The Religion of TrumpQ

If it quacks like a duck...

Saturday night, the former president held a rally in Ohio¹ ostensibly in support of Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance². In some ways, it sounds like the rally was like any other. Whip up the crowd with conservatives making warm-up speeches, add some boisterous music, and then Trump comes out and gives his standard best-hits special.

I confess that I’ve never been to a Trump rally. I’ve never watched one online. But I do watch the clips that get shared on Twitter. And I’ve long been a fan of Jordan Klepper’s chats with rally-goers that get shared on “The Daily Show” where they repeat their talking points regardless of how they sound.

As others have documented, there has always been a sort of carnival nature to the rallies. People buy FJB shirts³, repeat their chants, attack the media. Some supporters travel from rally to rally.

But from the reporting, it seems like Saturday’s crowd was different. First, it was smaller.⁴ That might have made it a more dedicated crowd that just the carnival goers. But more importantly, it was the first rally after Trump appeared this week to be explicitly embracing QAnon themes on his Truth Social account.

So, as Trump brought his stemwinder to a close, music played in the background with dynamics that echoed the preparation for an altar call in a church. The music was believed to be a QAnon anthem (the Trump people deny this). The supporters in the audience responded, as this chilling picture shows.

Photo by Gaelen Morse for Reuters

When I heard more about the Trump rally (and after the Broncos game was over), I was reading Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s Subversive Witness. In his chapter about how the actions of Moses’ sister and Pharaoh’s daughter subverted the leader’s plan to eliminate all male Hebrew babies, he writes this:

Within a theocracy like the Egyptian Empire, the answer is likely religious manipulation. People are told, and often believe, that leaders are divinely appointed--even when their leadership does not align with the values or principles of their faith. When the masses believe a leader is chosen by God, many in turn believe that the leader can do no wrong. Moreover, many may also believe that they would become wrong themselves if they opposed the will or policies of a God-appointed leader. Therefore people commonly comply even when they internally question a leader's choices. Within a totalitarian regime, people commonly feel coerced into compliance. They obey out of sheer fear of retribution. When this happens, out of self-preservation, people consciously participate in immorality because they are summoned to. But regardless of why people comply, it is their choice to make. (25)

I want to be careful here. It’s too easy to try to create a one-to-one correspondence between Gilliard’s words about Pharaoh and the Youngstown Rally. In fact, I want to avoid anything that allows those rally-goers to think I’m calling all Trump voters deplorables or semi-fascists.

I don’t have specific data on this, but in general I’m willing to stipulate some facts. Not all people who voted for Trump in 2020 think the former president is divinely appointed. Not all Trump supporters are Christian Nationalists. Not all Christian Nationalists are QAnon adherents. For all I know, there are QAnon adherents who aren’t Christian Nationalists. Some number of them are just in it for the game and to “enjoy liberal tears”.

And yet the image above is seriously discomfiting. For a political rally to mimic religious devotion raises serious red flags.

Thinking about the QAnon supporters at that rally made me think about how closely they track as religious adherents. I got out the Sociology of Religion text⁵ by the late Keith Roberts and David Yaname I used in class. While there are some similarities to Durkheim's collective conscience argument, this situation is much better illustrated by anthropologist Clifford Geertz' symbolic approach to religion. Here is how the Roberts and Yaname text quotes Geertz:

Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations in [people] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (Geertz 1973:90)

Geertz would have appreciated the Youngstown rally. QAnon has developed as a secret code of understanding that explain the “real things” going on in society. Their symbolism is literally on their shirts and their signs. They are motivated by being in on the secret about cannibalistic pedophile cabals and having information nobody else knows (which is why they keep looking for JFK, Jr.).

Their devotion — yes to Trump but even more to their Cause — puts them in a special category making it hard to respond. Where Peter Berger described the importance of “plausibility structures” that undergird faith commitments, it’s as if QAnon supports thrive on the implausibility of their position. As Gilliard says, they have already committed to their position and mere argument will not move them.

One other thing to mention here is the relationship between ritual and belief. I would argue that not everyone with their finger extended in that picture is in support of the larger agenda. Given what we know about collective behavior, it would be very difficult to stand in such a tightly-packed, emotional, crowd and NOT raise one’s hand. And with what we know about social psychology, having raised your hand at the rally makes you somewhat more receptive to the movement’s views.

Of course, we may look back at the Youngstown rally supporters and see that they were the last remnant of a dissolving movement. Perhaps they are like other religious millenarians who find the proposed date of the second coming of Christ in their rearview mirrors, needing to find new calculations or affirmative explanations of their own valiant efforts that gave us all a reprieve.⁶

Given our current levels of political polarization and the willingness of far too many to use threats of violence or actual violence to support their side, I think that hoping that this group will simply dissipate is a risk we cannot take.

I wish I had a better handle on potential responses. At this point, I simply share the angst that Will Bunch described in his column yesterday:

Some 24 hours later, Trump senior ended his Ohio event with the musical notes of what’s known as “an altar call.” Don’t call it a coincidence. Call it Christian fascism. Will it lead to violence? It already has, as in the recent case of the Michigan man who killed his wife and injured his daughter after falling down the QAnon rabbit hole after the 2020 election. And it can only get worse.

Maybe prayer and fasting is the only solution to this “religious” movement. But it would sure help a lot of those supposed “mainstream Republicans”⁷ actually called out this strange behavior.

1. DURING THE OHIO STATE VS TOLEDO FOOTBALL GAME! IN OHIO!

2. In the speech, Trump said “JD is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad.” So not the best look for Vance.

3. A professor friend reported that he had just had his first “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirt sighting in his class — at a Christian University!

4. Anybody like College Football?

5. The link is to the 7th edition and mine is the 6th. But I’m sure much material remains the same.

6. This latter step was what the “true believers” in When Prophecy Fails argued after the UFOs didn’t come and the promised earthquake didn’t materialize.

7. The not-deplorable, not-semi-fascist bunch that so wants to claim the high road and decry those on the left.