Anti-Catholicism to Anti-Trumpism: Collaborations and Cleavages on the Christian Right

• In Event: 2111 - War, States, Money and Culture: New Approaches to Classic Concerns in Comparative and Historical Sociology

Abstract

Scholarship on the U.S. Christian Right has tended to downplay the significant role of anti-Catholicism—a combined racial and religious intolerance by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—as a barrier to organizing a conservative interfaith coalition. This has led to a misconception of key New Right organizations (i.e. Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council) as more secular, rather than recognizing this as a façade presented by devout Catholic conservatives in order not to drive away evangelicals, their hoped-for allies. As the Catholic-evangelical alliance has become cemented in the Christian Right (and with Catholics even embraced by white supremacist groups), nonetheless these legacies of intolerance retain deep significance for another group: Mormons. After achieving a new level of acceptance as white and Christian during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run, the Church of Latter-day Saints finds itself in the unusual position of pushing away from the Republican Party in the face of President Donald Trump’s racism and xenophobia. While the Christian Right is sometimes simplified today as a relatively monolithic force, its present identity reflects the work of strategic social movement entrepreneurs. A wedge, like the Trump administration, operating on continuing religious (and historically “racial”) differences could create a split in Mormons' past overwhelmingly unified loyalty to the Republican Party.

Author

• Alex DiBranco, Yale University