Eugene McCarraher is Associate Professor of Humanities at Villanova University. His book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, argues that capitalist imperatives have superseded those of Christianity over time. The following was presented as part of a panel on McCarraher at the 2025 Religious Communication Association convention in Denver, Colorado.

On November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election, the Pew Research Center reported that 81 percent of white evangelical voters had cast ballots for Donald Trump. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this figure would remain remarkably consistent in both the 2020 and 2024 elections as well, and that evangelical Trumpism would normalize and calcify within the conventional wisdom over time. Now a full decade into the Trump epoch in American life, we might pause here to acknowledge that the handwringing on this matter has largely wrung itself out, replaced instead either by resignation or by broader concerns about “Christian Nationalism” and its symptoms.

But back in those sepia days, the political union between America’s most self-consciously moral demographic and her most flagrantly immoral public figure had not yet lost its shock value. It was productive of discussion. In fact, the years 2016-2022 marked the golden age of the Trump-evangelical explainer in both short- and long-form. That partnership was the religio-political development that launched a million tweets, blog posts, op-eds, conference papers, and monographs. I think I read most of these, and as a then-contributor to the web magazines Religion Dispatches and Religion & Politics, I interviewed many of their authors. But it did not bring me much in the way of peace or acceptance.

Since then I have often found myself returning to an essay published in September 2016, in the Atlantic Monthly, in which the journalist Salena Zito first suggested that “the press takes Trump literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” It bounced around in my brain for years as I continued to grapple mulishly with that fundamental question: Why, or how, had the evangelicals learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump? Eventually, I came to consider the possibility that my persistent frustration with the toxic politics of the “white evangelicals” may be attributable to a contradiction in my thinking—not in theirs. Maybe, like all “exvangelicals,” I had become so self-righteous and insufferable in my own right because, like most “exvangelicals,” I had not stayed long enough in the faith to mature beyond my youthful, romantic image of Christ and into a worldly realpolitik that holds him at a pragmatic arm’s length. Because we grew up memorizing verses and competing in sword drills and insisting on fidelity to the literal, plain text of the scriptures, we took it for granted that such commitment would be born out in our lives, our choices, our practice of citizenship—that they would know we were Christians by our love, our humility, our service to the poor, etc.

It is only in adulthood, perhaps, that people come understand the sheer impracticality of such a posture, of its patent inability to get things done or to get one ahead or to ensure that a broad distinction is drawn between those who deserve and those who do not. Living in the United States, in this day and age, with this ballooning economy, this inescapable culture, this zealous nationalism, and so many other influential inputs, few indeed are those who model anything approaching a truly and radically Christlike life. In the Church writ large and perhaps the suburban evangelical megachurch more than most, American Christians have proven themselves consistent in that they also take Jesus seriously but not literally, and so entitle themselves to build identities upon his name while dismissing or minimizing some of his most explicit priorities. With that sort of flexibility, just about anything can happen.

With enough neglect, for example, the red-letter text of the gospel could forfeit its very pronounced critique of avarice and be canonized instead in the scripture of Mammon. Paired with and soon blended within a sacralized capitalism, Christianity might be persuaded to adopt the doctrine that greed is good, actually—that the diligent pursuit of private wealth, undertaken by scores of individuals, in fierce competition with each other, and bound relentlessly toward treasures on earth, would lead indirectly—in effect, accidentally—to the betterment of all. The case for such a revision would be strengthened if capitalism did in fact inaugurate world-historic rates of production and accumulation, if these did in fact contribute to marked reductions in global poverty, and if churches were to benefit from generous tithes calculated at around 10% of the steadily increasing incomes won by congregants in the market, who would then have more than enough left over to live comfortably on a cul-de-sac, to drive a fashionable car, to take enviable vacations, and to live otherwise satisfactory lives amid the material markers of affluence and status, respected by and exerting influence upon their communities, states, and certainly this one nation under God.

The question of precisely how all of that surplus value had been extracted, where exactly those commodities had been assembled, under what sort of labor conditions, and at the cost of which environmental impacts would be easy enough to ignore, especially as the Church and its networks acquired political power befitting God’s agents on Earth. By then, any critique of the Christian-capitalist merger could be dismissed as a sacrilege, and any perceived loss of power would feel like existential risk rising. Maybe then the Christians would turn out en masse to endorse an arch-capitalist for President, on a platform of being rich and making deals and restoring Christianity to vengeful power over its cultured despisers, other considerations be damned.

