The Christian Nationalist Hydra (TPM)

The Christian Nationalist Hydra: In Era of Trump, Christian Nationalism Has Many Faces

 From traditional Christian-right figures to secret societies envisioning a ‘national divorce,’ a growing contingent of radical activists is planning for Christian supremacy.

By Sarah Posner     April 12, 2024 9:54 a.m.

I am a journalist who has covered the Christian right for two decades. Over the past three years, I began to more frequently use the term “Christian nationalism” to describe the movement I cover. But I did not start using a new term to suggest its proponents’ ideology had changed. Instead, the term had come into more common usage in the Trump era, now regularly used by academics, journalists, and pro-democracy activists to describe a movement that insists America is a “Christian nation” — that is, an illiberal, nominally democratic theocracy, rather than a pluralistic secular democracy.

To me, the phrase was highly descriptive of the movement I’ve dedicated my career to covering, and neatly encapsulates the core threat the Christian right poses to freedom and equality. From its top leaders and influencers down to the grassroots — politically mobilized white evangelicals, the foot soldiers of the Christian right — its proponents believe that God divinely ordained America to be a Christian nation; that this Christian nation has come under attack by liberals and secularists; and that patriotic Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to rid America of demonic forces, and in political action to restore its Christian heritage. That includes taking political steps — as a voter, as an elected official, as a lawyer, as a judge — to ensure that America is governed according to a “biblical worldview.”

If you want to see that definition in action, look no further than the career of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Seventeen years ago, when I interviewed Johnson, then a lawyer with the Christian right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom, I would have labeled him a loyal soldier in the Christian right’s legal army trying to bring down the separation of church and state. He is a product of and a participant in a sprawling religious and political infrastructure that has made the movement’s successes possible, from politically active megachurches, to culture-shaping organizations like Focus on the Family, to political players like the Family Research Council, to the legal force in his former employer ADF. 

In today’s parlance, Johnson is a Christian nationalist — although he, like most of his compatriots, has certainly not embraced the label. But Mike Johnson the House Speaker is still Mike Johnson the lawyer I interviewed all those years ago: an evangelical called to politics to be a “servant leader” to a Christian nation, dedicated to its governance according to a biblical worldview: against church-state separation, for expanded rights for conservative Christians, adamantly against abortion and LGBTQ rights, and especially, currently, trans rights.

That mindset is still the beating heart of the Christian right, even as the movement, and other movements in the far-right space, have radicalized in the Trump era, taking on new forms and embracing a range of solutions to the apocalyptic trajectory they see America to be on. Different movements imagining a version of Christian supremacy exist side by side — different strains that often borrow ideas from one another, and that fit comfortably under the banner of Christian nationalism.  

The term “Christian nationalism” became popularized during Trump’s presidency for a few reasons. First, Trump, who first ran in 2016 on a nativist platform with the nationalist slogan “Make America Great Again,” was and still is dependent on white evangelicals to win elections and maintain a hold on power. He is consequently willing to carry out their goals, bringing their ambitions closer to fruition than they’ve ever been in their 45-year marriage to the Republican Party. They have been clear, for example, in crediting him for the downfall of Roe v. Wade, among other assaults on other peoples’ rights.

Second, the prominence of Christian iconography at the January 6 insurrection, and the support for Trump’s stolen election lie before, during, and after January 6 by both Christian right influencers and the grassroots, brought into stark relief that Christian nationalist motivations helped fuel his attempted coup.  

Finally, sociologists studying the belief systems of Christian nationalists pushed the term into public usage, as did anti-nationalist Christians, especially after January 6, in order to elevate awareness of the threats Christian nationalism poses to democracy. (The paperback edition of my book, Unholy, which was published in mid-2021 and included a post-January 6 afterword, reflected the increasing usage of the term Christian nationalists by including the term in a fresh subtitle.)

The Trump era, along with the rise of openly Christian nationalist social media sites like Gab, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, have given space for otherwise unknown figures, like the rabidly antisemitic Gab founder Andrew Torba, co-author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, and Stephen Wolfe, author of the racist book The Case for Christian Nationalism, to enter the Christian nationalism discourse. Although Torba and Wolfe have made waves online, and extremism watchers are rightly alarmed that their tracts could prove influential and radicalizing, they remain distinct from the Christian right. Torba’s antisemitism is so extreme, for example, that Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano — himself extreme — was forced to create some daylight between himself and his supporter Torba in his 2022 run. Torba’s site platformed the antisemitic rantings of the shooter in the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, and Torba himself has said Jews aren’t welcome in his envisioned Christian nation. The Republican Jewish Coalition called Gab “a cesspool of bigotry and antisemitism.” Mastriano’s move seemed motivated more by self-preservation than contrition (and he lost the race anyway). 

