For over six decades, the “religious right” in America was boomer “Christian nationalism,” straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was about “keeping God in the schools” and the National Prayer Breakfast. It was traditionalist, mindful of theology, and, well, theocratic, which is to say it wanted to take the standards of a religious tradition and apply them to the secular law. They wanted the books of Scripture to replace the statute books.

But President Donald Trump is trying to create a new religious right, one that is not just illiberal but fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we’ve known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of the strange beast that is American nationalism — the belief that the American project is an exercise in freedom and prosperity like the world has never known, but also the sole possession of those who are white, heterosexual, and unquestioningly loyal to the nation.

It’s a model of church-state relations that has less in common with post-revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic cleric known as the supreme leader and his council of religious jurists preside over government, and more in common with Soviet (and arguably contemporary) Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to the whims of the Kremlin, acting as everything from propaganda tool to spy center.

 This is evident from the members and mission of Trump’s new Religious Liberty Commission, as well as its three advisory bodies of religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The commission is tasked with preparing a report on the history and current state of religious liberty in America.

By contrast, Trump’s three immediate predecessors maintained an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to advise on how faith-based organizations and the government could collaborate on issues like human trafficking, climate change, or global poverty. Called “Community Initiatives” under Bush, this model reflected the church coming to the aid of the state to address issues arising from the collective moral failings of secular society.

Trump abolished this office at the beginning of his second term. His new plan — the commission charged with producing an “official account” of American religious liberty past and present — is not only unprecedented in American history; it is the product of a very different view of the church-state relationship. In this formulation, faith is not a balm for the moral ills of a nation. Here, the United States, its history and institutions, is the means by which religion can sustain itself. And therefore religious institutions prosper or fail in proportion not to their own morality or faithfulness but to the extent to which America is “American” enough.

In another era, it might be possible to see this new model of engaging religious leaders as a mere accident and the commission as harmless pandering, a bone thrown to conservative religious voters who turn out election after election for Republican candidates. But it is much harder to see the commission and advisory boards as harmless pandering in the current political climate, when the concept of “religious liberty” has become increasingly weaponized. “Religious liberty” has been used by bakers to deny wedding cakes to gay and lesbian couples, by pharmacists to deny women the morning-after pill, and by ER nurses to refuse a Covid-19 vaccine. In a transformation that began when segregationists invoked their religious freedom as a defense against racial equality during the civil rights movement, religious liberty is now a dog whistle for opposition to social progress.

This strategy was one of the founding tactics of the old religious right, a tactic it shares with this new religious movement. But the MAGA religious right has taken this strategy to a new level. And this new movement is far more complex. If we believe that these ideological architects are simply “conservative Christians” or even “Christian nationalists” in the old vein, we are fundamentally misreading both the religious character of the MAGA movement and its broader ideological and practical aims. If, however, we perceive and understand the difference, we are much better situated to combat the radical remaking not just of American religion but of America itself.