Racketeering in religion: Adorno and evangelical support for Donald Trump

Abstract

In the 2016 American presidential election, 81% of White evangelicals voted for Donald Trump despite the obvious fact that he had little knowledge or interest in Christianity. This has continued to puzzle many commentators, as well as conservative Christian leaders. This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s 1943 analysis of the radio broadcasts of Martin Luther Thomas provides insight into Trump’s popularity among evangelicals. Adorno compares the fascist-style broadcasts of Thomas to a pagan religious sect. He describes this practice as “racketeering in religion,” which effectively results in the “liquidation of religion.” The article demonstrates ways in which this analysis is relevant for understanding the relationship between Trump and American Evangelicals.

Keywords

Adorno Donald Trump evangelical religion Frankfurt School

In the 2016 American Presidential election, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump (Pew 2016). The extent of this support shocked many commentators, even though, according to a Pew Research Center’s “Religious Landscape Study” (2014), the majority of Evangelicals in the USA are white (76%) and Republican (56%). It was presumed early in the primaries that evangelicals would gravitate toward candidates with an overt evangelical identity, such as Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. That a shift toward Donald Trump emerged bewildered many.

This article argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s 1943 analysis of the radio broadcasts of Martin Luther Thomas helps explain Trump’s popularity among evangelicals. Adorno compares the fascist-style broadcasts of Thomas to a pagan religious sect. He describes this practice as “racketeering in religion,” which effectively results in the “liquidation of religion.” Adorno conceives of “religious subjectivism” as a collective phenomenon rather than simply a matter of individual psychology. It is a general feature of the existing social order, which is both fuelled by resentment and repression, while at the same time reinforcing identification with the status quo.

With reference to diverse voices from the conservative Christian press, as well as to the writing of Trump supporter Eric Metaxas, the article demonstrates how patterns identified by Adorno in the broadcasts of Thomas in the 1930s resonate with developments in the movement surrounding Donald Trump. The discussion concludes that Trump’s appeal to evangelicals is to be explained for reasons that surpass the presenting symptoms of his anti-Muslim rhetoric, veiled racism, chauvinism, militarism, or xenophobic nationalism; instead, it is instead due to the way in which his rhetoric and persona call upon his followers to jettison their individual subjectivity and merge into his religious racket.

Although the article acknowledges the distinct socioeconomic context in which Adorno conducted his analysis of Thomas’s right-wing Christian movement in the 1940s, it argues that a number of the dynamics which concerned him are operative in similar ways in the contemporary context.

The puzzle of evangelical support for Donald Trump

The evangelical Russell Moore (2015) summarized what puzzled many about Trump’s emerging success during the Republican primaries, “Most illogical is his support from evangelicals and other social conservatives. To back Mr. Trump, these voters must repudiate everything they believe.” Frank Bruni (2015) of The New York Times described his bafflement as follows:

I’m grasping at straws, because there’s no sense in the fact that many of the people who most frequently espouse the Christian spirit then proceed to vilify immigrants, demonize minorities and line up behind a candidate who’s a one-man master class in such misanthropy.

Rather than trying to explain the puzzling phenomenon, some embarrassed church leaders initially suggested that stories of evangelical enthusiasm for Trump during the primaries amounted to “fake news.” Keith Miller (2015), for example, insisted that polling data suggested Trump enjoyed support from only 25% of self-identified “evangelicals” or “born again” Christians. According to Miller, evangelicals were the “most skeptical” members of the GOP toward Trump, and those who claimed anything to the contrary were merely using the occasion to “bash the evangelical piñata.”

Most analysis of polling data, however, even in the conservative Christian press, suggested that the majority of white evangelicals supported Trump (Zylstra, 2016a). In response to such evidence, some evangelical leaders switched tactics and argued that those Trump supporters who self-identified as “evangelicals” were not authentically such, but were merely imposters (Guerra, 2016). Others emphasized that those who attend church regularly did not support Trump (Miller, 2015). More nuanced interpretations of polling data—even in the evangelical press—observed that the claim that only inactive evangelicals support Trump was a myth, while acknowledging that those who attend church weekly were actually more likely to vote for Trump (Stetzer, 2016). Postelection analysis demonstrated conclusively that the majority of white evangelicals not only voted for Trump in the presidential election, but that three-quarters of them approved of his subsequent performance as president during the spring and summer of 2017 (Smith, 2017).

A number of explanations have been proposed to account for this widespread support of white evangelicals for Trump. Some interpret it as a strategic embrace of a “strong-man” figure who will defend their interests. Along these lines, Ross Douthat (2016), a conservative commentator at the New York Times, explained the phenomenon as follows: “What Trump is doing … isn’t so much co-opting conservative Christianity as exploiting its weaknesses and divisions.” He continues, “If this is really a post-Christian society, they seem to be thinking, then Christians need to make sure the meanest, toughest heathen on the block is on their side.” Others suggest that Trumpism is an expression of rage against a sense of cultural marginalization and the “elites.” A letter to the editor (McClure, 2016) in the New York Times offered such an assessment: “You scoff at religious-minded Trump supporters as hypocrites…. Mr. Trump’s posturing, his crassness, his rudeness, his simplistic descriptions of international issues, his demeanor—we see it all.” The writer then explains why evangelicals nevertheless support Trump: “We are desperate for a change in direction. And in future columns of The New York Times I will be looking for reasons that we should listen to you—part of the Establishment that got us into this mess.” Whereas Moore and Bruni see evangelical supporters of Trump as acting contrary to their faith commitments, Douthat and the letter to the editor explain such support as a calculated protest against the existing political order.

Other arguments range from the accusation that Trump’s followers succumbed to the “Prosperity Gospel” (Posner, 2016) or that they had fallen prey to his “feel good Gospel” rooted in his association with Norman Vincent Peale (Horton, 2016). Some argue support for Trump is due to white ethnocentrism (Edsall, 2016) or that it is fuelled by rage against the status quo (McFarland, 2016). What is noteworthy about these various accounts of Trump’s success is the extent to which they are largely descriptions of various characteristics of evangelical followers of Trump, rather than explanations for such support. If evangelicals are seeking protection from a strong man, what has led them to this point? If xenophobia and racism are factors, why are these phenomena apparently on the rise among evangelicals?

