A third of the people who elected Donald Trump to the US Presidency were white evangelical Christians, indeed four out of every five white evangelical Christians voted for him. This is, of course, quite staggering. Millions of devout Christians voted for a narcissistic, lying, crooked bully, a racist and misogynist without a Christian bone in his body. Indeed, as one Republican critic put it, Trump actually regards the Ten Commandments as a to-do list. Not only did they vote for him, but many actively campaigned for him, prayed for his victory and welcomed it as a miracle. The miracle was all the more obvious because he had actually lost the popular vote by 3 million. The key to understanding how this came about is to recognise that the Christian Right in the USA is completely different from what we would understand as Christianity in Britain and indeed in the rest of Europe. It has a character that most outsiders are completely unfamiliar with and would usually dismiss as a caricature, as taking the piss. When Oral Roberts sold bottles of holy water to his followers, telling them to baptise their wallets in order to witness financial miracles, he was not some huckster operating out of the back of a wagon, conning illiterate backwoods people in the grip of the crudest religious superstition. Far from it! He was at the time a popular TV and radio evangelist with an avid audience of millions, regularly raising millions of dollars in donations for his ministry and, of course, for himself. He was known to cure illness and financial problems and had on a number of occasions actually raised the dead. Indeed, he even had his own university. There is no other 'advanced' country where tens of millions of people willingly embrace such a reactionary, hateful and superstitious version of Christianity. It is, of course, important to always remember that one in five white evangelicals did not vote for Trump and that throughout US history there have been evangelical Christians involved in every progressive movement and struggle. Nevertheless, the US Christian Right need to be carefully watched.

These people inhabit a self-contained sub-culture where they go to Christian schools or are home-schooled according to a Christian curriculum, go on to a Christian university or college (there are more than a hundred) and then inhabit an evangelical world where they hardly ever need interact with non-believers. There are Christian gyms, stores and shops, museums and theme parks, TV channels, law firms, indeed just about everything. There is a Christian brand of chewing gum called Testamint. And there are even Christian sex manuals (the discussion of whether the Bible allows oral sex before marriage in Tim and Beverly LaHaye’s The Act of Marrriage is particularly interesting). There is also a huge popular literature espousing their world-view available. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, was the best-selling book of the decade and had sold some 30 million copies by the end of the twentieth century. The astonishing success of this semi-literate exercise in mining the Bible to extract reactionary prophecies that warn of the imminent End Times has produced hundreds of similar volumes, many of them selling in huge quantities. Even more successful has been Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind franchise. This fictional recounting of the Rapture leading up to the eventual return of the Messiah has sold over 100 million copies in its various incarnations and is a major cultural phenomenon virtually unknown outside of the USA. There are twelve volumes in the original series along with sequels, a series of novels for children, Left Behind comic books, video games and three feature films, one starring Nicholas Cage. It is worth noticing here that one thing that is common in all this literature is that when Christ returns, he is not a kind forgiving Christ but a brutal, mass murdering, indeed genocidal Christ who horrifically slaughters everyone who is not a Born Again evangelical and consigns them to an eternity of torture in Hell. This is the Christ that most white evangelical Christians in the USA hope will soon be returning and they wholeheartedly endorse the terrible fate that awaits Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, in fact most Christians, Jews, Atheists, Secularists, Liberals, Socialists, indeed the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. They have found their hero in Donald Trump!

An important part of this evangelical sub-culture involves the indoctrinating and disciplining of children. Control of schooling has long been a vital concern of the Christian Right and one of their number, Betsy DeVos, is currently Trump’s Education Secretary. It is worth remembering that it was one of the most prominent evangelical preachers, Jerry Falwell (once again he had his own university), who first outed Tinky Winky as gay, while another preacher, James Robson, bravely exposed SpongeBob Squarepants. The most vicious homophobia is a central feature of this evangelical worldview. And they are all pretty much horrified by the Harry Potter books for the way they have encouraged the revival of witchcraft in the US. Now many people probably thought that the spectacle of evangelical pastors gathering around Donald Trump to bless him, lay their hands on him and to celebrate him as the man chosen by God to save America from the forces of evil was as obscene as the American Christian Right could possibly get. Well they were wrong. Three children’s illustrated stories, Donald Drains the Swamp (2018), Donald Builds the Wall (2019) and Donald and the Fake News (2020), all published by Regnery Publishing, establish a new low. As far as the Christian Right is concerned, Trump is a hero to be admired and emulated by young kids and they have just the man to bring this off.

