How Religion Made a Global Comeback in 2017
One of the great paradoxes of Donald Trump is that, for a president who is among the least overtly pious in recent memory, he often presents the world through a religious lens. It's in his towering rhetoric about the looming “beachhead of intolerance” in the U.S., terrorists who “do not worship God, they worship death,” and America as “a nation of true believers.” It was evident in Trump’s first international trip as president, a spin through Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Rome framed explicitly as a world tour of Abrahamic religions. Religion has been at the center of Vice President Pence’s portfolio, with visits to the evangelist Franklin Graham’s summit on international religious freedom and the annual meeting of Christians United for Israel. And religious groups were instrumental in one of the year’s biggest foreign-policy moves: Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate the American embassy there.
Trump’s first year in office strongly
