Jamie Horowitz

After recovering from cataclysmic but largely unfulfilled projections of how their populations would be decimated by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, African countries have gradually relaxed restrictions and continue to re-evaluate the public health risks. Following months of closure, universities and institutions of higher learning across sub-Saharan Africa re-opened.

For the past three years, I have taught a course entitled “#BlackLivesMatter and Religion.” The course is popular: I am a pretty good teacher, so the students are always engaged and, by the time we are done, they can articulate the religious dimensions of antiblackness, particularly when it comes to state-sanctioned violence. Many students—quite a few of whom are black women—find or strengthen their voices.

Trumpism has been called many things—populism, fascism, and authoritarianism, for instance. I interpret it somewhat differently, namely, as a “secularized version of religious nationalism.” How else to explain the overwhelming support of white evangelicals for a manifestly un-Christian man? The fact that conservative white evangelicals are Donald Trump’s real political “base”?