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.

When the courts do hospitals' dirty work - Libby Watson

 

When the courts do hospitals' dirty work

Libby Watson

The story that drove me most insane in the last week was a USA Today piece about Hertz’s practice of filing police reports for cars that are not stolen, more information about which emerged in the proceedings of an ongoing lawsuit this week. Sometimes the cars are simply lost, or ‘missing’ in the system because someone extended a reservation by phone. This practice of filing police reports—which it does an average of 3,365 times per year, or about nine a day—has led to the 230 plaintiffs currently seeking justice in the lawsuit spending 2,742 collective days in jail. People interviewed by the paper have lost jobs or homes because of these false charges. This is not a healthcare story, but it does highlight an inescapable fact of American life that is horribly relevant to healthcare: The profitable partnership of massive corporations and the criminal justice system, holding hands to stamp on the faces of the poor.  

The story reminded me immediately of two others. First, this New York Times story from 2018, which revealed how huge corporations like Walmart “employ aggressive legal tactics and take advantage of loosely written state laws” to demand money from people they accused of shoplifting, even if those accusations were false. Those retailers often “do not have to return the money they collect if the cases are ultimately dismissed or the people are cleared.” In one instance, a woman accused of stealing $25 worth of CDs alleged that “two police officers ‘threw’ her on a couch, handcuffed her and took her to jail.” The charges were later dropped, but not until after Walmart’s lawyers demanded money from her and threatened her with a lawsuit. 

 Second, in 2019, ProPublica wrote about the practice of jailing people who fail to appear in court for medical debt cases, which became especially profitable for one collection attorney in Kansas. The story provided harrowing examples, like the cancer patient who was “hauled away from home in her pajamas in front of her three children; too weak to climb the stairs to the women’s area of the jail, she spent the night in a men’s mental health unit where an inmate smeared feces on the wall.” Not long before that piece came out, a story from Kaiser Health News detailed the University of Virginia’s practice of taking patients to court for unpaid medical bills, for as little as $13.91. Together, these pieces tell a powerful tale about how hospitals can use the justice system to threaten and extract payment from patients—all possible because we make patients ultimately responsible for the individual costs of their healthcare. The charges the patients owe money for are, of course, completely arbitrary and wildly inflated, but they don’t have to justify the fees to sue the patient over them. 

These are stories from three different sectors of the American economy—car rentals, retail, and healthcare—but they have an important aspect in common. In all of these stories, huge, profitable institutions are able to use the full might of the state, with all the consequences this has for their victims’ lives, to obtain mostly meaningless amounts of money—to them, that is. To the people whose lives they’re ruining, these sums can be life-changing, or life-ruining. The cops and the courts act on behalf of the corporation, no matter how egregiously wrong or aggressive they might be, to insure them against any little loss of profit. 

I write about healthcare, not criminal justice or American history, so I don’t feel like I can adequately diagnose or explain how the American justice system got so eager to help corporations like this. I can’t explain why a judge in Virginia might have told a woman in her 70s, who arrived at hospital “bleeding and in pain” from uterine cancer, that her payment agreement with the hospital was not too vague to be enforced, because she always had “the ability to decline the surgery” that led to her $23,849 bill. I guess she could have gathered up her bloody clothes and tottered along to the next hospital, which would have had exactly the same clause “you owe us whatever we say you do” in its contract and might have charged her twice as much anyway (neither could have told her the cost beforehand, of course). I can’t explain how the debt collector in Coffeyville lives with himself. I can’t explain why Walmart goes to such lengths to pursue people for such stupidly small amounts of money, which must itself cost them a lot in legal fees.

I can’t explain any of it, but I do know that all over this country, there are frightening and arbitrary schemes put in place by corporations to ensnare regular people, extract their little bits of money, and toss them aside, into jail or financial ruin, or both. The criminal justice system opens its arms and welcomes the worst fucking snakes in America and happily lets them use it, with its gun-toting cops itching to humiliate people and its horrific, dangerous jails, to chop up the meager finances of the poor and turn them into snake food.

And I know that there are many, many hospitals that are no better in this way than Hertz or Walmart.

Thousands and thousands of lawsuits are filed by hospitals against their patients every year; some kept doing it during the pandemic, including New York’s Northwell Health. According to Axios, the Mayo Clinic Saint Mary’s Campus sought $4 million in 904 lawsuits against patients between January 2018 and July 2020; the Mayo Clinic’s total revenue just in 2019 was $13.82 billion. Those lawsuits over two and a half years represent 0.02 percent of the organization’s revenue in one of those years. 0.02 percent of a normal person’s yearly income is like what you might spend on lunch. Could they perhaps have foregone their lunch to not ruin 904 people’s lives? 

Cops and judges arrested and jailed people who had not stolen a car to help out Hertz. They humiliated people who had not stolen stuff to help out Walmart. They jailed cancer patients for being unable to afford the made-up price a hospital charged them to stay alive, to help out the hospital. (I didn’t even mention the judges who sign off on landlords’ arrest warrants for unpaid rent.) The reverse of this—for ordinary people to use the legal system to obtain justice from large corporations—is absurdly difficult, thanks to neat things like arbitration clauses and ‘needing money to get a lawyer.’

The truth of American inequality is not just that some people have a lot of money and a lot more have very little, in some sad natural accident. The rich are rich because other people are poor. The wealthy elite extracts their riches from the poor through schemes like this, or underpaying workers, or pure wage theft. It’s a transfer, and the logic of capitalism and ever-increasing profits dictates that they must always use every possible avenue to expand this transfer. And sitting right there is the criminal justice system, already primed to oppress the powerless and vulnerable, with the legal authority to take people’s money. It’s a loaded gun, literally.

Maybe you expect this of Walmart. But hospitals? If a hospital is just as willing to engage in this behavior as Big Evil Corp., and the legal system is willing to enforce the complete fiction that hospital prices are real, we don’t really have a healthcare system—and we certainly don’t have justice, let alone a right to healthcare. We just have another type of greedy fuckers making money however they can, who just happen to sell healthcare instead of cars.