Unipolar Dispensations: Exceptionalism, Empire, and the End of One America

Public and political discourse around the 2016 US Presidential election constructed it as a time of crisis for America. Yet, while over 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, religion’s role in this crisis has been marginalized. Analyzing Trump’s support among premillennial dispensationalists, this article explores connections between dispensationalist discourses of divine providence and constructions of Trump’s election as a “turning point” for America. Charting links between conflicts over domestic cultural homogeneity and attempted impositions of US power over global “deviants” (terrorists, rogue states), it argues that the crisis of American identity figured by Trump’s election is tied to religious and secularized soteriologies emerging from notions of American exceptionalism and empire inaugurated by the end of the Cold War