Trump and the Puritans
JAMES ROBERTS and MARTYN WHITTOCK
(BITEBACK, 320 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £15 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Donald Trump has proved such an erratic political force that it seems almost preposterous to argue that a coherent philosophy lies behind his dizzyingly unpredictable moves – unless one considers “disruption” to constitute a political philosophy. Yet this thought-provoking work argues that Trump’s presidency can in fact be best understood as the latest manifestation of a strain of American religious thought that derives from the original Puritan settlers of the Mayflower.
It seems a far stretch from the Plymouth Rock of 1620 to the Trump White House 400 years later, but the authors (James Roberts is foreign news editor of The Tablet) nonetheless present a largely convincing case. They show how the original settlers were determined to found a new Jerusalem on the harsh Massachusetts shore; determined to practise their religion without external interference. The tolerance they sought did not always work both ways, as their own subsequent persecution of both Native Americans and dissenters such as Quakers demonstrated, but soon the proliferation of many kinds of Christian faith in the fledgling New England meant freedom of religion became a priority for all the new colonials. The famous divide between Church and State imposed by the American Constitution, which made no mention of religion except to forbid discrimination on its basis, could not disguise the fact that the “impact of the Christian religion on US political discourse” has always been profound.