Explanations like those above for conservative Christian support for Trump identify factors that are largely external to economics and the shifts in labor markets. As such, these accounts share much in common with other theories on Trump’s success and the rise of right-wing populism more generally. In this wider literature, there persists a tendency to explain Trump’s achievement as a cultural, technological, or psychological phenomenon. According to some interpreters, Trump’s success is due to a combination of his deployment of new media and the stagnation of the two-party system in the USA (Ware, 2016). Some emphasize Trump’s stylistic “politics of persuasion” and its combination with the affective power of “shock politics” (Connolly, 2017). Others argue that Trump’s election to the Presidency had more to do with a rejection of Hilary Clinton than with Trump himself or his agenda (Shockley-Zalabak et al., 2017). The literature focusing on this distinction between Trump and Clinton frequently draws on psychological models to explain why Trump supporters are drawn to authoritarianism (Crowson and Brandes, 2017; Choma and Hanoch, 2017).

Such interpretations of evangelical support for Trump resonate with a common inclination to associate authoritarian politics with a certain type of personality. David Yarrow (2017) criticizes this tendency in various interpretations of the contemporary rise of right-wing populism, particularly for neglecting the economic roots of the phenomenon. A preoccupation with an authoritarian “personality type” is often associated with a study published in 1950, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1964), based on sociological research conducted by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. This work initially enjoyed widespread academic appreciation but was subsequently largely dismissed (Stewart and Hoult, 1959; Billings, Guastello, and Reike, 1993). Paul Apostolidis (2000) has criticized this study for being insufficiently self-reflexive and dialectical, and for an overreliance on Adorno’s theories of state capitalism and the culture industry.

In the wake of Trump’s political rise, however, some scholars, such as Peter Gordon (2017), have noted how the movement mobilized around Trump is eerily reminiscent of Adorno’s analysis of authoritarian movements in the 1940s. Moreover, Gordon argues that Adorno’s own position does not reduce authoritarianism to a “type,” but emphasizes that the phenomenon emerges out of general features of modern society (33). What has received little attention is the relation of evangelical Christianity to this development. For as Gordon follows Adorno in suggesting that the ultimate source of prejudice and authoritarian populism is found in societal factors, the impact of these structures on conservative Christianity in the USA requires further analysis. This is particularly the case as books such as John Fea’s (2018) begin to appear, which reduce Christian support of Trump to psychological categories like “evangelical fear.”

Before demonstrating the ways in which Adorno’s analysis of authoritarian political movements is relevant for analyzing evangelical support for Donald Trump, it is instructive to first set this discussion in the context of wider debates over the relationship between religion and populism.

Religion and populism

Academic literature on populist political movements identifies significant overlap with tendencies in religious movements. In a study of the populist movement in the southern United States in the latter half of the 19th century, Joe Creech (2006: xv) observes how, “the Populists’ reform agenda rested on a cluster of evangelical patterns of thought foundational to what most southerners thought it meant to be Christian, southern and American.” Although Creech acknowledges that American populism was first and foremost a grassroots political movement, he argues that it also demonstrated a clear elision of religion and politics.

This relation between religion and populism is a matter of theoretical debate. As Giovanna Campani and Mojca Pajnik (2017) observe, the concept of populism is sometimes considered too vague a term to serve as a coherent analytical category, given the diverse range of movements assembled under the label. In its defense, however, they argue that in addition to being a concept commonly employed to refer to contemporary movements that oppose the neoliberal economic model (from either the right or left-wings of the political spectrum), populist rhetoric evidences some shared characteristics: a universalist appeal of some kind (generally to “the People”), strong moral judgments on the existing state of affairs, and a dualistic Manichean distinction between a good “Us” and an evil “Them.” It is such features that lead many who study populist movements to suggest a substantial overlap between populism and religion, even when the activist group under consideration lacks the overt religious identity and convictions analyzed by Creech in his 19th century American example.

In similar fashion, Francisco Panizza (2005) defines populism as an anti-status quo movement that symbolically constructs a fundamental antagonism between “the people” and “the other.” This symbolization, he continues, is framed in terms other than sociological categories, rendering the evocation of “the people” without fixed referent or precise meaning. The sense of the term is constituted by the very process of naming; it is performed rather than coherently constructed. A similar observation encourages Margaret Canovan (2005) to describe “the people” as a mythical concept, given its propensity to evoke notions of foundational origin and future redemption. Nadia Marzouki and Duncan McConnell (2016) link this feature of populism to religion. They argue that populist movements resemble religious communities for the way in which they foster an intense sense of belonging. This is encouraged by a characteristic deployment of concepts like “restoration” and a “battle,” which leads Marzouki and McDonnell to suggest that this feature distinguishes populism from other social movements, particularly with regard to a resonance with religion. The sense of what must be restored by populism is a particular religious, ethnic, or cultural identity, and to achieve this, the movement’s leadership suggests that it must overthrow the “enemy of the people,” generally those identified as the “elites,” the “foreign,” or the heretically “other.”

It is in this regard that a number of political theorists identify significant “resonances” between contemporary conservative Christianity and right-wing free market conservative political thinkers. Linda Kintz (1997: 5), for example, argues that there exist shared patterns of belief between religious and secular conservatives in the United States; both constituencies, she suggests, are “loosely joined under the umbrella of a remarkably clear and comprehensible cosmology.” Kintz develops this conclusion out of an analysis of the writings of figures such as Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and Elizabeth Dole, and by studying organizations like the Christian Coalition and the Heritage Foundation. The worldview promoted by this material, Kintz demonstrates, is constructed according to a rigid conception of the traditional family and gender roles, a vigorous privileging of private property and the free market, and strong notions of patriotism and national exceptionalism. She draws upon the work of Jacqueline Rose to describe a “psychic framework” that is common to both religious and secular conservatives in the USA. Rose describes a combination of views that “hover somewhere between an articulable belief ” and a symbolic fantasy “in which collective self-imaginings take shape” (5). Kintz argues that this combination illuminates the role of emotional affect in political life, which drives the passionate appeal of conservative populist movements in the United States.

