News and Notes: Crashing Through The Wall

By George Francis Kane

During the last electoral campaign secularists were sounding alarms about the plans of Project 2025 to demolish American democracy and to herald the triumphant dawn of the age of Christian nationalism. Since Donald Trump won a second term, the news on every site that monitors church/state separation has been continuously frightening and infuriating.

Secularists find little solace that many of our political allies are in an even more precarious position. Thousands of career civil servants have been villainized and summarily dismissed as federal agencies and major functions are being eliminated. Americans in the economic mainstream are apprehensive of the collapse of government benefit systems on which they depend. Immigrants are being picked off the streets, deported and even imprisoned abroad at U.S. government request, with no opportunity to present their facts to legal adjudication. We, too, are likely to find that Establishment Clause violations become minor concerns among the assaults of government that we face. But even though all this had been threatened during the electoral campaign, I am still bewildered by the on-rushing dystopia. We have so many advantages to secure the separation of church and state into the future.

• The religious share of the population is declining. Self-described Christians fell from 78% in 2007 to 62% in 2023-24, while the religiously unaffiliated have grown into America’s largest denomination. The recently released Pew Religious Landscape Survey notes that the decline of Christians has stalled, but that is not going to last long. The generation starting their families today is much less religious than their parents, so the decline in religious conviction of the future population has the momentum to continue.
• The Dobbs decision overturning the right to abortion has inspired Christian nationalist state legislatures to push for outlawing the practice, but the popular backlash has been overwhelming. Across the nation, abortion rights have won wherever it was on the ballot. Abortion is recognized by everyone as a religious issue, and the struggle has driven politicized religion under deep suspicion.
• Additionally, Americans have a reflexive trust that the institutions that protect our civil rights and liberties will hold.

With all of that going for us, we can’t possibly lose, right? Unfortunately, the wall of separation is being washed away in the wake of the now derelict rule of law.

The political dominance Trump has wielded thus far has been bewildering. He received less than half of the popular vote and has the narrowest possible majority in both houses of Congress. He has failed in most of the court actions the administration has received so far.

Presidents usually enjoy a holiday at the beginning of their term, borne on the optimism of their victory. Typically, they run into a backlash in the mid-term elections. Trump is already a “lame duck,” prohibited to run again by the Twenty-second Amendment. That usually drains the president’s political capital, so that they cannot accomplish much in their second term.

But Trump is working on a radical project. He is not trying to create any new program, but rather to dismantle government. He is reducing dozens of federal agencies to skeletons. He is not increasing government power but eviscerating its functional capacity. For example, he is deeply cutting the staffing of Social Security while eliminating telephone service lines and requiring claimants to appear in-person to file for benefits. The current waiting time for an appointment, though, already exceeds a month. He is crippling government agencies to render them incapable of executing their client service functions.

The objective of Trump’s campaign of destruction is far-sighted. He is counting on political division to be so intractable that Congress will be unable to repair government. With a weak domestic government, the economic elite will be able to control the nation unfettered. Trump’s Christian nationalism, to the contrary, is purely transactional. His only interest in promoting the influence of religion over government is to win votes, so he may not be inclined to devote further attention to their cause.