(RNS) — It is a very good thing that no violence has occurred this Jan. 6th as the 2024 presidential election results are certified by Congress. A peaceful transfer of power, which recognizes the legitimacy of free and fair elections regardless of the winner, is a central pillar on which democratic life is built. Four years ago, this pillar was nearly toppled by a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump who wished to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump’s supporters called the 2020 election “stolen” and were willing to “Stop the Steal” by any means necessary, including violence. But alleged (and widely disproven) voter fraud was never the real source of the supposed theft. If we take the insurrectionists’ words at the Capitol that day seriously, they viewed the election as stolen because the candidate chosen by the majority of white Christians — those the insurrectionists framed as “real Americans” — had lost.
The same conspiratorial voices who had fanned the flames of “Stop the Steal” conspiracies in 2020 were poised to do so again in 2024 should their chosen candidate (Trump) lose again. But a curious thing happened when Trump won. We heard hardly a peep about fraudulent ballots or stolen elections. Suddenly, the Make America Great Again movement seemed to trust elections again.
This peace reveals a darker truth. The right’s support for democratic institutions like elections has always been contingent. Specifically, it has been contingent upon those institutions maintaining a traditional social hierarchy.
For the past decade, large shares of white Christians have lamented the demographic and social shifts that have made them a minority in “their own country.” Trump rose to power, in part, by promising this group that he would return them to a position of power and privilege in a country they believe God intended for them to rule.
The MAGA movement has coalesced around this political theology of hierarchy, which sanctifies a social order resting on hierarchies between social groups—racial, religious, gendered and moral. Moreover, it asserts that the nation’s very survival depends on the maintenance of this hierarchical social order in which conservative white Christian men are at the top.
But one need not feel invested in all of these forms of hierarchy in order to embrace the general package Trump offers, or to feel anxi