Ian Buruma
Donald Trump is deliberately destroying faith in the system of government that has held together a vast and disparate country. By tearing down that civic religion, flawed as it may be, he is laying the groundwork for another quasi-religious faith: unquestioning fealty to an autocratic ruler.
NEW YORK – Compared to other Western democracies, the United States is still a profoundly religious country. Around 24% of Americans identify as evangelical Christians. Five US Supreme Court justices are conservative Catholics (the only other conservative on the bench, Neil Gorsuch, was raised and educated as a Catholic but is now an Episcopalian). And American presidents portray themselves as religious, regardless of their true beliefs.
A quasi-religious aura even hovers over the US constitution, which many Americans – including secular liberals – have long treated as a kind of sacred text, written by the country’s founders. After visiting in the early 1830s, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville came to see Christian morality as an essential ingredient in US democracy: it created a kind of “civic religion” to balance the crude materialism of American life. Belief in a political system that guaranteed individual freedom based on the rule of law served as the connective tissue for a country of immigrants.
