CHEETO JESUS:

The golden statue of former President Donald Trump that was wheeled through the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) earned a full measure of derision as Trump's Golden Calf. It was also the first icon of Trump's Lost Cause religion.

That the Civil War cast its long shadow over the Trump presidency has long been apparent. 

The symbolism was there for all to see, from the "Unite the Right" rally against the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville in 2017 to the insurrectionists carrying Confederate battle flags through the halls of the U.S. Capitol on June 6. Trump made the cause his own, standing up for keeping the monuments as well as the names of Confederate generals on military bases.

The message became clearer as his term went on: Just as white Southerners went to war to protect their slavery-based way of life, so white conservatives have been engaged in a proto-civil war to protect a way of life marked by structural racism. In Proud Boys v. Black Lives Matter, Trump left no doubt which side he was on.  

And then there was the role of religion.

White evangelicals' support for Trump manifested a Christian nationalism that harked back to the Southern nationalism of the Civil War era. Then, the leading ideologists of the Southern way of life were clergymen -- representatives of a trans-denominational  evangelicalism that came to dominate the region during the antebellum period.

For them, the defense of slavery was existentially connected to a defense of Christianity against godless egalitarianism. As the prominent Presbyterian divine Benjamin Morgan Palmer put it in a famous Thanksgiving sermon on the eve of the war:

"(I)n this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshipped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the Americans, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. From a thousand Jacobin clubs here, as in France, the decree has gone forth which strikes at God by striking at all subordination and law.

After the war, many of the same clergy refashioned this belief into a religion of the Lost Cause, which, as historian Charles Reagan Wilson shows in his seminal 2009 study, "Baptized in Blood," became the civil religion of white Southerners.

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