William E. Connolly (2008) seeks to develop this explanation for the resonances between Christian and secular conservatives in the USA. He suggests that the two constituencies, which are often thought to have little in common, share a common “spirituality.” This is characterized by an existential resentment of alternative worldviews, a staunch defense of capitalism, and a dismissal of the concept of class. Connolly argues that this dynamic emerges as capitalism generates proliferating diversity (or “nomadism”), which fragments the sense that many have of a unified society into a collection of ever-increasing minority groups. What the spirituality of the capitalist-Christian “resonance machine” enables in the wake of such an experience is the fostering of a political position in which the capitalist system is exempted from criticism while the numerous minorities it creates are defined as irregular (29–30). In the American context, Connolly continues, Christianity functions as a prominent cultural form that serves to establish the primary distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of nomadism. According to Connolly, “the advocates of different creeds—secular in some cases, theological in others—are drawn together despite creedal differences because of affinities or complementarities of spirituality” (40).

Given this diagnosis, it is noteworthy that Connolly’s (2017) analysis of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States grants little attention to Christianity. Although Connolly emphasizes how the rhetoric of Trump’s speeches follows the populist pattern of constructing dualistic binaries, religion is not explored for the ways in which it contributed to and facilitated this dynamic. Connolly argues that the “regular self and the unitary nation” are deployed to erect rigid boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable social groups, but here he emphasizes that it is Trump’s “speaking style,” rather than any form of “spirituality,” which fuels the movement’s emotive political force (28–29). A relationship between religion and populism is hinted at but then subsequently left relatively unexplored.

In this regard, Adorno’s work represents a significant resource for understanding the relationship between Trump and American evangelicals, and the resonance between religion and populism. In the early 1940s, Adorno undertook a study of the ways in which the Christian populist leader Martin Luther Thomas employed religious themes to nurture what Adorno calls “religious subjectivism.” Like many contemporary observers of the Trump campaign, Adorno noted how Thomas’s political ideas were incompatible with the theological content of Christianity, yet Adorno also emphasized how the demagogue’s rhetoric offered emotional release, a “pragmatic irrationality,” which enabled people to dissolve themselves into a collectivity. Rather than dismissing Christian supporters of Thomas as irrational or deluded due to their allegiance to a movement that contradicted their stated beliefs and values, Adorno sought to explain the socioeconomic roots of this inconsistency. As the subsequent discussion demonstrates, such an approach is relevant for interpreting Trump’s success.

Adorno on Martin Luther Thomas

Martin Luther Thomas was an evangelical Presbyterian preacher based in southern California, who launched a fascist-inspired political organization in the 1930s framed in Christian terms, called “the Christian American Crusade” (1936). Adorno’s research was funded by the American Jewish Committee, which commissioned him, along with Max Horkheimer, to conduct a project exploring the psychology of destructive tendencies within civilized society.

Adorno’s (2000) analysis of Thomas’s radio addresses is structured according to different rhetorical devices employed by the broadcaster in his preaching, including what Adorno identifies as a “persecuted innocence” trope, “anti-institutionalism,” an “anti-Pharisees” device, and a nostalgic “faith-of-our-Fathers” theme. Adorno notes that Thomas consciously modeled such rhetorical patterns on Adolph Hitler’s speeches and those of other members of the Nazi party, although not much is made of this. Nor does Adorno attend substantially to Thomas’s blatant anti-Semitism, which is curious, given the source of the project’s funding. George Cavaletto (2007: 134) argues that such decisions were due to Adorno’s concern to focus on the ways in which Thomas’s propaganda expresses the “objective conditions” of society. Adorno’s concern in this study is not primarily with propaganda as a device for spreading falsehood and manipulating emotions; rather, he intends to elucidate how truly effective propaganda resonates with the structural forces shaping society and the subjective identities of those living within it. Paul Apostolidis (2000: 61–73) emphasizes that this approach sets Adorno’s research apart from better known studies produced during this period (Adorno et al., 1964; Lowenthal and Guterman, 1949). It also contrasts with the approach that many contemporary analyses take toward the rise of “Trumpism.”

Rather than focusing on parallels between Thomas’s theo-political rhetoric and the speeches of Hitler, or criticizing him for being an anti-Semite, Adorno’s analysis compares these radio broadcasts with the advertising industry. The very first sentence of his Thomas study emphasizes this point by describing the fascist as a self-advertiser: “The fascist leader characteristically indulges in loquacious statements about himself ” (Adorno, 2000: 1). Adorno continues,

Their talk is personal… The more impersonal our order becomes, the more important personality becomes as an ideology. The more the individual is reduced to a mere cog, the more the uniqueness of the individual, his autonomy and importance, has to be stressed as a compensation for his actual weakness…. It can even be said that part of the secret of totalitarian leadership is that the leader presents the image of an autonomous personality actually denied his followers.

Here Adorno establishes a link between the impact of the populist leader and existing social conditions. According to Adorno, “self-advertising” on the part of Thomas functions as a “confidence trick” (2). It is not merely that such a leader claims strength and authority, but also that he holds out the promise that the weak can become strong, even as they inhabit socioeconomic structures that inhibit such advancement. In this regard, Adorno argues that it is important for the leader to dwell on his “also being human.” He must appear both human and superhuman—proximate yet distant—so as to represent a model for the very attitude he wants to instill in his followers, that which they can identify with and aspire to.

Modern authoritarianism, Adorno continues, “feeds upon the lack of emotional gratification in an industrial society” (7). The rhetoric of Thomas helps those caught up in it to experience what Adorno describes as an “emotional release,” which identification with a powerful leader facilitates. Yet Adorno emphasizes the unstable nature of such “irrational pragmatism”: “There is no real pleasure or joy, but only the release of the feeling of one’s own unhappiness and the achievement of retroactive gratification out of the submergence of the self into the community” (8). This merely performative release, as Peter Gordon (2017: 49) notes, “serves as a dream of redemption without providing any actual transformation from the social conditions of unhappiness.”

