Yes and no

As is typically the case, Andrew Sullivan is on to something:

Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning.

Damn right. But there's more:

For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.

Ask Kevin Hart, just the latest comedian to come a cropper. There's more:

And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.

But for a guy who can be as spot-on in his observations as these are, he still misreads other things in the very same essay. He starts out well, to wit:

So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction. And religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time. And like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.

Then he gets to Trump and steers into the ditch:

Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. 

How is that, Andrew?

Yes, many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal. They have turned to idols — including their blasphemous belief in America as God’s chosen country. They have embraced wealth and nationalism as core goods, two ideas utterly anathema to Christ. They are indifferent to the destruction of the creation they say they believe God made. And because their faith is unmoored but their religious impulse is strong, they seek a replacement for religion. This is why they could suddenly rally to a cult called Trump. He may be the least Christian person in America, but his persona met the religious need their own faiths had ceased to provide. The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.

This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either. And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do.

It's important to define who "they" are. The Trump supporters I know don't view him as a demigod at all; his popularity is contingent on his message, which is less about a search for meaning than about calling out the steady, ever-ratcheting imposition of the desires of those in power and trying to reverse the ratcheting. There is no Trump in Europe, but the yellow vests are on the scene for many of the same reasons the MAGA hats are on display in the United States. The Robert Muellers and James Comeys and Amy Klobuchars of the world may not arrive in Washington from the same locales, but they have the same mindset and the same self-appointed sense of being a surety, along with the overweening self-regard of the Pharisees, if you want to take a historical-religious tack on the matter. Macron and Trudeau are of the same caste.

But that last sentence of Sullivan is worth note: And what’s interesting is how support for Trump is greater among those who do not regularly attend church than among those who do. Perhaps those are the cultists Sullivan believes he sees, but that statement suggests he needs to dig a little deeper. Yes, if  you were to survey a regular churchgoer at St. Joan of Arc, or at any number of dessicated mainline Protestant churches in town, it would be difficult to find a Trump supporter. But if you expect fidelity to that ol' time religion in such precincts, you'll not find it. Jesus is just all right with them, but He's not the center of things. And while believers keep their focus on eternal salvation, they aren't necessarily ignoring the world they inhabit right now.

As always, Sullivan can be a fascinating read. He's worth a click. But he's not necessarily the go-to for taxonomy.