The year 2020is a hugely significant one for the United States of America, marking as itdoes the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower Pilgrims tothe New World and their establishment of a 'godly' colony in (what was forthem) the 'American wilderness'. But it is also the year of the nextPresidential election, one where the current occupant is expected to stand forre-election.

Many millionsof Americans will not see this as a random juxtaposition of events, since forthem the unlikely person of Donald Trump is the one chosen by God to implementa twenty-first-century programme of godly rule and the restoration of Americanspiritual exceptionalism that is directly rooted in those far-off times whenPuritan settlers (who followed in 1630) first established a semi-theocratic'New Jerusalem' in the 'New World'.

The USA is the home of more Christians than any other nation on earth.In 2014 research revealed that 70.6 per cent of Americans identified asChristians of some form with 25.4% identifying as'Evangelicals'. Eighty-one per cent of them, around 33.7 million people,voted Trump in 2016. How can it be thatself-described Christians of the 'Evangelical Religious Right' see, of allpeople, Donald Trump as their political representative and thus defender oftheir cause?