This point highlights a key distinguishing feature of Adorno’s analysis of authoritarian social movements: although he takes seriously the affective and psychological dimensions of this phenomenon, Adorno discourages focusing on individual psychology in favor of attending to the formation of collective identity. Moreover, Adorno roots this dynamic in the dominant features of modern society.

In his theory of state capitalism (influenced by the work of his Frankfurt colleagues Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer), Adorno was convinced that the centralization of economic and political authority in late capitalism was constricting the possibility of autonomous individual subjectivity. The departure from laissez-faire economic principles in the 1930s resulted in extensive state interventions in the economies of many nations. Adorno’s state capitalism thesis argues that the concentration of economic power shifted away from small and medium-sized businesses to large corporations and the state, undermining the independence of all cultural forms (Abromeit, 2011: 394–424).

Apostolidis (2000: 75–88) faults Adorno’s analysis of Martin Luther Thomas (and his more general social theory) for being overly reliant upon this theory of state capitalism. He argues that the model neglects sectors of the economy that continue to resist state intervention and exaggerates the extent to which cultural interactions were impeded by centralizing forces. Although appreciative of Adorno’s interpretation of Thomas’ theo-political movement, Apostolidis suggests that it is insufficiently dialectical because it neglects ways in which the religious content of these radio broadcasts not only embody dominant power relations, but are also “endowed with utopian strength” (37). Apostolidis’s critique raises the question of the extent to which changing socioeconomic conditions since the 1970s have impacted on the relevance of Adorno’s contextualized social analysis for contemporary phenomenon like Christian support for Donald Trump.

These critical concerns will be addressed below. First, it is instructive to demonstrate some ways in which Adorno’s analytical approach to the Thomas radio addresses resonates with issues surrounding the interpretation of Trump’s success. Particularly notable in this regard is the aforementioned tendency to ignore the socioeconomic context in which “Trumpism” emerged. Surface dismissals of Trump, such as the actor George Clooney’s suggestion that Trump is simply a “Xenophobic fascist” followed by racists and xenophobes (Pulver, 2016), fail to offer much insight into the dynamics at work. Hilary Clinton voiced her own version of this simplistic explanation when she dismissed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” (Chozick, 2016). More reflective journalists, by contrast, noted how many white middle-class workers described the state of their society as the “death of the American Dream.” One laid-off worker of the Carrier plant in Indiana, for example, said to a reporter, “The American Dream is increasingly a sick joke. That’s really what this election is about” (Harris, 2016).

This is the context in which Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” resonated. Some analysts focus on this economic dimension, crediting Trump’s victory to “a widespread pattern of populist reactions against the neo-liberal order” (Anderson, 2017: 54), but as highlighted earlier in this article, such interpretations have yet to be firmly adopted. Thus while Trump’s “monstrous discourse” may come under scrutiny (Williams and Prince, 2018), or the “racial resentment” of his followers might be emphasized (Abrahmowitz, 2017), the reasons for the rise of such phenomena are frequently given secondary consideration, if at all. In similar fashion, studies of Christian support for Trump continue to focus largely on cultural issues; for example, on Trump’s commitment to support pro-life appointments to the Supreme Court (Rozell and Wilcox, 2018: 7), or on a strong dislike of Hilary Clinton (Young, 2018: 73).

Analysis informed by Adorno’s perspective does not disregard such motivating factors; rather, it explores the relation of these stated concerns to the wider social context (or “totality” in Adorno’s terminology). Adorno’s social theory seeks to uncover ways in which existing social structures shape cultural objects. By engaging in an “immanent criticism” of these objects, he intends to bring into view ways in which they are consistent with dominant power relations, and the extent to which they resist and contradict such structures (Apostolidis, 2000: 31–56; Benzer, 2011: 51–85).

This stands in contrast with the way many scholars emphasize the extent to which the political engagement of American evangelicals is focused solely on promoting “traditional values” (the patriarchal heterosexual family, opposition to abortion, and so forth) at the expense of concern with socioeconomic issues like poverty (C. Smith, 2000). This has encouraged reducing evangelicals to “values voters” (Backer and Boudens, 2009) and has promoted conceiving of tensions in the USA as a “Culture War” between “traditionalist conservatives” and “progressive liberals” (Hunter, 1991). Such discussions are developed on the basis of survey data, while engaging in little analysis of what encourages the preponderance of such values among evangelicals. Moreover, the “Culture Wars” hypothesis grants little consideration to the ways in which individuals frequently disregard the very values their political position claims to defend.

This is a problem that Adorno’s immanent criticism helps illuminate. On the question of how Christians can seemingly betray their most cherished moral values (e.g. universal love of neighbor) by aligning with a right-wing fascist movement, he argues that their political stance is not shaped by religious principles or values in an unmediated manner; instead, Adorno suggests that conservative Christians are influenced “on a deeper, more unconscious level” by their religious heritage (Adorno et al., 1964: 728). He argues that a significant factor here is the resentment of Christians over their declining status in modernity. Although Christianity is far from being abolished in western societies, he continues, it has largely been politically neutralized. The relegation of religion to the private sphere, to the status of “leisure,” generates both frustration and insecurity among some adherents (729).

Numerous observers have recently documented such frustration among evangelicals. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, explained his support for Trump as follows:

Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find…. [T]hat’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals…. He [Trump] has said that he believes that Christians and Christianity are being marginalized. He always gets a laugh when he says, ‘We’re gonna start saying, “Merry Christmas” in America again.’ We all know what he’s talking about. (quoted in Dionne, Ornstein & Mann, 2017: 163-64)

Such a perspective understands the seemingly contradictory behavior of conservative Christians as illuminating tensions in existing social power relations. Why do Christians who claim to follow a crucified leader who refused to conform to the “powers of this world” so deeply resent their lack of worldly influence? Lingering on this phenomenon shifts the focus of analysis beyond immediate cultural issues to account for anxieties over status and security. Adorno’s reading of the radio broadcasts of Martin Luther Thomas encourages the exploration of structural reasons for the way in which supporters appear to care so little about Trump’s obvious flaws, and indeed, seem to even trust him more because of those very frailties. Adorno argues that Thomas’s display of his own frailties resonated with his followers because being so fallibly human, he appeared more like them, less reminiscent of the polished bureaucrats who only highlighted their status as cogs in an unjust system.

