Reposted from “The American Reformer” written by Jeremy Carl
A few news cycles ago, the legacy media needed smelling salts when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth approvingly quote tweeted an interview with Pastor Doug Wilson writing “All of Christ for all of Life,” a trademark saying of Wilson’s and his denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).
The media’s angst was generated in response to Hegseth’s positive acknowledgement of Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist. But Christian nationalism, far from an act of cultural aggression by right-wing Christians, is better seen as a reaction to Christian dispossession in public life, in particular White Protestant dispossession that began decades ago, but accelerated to warp speed under President Biden all while the media stayed silent. (While Christian nationalism can in theory be embraced by Christians of any stripe, it has been at its heart a Protestant, and particularly Reformed evangelical Protestant venture to this point.) It is not a coincidence that the movement’s founding text, Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism arrived in September 2022, well after Biden’s great White Protestant purge of the senior ranks of government had already taken place.
Contrary to the fears sown by its enemies inside and outside of the Christian community, Christian Nationalism is not about to “take over” America. Even its most optimistic proponents see it as a project taking place over many decades, while others even refer to centuries. On the other hand, the displacement of America’s historic Protestant Christian Character in the modern Democrat party is happening today, not decades from now. The nature and level of that displacement is the subject of this piece.
Of course, there should be nothing shocking about a conservative evangelical Christian like Pete Hegseth quote tweeting the leading figure in his own denomination—but perhaps we had gotten used to the absence of such sentiments because of the complete disappearance of White Protestants from political leadership in the Biden administration, a remarkable fact that was even more remarkable because it went almost totally unnoticed by any “mainstream” journalists.
What does that disappearance look like? Of Joe Biden’s twenty-five cabinet and cabinet-level officials, not a single one was of White Protestant origin. Indeed, only three were of Protestant at all. The one nominal White Protestant in Biden’s cabinet, Pete Buttigieg, was of Maltese Catholic origin who grew up in a culturally Catholic milieu, son of a former seminarian, going to Catholic High School in South Bend, Indiana, home of Notre Dame University and only leaving the Catholic church for Episcopalians as an adult because the of the Catholic Church’s stance on his homosexuality. This anti-Protestant administration is so historically shocking, and obviously intentional, given the centuries of dominance of such cabinet positions by White Protestants.
Why does the disappearance of White Protestants in the Biden Administration matter, and why should it have occasioned far more commentary than it did? First it is important, for what it says about the future of the Democrat party—that it could historically exclude the keystone group in American history, and not even notice the exclusion. And second, because the entire origin story of America is inextricably tied up with Protestantism, from the first colonists in New England, Protestant dissenters who famously landed with the Mayflower—but even more commercial early colonies such as Jamestown were often justified to their investors because settlers were also engaging in Protestant Christian evangelism of Native Americans. Speaking purely numerically, most of the history of America is inextricably intertwined with the history of the White Protestants who dominated its political community, set its ideology, and forged its views on governance including the relationship between the church and state. You can like that or hate it, but what you can’t plausibly do, with any measure of intellectual honesty, is to deny it. Or, if you are a Democrat, you can try to erase it.
Now no one should be picked for a cabinet position because of their race or religion. Obviously, none of Biden’s cabinet picks were inherently illegitimate for not being White or Protestant. But if the leadership of a country completely excludes a population that constitutes a huge percentage of American adults (26% to well over 40% if you count those religiously unaffiliated of Protestant origin) a group that excels in virtually every other area of society (compare the number of White Protestant CEOs and entrepreneurs, top physicians, Big Law partners etc. to the number in Biden’s Cabinet) and it is more than fair to ask whether some fairly pernicious discrimination was taking place. And there was no historical precedence for this exclusion, even among Liberal Democrats. Barack Obama’s cabinet had many White Protestants, including, in the first term alone, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And yet Biden’s great White Protestant erasure created scarcely any media notice. Were it any other demographic, media would have made a point of noticing.
To understand how dramatic a departure the Biden administration was from America’s historic traditions, consider how Protestant America was at its founding. Of the Euro-American colonists in 1776, only approximately 40,000 of 2.5 million (1.6%) were Catholics and just 2,500 were Jews. All but one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were White Protestants, the sole exception being Charles Carroll of Maryland (the one colony founded by Catholic aristocrats even as it was predominately Protestant). Furthermore, various strains of Protestantism played the dominant role in America’s original founding ideologies, something that has been remarked upon by numerous historians of colonial America. Indeed, eight of the thirteen Colonies had an established Protestant church, which played a dominant role in the life of each of these colonies.
