonomy. Revivalists generally believed
that liberty required moral formation because people “enslaved” to
vice, sin, and temptation were not truly free at all.

That tension has never disappeared from American political culture,
but MAGA politics have fueled a particularly revealing transformation.
The modern religious right has enthusiastically embraced the coercive
side of revivalism while weakening or abandoning many of the universal
moral commitments that once accompanied it. What remains is a politics
deeply concerned with order, hierarchy, discipline, punishment, and
cultural conformity but detached from the expansive reform movements
that once gave revivalist Christianity much of its moral force.

This helps explain the right’s growing hostility toward virtues that
Christianity itself has historically treated as central moral
obligations. Compassion for migrants, concern for the poor, humility,
mercy, and care for strangers are now portrayed by segments of the
right not as virtues but as civilizational liabilities in a global,
moral war. The rise of phrases like “toxic empathy
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is revealing here. In some right-wing circles, empathy itself is
increasingly framed as a form of weakness that prevents societies from
enforcing borders, punishing enemies, maintaining hierarchy, or
defending national identity. But Christian teachings focus on mercy
and compassion precisely because they transcend tribe, nationality,
and worldly status. The obligation to care for the vulnerable is
supposed to apply even to outsiders and enemies.

See Vice President JD Vance’s feud with Pope Leo XIV for an
illuminating example. For Pope Leo, Christian ethics impose universal
obligations to care for migrants and the poor as a core part of
Christian moral teaching
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conservative Catholic convert Vance though, the Pope should “be
careful when he talks about matters of theology” with which the
right disagrees. For much of the nationalist right, Christianity is
more of a civilizational identity tied to borders, social cohesion,
and cultural inheritance that fits with their obsession with the
supremacy of “the West.”

This is one reason contemporary right-wing Christianity often feels
disconnected from the teachings it claims to defend. The language of
sin, order, authority, and moral decline that would be familiar to a
nineteenth-century revivalist remains central, but the moral
obligations that inspired progress during the Second Great Awakening
are instead seen as weaknesses.

This does not mean MAGA Christianity is somehow fake Christianity or
entirely alien to American religious history. The coercive and
exclusionary tendencies now visible on the right were always present
within parts of American revivalism. The same religious culture that
fueled abolitionism also fueled paternalistic moral regulation,
anti-Catholicism, and defenses of hierarchy, but the balance has
shifted. Earlier revival movements, for all their flaws, generally
paired moral discipline with some broader universal vision of human
redemption or social transformation. They sought not only to restore
order but to redeem society. Contemporary religious nationalism is far
narrower and more defensive, with its energy directed toward
protecting an embattled cultural identity and recovering what it
believes to be a lost social order.

This reflects a consequential reimagination of how freedom itself is
understood. Earlier revivalists believed freedom required moral
discipline because they understood liberty as liberation from sin.
Modern liberalism, by contrast, tends to define freedom more as
autonomy and self-determination. MAGA Christianity occupies an
unstable position between these traditions that rejects liberal
permissiveness and expressive individualism along with the universal
moral obligations that accompanied older Christian visions of moral
order.

This helps explain supposedly devout Christians in the Trump
administration gleefully celebrating the U.S. military murdering
fishermen in the Caribbean and leveling population centers in Iran. It
also helps explain the administration’s embrace of mass deportation
policies that treat migrants and asylum seekers not as human beings
deserving dignity and compassion, but as threats to be expelled and
punished. It shows why a Supreme Court dominated by right-wing
Christians continuously finds freedom of religion grounds for
overturning inclusive policies and essentially creating a Christian
right to discriminate against people simply exercising their personal
autonomy.

This shift may ultimately prove self-defeating even on religious
terms. Historically, Christianity has often expanded when it presented
itself as morally universal, capable of transcending tribe,
nationality, and hierarchy. When religion becomes tightly fused to
partisan identity and cultural resentment, it risks reducing itself to
an instrument of political power rather than a source of moral
authority. It is difficult to deny that this kind of identity and
power politics is exactly what MAGA has embraced.

The American right increasingly speaks in the language of religious
revival while simultaneously narrowing the moral scope of revivalist
Christianity itself. Its version of Christianity centers cultural
identity, hierarchy, discipline, and exclusion far more than moral
obligation or social redemption. In this framework, conducting violent
mass deportations, enforcing conformity, and legitimizing undemocratic
political power are actually Christian virtues. And that may
ultimately be the clearest sign that this is not a new Great Awakening
at all, but the evolution of revivalist religion to support the
country’s ongoing reversion to more explicitly authoritarian
politics.

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Steve is the organizing and network director at the People’s Parity
Project.

* Religion; Politics; Revivalism; Religious Right;
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