A glimpse into ways in which the contemporary white working class experiences the sense of being such “cogs” is provided by Victor Tan Chen, who conducted ethnographic research among Detroit autoworkers laid off in 2009 and 2010. Such studies not only establish a link between the insights of Adorno’s research and Trumpism’s political emergence but they also begin to suggest that Adorno’s social theory may not be as outdated as some critics have suggested. Through his interview subjects, Chen uncovers the psychological impact that unemployment and lost social status was having among those who had previously enjoyed years of secure income. A number of these individuals describe themselves as feeling like a “loser” (Chen, 2015: 22). Chen (23) demonstrates how these victims of the economic downturn in the manufacturing industry think of “their protracted joblessness as an individual, moral failing: a deserved comeuppance from foolish decisions they have made.” Having being laid off, they felt they had been rendered obsolete, since they were unable or too old to retrain, and considered it impossible to relocate to another region of the country to find comparable employment. Thus, adding to their frustration and anxiety, Chen notes that it was common for many of his informants to express resentment over being made to feel like they were personally responsible for their situation. They felt that the system they found themselves in was implying that if they were smarter, had chosen different vocations, or were more adaptable, they would not be in this situation.

Studies like Chen’s help explain why those experiencing a state of individual psychological crisis are attracted to a figure like Donald Trump. Trump’s image enables them to cry, “the American Dream is dead; long live the American Dream.” In the words of a former Carrier employee: “I think [Trump] is a little crazy, but that’s what it’s gonna take to undo what Barack Obama’s done” (Posner, 2015). Another added: “I hate the way he talks about women, but I love the way he handles things.” An Indiana worker underlined the message shared by all of his colleagues: “We need someone who’s tough…. Bernie, I think, would be, like Obama, a pushover. Bernie says he’s tough, [but] Trump just shows toughness, and I love that!” That the performance of “toughness” bears little relation to actually changing existing social conditions remains largely irrelevant to the emotional power of Trump’s appeal. While respecting his strength, recognition of his personal failings helps prevent Trump from being associated with those who represent the domination of the status quo they so much resent. At the same time, Trump’s message and “tough” persona permits his audience, in Adorno’s (2000: 2) words, to perceive an “image of an autonomous personality actually denied his followers.”

Beyond this general desire for a “tough” leader among white Americans who are experiencing anxiety over lost status and economic security, evangelicals have their own motivation for being drawn to a strongman. In his analysis of the theology of evangelical Republicans, Benjamin Lynerd (2014) identifies a basic tension between their libertarian economic agenda and restrictive public moralism. According to Lynerd, this contradictory position is held together by a theology that emphasizes a God-given right to liberty, which the chosen few are able to employ for their own sanctification. Only in free societies, they argue, do citizens have the opportunity to cultivate Christian virtue. A dialectical reading of this phenomenon appreciates the way in which this stance values and upholds individual freedom and subjectivity, while at the same time noting the tension within the theological position which hints at the fact that achieving this ideal will be elusive for structural reasons. Adorno’s approach to immanent critique encourages one to linger on this contradiction in American evangelical theology. As one does so, tensions underneath the surface are newly exposed in the wake of Trumpism’s emergence.

To show how this in the case, it is instructive to return to Adorno’s collaborative research on the authoritarian personality. In that work, he included some notes of his own on the significance of aspects of theological content that he observed in the project’s interview data. He argues that even though, in modernity, there are no longer immediate causal links between religious fanaticism and prejudice, the influence of “old beliefs” linger in subtle, even unconscious ways (1964: 718). Adorno argues that it is actually those Christians who maintain a “religious rigidity” toward their theological system who are less susceptible to ethnocentric prejudice. The Christian identity of the majority of individuals in modern society, he continues, has largely conformed to wider social conventions and been deprived of its “truth content” (730). The resulting trend, Adorno observes, is that one now goes to church “in order to express one’s normality, or at least to be classed with normal people” (731). In other words, from this perspective, what initially appears to be religious zeal on the part of conservative evangelical Christians has often more to do with conforming to dominant social forces than faithful adherence to a theological worldview.

According to Adorno, although the positive cultural elements of religion are deprived of their “truth content” by modern society (through processes of secularization), he argues that the formal properties of religion (particularly, the notion of a rigid dualism between good and evil, the priority placed on the power of individual conscience, etc.) become “congealed” into a new and powerful form of “social cement” (730). On this basis, Adorno emphasizes his key point,

the more this cement is needed for the maintenance of the status quo and the more dubious its inherent truth becomes, the more obstinately is its authority upheld and the more its hostile, destructive and negative features come into focus.

Consider, in this light, the more racist and xenophobic attitudes among Trump’s evangelical supporters. The more the dominant social structures come under strain, the more ideological energy is required to support them. Many white Republican evangelicals respond to this tension by appearing to cling ever-more fervently to their Christian identity, while in actuality, they frequently embody attitudes and practices that contradict core elements of that same tradition (e.g. hospitality to strangers or love of neighbor).

Adorno’s work is thus prescient in the light of statements by some American evangelical leaders who explain their support of Trump in terms of being attracted to a strong leader who will protect “Christian values.” The prominent Christian author, Eric Metaxas, is a case in point. In an interview with the conservative radio broadcaster, Mike Gallagher, Metaxas criticized Christian leaders for permitting themselves to be “muzzled” by secular society, and “allowing themselves to be beaten up” (Metaxas, 2016b). He celebrates Trump for his suggestion that freedom of religion is under assault in America, and for bringing to light the extent to which the contemporary USA demands an “existential struggle” against “termites from within.” Metaxas thus articulates the fear expressed by many conservative Christians over their sense of lost social status.