Catholics played only a small and relatively marginal part in American politics until the 20th century. Only two Catholics and no adherents of non-Christian religions served in any Presidential cabinet until the 20th century. Functionally speaking, for the first 300 years of the America, beginning with Jamestown, with a few exceptions, essentially the entire governing class of America, a governing class which took America from a marginal group of small settlements hugging the Eastern Seaboard to a continent-spanning superpower that had the world’s biggest and most powerful economy, was almost entirely White Protestant.
The most dramatic symbol that America was changing in a direction of greater religious pluralism was when, John F. Kennedy became America’s First Catholic President in 1960. Kennedy’s religion was seen as tremendously controversial in many circles, and it caused him to lose support in places where Democrats had not lost it in years. (Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky and Florida were among the “Solid South” states that Kennedy failed to carry, and he came close to losing North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, which had voted Democrat almost without exception since the end of Reconstruction. And it wasn’t just the South. Kennedy’s failure to win Ohio is also blamed on Ohioans suspicion of his Catholicism. But even Kennedy had a heavily Protestant cabinet with only two Catholics—his brother and Health Education and Welfare Secretary Anthony Celebrezze.
By contrast, when Biden became the second Catholic President, his Catholicism was seen as incidental and was an almost complete non-issue during the race. One could perhaps see this as a sign of growing religious tolerance in America. Yet, Joe Biden, running as an alleged pluralist, seemed to be engaging in the ethno-religious nepotism that voters in the 1960s baselessly feared would happen with Kennedy.
Biden appointed Eight Catholics to his Cabinet. Biden had five Jewish cabinet members including three of the four most powerful positions—State (Blinken), Treasury (Yellen) and Attorney General (Garland)—along with the White House Chief of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence. This would certainly be notable for a group comprising a bit more than 2% of the population, even one known for its disproportionate achievements relative to their population. What important perspectives and what historical memory of America’s traditions were lost under Biden because White Protestants did not even have a seat at the table? One was not even permitted to notice, much less ask.
Indeed, when it came to Cabinet-level officials, The Biden administration almost had more Hindus or Atheists than white Protestant Christians. Indeed, Biden would have had multiple Hindu cabinet members, save that Neera Tanden, his nominee for OMB, was the one cabinet nominee that could not be confirmed. Nor did the Trend begun under Biden seem to be an anomaly—of the top five prospective Democrat candidates for President in 2028 as featured in The Hill recently, not one was a White Protestant Christian.
Yet what I will call the Democrat counter-reformation was met with media silence. The not-so-great replacement of White Protestants at the summit of our federal government scarcely even attracted any public notice. And this is important not because of ethnic grouping but because the social policies of someone schooled on Rerum Novarum are likely to operate from very different priors and assumptions than someone steeped in the political theology of the average conservative Calvinist or non-denominational evangelical.
By contrast, Trump’s Cabinet represents a return from Biden’s radicalism. Its composition much more closely reflects America’s Protestant heritage, while still also acknowledging America’s religious diversity—just what you’d expect from a cabinet selected by merit rather than ethnic or religious nepotism. While Catholics are heavily represented and these include both the vice president (a Protestant convert to Catholicism) and Secretary of State (a Catholic who reportedly also attends a Southern Baptist church), there are many White Protestants in Trump’s cabinet, including Department of War Secretary Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Bessent. White House chief of Staff Susie Wiles is a Protestant as is OMB Director Russell Vought, who has strong ties to Christian evangelical circles. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem is also prominent in Evangelical circles. Jamieson Greer (LDS) and Tulsi Gabbard (Hindu) represent smaller religious minorities while Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and EPA head Lee Zeldin are Jewish.
The religious representation in the Trump cabinet represents a return to normal—without Trump ever having stated it as a goal, it represents the religious diversity in today’s America, with a hearty nod to America’s Protestant roots. Trump didn’t plan to do this of course. It’s just what happens naturally when you decide to build on America’s historic foundations rather than toppling them.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
