Trump Trip to Notre Dame Sends Signal on Europe, Christianity
What will president-elect pray for in cathedral restored to “glory”?
Of all the news out of the Trump transition, some of the most encouraging relates to the decision of the president-elect to travel to Paris this coming weekend for, as Trump put it, “the re-opening of the Magnificent and Historic Notre Dame Cathedral, which has been fully restored after a devastating fire five years ago.”
Trump said President Macron “has done a wonderful job ensuring that Notre Dame has been restored to its full level of glory, and even more so.” Trump predicted that the re-opening “will be a very special day for all!”
It’s a remarkable announcement, given that President Biden and Vice President Harris have spent the last year claiming that Trump was preparing to scrap NATO and abandon Europe to Russia. Trump isn’t merely paying lip service to U.S.-Europe ties—he’s making the unusual step of a foreign trip by a president-elect to show his commitment. He has also quickly moved to name trusted figures to represent him in European capitals, selecting his mekhutn Charles Kushner as ambassador to France and Warren Stephens to be ambassador to the Court of St James’s.
To judge by the flow of post-election foreign visitors through Mar-a-Lago—including Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada, President Milei of Argentina, and Sara and Yair Netanyahu of Israel—the second Trump term may be less isolationist, and more internationalist, than many expected or in some cases feared (or hoped). In that context, the Paris trip sends a message about the place of Europe in American policy, and the potential for partnership, in a second Trump term. Everyone is aware of the threat of tariffs on Communist China, but the world hasn’t quite woken up to the growth potential of warmer, closer commercial relations between the U.S., Europe, and the U.K.
Beyond that, and relatedly, Trump’s visit to Notre Dame sends a message that isn’t only about geopolitics or trade, but about religion and culture.
One of the worst decisions among many in Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign was her decision to skip the dinner for Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. The dinner raises money for scholarships to New York Catholic schools. Dolan called her no-show a “shame.” Trump showed up.
According to AP VoteCast, Trump won the Catholic vote in 2024, 54 percent to 44 percent. (Fox News uses the same survey and calls the Catholic vote 55 percent for Trump and 44 percent for Harris.) An Edison exit poll for the television networks had the Catholic voters backing Trump 59 percent to 39 percent for Harris.
Gallup has a ton of detailed survey data showing declining American church attendance, church membership, and belief in God. Pew has similar detailed data, though a shorter time series, on the rise of the religious “nones,” those who are atheists, agnostics, or religiously unaffiliated.
One can tell this story in a lot of different ways, but the Notre Dame Cathedral is part of the narrative. During the French revolution it was sacked by atheists who rededicated it as a temple to “reason,” which was supposed to replace Christianity. The French monarchy surely had its excesses, as did the Catholicism with which it was closely entwined, yet so did the French Revolution. The Revolution’s overreach inspired thinkers like Edmund Burke to make the case for a civilization rooted in certain enduring traditions, rather than invented entirely anew.
Trump might seem an unlikely representative of Burkean conservatism, but it’s hardly the only way he’s unlikely.
The NPR “domestic extremism correspondent” types will doubtless see the specter of what they breathlessly call “Christian nationalism” in Trump’s trip to Paris. Yet Trump is praising Macron, not Marine Le Pen. One way to look at the world right now is as Christian and Jewish civilization fighting against Chinese Communism and Muslim Sunni and Shia extremism. That’s not my own precise view of it—there are Muslim moderates in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, including in the Iranian population, and there are allies of freedom, democracy, and rule of law in Asia, Europe, and America who are not Jewish or Christian and who belong to other religions or to none at all. But as an explanatory framework, it worth paying some attention to.
For all Trump’s wrecking ball qualities there’s an aspect of him in which he’s also a builder. Those European cathedrals are not only symbols of Christianity they are achievements of architecture, construction, artistry, and craft. The Notre Dame Cathedral is a real estate project.
If Trump is moved to prayer while he’s there in the cathedral, perhaps he’ll seek inspiration about how to assist the flourishing of religious communities in America. So many churches here are empty that they are being repurposed as condominiums, restaurants, or coworking spaces. The solution isn’t an established church on the national level, as the French and British experiences show and as the American founders were wise enough to prevent with the First Amendment. Yet if Trump is able to help fuel, with wise policies, a new American religious revival that reverses the long downward trends, he’ll have achieved something as remarkable as Macron’s restoration of Notre Dame to “its full level of glory.” And “even more so.”
The hyperlink for mekhutan suggests it is a generic term for what are called in-laws in English. But I've only heard mekhutan used in the narrower sense that Ira Stoll used it - for a parent of one's son-in-law or daughter-in-law.
Good point. What is remarkable is that this trip cannot simply be dismissed as Trump finding something to do while he awaits Jan. 20. We are in a very strange transition. Our actual President is almost entirely absent, except for pardoning his son and undercutting thereby his party's bogus claim to some higher moral ground. His Vice President is also almost entirely absent, except when she shows up to embarrass herself. In a way, Trump is now already functioning as President, at least in some interim fashion. His decisive, remarkable, and (in my view) almost entirely terrific appointments, his meetings with foreign leaders, etc. As for Notre Dame, restored from its recent fires, what better symbol of the Western heritage that is so terribly on the line and under threat now. So in need of restoration. Very hopeful.