In his book If You Can Keep It, Metaxas elaborates at greater length on this interpretation of contemporary America. He argues that capitalism requires a belief in God to sustain it; otherwise, “everything falls apart” (Metaxas, 2016a: 48), while at the same time American freedom requires a virtuous citizenship in order to thrive. This claim is based on what Metaxas calls the “golden triangle of freedom”: freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom (54). Echoing a position observed in Lynerd’s study of Republican theology, Metaxas explains that there can be no lasting liberty in society without a virtuous citizenry, for otherwise strong tyrants will be required to maintain order. Yet, Metaxas continues, only “faith” can motivate citizens to behave virtuously. From this point follows a classic Protestant emphasis on the need for faith to be individually and consciously adopted in order for it to be authentic.

Two details about this argument are particularly noteworthy. First, this formula is derived largely with reference to selective quotations from Tocqueville and the “Founding Fathers” of the United States. When the “Judeo-Christian” tradition is briefly mentioned, it is only to advance the political function of theism. The concept of God merely provides the necessary figure to whom individuals can “voluntarily submit themselves” (64). Metaxas makes little reference to specific Christian teachings, texts, or practices; religion in this book serves a sociological and political function. When there is explicit reference to the biblical text, it is to defend the notion of “American exceptionalism” by establishing parallels between the Unites States and ancient Israel as God’s “chosen people” (188).

Second, the support that Metaxas urges Christians to offer to Trump is actually contrary to the logic of the argument above. That religious adherents must put their faith in Trump to defend them signals that “faith” is no longer adequate to maintain a social or moral order to Metaxas' liking. His call to turn to a strong leader suggests that, ultimately, for him, political sovereignty “trumps” virtue and faith in a way that undermines his tidy “golden triangle” formula. As such, Metaxas' position is captured by Sarah Posner’s (2015) characterization of Trump’s rallies during the Presidential primaries: “Trump doesn’t have a salvation story – he is the Savior.” Adorno’s diagnosis of the evaporation of religion’s “truth content” under late capitalism could not be more vividly illustrated.

This contradiction evident in evangelical arguments in support of Trump is thus consistent with patterns that Adorno observed in his research on Martin Luther Thomas. Metaxas does not make any overt reference to positive Christian principles in his interview. His political concerns provide the content of his version of Christianity; specific doctrines or principles go largely unmentioned. As such, from a perspective informed by Adorno, Metaxas' rhetoric represents a performance of authenticity without specificity. On the surface, it may appear (and, among evangelicals, even feel) like Christianity is being passionately embraced, yet under the scrutiny of an immanent critique, tensions in existing society are clearly motivating a good deal of the agenda.

Religion as a racket

Building on his view that Christianity can serve as a form of “social cement” in a society that is under significant strain, Adorno (2000: 75) argues that the Christian tradition in Thomas’s radio addresses functions as a “racket.” Adorno, along with Max Horkheimer, employed a theory of rackets to describe the impact of the erosion of bourgeois society. In their view, the boundary separating democracy from totalitarianism had become opaque and fragile in 1930’s Europe (Stirk, 1992: 131–154). They suggest that a key feature that fueled this development was the way in which particular leaders established their own private instruments of power, distinct from formal public state institutions. This emerged as “oligarchic cliques” developed in the wake of economic concentration and centralization. The theory of rackets thus sought to describe and explain how, under state capitalism and even in Nazi Germany, competing power blocks could emerge, even as the primacy of politics over economics was established.

Horkheimer (1972: 85) argued that when socially necessary functions (like electricity or water) become privatized, what ensues is gangster-like behavior. Individual power is increasingly emphasized over market allocation. Previous social categories, such as class or strata, become less relevant as they are replaced by narrower pragmatic associations. As the liberal nation-state loses its capacity to provide universal guaranteed rights to its citizens, the principal form of domination becomes “protection,” which is offered at a price. The “racket” is a social phenomenon that elevates the small group over both the individual and general society, while the key social distinction that is established is the divide between members of a racket and their victims.

Leaving aside for the moment the extent to which such a theory is relevant for conceiving of the current socioeconomic climate, let us first return to the link Adorno establishes between the theory of rackets and religion. According to Adorno, the concept of a racket captures the function of Christianity in Thomas’s radio addresses. Adorno (2000: 98) writes, “religion, while being used as a net to ensnare a certain group of the population, is also transformed into a technique of political manipulation.” He continues, “The complete cynicism with which [Thomas] handles Biblical stories shows that he is actually concerned only with the residues of religious prestige and authority.” Elsewhere, Adorno (1992: 294) sums up this same concern,

Religion is on sale, as it were. It is cheaply marketed in order to provide one more so-called irrational stimulus among many others by which the members of a calculating society are calculatingly made to forget the calculation under which they suffer.

This statement illustrates what Adorno means when in his Thomas study he employs the concepts of “religious subjectivism” to describe a collective phenomenon rather than simply a matter of individual psychology. The type of individual being shaped by the dominant social order is fuelled by both repression and resentment of the same, while simultaneously reinforcing identification with the status quo.

According to Adorno (2000: 88), an example of this function of religion as a racket is the way in which Thomas claims to stand for “living faith” over against institutional religion. Thomas’s appeal is to immediate and personal emotion; in Weberian terms, it is based on charismatic rather than bureaucratic authority. Thomas encourages a weakening of independent rational thought, including the sort found in theological reasoning. As Adorno (90) describes it, “the individual must think of God and his own immediate relationship with God, rather than of the Church to which he belongs.” Thomas and his sectarian agenda is now the audience’s “racket.” In an aside, Adorno notes the similar hostility with which the Nazi regime regarded large church organizations.

Adorno argues that the direct and immediate nature of the believer’s personal relationship with God is stressed by the leader to “exclude any interference from outside agencies.” Here Adorno might be said to offer further specificity and nuance to the dynamic Connolly calls the “spirituality” of contemporary capitalism. Adorno’s understanding of the individual’s relation to God, mediated through the appeal of an authoritarian leader, both conforms to the social fragmentation encouraged by contemporary socioeconomic structures, while offering a racket in which to take refuge from the ravages of individualistic nomadism.

