Theology of Trumpism and the Myth of American Paradise | Maxim Medovarov

When we correctly perceive the current global landscape as a confrontation between traditional civilizations—with their revived doctrines of sacred authority (Iran, Russia, China, and to some extent India and Turkey)—and a doctrinally anti-traditional coalition led by a Trumpist United States, several non-trivial questions regarding the latter's political ideology arise. 

 

» Our Glorious LORD, will have an HOLY CITY in AMERICA; a City, the STREET whereof will be Pure GOLD. «

Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather, preaching to the Massachusetts General Assembly, 1709.

Indeed, under Trump, a sharp leap has been taken from legacy Republicanism toward an Antichrist-like charismatic pseudo-monarchy. Trump proclaims himself an absolute ruler sent from above by God (often self-depicted in propaganda in the guise of an Emperor), while the "Holy Roller" pastors surrounding him—figures like Paula White and Mark Burns—provide the theological justification, solemnly declaring that "to be against Trump is to be against God.

Meanwhile, Trumpist theology is a logical derivation of Puritanism compounded by Kantian Enlightenment (Trump’s German ancestry is no coincidence here). Of course, many Protestants reject Trumpism; however, we are discussing not the only possible conclusion, but a specific trajectory of Puritan-Calvinist theology that was repackaged in the 18th century within the secular shell of the cult of technical progress (a concept the original Puritans lacked).

This explains Trump’s belief in his own status as "divinely chosen," his brazen claims to the lands of civilizations foreign to the US (primarily Catholic Latin America—the Monroe Doctrine is an absurdity from any perspective other than Puritan theology), his profound contempt for Europe, and his obsession with technocracy and industrial power. This fixation has no basis in reality and exists only in the theologically inflamed minds of the "madman" Trump, the "addict" Musk, the "sectarian-alcoholic" Hegseth, and their ilk.

 

To adequately grasp this subject, one must look to the classics of traditionalist thought. Fortunately, such an answer on Puritan American Messianism was written over half a century ago by Mircea Eliade [in Chapter 6 of "The Quest. History and Meaning in Religion."]. We now begin publishing it here in ten short excerpts—for now, without commentary, which we will provide at the very end.  

The Search for the Terrestrial Paradise

Christopher Columbus had no doubt that he was approaching the terrestrial Paradise. He thought that the cold currents he met in the Gulf of Paria had their origin in the four rivers that water the Garden of Eden. For Columbus the search for the terrestrial Paradise was not a chimera. The great navigator attached an eschatological meaning to his geographic discoveries. The New World was not simply a new continent where the Christian message could be further propagated. The very fact of its discovery had an eschatological weight. Columbus was certain that the prophecy concerning the propagation of the Gospel throughout the world was to be fulfilled before the end of the world. Consequently the end of the world was near. 

In his "Book of Prophecies," Columbus maintained that this event—the end of the world—would be preceded by the conquest of the new continent, the conversion of the heathen, and the destruction of the Antichrist. He assigned himself a major role in this grand historical and cosmic drama. In a letter to Prince Yago, Columbus wrote: "God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of Saint John, after having spoken of it through the mouth of Isaiah; and he showed me the spot where to find it."

The transoceanic expeditions and the geographic discoveries that so radically changed the face of Western Europe took place in this messianic and apocalyptic atmosphere. All Europe believed in a near regeneration of the world, although the reasons and the grounds for this regeneration were different and even contradictory.

The colonization of the two Americas began under an eschatological sign: people believed that the time had come for a renewal of the Christian world, and that this was to be realized either in the form of a terrestrial Paradise or, at least, as a resumption of sacred history, as a repetition of the miraculous events narrated in the Bible. This is why the literature of the period, as well as the sermons, memoirs, and correspondence, is full of paradisiacal and eschatological allusions. The English, for example, believed that the colonization of America continued and completed the sacred history begun at the dawn of the Reformation.

