‘Trump Digs Coal’ proclaimed the placard brandished by candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail in 2016. Upon election victory, he followed through on his campaign rhetoric. Pronouncing climate change a hoax, Trump doubled down on an expansive fossil fuel agenda. His administration rolled back or weakened every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions (Baker et al., 2020).

Trump's pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate change stance was not new. It reflected what has become a standard talking point of the US Republican Party in recent years, one that casts doubt not only on climate science but on expertise per se. The logic of the position was perhaps best articulated by former Pennsylvania Senator and two-time Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum in an interview on the Rush Limbaugh radio show in 2011. ‘Man-made climate change’, Santorum declared, is ‘patently absurd … junk science … a beautifully concocted scheme … by the left … just an excuse for more government control of your life.’ The underlying political stance reflects both a deep hostility towards the regulatory functions of government and a fixation on what is understood as the baleful influence on Western contemporary thought by the political left. In some quarters of the right, this malevolent influence is attributed to the evil of ‘cultural Marxism’ (The Rick Santorum Interview, 2011; Jay, 2011). ¹

My aim in this chapter is to illuminate how American conservatives arrived at this position on climate change, a position that serves to underscore that the Republican Party has become virtually indistinguishable from the far right. The stance entails an outlook that regards fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – as the fundamental pillars of the American energy mix. It sees the private companies that engage in mining, drilling and fracking as entities to be rewarded – even venerated – for their risk taking (and contribution to nationbuilding), and thus deserving of solicitude by government. Energy sources have entered the culture wars in the United States and are imbued with symbolic, in addition to material economic, significance. Fossil fuel extraction and use are patriotic: the mining of coal and the drilling of oil and gas not only drive the nation's industrial might, but they also secure independence from possible foreign malefactors (Tabuchi & Friedman, 2021). ² Mining and drilling are coded as masculine: fossil fuels are the product of the physical labour of men joined in the gruelling effort to liberate God's mysterious gifts from the bowels of the (feminine) earth (Daggett, 2018).

Renewable forms of energy, by contrast, are a limited and troublesome addition to the energy mix because their output is intermittent and dependent on forces beyond human control. Moreover, conservatives complain, renewables benefit from unfair subsidies (Johnson, 2011). ³ Environmentalism is typecast as a feminine creed that both exudes weakness and animates a massive regulatory apparatus, the result of which is to rob people of their natural freedoms. It should not be surprising that the regulatory system is often denigrated by the right as the ‘nanny state’ (another belittling gendered construction) (McCright & Dunlap, 2011; Hunt, 2020). Climate science is nothing but politicized claptrap, its claims to expertise bunk. Policies designed to address climate change are nothing but power grabs by the left. At the most abstract edge of this complaint, the environmental regulatory juggernaut is claimed to violate natural law. ⁴ The overall stance is one that we might call ‘fossil fuel authoritarianism’.

The identity of the Republican Party with fossil fuel authoritarianism was not always thus. Protection of the environment was once a bipartisan affair in the United States. ⁵ Indeed, Republicans were early champions of conservation. The setting aside of public lands to preserve areas of natural or historic interest was championed by President Theodore Roosevelt in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not long thereafter, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, presided over the creation of the National Park Service to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife within the national parks (Organic Act, 1916). In more recent decades, the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), sometimes called the Magna Carta of US environmental law, passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming 372–15 margin. The Senate vote for the bill was unanimous. Although he did not do much to shape the NEPA bill, President Richard Nixon saw political advantage in embracing and signing it. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the same year that the Senate unanimously passed the tough Clean Air Act. When Nixon reversed course and vetoed the Clean Water Act in 1972, a bipartisan Congress over-rode his veto (National Environmental Policy Act, 1970). As late as 1990, a bipartisan majority passed strong amendments to the Clean Air Act, legislation that substantially increased the authority and responsibility of the federal government to control acid rain and issue power station operating permits (Clean Air Amendments Act, 1990). But by 1992, political polarization on issues of environmental concern had begun to emerge, driven by anti-environmentalism among conservative elites (McCright, Xiao & Dunlap, 2014).

