Given the strong support that Donald Trump received from evangelical Christian voters in 2016, one might have expected the Trump administration’s State Department to pursue a Christian Right agenda. And indeed, the Trump administration’s State Department did take several actions that pleased American religious conservatives, such as moving the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But the Trump administration also largely dismantled the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs that Secretary of State John Kerry established in 2013. When a reporter asked White House press secretary about this in 2018, she responded, “I don’t think an office is what determines the faith of the administration” (p. 61).
David T. Buckley’s Blessing America First examines the apparent paradox of the Trump administration’s simultaneous rhetorical support for religion in public life and its antipathy to the Office of Religion and Global Affairs. Buckley argues that although the State Department during Trump’s first term in office did give some support to Christian nationalist ideas, it was not Christian nationalist ideology per se but rather an anti-institutional populism that characterized the Trump administration’s approach to religion in foreign policy. Before Trump’s presidency, the Obama administration was already integrating an understanding of religion into its diplomacy through the Office of Religion and Global Affairs, but Trump disliked this approach. Instead of bolstering this office or staffing it with Republicans, the Trump administration systematically dismantled existing bureaucracy and replaced it with the politics of personal loyalty, an approach that Buckley identifies as populist. Populist leaders cultivate a direct connection with the people that is unmitigated by institutional intermediaries or governed by traditional bureaucratic procedures. Instead of relying on academics and career diplomats to systematically study religious institutions (as Obama had done), Trump cultivated alliances with religious leaders on an ad hoc basis and relied on informal channels (such as conversations at Prayer Breakfasts) rather than official organizations. He had little respect for traditional understandings of church-state separation, and instead sought to undermine restrictions on religion and politics, such as the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations such as churches from engaging in partisan campaigning. Although Trump supported institutions within the State Department that could be used to support conservative Christian goals – such as the International Religious Freedom Office, which was staffed with religious conservatives – he preferred to work outside of existing institutional structures whenever possible.
Buckley approaches this topic as both a political scientist and an insider. He served as an academic fellow in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs from 2016 to 2017, so he witnessed firsthand the effects that the change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration had on the State Department’s approach to religion. Yet as he notes, he did not want to write a memoir or eyewitness report of his experiences. Instead, the book is an academic work of political science that utilizes the same sources that any political scientist would use to study the topic: social science surveys, academic scholarship, and news reports.
Because this book is primarily a study of the Trump administration’s State Department rather than a study of American religion during Trump’s first term, it probably needs to be coupled with a study of modern American evangelicalism to fully understand the larger context of the State Department’s actions. American evangelicalism has a strong populist and anti-institutional strain, and the Trump administration was able to tap into that preexisting evangelical antipathy to “elite” institutions by characterizing the Obama administration’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs as a progressive institution that did not represent conservative Christian values. The Office of Religion and Global Affairs was, in fact, closely connected with a liberal, pluralist approach to religion that many conservative evangelicals did not share. (For evidence of this, see Office of Religion and Global Affairs director Shaun A. Casey’s Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom.) It enjoyed the support of religious moderates, but may never have had much appeal to the conservative Christians who helped elect Trump.
Blessing America First was published in 2024, and its narrative ends in 2022, right after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There is no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, or the war in Gaza, nor is there any suggestion that Trump might be elected to another term in office. And of course, there is no mention of any of the foreign policy crises of Trump’s second term. Some readers may therefore view the book as dated or incomplete, since any study of the Trump administration written today would likely need to draw connections between Trump’s first and second terms.
Nevertheless, the book offers valuable insight into Trump’s approach to religion and diplomacy after his second inauguration, because the populist, anti-institutional inclinations that Buckley noticed in Trump’s first term were magnified in his second. As Buckley notes, the State Department was antipathetic to USAID during Trump’s first term, but in his second term, that antipathy developed into a full-blown effort to dismantle USAID entirely. The attraction that some members of the Trump administration had to right-wing leaders such as Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin during Trump’s first term continued to influence policy in Trump’s second term.
While this book will not be the final word on religion and diplomacy in the Trump administration, it presents a perceptive analysis of the way that the Trump administration used a populist-based foreign policy to appeal to religious conservatives and undermine existing State Department programs on religion and diplomacy. As Buckley notes in his conclusion, the Biden administration was not able to entirely reverse this shift. That means that the consequences of the Trump administration’s actions in the late 2010s will probably continue to affect the role of religion in American foreign policy for the foreseeable future. If that’s the case, an academic study of this phenomenon is important, even if the story it chronicles is not yet complete.
