Next week, when Donald Trump strokes a Bible and requests the help of God as president, even a large share of his own fans will doubt that he means either gesture. Thirty-eight per cent of them, as well as most Americans in general, have him down as “not too” or “not at all” religious. I won’t presume to know the inner life of a stranger. But as far as the public is concerned, the US has had, and is about to have again, a leader who is at least atheist-adjacent. Within my lifetime, this was unthinkable.
It is worth pausing to mark little liberal wins, such as the creeping secularisation of the most important country on Earth. Seventy per cent of Americans were members of a place of worship as recently as the millennium. Now fewer than half are. The religious right, while still a force, as Dobbs showed, has to be more covert and euphemistic than it was under Reagan or either Bush. Trump keeps the agents of God around him, no doubt. But on what a tellingly short leash.