This phenomenon that Adorno calls “religious subjectivism” resonates with dynamics observed among Trump supporters. While reporting for the New York Times, Jeff Sharlet (2016) asked people what they loved so much about Trump’s rallies. He reports: “the way it makes them feel. How much it makes them feel … not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance. It doesn’t feel political.” It is experienced, rather, more in terms of what Connolly describes as “spirituality.”

Yet despite this constructed sense of “true feeling,” Trump’s rallies are deeply political, displaying striking parallels to the rhetorical structures identified by Adorno in the radio addresses of Thomas. It is not much of a stretch to compare the ways in which Trump frequently recites a list of “losers,” who “don’t know how to win! They haven’t won in a long time,” with what Adorno describes as a “racket” (Sharlet, 2016). To a crowd of people who, as Chen (2015) has demonstrated, themselves feel like losers, such a message holds out the promise of finally becoming a winner, while deflecting the blame on others for their own personal defeats.

What distinguishes Trump from Thomas, of course, is that the former has increasingly abandoned any attempt to employ overt references to Christianity or religion. He is able, in Adorno’s terms, to mobilize the “religious subjectivism” of his followers with little to no explicit mention of religion itself. But this is consistent with Adorno’s interpretation of the dynamics at work in Thomas’s religious authoritarianism. As already demonstrated, the theological content of the radio addresses is irrelevant for Thomas and largely, it would seem, for his audience. The journalists Maggie Habermas and Thomas Kaplan (2016) observed a similar phenomenon at Trump rallies: his evangelical supporters do not necessarily see him as a man of faith, but rather as a man of conviction—and that is all that matters to them. It feels to them that he is a Christian, because he appears to feel like they do. As a Methodist man in the audience at Liberty University told them, “[Trump] is like I am. He speaks like I do. He doesn’t hide what he’s saying. And he comes across very, very truthful.”

It is observations such as these that led Adorno (2000: 89) to suggest that Thomas’ “racketeering in religion” results in the “liquidation of religion.” As Thomas’s speeches bring to the fore the “destructive and naturalistic elements of anti-institutionalism,” Adorno explains, they trigger a deep psychological rage and repressed emotion, rather than anything that might properly be described as particularly “religious” passions. Adorno emphasizes the following:

This is why [Thomas’] manipulation of religious themes is more than an obsolete device to catch backward people. Behind his home-spun theology looms the spectre of a streamlined doctrine in which politics and ideology are bluntly integrated in the name of ‘God, home, and the native land’.

This perspective suggests that those conservative Christian leaders who dismiss Trump’s evangelical followers for not being “true evangelicals” misdiagnose the phenomenon. For Trump appeals to many evangelicals—not because of their own lukewarm evangelicalism, nor because their fail to recognize the relative absence of Trump’s personal piety—but precisely because they have grown weary of theo-politics. The lamentations of some leaders of the Religious Right over the failure of America to become a “Christian nation” appear to sound to Trump supporters like the cries of losers. Many evangelicals long to belong to a winning racket—to Trump Nation—whose leader may not have a salvation story, but he certainly looks and feels to them like a savior.

This is not a new trend within American evangelicalism according to sociologists of religion like Christian Smith. As early as the late 1990s, he concluded ordinary evangelicals were not particularly interested in the cultural politics promoted by their leaders; instead, Smith perceived a “triumph of ambivalence” (C. Smith, 2000: 195). Trump has identified ways to take advantage of this religious vacillation, while mobilizing discontent fuelled by tensions over a lost sense of security and status.

Adorno’s analysis suggests that this trend is not simply a symptom of backward irrational sentimentality, but is in fact rooted in cultural tendencies that are reinforced by the dominant structural conditions of society. Yet Adorno does not regard the Christian identity of Thomas’ followers to be unrelated to their support of his fascist movement. The religious beliefs of these individuals and the rhetoric of Thomas’s populist movement had fused into one. As Adorno’s (2000: 45) puts it,

religion largely and unconsciously has been replaced by a very abstract yet tremendously powerful cult of the existent. That something exists is taken as a proof that it is stronger than that which does not exist, and therefore it is better.

This is to say that, by making their own immediate fears and desires the measure of reality, these same fears and desires on the part of Thomas’s supporters became their own self-justification. The self has collapsed into itself, and thus sacrifices itself to the collective racket.

Adorno’s analysis of the “religious racket” of Martin Luther Thomas invites some intriguing comparisons to the support of American evangelicals for Donald Trump. Adorno’s account of the “religious subjectivism” of Thomas’ followers, who appear to both jettison individual for collective identity while disregarding the tenants of their faith, resonates with behavioral patterns among Trump’s evangelical supporters. Similar to the way in which Trump encourages Republican voters to disregard traditional linchpins of Republican ideology (free markets, NATO, and so forth), his evangelical followers tend to disregard core tenants of Protestant theology. The content of both public policy and theological doctrine is marginalized in Trump’s populist movement, as its sole content is occupied by the personality of the man himself.

Adorno’s contemporary relevance

The similarities between the dynamics of Trump’s movement and those Adorno discerned within Thomas’ “Crusade” are compelling, but a question posed by Apostolidis about the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s social theory remains to be addressed. To what extent does an analysis from the 1940s, rooted as it is in a theory of state capitalism, continue to be relevant to a very different socioeconomic context? Since the 1970s, shifts in political and economic structures have included: fiscal and legitimation crises in a number of nation-states, rising “flexible specialization” in the labor market, niche marketing and specialized commodities for the middle and upper classes, and a more competitive international economy (Apostolidis, 2000: 86–88).

Apostolidis (87) summarizes the issues related to the question of Adorno’s ongoing relevance as follows: “The answer hinges on whether the transition to post-Fordism mitigates or aggravates the danger that culture is losing its claim to autonomy from political and economic necessity.” At the time of publication, Apostolidis concluded, “on this issue, no conclusive or unequivocal judgment is possible.” While it is clearly not possible to offer a conclusive and equivocal response to this question within the confines of this article, the two decades since Apostolidis raised this issue provide fresh evidence to consider. Here there is space to briefly suggest three issues: the ongoing erosion of the nation-state’s authority in the wake of globalization, the impact of social media and the Internet, the related phenomenon of “fake news.”