The progress toward the West was considered the triumphal march of Wisdom and of the True Religion from the East to the West. For some time past Protestant theologians had been inclined to associate the West with moral and spiritual progress. Some of them even moved the "Ark of Abraham" to England. As the Anglican theologian William Crashaw wrote, "The God of Israel... is the God of England." In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert was sure that if England had come into possession of such "vast and excellent" territories, it was because the word of God, as a religion which always followed the movement of the sun from the East to the West, had now come to the West where "in all probability it must stay."
 

Solar Symbolism

This is a theme often met with in English literature of the period. The theologian Thomas Burnet wrote in his "Archaeologiae" (1692): "As the sun, so does science move from East to West, where we have already for some time enjoyed its light." Bishop Berkeley begins a famous poem with the line: "Westward the course of empire takes its way..." clearly alluding to solar analogies to exalt the spiritual role of England.

Berkeley was only following a tradition which was already more than two centuries old. Indeed, the Egyptian alchemical teachings and solar symbolism, made popular by Marsilio Ficino and the Italian humanists, had come into fashion again after the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. For their contemporaries these discoveries were above all a proof of the triumph of the sun and of heliocentrism. Recent researches have brought to light the religious implications of Renaissance astronomy and cosmology, which for a long time remained hidden and camouflaged.

For the contemporaries of Copernicus and Galileo, heliocentrism was more than a scientific theory: it was the victory of solar symbolism over medieval science, that is to say, the revenge of the Hermetic tradition—venerated as preceding Moses, Orpheus, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, and Plato—over the provincialism of the medieval Church. Renaissance solar symbolism is too complex for us to discuss here. It is sufficient to note how persistently the solar analogies appear in the authors who exalt the religious meaning of the colonization of the New World.

The first English settlers in America considered themselves to be the elect of Providence, called to establish a "City upon a Hill." This was to be an example of true reform for all Europe. They were following the sun to the Far West, miraculously continuing the traditional migration of culture from East to West. They saw a sign of Divine Providence in the fact that America had remained hidden from the eyes of Europeans until the time of the Reformation. The first pioneers did not doubt that the final drama of moral regeneration and of universal salvation would begin with them, since it was they, the first settlers, who followed the sun in its movement toward the paradisiacal gardens of the West. As the Anglican poet George Herbert wrote in his poem "The Church Militant": "Religion stands tip-toe in our land Ready to pass to the American strand."

And this American strand, as we have seen and shall see again, appeared to the settlers as the image of Paradise. Ulrich Hugwald had prophesied that after the discovery of America mankind would return "to Christ, to Nature, to Paradise."

The New Jerusalem

The United States, more than any other modern nation, is a product of the Protestant Reformation seeking a terrestrial Paradise in which to complete the reform of the Church. Reform and the return to the terrestrial Paradise were linked in the minds of many writers from Heinrich Bullinger to Charles Dumoulin. For these theologians, reform had accelerated the arrival of the great day of paradisiacal bliss. It is significant that the millenarian theme gained great popularity shortly before the colonization of America and Cromwell's Revolution. It is not surprising that the religious doctrine according to which America was chosen by God from among all the nations for the second coming of Christ became the most popular here.

The Millennium, according to this doctrine, although spiritual in essence, was to be accompanied by a paradisiacal transformation of the earth, which would be the external symbol of internal perfection. As the eminent American Puritan Increase Mather, Rector of Harvard University from 1685 to 1701, wrote: "When the Kingdom of Christ fills the whole earth, this earth will be restored to its paradisiacal state."

The American Paradise

For some of the pioneers certain states already represented Paradise. When John Smith visited the coast of New England in 1614, he compared it to Eden: "Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for mans habitation... we chanced to arrive in a Country as God made it." George Alsop describes Maryland as the only place in the world that resembles "the terrestrial Paradise." These trees, plants, fruits, flowers speak to us like "the Hieroglyphicks of our first Adamitive creation." Another writer discovered "the future Eden" in Georgia, a state having the same climate as Palestine: "This blessed Canaan is chosen by God to bless the labor of his favorite people." For Edward Johnson, Massachusetts is the place "where the Lord has created a new heaven and a new earth." The Boston Puritan John Cotton, for his part, tells those who are about to leave England for Massachusetts: "You have the blessing of God by a holy Charter given to Adam and his posterity in Paradise."