If you can forgive the liberties taken here by way of insinuation, you can likely also perceive the German sociologist Max Weber peeking between the lines, perhaps alongside the English historian R. H. Tawney, with the contemporary economist Benjamin Friedman and the all-purpose social critic David Bentley Hart in the margins. For his part, Eugene McCarraher has not framed the story in quite this way, at least not in his massive tome that concludes in the latter half of the twentieth century, and that mentions Donald Trump only in the epilogue and then only in passing. McCarraher’s extensive history places Christianity and capitalism on parallel rather than convergent tracks, though conceding in one long chapter that the paragons of post-New-Deal reaction—figures like Hayek, von Mises, Rand, and Milton Friedman—would find common cause with those of that traditional, down-home agrarian sort of faith—figures like Kirk, Weaver, eventually Billy Graham—allowing for the animation of their shared anti-statism with the breath of heaven.

But McCarraher’s over-arching point is that capitalism is an alternative to Christianity—that it is not nearly so secular, so purely rational, so disenchanted as has often been claimed. Rather, he writes, it “is a form of enchantment—perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Its animating spirit is money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as ‘economics.’ Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies—the material culture of production and consumption,” and on and on (5). Capitalism, in this framing, is not something that can be cleanly blended with Christianity. It is instead something that can replace Christianity, a complex and layered substitute capable of filling the emptiness and instilling the purpose and satisfying the desire for transcendence that is lost with lost faith. To anyone who suggests, as I have here, that these hegemonic Christian and capitalist discourses are by now conjoined in America, McCarraher seems to respond that this is an illusion. It’s not that the two have become one, he replies, it’s that the one has displaced the other.

So it’s here, I’ll suggest, that McCarraher makes his way into the pantheon of the Trump-evangelical explainers, despite so little explicit interest in the man or his faithful. John Fea has attributed the union primarily to fear; Anthea Butler and Jemar Tisby primarily to race; Kristen Kobes du Mez and Beth Allison Barr to gender; Rachel Held Evans to theology. McCarraher attributes it, in his oblique way, to class, or at least to the sort of wealth and status considerations that class implies. Christianity and capitalism and conservatism are large discourses, to be sure, founded on deep traditions and possessed of a great many rhetorical resources, such that the posture of any at any given point in history may boil down ultimately to a question of emphasis. I am happy to concede this point and with it the validity of any number of rejoinders to the claims that I make today.

But since this presentation is imagined at least in part as a provocation, I’ll offer that McCarraher’s explanation makes a lot of sense. Donald Trump cannot be aligned with Jesus Christ because the two are functionally opposite in every important respect. Jesus is humble, Trump is boastful; Jesus is pure, Trump is lustful; Jesus is kind; Trump is cruel; Jesus cares for the poor; Trump cares only for the rich; and on and on and on. In every case, the opposite. Trump is the Bizarro Jesus in the same sense that there is a Bizarro Superman and a Bizarro Seinfeld. Another way to say this is that, putting aside the relevant matter eschatology for a moment, Trump is the Anti-Christ; his mission is not supplemental but antithetical to that of Christianity. His rise to power has not been the apotheosis of American Christendom, but its displacement.

If not strictly followed, Christ’s commentary on money remains familiar enough to forego quotation. And yet. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,” Jesus declares, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21). “If you want to be perfect,” he says, “go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matthew 6:24). “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed;” he warns, “life does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:14). “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).  And crucially, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). There is a long moment of silence then, perhaps, but when they respond, America’s white evangelicals drawl in a tone and cadence reminiscent of the Righteous Gemstone’s Uncle Baby Billy, himself a representative and a parody of these tendencies. “Come on nawh,” they whisper, “Let me get my paper straight.”

So finally, and in a strange way, McCarraher seems to align, by circuitous paths, with such evangelical luminaries as Mark Noll, George Marsden, David Bebbington, and Thomas Kidd, who have all made sense of Trumpian evangelicalism by arguing—at least in part—that most of those people aren’t really evangelicals. They don’t believe the things that evangelicals are supposed to believe, they don’t go to church as often as evangelicals are supposed to go, and they don’t even seem to understand precisely how the word is defined. (Though, to be fair, who does anymore?) That those people also account for 4/5ths of the self-identified political coalition remains a complicating factor in this analysis. McCarraher’s signature achievement, through a book twenty years in the writing, is to demonstrate conclusively how America became a capitalist nation while imagining itself a Christian nation and failing to recognize all along what either term actually means, or the various ways in which the two are fundamentally incompatible. More than any other consideration, this explains how Donald Trump could be nominated thrice for the presidency, how he could manage to win it twice, and how his made-for-TV aura could prove so enchanting to such a majority in a movement ostensibly committed to the very opposite of everything he represents.