That’s not to say, of course, that the Christian right and the conservative movement more broadly haven’t tolerated racists and other extremists in their midst — Trump’s endurance as their savior itself proves just how much that tolerance persists. Their entire alliance with Trump is one of sharing political and ideological space with the overtly antisemitic, racist, Islamophobic, nativist extremists he elevated to mainstream status in the GOP. But the Christian right is also committed to Christian Zionism, an ideology that claims to love the state of Israel while imagining it as the locus of Jesus’s violent return, and which is, in its philosemitism and bloody apocalyptic fantasies, antisemitic. Still, it would make it difficult for them to form explicit alliances with someone like Torba, a self-described Christian nationalist who repeatedly and unabashedly promotes some of the world’s oldest and ugliest antisemitic tropes like the Jews killed Jesus and secretly control the world. 

What’s more, Torba advocates for a “parallel society” for Christians to escape the supposedly debauched America he deplores. This is not unlike the Benedict Option advocated by conservative Christian (and Viktor Orbán admirer) Rod Dreher, or the secret, hyper-patriarchal Society for Civic American Renewal exposed by TPM’s Josh Kovensky, which is recruiting “unhyphenated” men of only certain denominations to run a Christian government after an anticipated “national divorce.” The language of SACR’s internal documents, to me, as a student of evangelicalism, is quite distinct from the sort of statement of faith you’d see from a church or evangelical organization, which would emphasize one’s salvation in Jesus Christ, commitment to the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God, and the imperative for Christians to preach the gospel around the world.

The conventional Christian right does not want a parallel society or a divorce. They believe they are restoring, and will run, the Christian nation God intended America to be — from the inside. They will do that, in their view, through faith (evangelizing others and bringing them to salvation through Jesus Christ); through spiritual warfare (using prayer to battle satanic enemies of Christian America); and through politics and the law (governing and lawmaking from a “biblical worldview” after eviscerating church-state separation). Changes in the evangelical world, particularly the emphasis in the growing charismatic movement on prophecy, signs and wonders, spiritual warfare, the prosperity gospel, and Trumpism, has intensified the prominence of the supernatural in their politics, giving their Christian nationalism its own unmistakable brand.

For decades, Christian right has been completely open about their beliefs and goals. Their quest to take dominion over American institutions by openly evangelizing and instituting Christian supremacist policies sets the Christian right apart from other types of Christian nationalists who might operate in secret, or imagine utopian communities as the ideal way to save themselves from a secular, debauched nation. 

The fact that far-right extremists like Torba or Wolfe embrace the Christian nationalist label gives the more conventional Christian right leaders and organizations space to disassociate themselves from it. Some also berate journalists who use it to describe them, accusing them of hurling a left-wing slur at Christians. 

The bottom line is that Christian nationalism takes on different forms, and despite organizational or even ideological differences, ideas can penetrate the often porous borders between different camps. Someone who receives the daily email blast from the Family Research Council might also be drawn to Wolfe’s book, for example. On a more unnerving, macro level, major right-wing and GOP figures, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and the CEO of the Daily Wire, the podcast consortium run by conservative influencer Ben Shapiro, have embraced the rabidly antisemitic, Hitler-admiring antagonist Nick Fuentes, who is Catholic but also is accurately described as a Christian nationalist. The increasingly influential Catholic integralist movement, which seeks a Catholic-inflected replacement for the “liberal order,” is yet another unique form of Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism is a serious threat to democracy, because it is premised on the supremacy of Christianity and rejects the democratic values of freedom and equality for all. It is crucial to understand that it takes various forms, how its numerous proponents differ, and how they intersect. Some pose a threat because of their proximity to political and legal power; others because they accelerate racist and antisemitic rhetoric; and still others because they might incite violence. These distinctions show how Christian nationalism is varied, very combustible, and critical to combat.

 

Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work 

Their "Reaganism" sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution: It’s time to say out loud that it hasn’t worked.

Thom Hartmann

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.  Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America’s workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then America.

They then moved on to infiltrate our universities, seize our media, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to add millions of votes, and turn upside down our tax, labor, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians. Five Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans that can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.”

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have what they told us was “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by student’s tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans .

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives — while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 10 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming — a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can’t stop it much longer.

Why do I blame the Republican Party? Because the Republican Party is to blame

 Why do I blame the Republican Party? Because the Republican Party is to blame

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

Here’s what we’re not going to do.

We are not going to indulge the lazy rationalizations, false equivalence, cheap gaslighting and other forms of rhetorical chicanery that have become so common to political discourse in this era. Our country is in crisis, and we owe it better. The warning is for those who claimed offense at the following observation, made in this space a few days back: “What Americans have lost — to be painfully accurate, what Republicans have trashed in pursuit of power — is the willingness and ability to share a common national identity.” It would seem to be self-evident truth. But not everyone agrees.