But all this reflects only one aspect of the millenarian experience of the American pioneers. For many other emigrants the New World appeared as a "wilderness" inhabited by demonic beings. This, however, did not dampen their eschatological exaltation, for they heard daily in the sermons that the hardships they were suffering were no more than a moral and spiritual trial before reaching the promised terrestrial Paradise. The pioneers compared themselves to the Israelites crossing the Red Sea; their life in England was a sort of Egyptian bondage. After the terrible trial of the wilderness, they would enter the land of Canaan. As Cotton Mather wrote, "the wilderness which we are passing through to the promised Land is all over fill’d with fiery flying serpents."

Labor and the Idea of Progress

But then a new idea was born: the New Jerusalem would be, to a certain extent, the result of labor. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) thought that it was labor that would transform New England into a sort of "paradise on earth." We see how gradually the millenarianism of the pioneers approached the idea of progress. In the first stage the paradisiacal life was made to depend on the earthly possibilities available to the inhabitants of the New World. During the next stage the eschatological tension decreased; the expectation of that collapse, of that decline of life and spirit which was to precede the "Last Days," finally disappeared, giving way to the idea of a gradual and continuous improvement.

But before crystallizing into the idea of progress so characteristic of Americans, the millenarianism of the first settlers underwent many other transformations. The first major crisis of this Puritan eschatology was brought about by the struggle between the European powers for the colonial Empire. Rome and the Catholic countries were perceived as the incarnation of the Antichrist—with whose death the arrival of the future Kingdom of God was linked. At one point the dominant theme of English literature was this: the capture of America by the Antichrist, threatening to destroy the hope of the final victory of Christ. For John Winthrop the first duty of New England was to "raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits are trying to establish in that country." Other authors maintained that before the arrival of the Catholics the New World had been a true paradise.

Obviously the rivalry of the European states in the struggle for influence in the transatlantic empire was largely economic in character. But it was sharpened by an almost Manichaean eschatology: everything was apparently reduced to a conflict between Good and Evil. Protestant authors spoke of the threat to the English colonies from France and Spain, which were trying to establish a "new Babylonian hierarchy" or an "Egyptian slavery." France and Spain appeared as tyrants, as slaves of the Antichrist. Catholic Europe appeared in their eyes as a fallen world, as a Hell, in sharp contrast with the Paradise of the New World. The opposition between "Heaven and Europe" was often perceived as the opposition between "Heaven and Hell." The trials sent to the first settlers in the "wilderness" of America had as their main purpose the redemption of the carnal sins of the pagan Old World.
 

Return to Primitive Christianity

Since the conflict between Good and Evil was embodied for the first settlers in the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism, England remained, as it were, outside the battle. But after 1640 tension began to arise between the colonists and the mother country. In the eyes of the perfectionists of the colonies, the English Reformation was flawed. And worse still: the religious practice of England was considered the work of the Antichrist. In the apocalyptic imagination of the colonists, England took the place of Rome. And as a direct consequence of this substitution, the view arose that the mission of the first settlers—as a chosen people—was not to continue an old tradition of religious activity, but to build something entirely new. Expecting a regeneration far from the European Hell, the pioneers of the New World already saw themselves as the discoverers of the final stage of History. In 1647 John Eliot, the apostle of the Indians, announced the "dawn, or even the rising of the Sun of the Gospel in New England."

Such statements indicated a deep break with the European past. It should be noted that this gap appeared long before the Revolution and the establishment of American independence. In 1646 New England considered itself a free State, and not at all a "colony or part of England." There were primarily religious reasons for this awareness of autonomy. Cotton Mather expected a return to the early days of Christianity on the soil of New England. "The first time," he wrote, "was a time of a Golden Age. To return to it one must become a Protestant and, I dare add, a Puritan." This return to the Golden Age of primitive Christianity was to transform the earth. As Increase Mather maintained, the return of the primitive church would turn the earth into a paradise.

