In this election year in the United States, there are several signs that the religious right has outsized influence.
Since his ascension in 2016, Donald Trump has formed an unwavering alliance with the religious right, including much of the evangelical Christian churches.
This pact has already had and will continue to have profound impacts both on American politics and society and on the international role of the United States.
Unholy alliance?
How can we explain that American evangelical Christians so strongly support a twice-divorced so-called billionaire, convicted of fraud, charged with 91 felonies, who has sex with porn actresses and who has bragged about multiple assaults? sexual?
It is complicated. In short, Donald Trump and the Republican Party he has appropriated are opening wide the doors of power to the leaders of the religious right and giving them an unexpected role in the reorientation of politics and law.
This alliance was neither immediate nor automatic. In 2016 Trump received little support from evangelical leaders before being declared a presidential candidate. However, they quickly realized that Trump could be very useful to them, especially since a large number of their followers identified with his nationalist and revanchist discourse.
For Trump, the unconditional support of the evangelical Christian right has become an indispensable and almost immovable pillar of his electoral base. For leaders of the religious right, Trump is a useful tool for achieving real power. A good deal on both sides.
Real impacts
The religious right has already had a major impact on the law, notably with the Supreme Court decision which put the criminalization of abortion back on the agenda. The Supreme Court of Alabama, ruling that this decision grants legal personality to human embryos, has just banned de facto in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state. Donald Trump and the Republicans may say they approve of IVF, but conservative judges will have the last word.
There is a good deal of hypocrisy in the attitude of Trump-Republicans who are preparing to give in to the religious right by blocking Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth’s bill aimed at guaranteeing the legality of IVF treatments.
Beyond abortion
The religious right also has in its sights the right of access to contraception, the right to marriage for people of the same sex and the secularism of public education. In short, we want to erase the wall of separation between Church and State erected by the founders by hanging on to Trump’s political bandwagon.
If Trump returns to power, he will not improvise. To remake the public service and the federal judiciary from top to bottom, he will draw from a pool of candidates pre-approved by his close advisors from the religious right.
In the meantime, the impact of this religious right is being felt even in foreign policy. As I wrote on Saturday, the blocking of military aid to Ukraine by Congressional Republicans comes from the fact that many of them identify more with the religious conservatism in which Vladimir Putin cloaks his authoritarian imperialism than with the liberal and secular pluralism of Volodymyr Zelensky.