The books are written by a member of Trump’s spiritual advisory council, Eric Metaxas. He is the author of numerous Christian children’s books, of episodes of the Christian TV cartoon series, Veggie Tales, and of substantial biographies of Martin Luther, William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His book Miracles, published in 2014, celebrates faith healing, including the scams of multi-millionaire preacher Benny Hinn. The activities of the faith healing conmen and women that Metaxas shamelessly endorses put the worst excesses of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church in the shade. And, he has his own radio show on which his guests have included the likes of Milo Yiannopoulis and Katie Hopkins as well as the Canadian alt rightist Ezra Levant given airtime to condemn the ‘persecution’ of Tommy Robinson by the courts in Britain. Metaxas is both an alleged humorist and a pseudo intellectual, but most important, he is a key figure on the Christian Right, one of Trump’s leading ‘court evangelicals’.

The three children’s books, illustrated by Tim Raglin, tell the story of Donald the Caveman and how his bravery, hard work, good sense, integrity and single-minded concern for others saves the people from the creatures of the Swamp and other dangers. They are all, we are told, based on ‘a TRUE story’. In Donald Drains the Swamp, the people complain to the handsome athletic Donald that the king no longer takes any notice of them, but only listens to the dinosaurs that inhabit the Swamp. To a builder like Donald the answer is obvious: drain the Swamp. The Swamp is full on money which is why the creatures live there, but Donald is totally uninterested in money and proceeds to dig a trench. There is a very obvious Hillary Clinton dinosaur living in the Swamp, but the real threat comes from the giant George-o-saurus. George Soros is, of course, very much a hate-figure for the US Right, blamed for just about everything. But the people rally round and join in digging the trench, chanting ‘DRAIN THE SWAMP’, sweeping the dinosaurs away. They reward Donald by installing him as President of the Land of the Free, clothed in a Stars and Stripes loincloth, and all live happily ever after, or rather, ‘Bigly’.

In the second book, Donald Builds the Wall, the Land of the Free, has prospered because of its embrace of ‘the free market’ and the invention of fire. Now it is under threat from bad immigrants who don’t ‘abide by the laws of the Free People and were generally nothing but trouble’. The worst of these are the ‘MSNBC-13 gang’, a witty merging of the liberal TV news channel, MSNBC, which is one of Trump’s pet hates, and a well-known criminal street gang, MS-13. To keep these people out, Donald proposes building a Wall. George-o-saurus, however, sees these immigrants as a way for the Swamp creatures to take back control. They ally with ‘a crazy old man’, Bernie Sanders, who calls everyone ‘comrade’ and with ‘a little girl’, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is worried that global warming is going to destroy the planet. She wants to ban fire and to impose her Green Raw Deal on the Land of the Free. What they all really want though is the people’s money. But Donald’s Wall is finished just in time and keeps them all out. The Land of the Free continues to prosper under his leadership, once again, ‘Bigly’.

Which brings us to the latest volume: Donald and the Fake News. In this volume, Donald has drawn up the US Constitution which a conspiracy of Swamp supporters wants to overthrow. Led by a sorceress, ‘Madame Miss Speaker’, very obviously Nancy Pelosi, they attempt to undermine Donald by telling lies about him, portraying him as a bad person, in fact as a monster. This confuses a lot of people, but Donald tells them to ignore the ‘Fake News’. Unable to make headway, in their desperation, Madame Miss Speaker and her supporters resort to alleging that Donald is working for the Russians. Their evidence is that he has Russian Dressing on his Reuben sandwich. The lies spread and it looks like Donald might lose the upcoming Presidential election. The only way for Donald to fight back is through sending out hundreds of blue birds to spread or rather tweet the truth. Donald wins the election ‘BIGLY’. This drives Madame Miss Speaker and her supporters mad and they all throw themselves off a cliff, leaving the freedom and prosperity of the people in the Land of the Free increasing ‘until this very day’. What children actually make of all this garbage is hard to imagine, especially when they can see the real Trump on their TV screens every day. Still the books are intended to be bought by evangelical parents so who cares what the kids think.