What explains the shift of American conservatives, and the Republican Party specifically, from a general support of environmentalism to fossil fuel authoritarianism? The answer lies in the evolution of the Republican Party from a mainstream conservative political party into one whose policies are increasingly indistinguishable from those of the far right. The reasons for this evolution are complex and multi-faceted, and have been pondered by many scholars (see Perlstein, 2001, 2014; Rogers, 2011; Horwitz, 2013). One important factor – and the factor I think helps best explain the party's particular stance on climate – is the rise to dominance of white, right-wing Protestant evangelicalism within the Republican electoral coalition.

The religious transformation of the Republican Party began with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and has accelerated virtually unabated since (Smidt & Kellstedt, 1992; Igielnik et al., 2021). ⁶ Protestant evangelicalism embodies a set of doctrinal beliefs that our corrupt world is moving towards its ‘end times’. Human attempts to halt climate change (or any broad social problem for that matter) are just short of blasphemy; only God can intervene in the world. Historical change takes place not via human actions but through divine intervention, the details of which are revealed in Scripture. From its beginnings, Protestantism exuded a common-sense anti-elitism in opposition to the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church. That inheritance has been transformed in current American evangelicalism into a strong tendency towards anti-science dogmatism. Religious dogmatism is characterized by an unchangeable certainty in a set of beliefs and practices, ostensibly rooted in the Bible, without consideration of evidence or contrary opinion. What has happened over the last decades of US political history is that evangelical religion has become politicized and Republican politics has become religious. Dogmatism in the religious domain has become dogmatism in the political domain. In the area of climate, this has manifested in fossil fuel authoritarianism.

The transformation of the Republican Party: an overview

From its creation in the 1850s, the Republican Party (also known as the Grand Old Party, or GOP) was the party of the pro-business, anti-slavery northern modernist Protestant establishment. African Americans supported the GOP after the Civil War because of the emancipation legacy of President Abraham Lincoln. The Democratic Party, in turn, historically constituted a contradictory political alliance consisting of northern urban working-class ethnic groups (such as Italian and Irish Americans), Catholics, organized labour and the pro-slavery white South. The New Deal, the name for the long presidential administration of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, permanently transformed US domestic politics through a centre-left embrace of government intervention into the economy and the establishment of a regulatory state in the 1930s and 1940s. The power of the white South in the New Deal coalition, however, meant that little progress was made in the area of race relations/civil rights.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower led the Republican Party's dominant, establishment wing. The party, having vigorously opposed the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, made a reluctant peace with it and the institutions of the modest welfare state the New Deal had established. The GOP also signed on to the postwar Democrats’ anti-communist agenda, both domestically and in the international arena in the policy of the containment of international communism. The Republican Party was thus part of what scholars have labelled the postwar liberal consensus (Hodgson, 1976).

A minority, anti-establishment faction of the Republican Party, instead advocated militant rollback: of international communism and the New Deal (considered communism's domestic version), both. The standard bearer of the anti-establishment conservative faction in the 1950s was Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy denounced social institutions such as labour unions, universities and Hollywood, as well as some government bureaus, as having been taken over by communists. Myriad right-wing organizations and non-mainstream media outlets championed McCarthy and his cause. In the 1960s, the leader of anti-establishment conservatism was Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign denounced the New Deal state as an attack on private property and liberty. He and his supporters also charged that the mere containment of the Soviet Union was inadequate; the United States must confront international communism militarily, with the nuclear arsenal if need be (Goldwater, 1960).

For all the damage that McCarthyism wreaked on the country, the Senator was censured and the movement he led disparaged. Goldwater, having brought the anti-establishment faction of the GOP to momentary domination, was trounced in the 1964 presidential election by Democrat Lyndon Johnson. The 1960s and 1970s essentially belonged (with many caveats that cannot be discussed here because of space constraints) to liberals.

