Photo: Chandan Khanna Agence France-Presse Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the far-right organization Turning Point's People of Faith Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 26.
Fabien Deglise in Brookfield, Wisconsin
Published at 0:00
- United States
“It's a beacon to guide us through the dark times we're going through!”
Sarah, a young mother, had nothing but good things to say about Pastor Matthew Trewhella, who came, as he did every Sunday, to deliver his mass in a very generic conference room of an ordinary hotel in the western suburbs of Milwaukee.
Lost between the business lunch of a group of local entrepreneurs and several waves of young people and families returning home, bouquets of balloons in hand, the day after a festive gathering, the Sunday meeting had everything to go unnoticed, with its dozens of parishioners — retirees and young couples, for the most part — chatting at the door between small groups of children running and shouting all around.
A conventional spectacle, as is being played out simultaneously at the doors of thousands of churches in the United States, but which had a little more to tell in this election year. That's because at 63, Pastor Trewhella has seen his influence extend far beyond the intimate confines of the small Mercy Seat Christian Church (whose name is a biblical reference to the chest containing the 10 commandments), which he founded in rural Wisconsin.
His name is regularly mentioned in the corridors of Trumpism, where Donald Trump’s former security adviser Michael Flynn recently praised a book the Protestant pastor self-published in 2013, calling it “a master plan showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.”
The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates(“The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates”), as it is titled, draws on a theory of resistance developed by Calvinists in the 16th century, during the European Wars of Religion, to counter the oppression of governments. Five hundred years later, it is used by Pastor Trewhella to justify by “divine law” all opposition to governments, policies, legislative texts and courts – and this, in the context of the cultural war currently being waged in the United States by the conservative camp against a change in morals perceived as a little too progressive.
Matthew Trewhella's work was thus cited last year in the entourage of the governor of Texas, Republican Greg Abbott, to call on him to oppose the immigration policies of the federal government and the management of the borders by the government of Joe Biden.
The approach, which places God and local politicians on the same ideological front line, has been praised by Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Donald Trump and a member of his 2020 campaign team. She sees the pastor's writings as a way out of “government overreach,” a complaint that Republicans have been particularly successful in resonating with their camp since the pandemic and its health measures, experienced by many as restrictions on freedom.
Power and frustration
In Waukesha County, the epicenter of Republican power in Wisconsin, Matthew Trewhella has forged strong ties with local leaders of Donald Trump's party. The latter particularly appreciate how he interprets sacred texts to condemn abortion — murder, according to him — or to promote the right to own firearms. The supremacy of men over women — a “creature unfit to occupy positions of power,” he says — and the condemnation of homosexuality are also part of his discourse elements.
Photo: Fabien Deglise Le Devoir At the entrance to Pastor Matthew Trewhella’s home in northern Wisconsin, a sign calls for the release of the January 6 insurgents who were thrown in prison following their trial.
“The state here in America is at war with you,” he says during his sermon on this Sunday morning in August. “It is at war with every aspect of our culture and society. It wants to force you to do the exact opposite of what God’s word says. It even wants you to believe that there are more than two sexes.”
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000In the room, several heads nod in reverence.
“You must wage war against the state through your family by being a protector, provider, and priest to them, by having children, even though the state doesn’t want you to have more than two,” the pastor adds. The man boasts of having 11 children, who have given him as many grandchildren, all of whom are homeschooled. “By owning guns when the state wants you to disarm, and by educating your own children,” he continues.
As the meeting opens, the pastor invites his congregation to make their request to God. A woman in her fifties raises her hand, asking for divine help to gather enough people around her in the coming days to form a protest outside a local public library. She wants to denounce the presence of “toxic books” on the shelves, she says.
An uninhibited Christian nationalism
Making religion a political weapon: this is the project that Matthew Trewhella, known for his past as an extremist activist against abortion clinics in Wisconsin, which earned him a few months in prison at the beginning of the century, has given himself. He now legitimizes his fight by conjugating sacred texts such as the Magdeburg Confession, a Lutheran declaration of faith published in 1550, in the present tense in a clever exercise that allows him to add his stone each Sunday to a theocratic foundation on which the Republican Party seeks to establish part of its base.
“Christian nationalism no longer shames American right-wing politicians,” summarizes in an interview Anna Rosenzweig, a French professor specializing in the premodern era at the University of Rochester in New York State, who closely follows the development of religious extremism in the United States. “This nationalism is even becoming normalized, driven by movements, such as that of Pastor Trewhella, who take religious writings from the past out of context to better justify their current culture war.”
She adds: “It is very dangerous, very anti-democratic too, since they call for freedom of religion and democratic values in order to advance theocratic ideas that, in the end, lock us into authoritarian regimes. It is no longer a question of debate or compromise for them. What they want is the suppression of the rights of several sectors of society: women, African-Americans, cultural and religious minorities…”
In late July, Donald Trump certainly added fuel to the fire when he called on Christians to “get out and vote” for him, while assuring them that they would not have to worry about the electoral process afterward if he won. “Four years from now, you won’t have to vote. We’ll have fixed it so you won’t have to vote,” he said at the Believers Summit, an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point Action in West Palm Beach, Florida.
A few days earlier, from the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, the Republican senator from Missouri Josh Hawley had for his part included Christian nationalism in a reform of the American political framework, affirming that, far from threatening American democracy, it “founds it, above all.” “And it is the best form of democracy ever devised by man: the most just, the most free, the most humane, and the most praiseworthy,” he argued.
Breaking Down the Wall Between Church and State?
In 2022, rising Trump figure Lauren Boebert said she was “tired” of the separation of church and state in the United States—“bullshit that’s not in the Constitution,” she claimed, as quoted by the Denver Post. “The church is supposed to run the government; the government is not supposed to run the church. That’s not the way our Founding Fathers intended it.” »
Yet in 1802, Thomas Jefferson, one of the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, mentioned this wall in a letter sent to the Danbury Baptist Association which recalled that the American legislature should not “make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
A separation that 16% of Americans say they are ready to question today, according to a Pew Research Center survey released last February. Some 83%, an overwhelming majority, believe, however, that the government should not declare Christianity the official religion of the country, it is indicated.
Matthew Trewhella is certainly not part of this majority, he who preaches a strengthening of the “divine function of civil government” and who invites the families gathered around him to take part in the “counter-revolution”. A resistance inspired by a political theory of the past, nourished by the Bible, and which – in a “rule of law that is crumbling”, he says – could in practice involve violence, writes the pastor in his book, where he speaks of “moments” when men “must make their swords red” (by blood, he understands).
“Calvin would have loved this guy,” says Professor Rosenzweig, who is concerned about witnessing the revival of these ideas today in a tense political context that does not shed enough light on their origins, and even less on the range of political and social projects that they support. “I recently attended a conference of Lutherans in Wyoming. And besides the fact that I was the only woman without a husband or children in the room, what struck me most was their pride in being anti-democratic,” she adds.
And this, in one of the largest democracies in the world, which, on November 5, will go to the polls.
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund- Le Devoir .