As time
goes on, the devotees of Donald Trump, particularly those invested in QAnon
conspiracy theories, increasingly display the characteristics of an emerging
religious movement. That religion in general should be an influential factor in
Trump supporters is not surprising, given his popularity with conservative
Evangelicals and Catholics. Many of those, at least at first, overlooked Trump’s
very obvious moral failings in hopes of advancing their long-term agenda of
transforming the American judiciary. At the time of Trump’s election, I wrote
about how his Christian supporters might come to view him as a new Constantine,
the 4th century CE Roman emperor who legalized Christianity in the
wake of the so-called “Great Persecution.” That dream was perhaps premature,
since it has led to mixed results, with many conservative Christians in America
still indulging a well-documented “persecution
complex,” in which they imagine themselves oppressed by government policy
and changing cultural norms.
Indeed, it is remarkable how much the narratives around Trump resonate with and exploit deeply rooted ideological tendencies from the Christian past. Amidst the chaos and uncertainty of the global pandemic, many of his supporters did a deep dive into the QAnon rabbit-hole, entering a theological fever-dream in which Trump is an American Messiah, engaged in a clandestine holy war against Democratic demons and child-eating Hollywood elites. Much of this has strong parallels to early Christian apocalypticism as expressed in the New Testament. Yet, like many messianic figures of the past, Trump’s attempt to overturn the established order ended in failure and defeat. Predictably, like their early Christian forerunners, Trump’s followers have turned his defeat into a hidden victory, albeit one postponed to the President’s eventual triumphant Second Coming.
Now, while they bide their time, Trump’s pious acolytes again suffer at the hands of the diabolical Dems, as President Biden, a veritable “second Nero,” aims to force his subjects to be injected with the “mark of the beast.” As such, right on cue, the unvaccinated masses are now primed to cast themselves as a new generation of martyrs—dying for a righteous, although highly preventable, cause. Modern scholars have debated the extent to which early Christians were actually put to death for their membership in the Christian movement. What cannot be doubted, however, is how successfully early Christians used martyrdom stories as a means of recruitment and mobilization. The proliferation of early Christian “martyr acts,” which recount the alleged executions in often excruciating detail, attest to the popularity and influence such stories had in the shaping of the new religion. One can only imagine how, given enough time and hagiographic reflection, a future Acts of the Floridian Martyrs* will recount the dark and desperate times in which we live.
*This is an
allusion to the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, one of the earliest early
Christian martyr texts from Roman North Africa.