Inevitably, one has to ask why anyone with any sense of decency, let alone a self-proclaimed Christian, would see a lying, bullying, greedy, profoundly ignorant, foul-mouthed, selfish, sexist, racist, crooked, authoritarian, narcissist like Donald Trump as some sort of role model for children. Presumably we still have books entitled Donald Grabs Pussy, Donald and Stormy Get It On, Donald Goes Bankrupt (Again and Again), Donald Opens A Casino and The Adventures of Donald and Vladimir to look forward to, although one suspects the publishers drew the line at Donald Tells The Truth and Donald Pays His Taxes as being just too fantastic. One nagging suspicion is that the books were not actually written for children at all. Rather they were written to be read by one special person, the Big Baby in the White House. We can be absolutely confident that of all the dozens of books written about Trump over the last few years, these three are the only ones he will have actually read from cover to cover maybe.

How did Metaxas come to prostitute himself in this way? He is, after all, the biographer of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He is certainly a sincere opponent of racism so how does he justify his enthusiastic embrace of as crude a racist and xenophobe as Donald Trump. And, moreover, his biography of Bonhoeffer celebrates a theologian who was bitterly opposed to the German Protestant Church’s embrace of Hitler as God’s Chosen One, for behaving as one historian has put it, like ‘Theological Storm Troopers’. He was executed by the Nazis in April 1945. Indeed, to just about every student of Bonhoeffer’s life and works, except Metaxas that is, Bonhoeffer stands as an indictment of the contemporary Christian Right and of their celebration of Trump.

Metaxas has been accused by experts in the field of ‘hijacking’ Bonhoeffer for the Christian Right, of inventing a ‘counterfeit’ Bonhoeffer that they can make use of. Certainly his account of Bonhoeffer’s brief time in the United States in 1930-31 bears this out. For some reason, he does not mention Bonhoeffer’s involvement with the Women’s Trade Union League and the Workers’ Education Bureau in New York or how impressed he was by the work of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Indeed, Bonhoeffer actually told his brother that what Germany needed was an organisation like the ACLU! Why does Metaxas not mention this in his massive 600-page biography? Could it be because the contemporary Christian Right actually consider the ACLU to be a demonic organisation going about Satan’s work?

 How would Bonhoeffer have responded one wonders to the Unite the Right demonstrations in Charlottesville in August 2017 when armed neo-Nazis and white supremacists paraded through the city and an anti-Nazi protester, Heather Heyer, was killed? Would he have pledged his continued support for Trump after he refused to unequivocally condemn the activities of the Far Right? This was the stance Metaxas himself took. ‘We’re going to stand up for Trump a hundred times more’, was how he put it. One suspects, indeed one knows, that Bonhoeffer would have stood with the protesters opposing the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. How then does Metaxas justify his stance? The answer is simple: in the worldview propagated by the Christian Right the United States is today under attack by a Nazi-style totalitarian Secular Humanist movement led by a liberal globalist Establishment headed up by George Soros that wants to suppress Christianity. It is literally demonically inspired and It has to be fought if America is to be saved. The instrument God has given them to win this battle is Donald Trump. Only recently, Eric Trump said on a Christian radio show that his father had ’literally saved Christianity’ in the US. He has previously praised his father for saving Christmas from the liberals. Now this might all seem too incredible to take seriously, but one of Fox News’s most protracted and they would say successful campaigns was to prevent liberals from abolishing Christmas. Millions of evangelical Christians would have wholeheartedly endorsed Eric Trump’s fantastical claims. Their sense of victimhood is overwhelming and in their fantasy world the Far Right are actually their allies. Metaxas himself has condemned the opposition to Trump as being demonically inspired on his radio show and his Donald the Caveman books are weapons in what they see as a protracted ongoing war.

But let us end on an up-beat note. In Britain, considerably more evangelical Christians vote Labour than vote Conservative and the great majority of those who vote Conservative would find the US Christian Right’s worldview wholly repellent. This has saved us from the appalling spectacle of Boris Johnson pretending to be Born Again and Again and Again and Again and hopefully from any Johnson kids’ books, titles that spring to mind are Boris the Menace, Boris of Toad Hall etc., but I’m sure everyone can come up with their own titles. John Newsinger is the author of Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism

John Newsinger is the author of Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism