Surveying the new American Imperial Cult
There are moments when the news is just as revealing as it is concerning. Over the past several years we’re witnessed school boards ban important literature, Republicans invoke God while signing anti-life laws, and “conservative” pastors demand total submission as congregations cheer their way into institutional failure and abuse.
Our present situation feels even more revealing. The Trump Administration is force disappearing and aggressively deporting people with great pleasure —illegally, in many cases— and doing so in a fashion to intimidate elected officials and citizens who have any disagreement with them. Republicans just passed legislation that will send already high inequality through the roof, even as Trump and co. engage in another senseless round of violence in the Middle East, gut the government, and raise living costs through severe economic mismanagement, slashing social programs, and ending consumer protections. MAGA and white evangelical extremists openly threaten violence and assassination, and are beginning to follow through. Theobros screech at Christians that empathy is a sin and talk boldly about sexual ethics, even as they shrug off sexual assault in their churches as merely the cost of doing business.
Eventually we have to stop asking How did we get here? and start asking Who are we becoming?
It feels like we are seeing the emergence of a new American Imperial Cult, one seemingly having more in common with the Roman imperial cult of old than anything in our own past. Empire has manifested in many forms throughout American history: the theft of Native lands, the Confederacy, the illegal seizure of Hawaii…even Pax Americana, which is probably already dead. Examples abound; however, a cult of empire —at a national scale like MAGA now is— does feel like a new beast of sorts.
This imperial cult we see emerging today harkens back to these darker moments of American history. Its fuel is a politics of grievance, fear, and dominance. Its religion is obsessed with culturally white, male-dominated hierarchy and retaining cultural control at all costs. Its social impulse demands we be allergic to compassion, even as its economy hoards wealth for the few, wealth gained off the backs of others at the expense of the common good. It’s Mammon, American style.
The same moral logic that fought to preserve the slave economy and looks to the 1950s as a golden era has been repackaged and is being preached anew in statehouses, churches, school board meetings, and beyond. It lurks behind crisp American flags and pulpits, preaching a false gospel of faith, freedom, and family. The language of overt racism and sexism is often replaced with being biblical and patriotic. Sometimes the roughest edges have been sanded off —such as chattel slavery, although some in the fold are not against that criminal system— but ultimately we are dealing with a cultish moral order that treats justice as a threat and power like a birthright. And now all wings and disparate groups that buy into these various aspects are marching together under MAGA, wearing a red hat or not.
The Religious Right bows to the new American Imperial Cult
This moment isn’t simply a continuation of the old Religious Right, even if they played a starring role in paving the road we are on. For long gone are the days of tent revivals and warnings of the afterlife, regardless of what you think of either. Gone are the days of most conservative evangelicals at least trying to explain that their politics stem out of a coherent theology, even if that was never fully true (it wasn’t). Gone are the days of Billy Graham, even if he was a more complicated figure than many evangelicals wish to believe. Compassionate conservatism in public life has been executed —with the corpse lit on fire— even if that approach to the world was overtly selective and never truly fair.
People have long argued if theology ever mattered to the Religious Right, but it certainly doesn’t matter now. Controlling the levers of power to bend American culture to its will is the only currency now, with haphazard theology thrown in at the end to try to justify a set of anti-life social conditions.
The Religious Right can still walk into their churches on Sunday mornings and worship as they see fit, but they have been pressed into the service of MAGA nationalism —the surrender has been very willing– to the point that the Religious Right is hardly trying to force the state to bow the knee anymore. Quite the opposite has happened, and the Religious Right now find themselves in bed with people and groups they would have had serious issue with just a decade ago: tech oligarchs who demand they be treated as gods, Raunch Republicans (more on that soon), and outright fascists and neo-Nazis.
The goal of this new American Imperial Cult is to radically transform the country into the one imagined by their “savior” Donald Trump. The Religious Right is now unwilling —powerless, even— to speak out against the parts of the cult it quietly mumbles in disapproval of. The stated religious and overtly secular right-wings have folded into the MAGA Imperial Cult, which has deep religious vibes of its own. Again, the Religious Right can still worship as they always have, but now they must bow the knee to the god of the MAGA Imperial Cult they have entered into.
Does this not reek of the Roman imperial cult of old? Worship whatever god you wish; but, when all the chips are down, the emperor and the religious cult around him will come first. The Religious Right has always been idolatrous, despite railing against idolatry, but the movement is now so openly engaged in the practice that the irony here should be lost on no one.
But the new MAGA Imperial Cult is still distinctly American in flavor, rooted in the same old things that past iterations of American empire have been rooted in: greed, white supremacy, and patriarchy. These ideologies cannot be understood apart from each other. Let’s briefly survey each of these dynamics before asking what this means for anyone trying to live with moral clarity in the face of widespread moral collapse.
Greed as religious truth
There’s a lot of anger and anxiety concerning the racism and sexism that is endemic in white evangelical and secular MAGA circles, and rightfully so. But underpinning both of these sins is an ever deeper one: greed. In the past, many of the wealthy —Religious Right and secular capitalists alike– at least tried to justify their greed with promises of job creation, private social programs, and the ability to cut big checks to nonprofits. Many of those promises were never carried out; but now, greed is blatantly held up as a virtue. There are three key areas this is easiest to see:
Prosperity religion and the wealthy’s demands for unfettered markets reinforcing each other.
Indifference by the MAGA wealthy toward the high cost of living and hollowing out of communities.
New levels of public-private corruption that enrich a few at the expense of others
First, prosperity religion has mixed with the wealthy’s demands for unfettered markets in a more flagrant way. In the Religious Right wing of the MAGA Imperial Cult, wealth and power are read as divine blessing and equated with righteousness. This is much more subtle and religious than the two-dimensional “prosperity gospel.” It shows up in a form of “stewardship” that seeks personal enrichment while aggressively avoiding even hints of justice and fairness. It can be seen when ordinary congregants fawn over big name evangelicals and their wealthy platforms, over and above those working alongside of the poor and oppressed with too few resources. It appears in private conservative religious schools —many of which were formed in the wake of school integration— that remain largely white to this day while keeping the rapidly diversifying world at bay from students, often at exorbitant cost to families.
This logic is nearly identical in the more secular elements of the MAGA Imperial Cult. Wealth is seen as evidence of intelligence, grit, and moral superiority. Corporate leaders who lay off thousands to squeeze out a few more bucks in profit are praised as visionaries. Tech billionaires promise that deregulation will lead to innovation, that more tax breaks for themselves will somehow benefit the working class, and that every act of extraction is a public service. When reality proves them wrong, as it often does, they shrug it off, or rage against those who point to simple facts and truth.
The marketplace is not a mere mechanism for either, but a sacred compass that even government should bow to, and attempts to regulate bad behavior in the market is condemned as heresy.
Second, greed has created a stunning indifference toward the high cost of living and the hollowing out of communities. One of the guiding ethics in the MAGA Imperial Cult is one of extreme entitlement. This has been playing out in churches, businesses, and other social circles for some time —easiest to see in gerontocracy— but it has now firmly taken hold of our governing institutions.
Both the Religious Right and secular right-wing have long pushed to defund social programs and drive up the national debt so the wealthy can get more tax breaks. Public schools are being defunded so private religious schools can grow richer. High costs of living are treated by wealthy churches and elite MAGA figures as an annoying complaint. Government aid is demonized while the wealthy are put on a pedestal, including some who’ve rigged the system to their benefit. For more and more people, higher education has become a debt trap and healthcare a commodity. The MAGA Imperial Cult doesn’t care.
This indifference can be seen in even more ways in evangelical churches. It is heard when congregants say the Church should be running social programs instead of the government, while making no effort to stand up alternative social programs, just advocacy to cut government services, allowing people to claim they are pro-life while in practice opposing healthcare for the poor, food for hungry children, and fair wages for workers. Older, sclerotic leaders steal prime years from the generations coming up behind them by staying in church office well past retirement or mental acuity —either as paid staff or as elders— and tweak internal systems to ensure nothing changes, all the while resisting true discipleship and processes that would allow for a smooth passing of the torch. The bulk of church funds stay inside the church, propping up internal programming that gives the illusion of community while strengthening ideological connections instead. Neighbors struggle with rising costs and social disconnection, often times knowing full well the local church is inward-looking and not living as Jesus did.
The people struggling under the weight of all this —the working class, the unhoused, the uninsured, and increasingly the lower-middle class— are ultimately blamed for the conditions they find themselves in. This is perhaps the greatest sign of indifference of all. If they worked harder, they’d be fine. If they trusted God, they wouldn’t be in that mess. Whether it’s cloaked in Scripture twisted out of context or trickle-down economics, the message is clear: you are what you produce, and if you produce nothing of value to me, you are nothing.
Third, new emerging public-private partnerships are little more than a hyper-corrupt patronage system. Today’s extreme wealthy —tech billionaires, venture capitalists, culture war profiteers— pour millions into MAGA candidates who will serve their interests, silence their critics, and prop up “traditional values." The end result is the funneling of power and funds for the public good into private hands. This allows the Religious Right –which has its own forms of patronage embedded in the evangelical consumer culture— to fit more comfortably into the broader MAGA Imperial Cult.
Elon Musk gained access to troves of sensitive private citizen and government data, while securing new business contracts even when he was still in the government. Other MAGA tech CEOs and billionaires have seen similar deals made. The IRS says churches can endorse political candidates, and the Justice Department has closed its investigation of the massive sexual abuse crisis in the Southern Baptist Convention. The list goes on; but, in the end, these are best understood as rewards doled out from the MAGA elite to different segments of the imperial cult.
All of this taken together, it is clear both the religious and secular wings look to the broader MAGA Imperial Cult to protect and increase their wealth and power. One blesses the wealthy in God’s name; the other assures them they are the heroes of human progress. Neither asks what justice requires, nor is concerned with who is left behind, as is most evident in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill that has become law. It’s not a coincidence that the same figures calling for Christian nationalism are also calling for lower corporate taxes, or that those running conservative Christian school networks and right-wing nonprofits are funded by the same billionaires lobbying against labor protections and regulations.
These once disparate movements are now less distinct from one another within a fusion of cultural resentment, religious rhetoric, and self-interest. Behind it all is a theology —secular and sacred— that preaches the same message to the base: You deserve more than what you have. Everyone else deserves what they get, or less. And justice is too expensive to be practical.
White supremacy as social order
If greed is the engine of the MAGA Imperial Cult, racism is one half of the social glue holding its different constituencies together. Personal bias is already well documented across the cult, but it is undergirded by a desired social order that elevates white racial culture and identity politics. With or without hateful words, this system helps keep power concentrated in the hands of cult leaders.
The racial politics of the MAGA Imperial Cult are built on grievance and denial. The story goes something like this: white Americans are the real victims, merely talking about diversity is a threat, and any challenge to the desired status quo is Marxist, socialist, anti-Christian, or un-American. Anyone to the left of MAGA, including staunch conservatives, are labeled as woke. This story isn’t being told on the margins; it’s being broadcast from campaign stages, statehouses, and pulpits.
The Religious Right in particular has long provided spiritual cover and myths for this racial order, which is now embraced by the rest of the MAGA Imperial Cult:
The myth of colorblindness, which refuses to see structural harm.
The myth of law and order, which often calls for ignoring actual laws and sowing disorder for desired ends.
The myth of a Christian nation, which masks the Religious Right’s desire for cultural dominance as divine will.
With these myths fused into the MAGA Imperial Cult, white evangelicals in particular have given themselves ample room to find comfort among some they otherwise would have severe issues with. It even provides them space to confront personal bias, but only in personal terms: a bad apple here or a moment of ignorance there.
All branches of the cult constantly traffic in these myths: from supporting voter suppression tools and anti-woke laws to anti-immigrant rhetoric and the largely manufactured panic over DEI, to even claims of a white genocide in the most extreme corners. Unleashed internationally, this shows up in taking a hatchet to USAID, which is already killing tens of thousands of people, and treating white Afrikaners as refugees. In many evangelical churches, missions is best understood as a kind of NIMBYism: go to another city or abroad to do so-called mission work, but refuse to allow the diverse people you’re preaching to anywhere near your own community.
What gives this racial system staying power is the religious cover that makes it feel holy. White evangelicalism has become a place where white supremacy doesn’t need to shout. It just needs to be spiritualized. The myths of the Religious Right provides that for all of MAGA.
Interestingly, and this is an important side note, the broader MAGA Imperial Cult now seems to have limited ability to do what the Religious Right often has not: actually bring people into the fold who aren’t white. For some in the more secular wings of the cult, as long as people bow to white culture and behave correctly in the confines of white identity politics, that’s enough. The Religious Right on its own still struggles to do this, but can now point to their position in the broader cult as a sign of progress.
Still, when all the chips are down, the story told is that some people are just more trustworthy, more American, more Christian, and more deserving of safety and success. Others will always be suspect, even dangerous, simply because of what they look like and where they were born. That this story still so often falls along racial lines should surprise no one.
Patriarchy as traditional righteousness
This is the other half of the social glue holding the MAGA Imperial Cult’s different constituencies together. It can also be the most difficult to understand. At first glance, the coming together of the Religious Right and different secular corners around patriarchy doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.
In the Religious Right, pastors preach biblical manhood as a sacred ideal, demanding that men lead with authority and women submit without question. Gender hierarchy often becomes the test of true orthodoxy, with complementarianism placed on the same doctrinal level of the most important Christian convictions, such as the divine and human nature of Jesus and the call to love our neighbors. Merely questioning the judgement of a male authority figure is branded as rebellious and a threat divine order.
Obviously this is a hierarchy ripe for all manner of abuse; but, even in harsher complementarian churches, there are often things said about men having the responsibility of protecting or guiding women. No doubt this is insulting and paternalistic, but the vocabulary used at least points to minimal recognition —even if it is never fully stated— that if this really is how things were designed to be, men at least owe women a certain degree of love and care.
At surface level this feels very different from secular MAGA, which blatantly treats women as trophies and conquests, often expecting them to play up the part. Donald Trump has bragged about sexually assaulting women and has been found liable for sexual abuse in a legitimate court of law. Allegations of abuse committed by other MAGA figures abound. Male Republican commentators often ogle at the way a woman looks before getting to her talents, intellect, and successes, and sometimes don’t even get there at all. Women in the upper echelons of the cult are expected to take up various supportive roles, from participating in Republican raunch culture –yes, that’s a thing– to pushing tradwife content, to having a certain look that skews plastic glam. (Side note: if a woman wants to look this way, I don’t really care, the issue is that this is how peak beauty is defined by men and that women who want to excel are expected to look this way to do so.) Tech CEOs and their secular allies not only shriek about declining birth rates, but talk openly about how they expect women to bear more children without asking why women aren’t. The Religious Right has jumped on that train, too. On the extreme end of this are figures like Elon Musk, who openly brags about impregnating multiple women and pushes porn onto children, even as those who publicly champion traditional family values fawn over him.
All of this is a far cry from the virtues of healthy Christian relationships, even ones that lean more conservative. One has to dig through a few layers to begin understanding that rhetoric is the only major difference between complementarianism and MAGA hyper-sexuality. It’s no secret that complementarian churches are rife with the same kinds of abuse found in secular MAGA circles, but they’re also teeming with very specific teachings in how gender hierarchy should work. It’s common for women in a complementarian church to be told they should always be available to meet their husband’s sexual needs and that being wife and mother is the greatest value a woman can aspire to. That true happiness can only be found in submission to her husband, and that she should always look and feel desirable while doing it all.
The connection here is men controlling women: how they dress, what they believe, and what they can and can’t do with their bodies. Purity culture and complementarianism —be it inside or outside of marriage— and Republican raunch culture are both ultimately about the subjugation of women; as such, they co-exist with ease. Because male dominance is the desired outcome, ideas of masculinity are weaponized to justify control and silence dissent in all realms of life, even beyond gender and sexuality, while cloaking selfishness and abuse in the language of faith and order.
Across the MAGA Imperial Cult —be it with evangelicals or their new secular allies— the emotional fragility, chest-thumping, and lust of men sits in the place of anything resembling a healthy masculinity. Male self-control is a vice, one that women are supposed to manage one way or the other with their own bodies, while seeing their own subjugation as righteousness, consequences be damned.
…..
Echoes of the old in the new
None of the above is the only way to understand this moment. It may not even be the most helpful —I don’t know— but understanding the longer story undergirding the MAGA Imperial Cult very much is. One chapter of that story in particular seems very helpful in this regard.
About 2.5 hours’ drive south of me is the small town of Indianola, Mississippi. This is in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, one of the subregions of the American South where the weight of a past imperial cult can still be felt: the Confederacy. In July 1954, nearly 90 years after the Civil War ended, a group of white residents gathered in Indianola. The Supreme Court had handed down the Brown v Board of Education decision two months earlier, abolishing legalized school segregation. Robert B. Patterson, the owner of a nearby plantation, had called the meeting in hopes of finding a way to oppose integration.
Together, they formed the first White Citizens' Council, a network of white supremacist and segregationist groups that quickly spread into at least 30 states. In the coming years these groups would battle the larger racial integration of public life using propaganda and intimidation, voter roll purges and restricted ballot box access, boycotts and other economic methods, and threats of violence and even outright violence on occasion. It was more or less the agenda of the Klan with superficially better table manners. Here’s Patterson, writing in 1956:
“Integration represents darkness, regimentation, totalitarianism, communism and destruction. Segregation represents the freedom to choose one’s associates, Americanism, State sovereignty and the survival of the white race. These two ideologies are now engaged in mortal conflict and only one can survive.”
Do these words not echo loudly today? Some louder than others perhaps, but do they not echo all the same?
Maybe it’s because I live in Tennessee; but, to me at least, the closest thing in our own history to this imperial cult we face today seems to be Confederacy in all its forms. There may be no secession papers, cannons, and plantations today, but Patterson tells us something important: the Confederacy is as much an ideology propping up broken religion and a morally bankrupt culture as it was once a geographic area dominated by an exploitative political system and glorified military leaders. Union troops obliterated many of the physical manifestations of that Confederacy —and much of the American South along the way— but nothing survives invading armies more easily than ideology. And so, the Confederacy endured, morphing into new forms through the failure of Reconstruction and the KKK, White Citizens' Councils and Jim Crow and Civil Rights, statues and monuments, and into today.
The MAGA Imperial Cult often feels like another iteration of the Confederacy because it is. It now controls the levers of government, and it cannot be defeated with invading armies, hails of cannon fire, and bold proclamations. This cult protects itself using the same legal rights that you and I cherish: the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, and assembly. Religion harbors hatred. Speech encourages greed and intimidates those who stand in their way. The press publishes truths inconvenient to the cult, so they make their own media outlets to spew confusion and deceit. Leaders and members alike assemble freely to make new plans, many that will lead to more division and disorder, in ways not so different than those white residents of Indianola, MS did decades ago, or the Religious Right in their churches after that.
Closing Thoughts
History never happens in a vacuum. Decades ago, the Religious Right declared a culture war on secularism and any form of civic religion that was to their left, even though there was little to their right. Today, the new MAGA Imperial Cult has swallowed up a Religious Right eager to the bow knee and attacks anyone who refuses to surrender. This new religion is not Christian in the biblical sense, but a religion of identity, blood, and soil. It’s the Religion of Confederacy. It’s the Religion of Empire.
This cult feeds on itself, and in doing so, further radicalizes itself. It's a closed loop system of grievance rooted in power, shame paired to contradictory justifications, and cruelty masquerading as righteousness. The statistical is matched by the anecdotal. We all know people — neighbors, church folk, even family — who just fifteen years ago were kind and thoughtful conservatives. Now they are unrecognizable, and not because their ideology or theology lurched into the extreme. In many cases their very identities have changed and are still changing, driven by propaganda, fear, algorithms they don’t see, and the new permission structure created by the cult they worship in.
Shaming people for their participation in this and calling out hypocrisy won’t work. There are few shared values to appeal to, and in some cases none at all. Civility won’t cut through when transgressive malevolence is the point. Scripture won’t make a difference because it has already been misinterpreted and weaponized as the Gospel. Fact checks fail because evidence and reason don’t matter. This is about complete allegiance to an old story, to an old moral vision and system in a dark new form. Once someone’s wrapped up in it, they won’t be argued out of it, because they don’t want to be argued out of it. Only catastrophe internal to the cult cracks opens a window to their freedom.
That resistance to love and reason is deeply religious, spiritual even. When the Apostle Paul wrote “for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” (Ephesians 6:12) I can’t help but think this style of cult is one of the things he had in mind. What we’re confronting is a dark moral order attempting to redefine holiness in its own image. While I still believe no human being is out of the reach of God’s love and mercy, the past several years have made me believe even more that some people can be out of the reach of other human beings.
So what we do? If ideology easily survives invading armies, then healthy resistance is just as much a function of the mind and heart as it is where one physically places themselves. I don’t think we have any specific answers for this moment, just the deeper ones that span time itself: moral conviction and clarity, imagination, and courage. The more specific answers we need will be found here, with time, and the weight of sacrifice.
The most obvious weak point that is easiest to exploit in the MAGA Imperial Cult is to tell the truth about ourselves, plainly and directly. Most MAGA religious beliefs begin with a blatant lie about what people they hate actually think and do, be they other Christians —including conservative ones— or liberals, progressives, moderates, conservatives…anyone else. Standing up and declaring this cult is lying about what we actually think, hope, and believe is important, as is pointing to real moments in our lives when we lived it all out. Lies and deceit can still be broken by naked truth.
As for the Christian who wants to tap into deeper truths, does not the Gospel shine brightest in dark moments? Not the hollow gospel of cult and exclusion, but the actual Gospel of Jesus Christ — the one who blessed the poor, disrupted the powerful, and tore down dividing walls, even death itself. Our hope is not in winning a culture war. Our hope is in Christ, who came to end all wars, who was never neutral in the face of injustice, and who never will be.
The Gospel is no mere platitude, but a way of living. Perhaps the best thing we can all do right now is simply live it out as best we can wherever we find ourselves. Hold the line where we find ourselves. Resist corruption and moral decay where we find ourselves, especially in our churches. In a world so determined to harden hearts, faithfulness can be an act of holy rebellion.
About Me
I explore faith, church culture, and formation in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything on this site is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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