Blessing America First - by David Buckley (Hardcover)

About the Book

Drawing on first-hand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2026 Religion and International Relations Book Award, Religion and International Relations Section, International Studies Association

Winner, 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

How did the Trump administration change the place of religion in U.S. foreign policy? How did the guardrails of America's foreign policy bureaucracy respond to a populist president? Drawing on firsthand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy, with significant implications for U.S. domestic and international politics.

Blessing America First argues that under Trump, religion in U.S. foreign policy shifted from an implement of statecraft to a tool of populist political strategy. Populism constructs ideological bounds between "the people" and threatening outsiders, and embraces personalist governance while rejecting bureaucratic constraint. This domestic political logic, Buckley demonstrates, influenced foreign policy decisions and reshaped bureaucratic offices in the State Department and USAID. Populism also promoted international religious ties in a surprising range of settings, from Poland to India, Brazil to Russia. Buckley shows that the possibility of curbing these changes was limited by conditions in American democracy that predated the 2016 election, including norms of nonpartisanship among career officials, malleable legal institutions, and polarization in public opinion. A groundbreaking examination of Trump's State Department, blending insider experience with original quantitative and qualitative data analysis, Blessing America First draws broader lessons for understanding the relationship between religion and democracy under populist rule.

Review Quotes

Buckley does an excellent job of distilling a rather complicated theory into testable hypotheses, displayed in easily digestible tables throughout the book... [a] careful qualitative analysis.--Jeffrey S. Peake, Clemson University "Presidential Studies Quarterly"

Exceptional...sober, complex, and evidence-driven.-- "Reading Religion"

[An] excellent book...Highly recommended.-- "Choice"

Buckley has written a remarkable book that is noteworthy not only for its rich empirical account of efforts to integrate religion into American diplomacy--profitably drawing on the author's firsthand experience serving in government--but also for its highly original and important insights about the encounter between populist politics, bureaucracy, and the making of foreign policy. Essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of religion and foreign affairs.--Peter Mandaville, United States Institute of Peace

Buckley's Blessing American First is an important addition to our understanding of religion and populism. It is one of the first academic analyses that questions the narrow approach of Trump politics as Christian nationalism that dominates the scholarship. It also investigates the neglected international dimension of Trump's populism. It is a must-read for scholars and students of religion and politics.--Jocelyne Cesari, University of Birmingham and Georgetown University

David T. Buckley's Blessing America First is a hugely important book. It sheds so much light on areas that have received little academic and journalistic attention: the growing role of religion in American diplomacy over a long period and the radical substantive and bureaucratic transformations around these issues during the Trump years. This is also an extraordinary participant-observer study, since Buckley was able to see the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations firsthand as an academic fellow in the State Department. Buckley's account--smart, eye-opening, and constructive--deserves a very wide audience. And here's hoping that future policymakers pay attention to his guidance.--E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country

Weaving firsthand personal experience with dispassionate scholarly analysis and methodological rigor, Buckley's book offers a masterful account of the Trump presidency's populist approach to religion in foreign policy. Highly recommended to students, scholars, policymakers, and anyone interested in the evolving nexus among faith, politics, and American diplomacy.--Gregorio Bettiza, author of Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World

About the Author

David T. Buckley is the Paul Weber Endowed Chair of Politics, Science, and Religion in the Department of Political Science at the University of Louisville, where he also directs the Center for Asian Democracy. He is the author of Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines (Columbia, 2017).