One way to characterize the success of liberalism in this period is to note the general expansion of individual rights and the concomitant broadening of pluralism and secularism in many domains of American society. Under the pressure and moral gravity of the African American civil rights movement, Congress finally passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, facilitating the right of racial minorities to belong, in principle, to the US social contract. Pressed by the anti-war, counterculture and feminist movements in the 1960s, the country (often with the help of the courts) moved beyond the protection of minority rights towards pluralistic positions in areas of public life that had historically embedded traditional religious values in such matters as school prayer, contraception, abortion and general individual deportment. In short, government began to secularize the life-world in response to the pluralistic cultural dynamism of the 1960s and the force of logic of judicial decisions involving the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution's equal protection and due process clauses (on secularization see Casanova, 1994: 11–39, 135–157). ⁷

Growth in the role and size of government, especially the federal government, accompanied these changes. Conservatives bristled. They felt the changes marked not only a ruinous expansion in the size and function of government, but also represented an abdication of moral responsibility and a judicial taking of sides. They saw the cultural enfranchisement of women and racial minorities and the liberalization of sexual mores as moral hazards. The anti-establishment faction of the Republican Party that had been pushed out of party halls of power after the defeat of Barry Goldwater emerged afresh. It recruited religious conservatives who felt that their institutions had come under threat by an intrusive federal government. By the mid-1970s, evangelicals perceived themselves to be losing the moral struggle with liberalism for the soul of America. They saw the principle of the separation between church and state being weaponized to undermine their religious institutions. They saw the liberalization of the life-world as the triumph of ‘secular humanism’ (which sometimes served as code for cultural Marxism, discussed previously, though the use of the latter concept was limited in that period of time). The Reverend Jerry Falwell mobilized these grievances in a powerful way in the founding of the Moral Majority in 1980 – the year that evangelicals turned out for Ronald Reagan (Falwell, 1980).

The anti-establishment conservative faction of the Republican Party became the Republican Party. Its electoral base was increasingly dominated by white evangelicals whose dogmatic, end-times doctrines began to suffuse generally through the party, including, as years went by, its anti-science stance on climate change. Here the long, complicated nexus between religion and oil in the United States is salient. That nexus is key to the understanding of current day Republican energy and climate politics. We explore the origins of those doctrines through the schismatic history of American Protestantism.

Postmillennialist Protestantism: fossil fuel extraction and rational, godly development

John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was the early and long-time leader of the oil industry in the United States. Standard was the first great American business trust, controlling, in 1904, 91 per cent of oil refinement and 85 per cent of final sales in the United States. The company long practised cut-throat pricing to undermine competitors, leading to antitrust litigation and its break-up in 1911 (Yergin, 1991; Desjardins, 2017). Rockefeller, who controlled Standard Oil as Chairman and major shareholder, was a pious northern Baptist Protestant who believed in economic and technological development as the way to build the Kingdom of God on earth in advance of Christ's second coming (Dochuk, 2019). Why Rockefeller's religious orientation is of importance requires examination that situates the centrality of Protestantism and its internal dynamics to American socio-economic life.

The American colonies were founded by religiously devout Christian dissenters. Persecution by state religions in Europe led these dissenters to embrace a conception of political liberty as non-domination or independence from arbitrary power. Independence of religious belief from political authority was embedded in the principle of the doctrine of the separation between church and state.

For most of the nineteenth century, the American Protestant worldview married a deep religiosity to republican political ideology (whose paramount value is political liberty) and moral reasoning based on Scottish common-sense philosophy (rather than the acute rationalism of the continental Enlightenment). Its epistemology held that there is a world outside us, which we can know via the use of induction from facts obvious to the senses. Resting on the implicit assumption that humans are by nature good, and educable, individuals were understood as free agents, naturally capable of understanding Scripture without priestly expertise. The capacity of individuals to read and understand the Bible meant in turn that ordinary free persons were in principle both capable of independent moral judgement and of self-government (Heclo, 2009).

