“Trump is unique among modern American presidents for his seeming lack of deep religious orientation,” the CNN correspondent MJ Lee wrote in 2017. Trump no longer belongs to a church, but he grew up attending services — first at a local Presbyterian ministry in Queens, and then at a church led by Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister turned self-help guru. “Obstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and well-being,” Peale wrote in his 1952 megahit The Power of Positive Thinking. “You need be defeated only if you are willing to be.” Trump seems to have thoroughly absorbed a secularized version of Peale’s gospel — what was January 6 but a refusal to be defeated by the obstacle of the democratic process? Many have described the president’s appeal as a cult of personality, but his supporters’ devotion is perhaps better understood as a cult of faith — a passionate belief in his ability to bend others to his will. 

Political commentators have long highlighted conservative Christians’ unwavering devotion to Trump despite his clear disinterest in religion. A recent poll indicated that he has a 72 percent approval rating among white evangelicals. These communities see in Trump’s culture war swagger a promise to govern in their image and favor. As Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, recently told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, “I don’t think a mainstream Republican would, in his Inaugural Address, have said ‘In my Administration, there will be two and only two genders: male and female.’” But even more significant is the way they are drawn to him because of how he makes them feel. “Donald Trump is a disruptor,” Mohler, who per Chotiner is “one of the best-known evangelicals in the United States,” continued. “There’s a great hunger on the part of many American conservatives, including conservative Christians, for disruption.”

The Democratic establishment, committed to the notion that reality should be bound by rules and norms, continues to believe that the strategy of pointing out Trump’s flagrant contempt for them will win back hearts and minds. Yet, with a God-like confidence, Trump has reshaped our reality by disregarding it, resetting the terms of the conversation on everything from trade policy to birthright citizenship. For Trump’s followers, his rejection of precedent doubles as an opportunity to embrace radical new possibilities. Seen in this light, the president’s supposed deficiencies become advantages. He needn’t — mustn’t — specify how he will achieve positive change. The vaguer his declarations, the more room his supporters have to provide their own visions of what America can be. And when Trump fails to deliver, each defeat is reconceptualized as a temporary setback, proof of how the system is fundamentally rigged against him. Failure does not undermine him — it sanctifies him.

The conviction among Trump’s followers that he has been divinely ordained was further solidified by the attempt on his life last July. That dramatic event, and the iconic imagery of resolve and triumph it produced, confirmed and amplified the faith of the MAGA movement — in defiance of whatever the polls or pundits said about the viability of his campaign.

This kind of faith, resilient in the face of defeat, was once the province of Americans who wanted to advance social progress. In the early years of the American republic, some leaders within the abolitionist movement, including Frederick Douglass, felt that their country had an obligation to live up to the egalitarian messages inscribed in its founding documents, and they believed fervently that it could eventually do so. “I do not despair of this country,” Douglass said in a July 1852 speech. “There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain.” 

Refusing despair enabled Douglass and his collaborators to work diligently toward their goal of eliminating slavery even when they had no reason to believe they were close to succeeding. By developing a language of belief in universal emancipation, the abolitionists laid the groundwork for what could be described as a secular faith tradition, which served as the basis for later social crusades for civil and labor rights. Those twentieth-century campaigns were often led by religious figures, like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and by activists deeply motivated by religion, like the United Farm Workers co-founder César Chávez, but they also attracted multitudes who held different religious beliefs or none at all. In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, when marchers were brutalized as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, Reverend King and other leaders swiftly planned another series of demonstrations. Eighteen days later, at the conclusion of a successful march from Selma to Montgomery, King addressed a multiracial crowd of 25,000 from from the steps of the state capitol. “I must admit to you that there are still jail cells waiting for us, and dark and difficult moments,” he said. “But if we will go on with the faith that nonviolence and its power can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, we will be able to change all of these conditions.”

Members of today’s Democratic Party have attempted to claim the mantle of struggles for civil and labor rights, but without the conviction displayed by those movements’ leaders. Instead, our politicians seem perpetually ready to jettison their values — and the most vulnerable members of their coalition — at the first sign of trouble. Like clockwork, a bevy of Democratic politicians and strategists seized on Harris’s loss to declare that it was time for the party to pivot toward the center. In February, Pete Buttigieg asserted that “Trump Republicans are made” by having to sit through DEI trainings that look “like something out of Portlandia.” The next month, Greg Landsman, a Democratic congressman from Ohio who otherwise professes support for trans rights, displayed his party’s evolving views on the issue: “I do think there is, on the positive side, a growing appreciation that Democrats could be a little judgy and annoying about this, and maybe we should be open-minded and appreciate that not everyone is where we are.”

The Democratic Party is dominated by strategists and pundits who are obsessed with technocratic policymaking and hold virtually no values sacrosanct — besides the imperative to please their billionaire backers. We are being led by people who have never learned to speak and think in terms of faith, and who fail to grasp that we are in a spiritual contest with our opponents.