This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 2 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined by David Buckley. He’s a professor at the University of Louisville who is a political scientist. He studies comparative politics—he studies religion in politics among his expertises. And we’re going to talk about ... religion in politics and particularly the role ... religious groups are playing in the Trump presidency—Trump 2.0. David, thanks for joining me.

David Buckley: Great to be here, Perry. Thanks.

Bacon: So ... I’m going to go through different religious groups. I think that might be helpful as a way to think about ... different groups in the U.S. and how they’re playing a role. So I want to start with Protestants who are for Trump.

The old story was basically white evangelicals were a big part of the Republican Party, and they were pushing pro-life and maybe anti-LGBT policies along with Republican politicians. But I think things have changed now. So Protestants who are on Trump’s side—what are they doing right now?

Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that if you just look at the demographic data at a top-line level, white Christians in general are a huge part of Trump’s core constituency. That is predominantly white evangelicals. But it’s also actually white mainline Protestants and disproportionately white Catholics.

Bacon: We’re coming to Catholics in a minute, but yeah, go ahead.

Buckley: So at a basic level, saying that white Christians make up the core of Trump’s political constituency is true.

The thing that has maybe started to change is that the first-term rationale was that this was essentially a bargain being made by social conservatives in exchange for justices who would make progress on Roe, for a president who they weren’t personally enthusiastic about, but who they went along with because they were making a calculated judgment rooted in their social conservatism.

In the second term, it’s harder to see any of that hesitancy playing out. These are not reluctant social conservatives. These are, in fact, some of the fullest throated supporters of the president. And if anything, there’s important evidence emerging from political science and sociology that it’s as much the personal loyalty to the president that’s driving the support as any theological motivation—or that the line between the two is almost impossible to distinguish. That, on a certain level, the president has become a kind of theological figure, almost, for a lot of these reasons.

Bacon: What are the Protestant right’s policy priorities? Because, as you said, Roe has been overturned. So that was the old priority—Roe—and to some extent, gay marriage is legal and probably going to stay that way. So what are the policy priorities of today’s Protestant Christian right?

Buckley: Yeah, it’s a good question. You have the old social conservatives who are still out there, who are pushing “frontier issues,” maybe related to abortion in the states, related to same-sex marriage and conscience exemptions. Older issues related to religion and education, for instance—which are not new at all in American democracy but have really flared up again in the second term—including legal questions related to the funding of religious charter schools.

And questions of “curricular reform” and how religion fits into the curriculum of American public schools or materials that are made available in American public schools. So you might think of those as just traditional sexuality- and gender-based culture wars—version 2.0.

Bacon: This is an issue that has been going on a long time.

Buckley: Yeah, exactly. So there’s nothing particularly new there, although it’s a new environment that it’s playing out in. But I think that what has bubbled up in this term is also the fusion of Trumpist Christianity into areas of the second Trump term that we might not have traditionally associated with conservative Christians.

What do I mean by that? For instance: enthusiastic conservative Christian endorsement for dismantling of elements of foreign assistance, and attacks on U.S. foreign aid as being “woke” or enmeshed in DEI politics.

That wasn’t necessarily on the bingo card for most folks who studied conservative Christian politics, the extent to which Trump’s most enthusiastic Christian supporters have really become enthusiastic endorsers of the “war on woke”—the turn against DEI policy, the turn against elite universities.

Those sorts of issues that we associate with this side of the Trump term are newer. You could find analogs for these things going back, but I think those are “new frontiers” that we didn’t see as much of in the first term.

Bacon: Are those issues they’re motivated by, or they’re just joining because those are issues the coalition is motivated by? Are they driving them, or are they just going along?

Buckley: I think this is the million-dollar question. There’s a lot of evidence from scholars like Michele Margolis and David Campbell and others that, frequently these days, we might think of religion as changing politics. When we study these things, religion changes politics. But that, actually, politics has changed religion and people’s religious commitments in the U.S. as much as the other way around.

And so in this case, the implication of that might be that the reason that these issues have come to rally the faithful isn’t because there’s a preexisting theological commitment here; it’s because the president has told them to. It’s the political cues essentially setting the religious agenda.

Now, there’s certain theological foundations for that that have maybe made some of those individuals in those communities more susceptible to Trumpist signaling. There’s traditions of apocalypticism, for instance. My colleague Paul Djupe talks a lot about this—and his colleagues and co-authors—and how that’s fusing with a Trumpist anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism. There’s raw material there theologically, but the president is the driver of that, and his religious supporters are responding to his cues.

Bacon: In an old world, there was Jerry Falwell; there was Pat Robertson. There were people whose names I remember ... who were prominent Protestants involved in politics. I guess Paula White is someone I can name, but do we have the same cohort of pastors around, like the way we did with George W. Bush? Is there a cohort of pastors Trump is around, and who is that? And if so, what does the group look like, demographically and socially?

Buckley: You certainly could point to folks who are on advisory councils. There’s a Religious Liberty Commission in this term that you could point to. In the first term, there was especially a network tied to his campaign’s evangelical advisory board from the first campaign that then transitioned into an informal advisory role. Those types of folks are around.

That folks who study their backgrounds—there would be diverse individuals, including Catholic bishops, for instance, involved in the Religious Liberty Commission—but there’s probably a disproportionate representation from leaders from the more kind of Pentecostal wing of American Protestantism among those folks, including somebody like Paula White, who’s probably the most prominent national-level representative of that.

But I do think it’s fair to say that this generation of a conservative Christian organizing is a little bit less institutionalized than the old-line religious right organizations. So there are newer organizations; there are organizations out there that are communicating regularly.

But to me, it seems like a little bit of a less coherent organizational landscape than the generation maybe 20 or 25 years ago, when........

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