The Protestant approach to knowledge and government was democratic, and hostile to the elite authority of the Catholic priestly hierarchy. Nineteenth-century Protestantism saw science, which it understood as the precise observation of the world, as the complement to the literal reading of the Bible. Science confirmed Scripture. There could be no contradiction between the deist God of the Newtonian universe and the God of the Bible, between natural and revealed religion (May, 1976). ⁸ But Protestantism's common-sense anti-elitism also revealed a populism that, as we shall see later, would be mobilized to challenge expertise per se.

In the nineteenth-century American Protestant worldview, work in the world improved the world. Hence the dominance of what is known as postmillennialism, the theological doctrine that understands spiritual and cultural progress as paving the way for the thousand years of God's kingdom, after which Christ will come to earth a second time. Nineteenth-century American Protestants believed that the Holy Spirit, working through Christians, would so Christianize the culture that Christ could return to provide the capstone to a thousand-year reign of perfect peace. In this view, although human history reflects the ongoing struggle between the cosmic forces of God and Satan, each represented by earthly powers, the victory of righteousness is essentially assured. Ethical human effort embodies God's goodness and speeds the advent of a blessed new world (Marsden, 1980). ⁹

The Social Gospel, the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century religious movement focused on the importance of good works and the mobilization of citizens to help the poor and do good politically, embodied the central motifs of the postmillennialist Protestant worldview (White Jr, 1990). In this optimistic, progressive view of history, the fit between the Christian God and republican liberty was natural, even divinely ordained. Postmillennialist Protestants saw the United States as a special nation, a chosen nation, whose self-development and encounters in the world were regarded as speeding the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. This tradition is a primary source of the idea of American exceptionalism.

The rational, disciplined engagement with the world to improve it is perhaps the central tenet of postmillennialist Protestant doctrine. Postmillennialism for the most part pervaded American culture writ large, even after religion per se receded as the central shaper of public discourse (Bellah, 1967; Marsden, 1980; Dorrien, 2008). Rockefeller, a staunch postmillennialist and equally steadfast Republican, was the epitome of what we call the mainline Protestant establishment, the power bloc that dominated American economic, political and cultural life from the beginning of the republic until late in the twentieth century (Mills, 1956). Rockefeller was convinced that Standard Oil's petroleum quests and his philanthropic missions were one and the same. Building the Kingdom of God on earth entailed making money from oil and giving back generously to various causes and institutions, including foreign religious missions and institutions of higher learning such as the University of Chicago and the historically Black Spellman College. Rockefeller had been a stalwart abolitionist (Chernow, 1998).

The historian Darren Dochuk offers a neat phrase for Rockefeller's doctrine of uplift through oil: ‘the civil religion of crude’. Work hard; bring forth oil from the earth; make money; use it in ways that improve the world – in short, the tenets of postmillennialist Protestantism. The civil religion of crude applied not just domestically, it was also linked to foreign policy and American exceptionalism. Standard Oil pressed onto foreign shores, especially what would become Saudi Arabia, eager to save global humanity with a redemptive message of benevolent faith, capitalism and oil (Dochuk, 2019: 10–13, 405–446).

As industry leader, Standard Oil embodied ordered, disciplined, managerial capitalism. Rockefeller detested the uncontrolled boom and bust that typified the oil industry outside of Standard's orbit; he was repulsed by the social mayhem characteristic of petroleum strikes and manic oil boomtowns. Of course, Standard Oil's ordered managerial capitalism meant establishing an integrated monopoly of refineries and pipelines in order to manipulate a scarcity of supply. Standard first manipulated supply domestically, then pursued the practice in the international market (Mitchell, 2011).

