I've been (slowly) making my way through Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. It's been a bit of a slow going, but I just read the compelling chapter on the seminal court cases, Engel v Vitale and Abington v Schempp. Those cases cemented the idea of separation of church and state, especially anything that smacked of sectarianism.
These cases were handed down before the Immigration Act of 1965 fundamentally remade the ethnic composition of the United States. Today only 69% of Americans identify as Christian, and that number is likely inflated by legacy faith expressions. If you were baptised, you call yourself a Christain, even if you haven't been to church since you grew old enough to say no. Only 45% of Americans identify as Protestant and only 17% as Evangelical. Roughly 31% identify either as non-Christian or Unaffliated.
I bring this up because of the grotesque display of what constitutes Evangelical Christianity today. Specifically, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions invocation of Paul's Letter to the Romans to justify ripping children from their parents along the southern border. Evangelism has become the Cult of Trump. And if there is one thing we know about Trump, it's that he craves a cult of personality.
Without necessarily meaning to, the Warren Court created a bulwark against the marriage of religion to a would-be authoritarian seeking to make his word the law. It won't work for that small sliver of Evangelicals who have aligned their faith with Trump. Those people are mostly lost to the 21st century anyway. But for the rest of us...Thanks.
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