The godless US election Viking shamans are transforming spirituality

Religion has been part of US elections for decades. As far back as 1976, Jimmy Carter’s victory was partly attributed to his religious openness, with his Southern Baptist roots proving attractive to voters. Four years later, Ronald Reagan prayed during his acceptance speech. By the turn of the millennium, Dubya declared that Christ was his favourite political philosopher: because he “changed my heart”. For his part, Barack Obama was fond of invoking his own conversion experience, while Joe Biden, who once considered entering the priesthood, has made frequent reference to his Catholicism. 

Cut to the 2024 election, however, and testimonies of faith have mostly vanished. Consider Donald Trump. Despite enjoying near-Messianic status among some supporters, not to mention selling Bibles with his name on them, the Republican hopeful isn’t a regular churchgoer and has little to say about his personal convictions. He has, to be fair, claimed his faith “took on new meaning” after he narrowly avoided assassination in July. Overall, though, the issue doesn’t seem to be front of mind. At a recent forum for faith voters in Georgia, Trump made just one allusion to his own beliefs, preferring instead to focus on the perils of illegal immigration.

Kamala Harris, for her part, grew up attending both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. With a Jewish husband and stepchildren, she’s been touted as the candidate for a multifaith, multiracial America. Yet if she’s made occasional references to personal religiosity, it’s not a significant part of her campaigning, an omission that’s been seized upon by her opponents. As J.D. Vance sniped: “There is something really bizarre with Kamala Harris’ anti-Christian rhetoric and anti-Christian approach to public policy.”

Americans have heard the message loud and clear. In a poll conducted in September, just 12% of voters said the word “religious” describes either Trump or Harris “extremely” or “very” well. 

So why might Trump and Harris have taken this Jesus-light approach? Part of the answer, presumably, is the much-touted decline of Christianity. As documented in the latest Pew Research Center survey, 28% of Americans are now classed as “nones” — meaning they’re religiously unaffiliated. This is up from 16% in 2007, and just 5% in 1972. Concurrently, the proportion of Christians has tumbled, from 90% in the Seventies to 78% in 2007 to less than two-thirds today.

According to the Pew Research Center’s projections, the numbers of Christians and “nones” could be roughly equal by 2070, each comprising around a third to a half of the US population. 

This demographic shift is inarguable, and Harris especially will have been paying attention. All those “nones” are a diverse cohort, comprising atheists, agnostics, loosely spiritual types, and a big group identifying as “nothing in particular”. They span everyone from the anti-religious to the apathetic, and while most believe in a higher power, nearly half maintain that religion does more harm than good.

They are also more inclined to vote for Harris: 70% of this group skew Democrat, including 84% of atheists. While they are far from a unified voting bloc, and are indeed less likely to vote than the general population, they equally include a very vocal group of Left-leaning secular activists. If Harris were to overdo the religious rhetoric, in short, she’d stand to alienate a significant chunk of her voter base. 

Of course, it isn’t as simple as saying that secularists vote blue and the godly go red. As well as courting the non-religious vote, Harris will be looking to maintain her support among black Protestants, 84% of whom lean Democrat. Many Jews, Muslims and Hispanic Catholics tend to look Left too.

Yet appealing to these groups doesn’t necessarily require Harris to talk up her faith. Rather, she’s made efforts to portray herself as a defender of minorities and a champion of abstract social justice. As the Democratic nominee vaguely put it, she “was raised to believe in a loving God, to believe that your faith is a verb”. It’s a position unlikely to ruffle her supporters, be they black Baptists or strident atheists. 

A case in point: Emanuel Jones, a Georgia state senator, has spoken approvingly of the presidential candidate’s unwillingness to mix politics and God. “I think she does a really good job of keeping them separate,” he said in October. “She did that today, and we all should.” 

On the face of it, Trump’s apparent irreligion is more mystifying. This is a man, after all, who is looking to court some of the most overtly religious voters in America. A whopping 85% of white evangelicals lean Republican, along with the lion’s share of white Christians generally. 

And though white evangelicals are less powerful than they were, now comprising less than one in seven Americans, they nonetheless are expected to wield outsize influence on the election. For one thing, this cohort is far more likely to vote than most. For another thing, they could play a decisive role in swing states like Georgia.

Trump can’t afford to lose these voters. But with two previous cycles under his belt, he doesn’t seem too worried about that. To put it differently, then, he may not talk about his faith because he doesn’t need to. Evangelical loyalty is assured already: even given Trump’s less-than-stellar personal behaviour, many white evangelicals now view him as synonymous with traditional Christian values. 