“Constantly blaming Republicans,” griped one respondent.

 “You ONLY blame the Republicans,” complained another.

 “You exclusively blame Republicans,” grumbled yet another.

 Well, there’s a reason the Republicans get the blame for destroying any sense of common American narrative. It’s because — pay close attention here — they deserve the blame for destroying any sense of common American narrative. 

Sorry, but Hunter Biden’s laptop didn’t do that. Black Lives Matter didn’t do that. Whatever thing Fox “News” last told its audience to fear did not do that.

The Republican Party did it by a campaign of demonizing dissent, shredding norms and boundaries, embracing a politics of white resentment and fear and, perhaps most corrosively, delegitimizing the very idea of knowable fact, so that an ordinary birth certificate becomes an object of suspicion, an ordinary election a seedbed of distrust and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol an innocent visit by tourists.

 Is it mere partisanship to hold the party accountable for this? Or are we not talking about something bigger and more foundational than political gamesmanship? Note how many of the GOP’s ardent defenders — George F. Will, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Kathleen Parker, Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Mitt Romney, Jonah Goldberg — have become, to various degrees, estranged from it in recent years. None of those worthies may be credibly accused of being anti-Republican. 

But what they are is conscientious enough that they cannot deny self-evident truth when it is right before them. Some of us prefer to peddle misguided both-sidesism, to spew non-responsive non-sequiturs or stick metaphorical fingers in metaphorical ears going “la la la la la la la” until the truth safely passes them by. 

Meantime, one party steers the ship of state toward jagged rocks. 

Political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein once observed that, “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

They wrote that in a 2012 book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” Ten years later, it’s even worse than that. 

It’s important to be clear on that, not to “blame” the GOP but because James Baldwin was right. You cannot fix what you will not face. And what America needs to face is the simple, chilling fact that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger. 

Confronting that does not make you a partisan. It makes you a patriot.

Josh Steich on Voter Education

 Josh Steich on voters: 
Voters have always been "vibe based" rather than deeply engaged, policy literate rational actors. And the folks (older homeowners) who have traditionally been the most deeply engaged are the ones who tend to advocate for policies that end up benefiting them while screwing the rest of us.

There are two ways to fight this (and both are probably needed): First, the most popular liberal establishment answer, and the most popular among college-educated folks overrepresented in political discourse, is to do better civic education and work on getting normies more politically literate. It's the "the answer to bad speech is more speech" option, and counts on most people engaging with politics the way that educated liberals generally do: through a mix of research, debate and mainstream credible sources.

Second, to work on better vibes for liberals, progressives and Dems. The general complaint from the right that Obama voters just thought he was cool and didn't really think much about his policies? That's probably correct, at least to a significant extent. It's probably true about Biden too. And Trump voters are almost comically politically illiterate, and entirely voting based on negative partisanship vibes. This is something that Republicans excel at — partly because they have to, because when you describe their policies accurately, they're really unpopular! Only something like 15% of the public wants abortion laws like Texas, and even most Republican voters want to see higher taxes on the rich. So it's all based on provoking an emotional, fear based response, where scary Democrats are going to eat your babies.

It's really hard for mainstream liberals and progressives to answer that, because they try to get back by grounding the discussion in rational debate — basically like trying to reason with shitposters. It can be even worse on the left, because a lot of people with status on the left got that status by being able to argue more forcefully with people who generally agree with them — that's the wrong skill for convincing people who don't agree, and leads to what I think of as "Fugazi politics." Fugazi is a great punk band who intentionally staked out a career whose goal wasn't to be financially successful, but to be purists about their music. Which, again, is pretty great. But that can make their fans really snobbish about music like Taylor Swift, who is widely loved by all sorts of people. If you want to win elections, you want to win over the Taylor Swift fans, not the Fugazi fans, because there just aren't enough Fugazi fans and there never will be.

And maintaining political power — which is the goal, in order to get preferred policies passed — means winning over people who will never really want to be engaged, never be interested in wrestling with whether this abstruse zoning rule will have a downstream effect on housing, etc. It means getting them engaged because of vibes. Because it's cool, it's fun, whatever.

The good news is that the best way to do this is for you, reader, to talk to your friends and family NOW about how you're voting for Dems in the fall. Not as a fight, not as an argument, but just, like, a thing you're doing because you're a normal person, and it's a normal thing to do. Don't make people feel attacked, don't make them feel scared or angry, shrug off any bullshit and just be public about voting for Dems. You gotta start now, though, because this shit TAKES LOTS OF TIME AND REPETITION. Save the arguments for people who you already agree with, make them about the best way to get policies you both agree with, etc.