Premillennialist Protestantism: the rush to drill before the end times

Opposing Rockefeller and Standard with both economic and religious fervour were the western independent oilmen, also known as wildcatters. These were the struggling oilmen largely frozen out by Standard's dominance. They tended to be Protestants of a very different orientation and doctrinal worldview from the Protestant mainline. These were the dispensational premillennialists – religious men who believed that the end of the world was imminent because of moral decay. In their view, the entire edifice of postmillennialism and its Social Gospel was blasphemous, an attempt to improve the world when the world was in God's hands alone (Marsden, 1980).

Premillennialism grew out of schisms as Protestant theology intersected with material and ideological conflicts. American Protestantism fractured not just along denominational lines (e.g. Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, etc.), but also within denominations over slavery, the basic view of God's word and, later, Darwinism. Individual congregations of the same denomination on different sides of the Mason–Dixon line (the line demarcating the North from the South) found that they did not share the same values on the crucial issue of slavery, and in part because of the slavery question, no longer interpreted the Bible in the same way.

In the decades before the Civil War, northern congregations eventually denounced slavery, finding biblical warrant in opposing the evil of what was called euphemistically ‘the peculiar institution’. Their southern counterparts likewise recited biblical passages in the effort to legitimize a slavery-based moral order. The application of Enlightenment rationality to the Bible precipitated another fault-line. The Higher Criticism was a scholarly movement coming from German academies under the broad influence of Kant and Hegel. It applied critical methods derived from other scholarly disciplines to Scripture and opened a process of exposing the Bible to close textual reading and hermeneutic analysis. Practitioners applied rational textual analysis to the Bible and in so doing cast doubt on scriptural verities such as the virgin birth and the miracles performed by Jesus. As these views filtered through scholarly and ministerial circles, many Protestants came to doubt the inerrancy of the Bible.

Darwinism posed another challenge as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth. Recall that nineteenth-century American Protestantism revered science and believed there was no contradiction between science and Scripture. But faced with growing scientific evidence that the earth had a very long geological history and that numerous biological species had appeared and disappeared during the eons, many Protestants came to believe that the Genesis story of creation could not be sustained. The Protestant modernists began to downplay the supernatural and to view theology as no longer a fixed, God-given body of eternally valid truths. They continued to identify the Kingdom of God with the progress of civilization, but they increasingly came to view the essence of religion as morality, not blind faith, and, over time, they embraced the pluralism of values. To be sure, this liberal shift in the mainline churches was gradual and took place over several decades (Ahlstrom, 1972).

Those holding onto the old understandings denounced the modernists. The Bible, the traditionalists declared, was God's very word, inerrant and perfect. They viewed slavery as biblically sanctioned. They viewed Darwinian theory as undercutting the central biblical tenet of humanity's special creation. Their rejection of the Higher Criticism embodied Protestantism's original and integral anti-elitist dismissal of priestly expertise and professional knowledge. Indeed, for traditionalists, modernist teachings were themselves evidence of the decline of civilization. Contrary to postmillennialism's optimism, late nineteenth-century traditionalists pronounced that the world was becoming increasingly corrupt. In contrast to postmillennialism's progressive story, history was, rather, the story of eras of regression, owing to the fact that human beings are by nature sinful. History, in the view of the premillennialists, is the sad story of the stages of human degeneration from its Edenic beginning.

According to this theory, history is the story of divine intervention, revealed in Scripture. History doesn't just reflect the Bible; the Bible is history. The present age, marked by apostasy in the churches and the moral collapse of Christian civilization, is prior to Christ's kingdom. The millennium lies wholly in the future, after Christ returns to a very troubled world. Linking verses from the biblical books of Revelation, Daniel and Ezekiel, premillennialists described Christ's second coming as at the end of an apocalyptic period called the tribulation – a period of war, famine and social chaos during the seven-year rule of the Antichrist. As the end times commence, true Christian believers and innocents will be transported by God from earth to heaven in an event called the Rapture. Those left behind will be subject to violence, suffering and strife in the battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan. Terrible suffering will ensue, but the forces of God will emerge victorious. Following Armageddon, Christ will return to establish a kingdom in Jerusalem, where he will reign for a thousand years (Clark, 2007: 27–144).