For sure, some are single-issue voters, who will hold their noses and vote Republican based on the abortion question alone. Others, though, are wedded to the idea that Trump is God’s flawed but “anointed” instrument on earth. As media personality Lance Wallnau put it rather ominously last year, “the hand of God is on him and he cannot be stopped”. 

Beyond that, though, it’s unclear how appeals to Christianity might fly with another group of voters, a group that’s garnered cultural clout while defying traditional classifications. 

It’s here that “conspirituality“ — a muddle of far-Right conspiracy theory and alternative spirituality — gathers steam. Think anti-vaxxer yoga teachers at one end of the spectrum, and Capitol-storming white supremacists at the other, with MAGA cheerleaders like Alex Jones hollering away in the middle. Many in this bracket would previously have aligned with RFK Jr, who identifies as Catholic but has made no secret of his conspiratorial persuasions. Around half of RFK Jr’s supporters are now thought to have pivoted to Trump, with only a quarter switching to Harris.

It’s hard to say how these voters might define themselves from a religious perspective. On the one hand, movements like Q-Anon have been painted as an offshoot of evangelical Christianity, with white evangelicals overrepresented among their supporters. On the other, many conspiracists have New Age-accented beliefs, while others use pagan signifiers. Who could forget the Viking shaman at the Capitol?

The academic Tobias Cremer argues that what we’re seeing is the emergence of a new, post-religious Right, consisting of “disenchanted working-class voters who combine secular values with cultural nativism and authoritarian tendencies”. This group may borrow the symbols of Christianity — for instance parading Christian crosses at their marches — but don’t necessarily believe Christ died for our sins. 

If Trump is interested in cornering this group, then, it may be smart to avoid traditional religious rhetoric. Not that these voters are insensitive to spirituality. For even if their Bibles are gathering dust, many continue to see politics as a meeting ground for cosmic forces, a clash not just between one set of values and another, but between the very powers of good and evil. 

QAnon message boards have always been full of apocalyptic grandiosity, notably claiming that those in Washington “worship the devil”. For the insurrectionists at the Capitol, what was at stake transcended politics: they believed they were waging war against the Deep State in a battle they called “The Storm”.

At the more absurd end of the spectrum is Kek, an ancient Egyptian chaos god who spawned an internet religion. He became a semi-ironic icon for the alt-Right, who used his image not only to troll liberals, but also make a serious point about their desire to overturn the global order.

Then, during the pandemic, these same far-Right fearmongers found some unlikely allies in the wellness community. Charles Eisenstein, a New Age thinker who became a campaign advisor for RFK Jr, identified a “locus of evil in Covid policy and the totalitarian impulse beneath it”. At the same time, the one-time liberal darling Naomi Wolf described the Covid health measures as “pure elemental evil” — adding that they caused her to believe in the “principalities and power” of darkness. 

Trump and his supporters are constantly alluding to this kind of spiritual warfare: a move that may appeal to white evangelicals and conspiratorially secularists alike. When they describe the Democratic party as “evil” — or else attribute Trump’s criminal charges to a demonic plot — they are tapping into a black-and-white psychology that goes far beyond a specific religious viewpoint. 

It should be noted that alternative spirituality isn’t merely a Right-wing phenomenon. A counterexample on the Left is the self-help author Marianne Williamson, who ran for the Democratic party nomination in 2020 and 2024. Her low polling numbers, however, suggest that something about her spirituality-infused spiel didn’t resonate. It remains to be seen whether other New Age candidates can break through, and what kind of narrative they’d need to persuade this highly educated voter base. In the immediate term, certainly, Williamson’s message of peace, love and vaccine hesitancy proved a little too kooky.

What we can be more sure about is that, as America’s ideological landscape continues to fracture, we haven’t seen the last of alternative spiritualities. What might this mean for politics? Once those “nones” equal America’s Christians — a situation that’s already close at hand in Britain — might we see what was once unthinkable: the first openly atheist presidential candidate? Or perhaps we should expect the first nominee to have founded an internet religion? Or one who endorses the curative powers of ayahuasca? Performs witchcraft? Follows an AI deity?

Short of securing the intercession of Kek, the future is impossible to predict. But whatever happens, politicians will always be tasked with finding the lowest common denominator among the voting public. Whether that’s the battle of good versus evil, or wan homilies about letting your beliefs inform your actions, they need a unifying message. With belief systems splintering ever more dramatically, it’ll take a very savvy politician to talk from the pulpit with skill. In the meantime, it’s business as usual: gaffes, clangers and baby-holding too.

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