Part of the answer to that is pragmatic. Fascist leaders are generally not supportive of their domestic religions, as they endeavour to build their own religious cults around themselves, though it has to be said that Hitler’s relationship with the Catholic Church was at best ambiguous, while Trump is quite reliant on the Christian Right in the US. 

Another part of the answer attaches to my response to earthly authority as described at the top of this. It sounds like a cop-out and, in part, I accept that. It’s actually an opt-out, in that the Christian story doesn’t recognise worldly authority unless it serves its standards, rather than the other way around. 

That’s why we’re feared by authoritarian political leaders – call them fascist if you will. By extension, the Christian faith isn’t politically populist, though it might be described as a popular movement. Our leadership model is among the people it serves, rather than from the front of them. That’s not a model that Trump or anyone he admires is likely to emulate any time soon. 

It is what so confounded and ultimately threatened the political establishment in which it was founded. An itinerant preacher and miracle-worker emerges from the backwoods of a far-flung province of the Roman Empire – a fascist enterprise if ever there was one – to tell both it and its puppet state Judea that his and his insurgent followers’ authority comes not from this world. And the triumph of that claim is recorded in the subsequent two millennia of human history. 

That’s not power to the people, nor really a power of the people, but a power of every person in a corporate unity. It is, if you like, the exact obverse of the Roman coin, the antithesis of the emperor and the antidote to every fascist leader that has ever followed and been followed. 

I’m not at all sure that Trump is a fascist, as claimed. There’s a school of thought that he’s not bright enough, is too plain dumb, to join that rogues’ gallery. The most dangerous fascists of history, like Hitler, have a pitch-dark ideology that they pursue at all human cost to others and themselves. Trump has no apparent ideology other than the serving of his own vanities and insecurities. 

That doesn’t make him undangerous, but it makes him a different kind of authoritarian from a true fascist. We’re in the territory here of the cruelty and savagery of the incompetent empty vessel. And we need to apply a different kind of vigilance from that of the authentic fascist. Because Trump is essentially a buffoon.