Because they understood the secular world as effectively under Satan's rule, traditionalists scorned efforts to make the world better through social activism, charity and politics. Traditionalists viewed the Social Gospel's emphasis on good works and serving the poor as undercutting the basic doctrinal concern for repentance from sin and dependence on God's grace. What mattered before the end times was to accept Christ as one's personal saviour and proselytize others to do so (see Marsden, 1987; Riesebrodt, 1993). ¹⁰

The wildcatters: drill, baby, drill

Premillennialism became increasingly popular within conservative circles during the years between the world wars, conspicuously in the oil patches. It was the primary religious orientation of the wildcatters. Texas wildcatters underwrote the rise of J. Frank Norris and John R. Rice, the two most prominent fundamentalist ministers in mid-century America (Dochuk, 2019: 246–249). Premillennialist belief informed the wildcatter worldview: oil was God's gift to men; it was God's will for humans to harvest the earth. But a driller had to take risks, work hard and be devout to be rewarded in the release of God's mysterious endowment. Against John D. Rockefeller's managerial capitalism, the wildcatters held to an intense libertarian individualism that must not be suppressed by bigger businesses or the state.

Like other conservative Protestants, the wildcatters displayed a kind of populist defiance towards the establishment, whether religious or business. To wildcatters, the fact that the world would soon come to an end meant they must extract oil deposits swiftly and save souls before God's final decree. There was little time to waste as the end times neared, and no reason to safeguard the fossil resource or forestall the despoilment of the land from whence it came. Besides, as we know from the Book of Revelation, those who will be left behind in the wake of the Rapture will be the sinners and the unbelievers. Why leave any of God's gift for them?

In their swashbuckling libertarian zeal, wildcatters built not only oil rigs across Texas, Oklahoma and California, but they also built fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches in the settlements around the wells. The wildcatters were promoters of the peculiarly American mixture of radical market freedom and religious moral traditionalism. It is not coincidence that it was Lyman Stewart, founder of the independent Union Oil, who bankrolled The Fundamentals, the foundational texts of Protestant fundamentalism, published between 1910 and 1915. It is also not coincidence that it was Sun Oil owner, J. Howard Pew, who financed Fuller Seminary, evangelicalism's key institution of theology. Pew also was the money behind evangelicalism's house media organ, the magazine Christianity Today. And Pew acted as bundler of western oil money for Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964 (Perlstein, 2001).

Conclusion

The story of the evolution of the Republican Party is the story of the transfer of the dogmatism embedded in its key evangelical constituency to the party as a whole. Metaphorically, evangelicalism is a religion of the heart. What matters is that one personally accepts Jesus and his love. It is not a religion of the head. By the time of the George W. Bush presidency, one could argue that the GOP had become essentially a religious party. That transformation began to have an impact on the character of public discourse and the reasoning offered to justify public policies writ large. President Bush came to legitimate the Iraq war in both secular and religious registers. Alongside the realist foreign policy official National Security Policy of the United States document were Bush's references to ‘a Third Great Awakening’ of religious devotion in the United States that had coincided with the nation's struggle with evil international terrorists (National Security Strategy, 2002; Baker, 2006). The Christian right, which strongly backed Bush and the war, saw Saddam Hussein as the anti-Christ and the Iraq war as the hoped-for beginning of the end times (Boyer, 2003).

The story of the Republican Party in the energy–climate domain is in part the story of the ascendance of the libertarian premillennialist wildcatter ethos embodied in the evangelical religious doctrine of the end times. As the Republican Party has become a party dominated by its evangelical base, it has rejected climate science, and expertise generally, as inherently political. Everything is politics, including facts and science. This radical scepticism can be traced, in part, to the old populist, anti-elitist character of the Protestant theory of knowledge, seen earlier in the traditionalist rejection of the Higher Criticism. That attitude, which also informed the battle against Darwinism, is now applied to climate science and expertise generally (Zimmerman, 2011). The latter is understood as just the latest in a long effort by liberal elites to expand the state and undermine freedom, private property and traditional cultural norms. The rejection of climate science and expertise is joined to the older and broader culture war of polarized politics against liberals and Democrats.

