American revival movements have always contained two competing impulses: the belief that all people possess equal moral worth before God, and the belief that society must be disciplined into righteousness whether it wants to be or not. That tension runs throughout the history of American Christianity. It shaped the First and Second Great Awakenings, fueled both abolitionism and moral policing, and inspired democratic reform movements—all while simultaneously justifying social hierarchy and coercion. If you’re wondering how the MAGA movement can speak constantly in the language of Christianity while bearing intense hostility to many traditional Christian virtues themselves, we can look to this history, which is now repeating itself.

There has been a great deal of discussion on the right in recent years about whether the United States is experiencing some kind of new religious revival. Church attendance remains historically low by many measures, most notably in the mainline churches that have historically fostered religious moderation and created communities of believers from across the political spectrum. That said, religious identity is also increasingly central to American political conflict. Christianity, particularly conservative Christianity, often functions as a marker of political and cultural belonging on the American right. The result is a society that may be becoming less religious overall while simultaneously becoming more religiously polarized. To understand this moment, it helps to revisit the Great Awakenings in U.S. history, when Americans renegotiated the meaning of freedom, morality, and identity on a national scale.

The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s challenged older religious hierarchies by emphasizing direct spiritual experience and personal conversion. Revivalist preachers like George Whitefield insisted that ordinary people could experience God directly without relying on established church authority. These ideas also intensified preachers’ use of emotionalism and encouraged suspicion toward institutional authority that would echo throughout American history. The emphasis on inward spiritual experience eventually fed into later forms of American individualism, including nineteenth-century Transcendentalism and the broader tendency to treat authenticity and inner conviction as sources of moral authority.

But it was the Second Great Awakening, stretching roughly from the 1790s through the 1830s, that most profoundly shaped American political culture. Massive revival meetings swept across the early republic, with Evangelical Protestantism rapidly expanding on the frontier and in growing northern cities. Preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney taught that both individuals and society itself could be morally transformed.

Critically, revivalists during this period did not generally understand freedom in the modern liberal sense of autonomy or self-expression. Instead, true freedom was liberation from sin. A truly free person was not simply someone left alone by the state or society, but someone morally regenerated and capable of living according to God’s order free from vice. This meant that many revivalists saw moral discipline not as a restriction on liberty but as its fulfillment. To these revivalists, the purpose of society and government was to guide people toward spiritual purity.

That outlook fueled some of the most important reform movements in American history. Evangelical activism contributed to abolitionism, prison reform, women’s rights, public education campaigns, and more. Many abolitionists viewed slavery not simply as an economic or political evil but as a profound moral sin incompatible with Christian teachings about the equal worth of souls before God.

Yet the same worldview also produced deeply coercive impulses. “Moral reform” often looked like regulating alcohol consumption, policing sexuality, suppressing vice, enforcing Sabbath observance, and attempting to discipline immigrants, Catholics, and the poor into a particular vision of respectable Protestant life. Temperance campaigns frequently blurred into broader efforts at social control and anti-Catholic nativism. Southern revivalists, meanwhile, adapted the language of Christian order and hierarchy into defenses of slavery itself.

The Second Great Awakening was a diffuse, leaderless movement, and was never ideologically uniform. It contained democratic and authoritarian tendencies simultaneously, with universal moral aspirations alongside intense paternalism and social discipline. But across the movement, its conception of freedom remained fundamentally different from today’s ideal of individual autonomy. Revivalists generally believed that liberty required moral formation because people “enslaved” to vice, sin, and temptation were not truly free at all.

That tension has never disappeared from American political culture, but MAGA politics have fueled a particularly revealing transformation. The modern religious right has enthusiastically embraced the coercive side of revivalism while weakening or abandoning many of the universal moral commitments that once accompanied it. What remains is a politics deeply concerned with order, hierarchy, discipline, punishment, and cultural conformity but detached from the expansive reform movements that once gave revivalist Christianity much of its moral force.

This helps explain the right’s growing hostility toward virtues that Christianity itself has historically treated as central moral obligations. Compassion for migrants, concern for the poor, humility, mercy, and care for strangers are now portrayed by segments of the right not as virtues but as civilizational liabilities in a global, moral war. The rise of phrases like “toxic empathy” is revealing here. In some right-wing circles, empathy itself is increasingly framed as a form of weakness that prevents societies from enforcing borders, punishing enemies, maintaining hierarchy, or defending national identity. But Christian teachings focus on mercy and compassion precisely because they transcend tribe, nationality, and worldly status. The obligation to care for the vulnerable is supposed to apply even to outsiders and enemies.

See Vice President JD Vance’s feud with Pope Leo XIV for an illuminating example. For Pope Leo, Christian ethics impose universal obligations to care for migrants and the poor as a core part of Christian moral teaching. To conservative Catholic convert Vance though, the Pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology” with which the right disagrees. For much of the nationalist right, Christianity is more of a civilizational identity tied to borders, social cohesion, and cultural inheritance that fits with their obsession with the supremacy of “the West.”

This is one reason contemporary right-wing Christianity often feels disconnected from the teachings it claims to defend. The language of sin, order, authority, and moral decline that would be familiar to a nineteenth-century revivalist remains central, but the moral obligations that inspired progress during the Second Great Awakening are instead seen as weaknesses.

This does not mean MAGA Christianity is somehow fake Christianity or entirely alien to American religious history. The coercive and exclusionary tendencies now visible on the right were always present within parts of American revivalism. The same religious culture that fueled abolitionism also fueled paternalistic moral regulation, anti-Catholicism, and defenses of hierarchy, but the balance has shifted. Earlier revival movements, for all their flaws, generally paired moral discipline with some broader universal vision of human redemption or social transformation. They sought not only to restore order but to redeem society. Contemporary religious nationalism is far narrower and more defensive, with its energy directed toward protecting an embattled cultural identity and recovering what it believes to be a lost social order.

This reflects a consequential reimagination of how freedom itself is understood. Earlier revivalists believed freedom required moral discipline because they understood liberty as liberation from sin. Modern liberalism, by contrast, tends to define freedom more as autonomy and self-determination. MAGA Christianity occupies an unstable position between these traditions that rejects liberal permissiveness and expressive individualism along with the universal moral obligations that accompanied older Christian visions of moral order.

This helps explain supposedly devout Christians in the Trump administration gleefully celebrating the U.S. military murdering fishermen in the Caribbean and leveling population centers in Iran. It also helps explain the administration’s embrace of mass deportation policies that treat migrants and asylum seekers not as human beings deserving dignity and compassion, but as threats to be expelled and punished. It shows why a Supreme Court dominated by right-wing Christians continuously finds freedom of religion grounds for overturning inclusive policies and essentially creating a Christian right to discriminate against people simply exercising their personal autonomy.

This shift may ultimately prove self-defeating even on religious terms. Historically, Christianity has often expanded when it presented itself as morally universal, capable of transcending tribe, nationality, and hierarchy. When religion becomes tightly fused to partisan identity and cultural resentment, it risks reducing itself to an instrument of political power rather than a source of moral authority. It is difficult to deny that this kind of identity and power politics is exactly what MAGA has embraced.

The American right increasingly speaks in the language of religious revival while simultaneously narrowing the moral scope of revivalist Christianity itself. Its version of Christianity centers cultural identity, hierarchy, discipline, and exclusion far more than moral obligation or social redemption. In this framework, conducting violent mass deportations, enforcing conformity, and legitimizing undemocratic political power are actually Christian virtues. And that may ultimately be the clearest sign that this is not a new Great Awakening at all, but the evolution of revivalist religion to support the country’s ongoing reversion to more explicitly authoritarian politics.