The US attorney general William Barr’s speech at the University of Notre Dame last week has been widely decried by liberal commentators for violating the separation between church and state. In his speech, Barr portrayed “secularists” as enemies of American democracy. Yet few seem to have grasped the deeper political significance of Barr’s remarks.

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On their face, none of Barr’s claims appear particularly new. The idea that “militant secularism” undermines the moral fabric of society, leading to all sorts of “social pathologies,” and the idea that “free government” requires the “moral discipline” afforded by religious belief, have been central tenets of official Catholic doctrine for at least a century and a half.

What is more original – and troubling – is the political use the US’s chief law-enforcement officer has made of these traditional religious themes. By subtly reworking some of the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine, he has constructed a new political theology in the service of Trumpism – one which aims to offer conservative Christians a set of principled, not just pragmatic, reasons for supporting the current US administration.

Three intellectual moves define this new political theology. First, by describing “secularists” as engaged in an “unremitting assault on religion and traditional values”, Barr presented an American majority group (self-identified Christians) as a victimized social group. This feeds into Trump’s broader appropriation of the logic of identity politics, which has converted it into a tool for defending the interests of previously dominant social groups by tapping into anxieties about “cultural replacement”.

Second, by establishing an equivalence between morality and religion, and between religion and Christianity (or, as he sometimes also put it, “Judaeo-Christian values”), Barr excluded two key social groups from the remit of those he deemed capable of “free government”: non-believers and non-Christians. For anyone keyed into the mainstays of Trump’s discourse, it should be clear who is here being stigmatized as a “threat”, not just for religion but for American freedom in general: urban elites and recent immigrants. Take these two groups out and you have a pretty good cross-section of Trump’s electorate.

Finally, by talking of a “wreckage of the family”, “record levels of depression and mental illness” and “an increase in senseless violence”, Barr also echoed the idea of an “American carnage” employed by Trump during his inaugural address to present himself as a providentially ordained “savior” called upon to re-establish “order” and “civility”.

Although Trump – a twice-divorced former pro-choicer – might seem an unlikely champion for this religious mission, Barr also implicitly appealed to the biblical theme of the “imperfect vessel”, which has been widely used by evangelical Christians to justify their support for the current president. While jokingly telling the story of the rocambolesque way in which Trump informed him about his nomination, he also made sure to reassure the audience that: “As long as I am attorney general, the Department of Justice will be at the forefront of [the] fight for the most cherished of our liberties: the freedom to live according to our faith.”

Faced with this sweeping set of theologico-political moves, the objection that Barr’s speech violated the principle of separation of church and state appears rather toothless, since it merely reaffirms an article of liberal faith against a conservative theology that doesn’t recognize any of its premises.

After all, Barr himself shrewdly alluded to the fact that there is a plausible reading of the “non-establishment” clause of the American constitution, which suggests that the matter should simply be left for states to legislate upon, since several states still had established religions at the time the first amendment was written. He also mentioned that many of the framers of the constitution explicitly believed that: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people; it is wholly inadequate for the government of any other”, as John Adams put it.

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A more powerful retort to Barr’s speech would therefore be to point out that it is ultimately in contradiction with itself, since it runs counter to other key themes of Catholic and – more broadly – Christian theology. Most notably, the fact that Christianity was never intended to function as an exclusive identity, marking out the boundaries between those deemed fit for “free government” and those that aren’t. On the contrary, the core of the Christian message is one of universal inclusion.

This is precisely the meaning of the New Testament’s affirmation that: “There is neither Jew nor gentile, neither slave nor free, nor male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The same point was also recently reiterated by Pope Francis when he reminded believers that “Catholicity” literally means “universality”, inferring from it that: “The church shows her catholicity by … liv[ing] in solidarity with all of humanity, and never closed in on ourselves.”

Recovering this universalist core of the Christian message is essential to breaking the unholy alliance between religious conservatism and Trump’s brand of authoritarian nationalism. Unless Trump’s opponents are able to persuade the religious right that there is something profoundly anti-Christian in the political theology of Trumpism, it seems pretty unlikely that the next presidential election will yield a result different from the previous one.