The contemporary Republican Party adopted the premillennialist wildcatter view of dominion over the earth. The looming of the end times made it unnecessary to conserve, or steward or act to avert climate change. Together with the old traditional Protestant distrust of experts and expertise, the old wildcatter ethos to exploit the earth fortifies the party's commitment to fossil fuel authoritarianism.

Now, here's the wrinkle. While we understand the doctrinal religious underpinnings of the GOP's denial of climate change and climate science, the public position is primarily a political one. A study of survey data on attitudes towards climate science shows that there is no particular difference between the Christian right's scepticism about human-made climate change and that of Republican voters generally. The survey data on the rejection of climate science does not show a lot of end times talk; the data show political talk (Evans & Feng, 2013). How should we understand this?

Religion may have shaped the contemporary Republican Party as a pro-extraction, anti-climate science party. The premillennialist Protestant embrace of resource extraction, fully consonant with the historical oil wildcatter ethos, has now been institutionalized in the Republican Party writ large. Its overtly religious origins no longer matter. Republicans without a religious bone in their body (such as Trump himself) adopt the drill, baby, drill perspective for purely partisan reasons (Antonio & Brulle, 2011). It remains strategic in a pluralistic polity (and even to sway Republicans not drawn to evangelicalism) to continue to couch religious reasons in more secular argument.

The sociological element here is that as political affiliation becomes less of an ideology and more of an identity, as it has in the last couple of decades, it is risky to the self to break from the positions of one's political community. Those evangelicals who break ranks with evangelical dogma (whether theological or political) have been drummed out of leadership positions and sometimes even out of their churches (O’Connor, 2017). ¹¹ Republican officeholders who may believe in climate science generally keep quiet. ¹²

The interpenetration of religion and politics has taken a fairly astonishing turn. White conservative Americans of non-Protestant faiths – or even no faith – are identifying as evangelicals because of the perception of identity between evangelicalism and the Republican Party under Trump's dominance. To be a conservative or right-wing white Republican is to be an evangelical Christian, even if one is Catholic, Hindu, Muslim or an unbeliever (Smith, 2021). This bodes ill for American politics. As the Republican Party has become more religious, it has become more dogmatic. Dogmatism is the enemy of politics; indeed, dogmatism undermines the political, because it substitutes emotion and preconceived opinion/judgement for reason. No one should gainsay how important religion has been and continues to be as a source of inspiration and fount of moral judgement influencing politics. Religious belief has animated any number of consequential political stances in American history, from the abolition of slavery, to Prohibition, to civil rights, to efforts to reduce poverty.

But religious argument is not political argument. That is, religious argument ultimately is based on some form of revelation or revealed truth, and thus is not argument per se. Rather, it is a foundationalist, pre-rational appeal not amenable to counterclaims outside of its faith-based framework. A democratic political public sphere is in principle the space for reasoned communicative exchange, wherein people exchange reasons in public in order to assess validity claims that have become problematic or subject to conflict. Religious claims are not of this character, because they are true not through argument; they are true through revelation or faith and thus not accessible to those outside the revelatory framework. The problem with religion in politics is that some religions are absolutist. There's little compromise or negotiation (the heart of democratic politics) with faith-based systems.

But politics is a domain that cannot be governed by dogmatism, or it ceases to be the domain where people talk and act in common (Habermas, 2006). As a political system and a culture, democracy is messy, frustrating, often unsatisfying. Although animated by ultimate values, in principle democracy requires a process of continuous negotiation and argument based on reason and evidence (Weber, 1946). A dogmatic or religious approach to politics, one in which belief overwhelms evidence or responsibility, is an authoritarian politics. It is the deep nihilism of the Republican far-right authoritarian project that confounds the United States politically and foils the effort to avert climate disaster.