The break with England and the European past deepened as the colonists began to believe in their mission, in the fact that they were preparing the millennium through a return to the virtues of the primitive church. For the Puritans the chief Christian virtue was simplicity and moderation in life. Conversely, intelligence, culture, erudition, good taste, and luxury were considered the work of the Devil. John Cotton wrote: "The more learned and witty you be, the more fit to act for Satan." Already the complex of superiority characteristic of the pioneers and missionaries of the Frontier began to be formed. Such a return to primitive Christianity, which was to restore paradise on earth, implied both a contempt for the erudition of the Jesuits and a criticism of the English aristocracy—essentially educated, elegant, refined, and complicated, clothed with authority and power. Extravagance and luxury in dress became "gentlemanly" sins par excellence. In his book Nathaniel Ward contrasted the simple life and moral superiority of the colonists with the corrupt manners of England and derived from this contrast a proof of the approach of the former to the paradisiacal state of the primitive church.

The Complex of Superiority

The discoverers of America asserted their superiority over the English, while admitting at the same time their backwardness as far as dress and culture were concerned. In the opinion of Charles L. Sanford, it is primarily in the activities of the frontier missionaries that the origins of the American complex of superiority are to be sought—a complex manifested both in foreign policy and in the enthusiastic desire to spread the "American way of life" over the whole planet. Religious symbolism blossomed around the Frontier and contributed to the preservation of the eschatology of the discoverers until the nineteenth century.

The impenetrable forests, the wilderness of the boundless plains, the bliss of rural life were contrasted with the vices and sins of the city. A new idea arose: the American paradise was invaded by demonic forces coming from urbanized Europe. The criticism of the aristocracy, luxury, and culture was reflected in the criticism of cities and urban life. The great "revival" religious movements began on the Frontier and reached the cities only much later. And in the cities themselves these movements were more popular among the poor than among the richer and more educated classes. The main idea was that the cause of religious decay was urban vice, especially drinking and luxury, which were inherent in the aristocracy of Europe, since it was obvious that hell was—and for a long time remained—the "way and image of life of Europe."

Religious Origins of the "American Way of Life"

But, as we have said, eschatological millenarianism and the expectation of a terrestrial Paradise eventually underwent a radical secularization. The most noticeable results of this transformation were the myth of progress and the cult of novelty and youth. However, even behind their clearly expressed secularized form, one can guess the religious enthusiasm of the ancestors and the eschatological expectations that so inspired previous generations. Like the first colonists, the emigrants who arrived from Europe later rushed to America as to a Country where they could be born again and start a new life.

The "novelty" which has fascinated Americans at all times, even down to the present day, is an expression of a desire that has a religious structure. In "novelty" there is a hope of regeneration, an expectation of a new life. New England, New York, New Haven—all these names express not only nostalgia for the homeland left behind, but above all the hope that life in these new cities and on these new lands will discover other dimensions. And not only life: everything on this continent, perceived as a terrestrial Paradise, must be greater, more beautiful, more powerful. In New England, "which looks like the Garden of Eden," the partridges are so fat they can no longer fly, and the turkeys are as large as sheep. This desire for the sublime and for exaggeration was shared in America even by the clearest and most skeptical minds.

The hope of being born again to a new life and the expectation of not only a better but a blissful future are quite recognizable in the American cult of youth. According to Charles Sanford, in the post-industrial period Americans are more and more inclined to seek lost purity and innocence in their children. The same author writes that the glorification of novelty, characteristic of the discoverers who followed the sun to the Far West, strengthened their individualistic traits and their rebellion against authority, but also crystallized in their character an irreverence toward tradition and history.

Metamorphosis of the Millenarian Ideal

Let us stop here on a few considerations concerning the metamorphosis of the millenarian eschatology of the first settlers. We have already seen how the first travelers, setting out in search of a transatlantic terrestrial paradise, came to realize their high role in the history of Salvation. How America, associated with the terrestrial Paradise, became the place where the Puritans thought it possible to carry out those reforms which, in their opinion, had failed in Europe; why the emigrants thought they had managed to escape the European Hell and expected a new birth in the New World.