Peter Sloterdijk (2013: 9) argues that, through the processes of globalization, contemporary global capitalism has resulted in the construction of an “expanded interior, a domestically and artificially climatized inner space.” This has divided regions of the globe between internal “winners” and external “losers” of the emerging economic system. As Sloterdijk puts it, “The primary fact of the Modern Age was not that the earth goes around the sun, but that money goes around the earth.” This simple observation suggests that Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of rackets continues to be a significant way to frame the power dynamics at work in the early 21st century. Indeed, contemporary developments encourage observers like Mark Weiner (2013: 202) to compare tensions in social life to those of competing clans:

All of these new clans, from extended families and gangs to churches and corporations, offer a wide range of goods and services previously furnished by the state or dispersed under its watchful guidance. The various functions of the state continue to be discharged.

Like Adorno, Weiner emphasizes the distinction between how the nation-state previously provided goods to individuals as individuals, whereas the emerging collective groupings serve only their members. Whether one thinks of contemporary figures like the Koch brothers (Mayer, 2016), Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, or Donald Trump, there are clear indications of a pattern of political forces encouraging individuals to attach themselves to a collective racket, rather than work to bolster the liberal welfare state and its related concept of individual subjectivity. The undermining of labor unions, public health care, equal access to education, and ever-more-rigid immigration policies all serve to fuel these trends. To the extent these forces continue to shape socioeconomic life, Adorno’s analysis of the loss of culture’s autonomy to political and economic structures remains a relevant theoretical perspective.

It is noteworthy that Apostolidis’s critique of Adorno was completed prior to arrival of the impact of the Internet and social media on cultural life. Although the full significance of this new technology remains to be understood, scholars (Axford, 2018; Gillespie, 2018; Storr, 2018) are increasingly raising concerns about the extent to which new communications technology shapes and conforms individual subjectivity and attitudes through the deployment of algorithms and siloing techniques. Adding to this challenge, widespread suspicion of election tampering through the manipulation of Facebook and other social media has led to the coining of the concept of “fake news” (McIntyre, 2018). While distinct from Adorno’s notion of the “culture industry” as an ideological extension of advertising encouraged by state capitalism, the impact on the autonomy of cultural objects from dominant power politics appears quite similar to what Adorno cautioned his audience against.

While these brief remarks fall far short of an adequate analysis of the socioeconomic power dynamics fuelling the success of Donald Trump, they do suggest that the theoretical lens employed by Adorno to analyze Martin Luther Thomas’s right-wing Christian movement remains relevant to the present context, despite the differences between the present and the mid-1940s. This impression is bolstered by the resonance demonstrated above between Adorno’s interpretation of Thomas’s rhetoric, and the dynamics many have observed among evangelical supporters of Donald Trump. When in 1943 Adorno (2000: 7) wrote that Thomas’s movement “feeds upon the lack of emotional gratification in an industrial society and that it grants to the people that irrational satisfaction which is denied them by today’s social and economic setup,” he could well have been describing contemporary white Americans, and particularly those left feeling insecure by shifting socioeconomic structures. Conservative evangelical theology and piety have clearly served as a convenient way to express such frustration and anxiety, particularly for the way in which their dualistic elements resonate with populist dynamics. That some evangelical leaders continue to criticize and resist this development suggests that the utopian dimension of religion, which Apostolidis criticizes Adorno of neglecting, may yet remain a resource for critical theory. Time will tell whether such voices will prove effective for mobilizing resistance to what appears to be the dominant religious racket of the age, for white evangelical Christians continue to remain among Trump’s staunchest supporters.

Conclusion

From the perspective of Adorno’s analysis of Thomas’ radio broadcasts, the support of evangelicals for Donald Trump is explained by the ways in which his rhetoric and persona call upon his followers to jettison their individual subjectivity and merge into his religious racket. Adorno’s analysis illuminates how Trump’s “racketeering in religion” disregards the content of Christianity, while tapping into the evangelical movement’s energy and social discontent. As such, evangelical critics of Trump are right to note that his Christian followers are being inconsistent in their support of his movement, but they are also naïve to think that simply pointing this out represents a powerful challenge to Trump’s ability to attract evangelical support. Adorno’s analysis helps explain this development as being the result of structural changes in society, which increasingly fragment large-scale national institutions, leaving people to associate themselves with competing rackets at the price of their individual subjectivity.

As a final observation, it is noteworthy that Adorno’s analysis of Thomas’ use of religious rhetoric does not treat Christianity as such as a source or ideology or even of false consciousness. Indeed, in this text, Christian theology as such is presented as almost the exact opposite of thoughtless ideology. Adorno suggests that, within modernity, the content of religion has a rational substance, and that the denominational institutions that organize and systematize such content have previously functioned as a source of stability for the individual subject, rather than the cause of its erosion.

While these observations have much to say about how one might interpret religion as a social and cultural phenomenon in the present historical moment, they also challenge how one might envision the possibilities for political resistance to the forces fuelling Trump’s success. At the very least, Adorno’s perspective interrupts the propensity to laud political mockery of Trump as a form of radical protest. It also complicates the tendency to dismiss theological commitments and doctrines as inherently regressive. In an climate in which the structures of liberal democracy are under increasing strain, and in which politics has become increasingly a matter of feeling rather than policy making or organization building, Adorno’s analysis of fascist tendencies among right-wing Christians in the 1940s remains a relevant and a prescient warning to contemporary critical theory.

Footnotes

Author biography

Christopher Craig Brittain is Dean of Divinity and Margaret E. Fleck Chair in Anglican Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He researches relations within the global Anglican Communion, Interfaith Partnerships, and Theological Responses to Disaster and Terrorism. In addition, he works on Political Theology and on the writings of the early Frankfurt School on religion and theology. His publications include The Anglican Communion at a Crossroads: The Crisis of a Global Church (with Andrew McKinnon, Penn State University Press, 2018), Religion at Ground Zero: Theological Responses to Times of Crisis (Continuum, 2011), and Adorno and Theology (T&T Clark, 2010).

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