We have also been able to understand to what extent the modern face of America can be considered the result of these messianic hopes, of this confidence in the idea of Paradise here on earth, of the faith in youth and in the simplicity of soul and mind. We can continue our analysis and show that the long resistance of the American elite to the industrialization of the country and its adherence to the virtues of rural labor is explained by the same nostalgia for the terrestrial Paradise. Even when industrialization and urbanization prevailed, the favorite images and habitual clichés of the pioneers did not lose their popularity.

Wanting to prove that urbanization and industrialization do not necessarily involve (as in Europe!) vice, poverty, and corruption of manners, factory owners increased their expenditures for charity and built churches, schools, and hospitals. It was necessary to show at all costs that technique, industry, and science, far from threatening religious and spiritual values, contributed to their affirmation. One of the books published in 1842 had the following title: The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. The nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to return to "Nature," in the bosom of which the ancestors lived, can be found in the current tendency to leave the metropolis and retire to the suburbs, to quiet and comfortable neighborhoods, carefully tended and looking like paradisiacal landscapes.

But we do not intend here to give a full analysis of the metamorphosis of the American millenarian ideal. For us it is important to emphasize, after many other authors, that the confidence in an eschatological mission, in the discovery of the perfection of primitive Christianity, in the possibility of restoring paradise on earth was not so easily and simply forgotten. It is very possible that the behavior of the average modern American, as well as the policy and ideology of the United States, still reflects the consequences of the Puritan faith in the restoration of Paradise on earth.

American Writers' Nostalgia for Primordiality

Such an eschatology also appears in what can be called a revolt against the historical past, a revolt of which we find examples in almost all the major American writers of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The "paradisiacal" elements—at least those of Judeo-Christian origin—had by this time been to a greater or lesser extent suppressed. But we find here a desire for a new beginning, a celebration of primordial innocence, of a blissful fullness of being that preceded history. In his book "The American Adam" (1955), R. W. B. Lewis provides a large number of quotations that express this tendency perfectly, and it is difficult to give preference to any of them. In one of his fantastic stories, "The Earth’s Holocaust," written in 1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne gives an image of a cosmic fire consuming the attributes of heraldry of old aristocratic families, the robes, the scepter, and other symbols of an obsolete statehood—but also all of European literature and philosophy.

"Now," says the person performing the service, "we shall be free of the weight of dead men’s thoughts." And in "The House of the Seven Gables" (1850) one of the characters, Holgrave, exclaims: "Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body!" He regrets that "we read dead men’s books! we laugh at dead men’s jokes, and weep at dead men’s tears!" Through his mouthpiece Holgrave, the author regrets that public buildings—"our cathedrals, our state-houses, our capitol, our court-houses, our city-halls, and our churches"—are built "of such durable materials as stone and brick. It would be much better if they were to tumble into ruin every twenty years, and so keep the people in mind that they are to test and reform the institutions which these buildings symbolize."

Already in 1789 Thomas Jefferson solemnly proclaimed in one of his letters from Paris: "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living, and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." The same angry renunciation of the historical is found in Thoreau. All objects, values, and symbols associated with the past must be committed to the flames. "I see England at this moment," writes Thoreau, "as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated from a long course of years, which he has not the courage to burn." Lewis shows how persistent the image of the American Adam is and how deep the faith that America gives mankind a unique chance to start history from scratch.

It was with deliberate purpose that we spent the last twenty-four hours publishing Mircea Eliade’s work on Puritan American Messianism and the labyrinthine paths of its evolution from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Today, theological questions are directly setting the tone for the contemporary era—a phenomenon that was entirely absent, for instance, half a century ago.

 

The unprecedented official statement issued today by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation, in which Bartholomew Archontonis [the secular name of Bartholomew I, the 270th and current Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople] is explicitly branded as an "Antichrist in a cassock," serves as further evidence of the world’s return to an overtly theological language in the struggle for power. We are moving away from the "veiled" political theology that characterized the Modern era between Hobbes and Schmitt, returning instead to a direct confrontation between sovereign powers over the nature of sacred authority:

Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople: "Antichrist in a cassock"

The Press Bureau of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation reports that, according to information received by the SVR, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople—having already dismembered Orthodox Ukraine—continues his schismatic activities across the Orthodox canonical space. He has now turned his "black eye" toward the Baltic states. This "devil incarnate" is obsessed with the idea of displacing Russian Orthodoxy from the territory of the Baltic nations, establishing in its place ecclesiastical structures entirely beholden to the Phanar.

In these endeavors, he is supported in every way by the British intelligence services, which are actively fueling Russophobic sentiments across Europe. At their instigation, Bartholomew—mired in the mortal sin of schism—has found common ground with the authorities of the Baltic states in a shared drive to sow discord within the Russian Orthodox world. Relying on ideological allies among local nationalists and neo-Nazis, he is attempting to sever the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian Orthodox Churches from the Moscow Patriarchate by poaching their clergy and laity into puppet religious structures artificially manufactured by Constantinople.

The aggressive appetites of the "Constantinople Antichrist" are not limited to Ukraine and the Baltics; through his treachery, he is gradually encroaching upon the lands of Eastern Europe as well. To strike a blow against the "particularly defiant" Serbian Orthodox Church, he intends to grant autocephaly to the unrecognized "Montenegrin Orthodox Church."

Observers within ecclesiastical circles note that Bartholomew is quite literally tearing apart the living Body of the Church. In doing so, he likens himself to the false prophets described in the Sermon on the Mount: "They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. ... Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Press Bureau of the SVR of Russia, January 12, 2026.

Quoted from:
Maxim Viktorovich Medovarov (January 12, 2026) - The Theology of Trumpism and the Myth of the American Paradise.

(Теология трампизма и миф об «американском рае»)

Maxim Viktorovich Medovarov (b. 1987) is a Russian historian, philosopher, and Associate Professor at Lobachevsky State University. A Candidate of Historical Sciences, he specializes in 19th-century conservative thought, "Byzantinism," and political theology. His scholarship focuses on reviving the "Byzantine inheritance" and the concept of "Sacred Authority" within the Russian state. He is widely recognized for his monographs on figures like Alexander Kireev and the monarchist philosopher Lev Tikhomirov. Medovarov is a key intellectual in Russian Traditionalist circles, blending academic rigor with metaphysical geopolitical analysis. He curates the influential Telegram channel @zapiskitrad, where he deconstructs liberal ideology using the lens of "Tradition versus Modernity." His writing often frames global tensions as a struggle between perennial civilizations and anti-traditional Western hegemony. Drawing on the works of the Old Believers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mircea Eliade, Julius Evola, Titus Burckhardt, and René Guénon, he critiques American exceptionalism as a secularized, "pseudo-messianic" religion. He remains a pivotal voice in defining Russia’s identity as a distinct Orthodox Civilization opposed to Western materialistic technocracy.

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a Romanian-born historian of religion, philosopher, and novelist who revolutionized the study of the sacred. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he became the leading proponent of the "Perennialist" approach, emphasizing the underlying unity of religious symbols across cultures. His scholarship focused on the distinction between the Sacred and the Profane, arguing that modern man has lost the capacity for "mythic" experience. He famously developed the concepts of Hierophany—the manifestation of the sacred in the world—and Illud Tempus, the longing to return to a mythical "primordial time." His seminal works, including "The Myth of the Eternal Return," explore how traditional societies use ritual to escape the "terror of history." Eliade’s influence extends into geopolitics and philosophy, as he analyzed how secular ideologies, such as Marxism or Americanism, often mask ancient eschatological and messianic myths. Despite later controversies regarding his early political affiliations, he remains a titan of 20th-century intellectual history. His legacy continues to provide the toolkit for Traditionalists seeking to decode the metaphysical foundations of modern global civilizations.

See also:
Mircea Eliade (1969) - The Quest. History and Meaning in Religion.