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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Christian Nationalism, Charismatic Christians, and Political Violence.”

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(Image of Taylor Swift from Time magazine)

Much ado has been made about Republican V.P. candidate JD Vance’s repeated comments about the problems of childless Americans, from fearmongering about “childless cat ladies” to warnings about the supposed crisis of “radical childless leaders in this country.” What we haven’t heard much this election season, by Vance or Trump, is what had been a standard for Christian Right politics since the early 1980s: fears about the “radical homosexual agenda” and opposition to sexual minorities’ rights. Why shift to childless Americans?

Far from a one-off comment, Vance’s repeated focus on the childless is a new expression of a much older mainstay of the Christian Right: a focus on the family—meaning only nuclear, patriarchal families are legitimate. Criticisms of the childless, and childless women in particular, along with a new focus on anti-trans rhetoric and policies, represent a new version of this much older focus on the patriarchal family. This new sexual politics is strategic. It recognizes, for now, that the Christian Right lost the cultural and legal war over same-sex marriage. This new family politics is meant to appeal to a larger audience, not just the white evangelical base of the Republican Party but also a broader patriarchal movement found in both conservative Catholicism and a new far-right tech culture. This broader coalition has the possibility to strengthen support for the conservative movement even as its evangelical base declines in numbers.

For decades, white evangelicals have represented the largest voting bloc in the United States, making up around a quarter of the electorate (despite actually decreasing in numbers, white evangelicals vote in such high numbers this percentage has remained largely the same). Typically, around 80% of white evangelicals support the same conservative candidates. In 2016, 81% of white born-again/evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump. Yet, each year they decline in numbers in relation to the electorate.

Through appealing to both white evangelical culture and this broader patriarchal coalition, Vance’s rhetoric is an experiment in building a new conservative movement, one that embraces Christian nationalism but also moves beyond it. While Vance was raised in an evangelical culture, he converted to Catholicism as an adult, and his newfound conservative Catholic faith resonates with much of the evangelical ethos that makes up the majority of today’s Christian nationalists. And this broader coalition of white evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and tech billionaires is an effort to continue to hold political power despite not reflecting the desires of most Americans.

Understanding Family Politics in White Evangelical Culture 

As the base of Christian nationalism, it is important to understand how a focus on the family has primed white evangelicals for Christian nationalism. In 2008 and then again in 2010, I moved to Colorado Springs, a center of white evangelical culture, to better understand how religious practice links seamlessly to political behavior for so many white evangelicals.

The first time I attended an evangelical service for my research I expected to hear a sermon with explicit political commentary. Instead, what I witnessed was an extended ecstatic worship session with a seven-member band, complete with stage lighting, that played for the majority of the service. The mood ranged from meditative to raucous and included in the set was a love ballad to Jesus with lyrics reminiscent of any secular love ballad: “Hold me in your arms,” “Never let me go,” and “your love is all I need.”

When the pastor finally entered the stage, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flop sandals, he boomed at the church, “Notice anything different this morning? What do you guys think about my bike?” Hanging above the center of the pulpit was his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The pastor went on to describe Jesus as a “man’s man” not “a sissy,” and preached that his goal was to make the church a welcoming place for men. He said the contemporary church could make men uncomfortable because they, “have to sing love songs to another man, even if it is to Jesus!” The congregation laughed loudly at his reference to homosexuality.

After completing sixteen months of research, over an eight-year period, on predominantly white evangelical spaces, including attendings dozens of sermons, listening to countless hours of Christian radio, and completing one hundred interviews with evangelical leaders, pastors, and congregants, I realized that this first introduction to white evangelicalism provided a key insight. While I heard frequent messages about opposing abortion, explicit political commentary was rare in nearly all of the churches I attended. What saturated evangelical spaces, however, were messages about gender, heterosexuality, and nuclear families. I came to see this focus on gender and the nuclear family in everyday life as connected to and a result of the Christian nationalist emphasis on defending the family.

(Image source: Maple Grove Mennonite Church)

One way evangelicals tie everyday family life to their theology is through directly linking fathers with the Heavenly Father, making patriarchy, and the patriarchal family, sacred. Pastor Alex, the pastor of a large church in Colorado, frequently preaches on this theme. In one sermon just before Christmas he made this case specifically. He preached that “what the Holy Spirit is inviting you into is a family! It’s about family and being together!” In another sermon, he preached on the importance of maintaining a child-like faith. He implored us to ask ourselves: “Do you see God as dad? Do you feel like you are in the palm of a good dad’s hand?”

The most important aspect of evangelical life is an intimate relationship with God. Male pastors sacralize the hetero-patriarchal family as a godly life through stories of their spouses and children, and with metaphors of marriage to understand one’s relationship with God. Such valorization of the patriarchal family as of primary importance incites emotional responses to defend it. And for evangelicals, emotional affiliations define their religious life. Proper action is important, but one must possess authentic feelings.

Linking proper Christian devotion with strong emotional ties to nuclear, heterosexual families means that defending the patriarchal family—particularly through opposition to LGBTQ rights and abortion access—became a way to defend one’s faith and one’s understanding of what God wants for everyone. Same-sex marriage challenges the inherent hierarchical order in patriarchal, heterosexual marriage. And elective abortion takes reproduction outside of male control. Both pose a problem to the millions of evangelicals who see the heterosexual nuclear family as not simply an ideal, but as central to God’s plan for humanity.

The Divine Institution and Its Politics

Evangelical leaders present heterosexual marriage as a divine institution, one with a set of hierarchies, what evangelicals call “relationships of accountability,” where wives are subservient to their husbands and children are subservient to their parents. Take James Dobson’s understanding of marriage. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and easily the most influential evangelical in the Christian Right, wrote in one of his many books, Marriage Under Fire:

“To put it simply, the institution of marriage represents the very foundation of human social order. Everything of value sits on that base…When it is weakened or undermined, the entire superstructure begins to wobble. That is exactly what has happened during the last thirty-five years, as radical feminists, liberal lawmakers, and profiteers in the entertainment industry have taken their toll on the stability of marriage. Many of our pressing social problems can be traced to this origin.”

Christian Right leaders have a long history of framing the institution of heterosexual marriage as the foundation for society. Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and the Moral Majority, wrote in Listen America!: The conservative blueprint for America’s moral rebirth in 1981:

“There are only three institutions God ordained in the Bible: government, the church, and the family. The family is the God-ordained institution of the marriage of one man and one woman together for a lifetime with their biological or adopted children. The family is the fundamental building block and the basic unit of our society, and its continued health is a prerequisite for a healthy and prosperous nation. No nation has ever been stronger than the families within her. America’s families are her strength and they symbolize the miracle of America.”

For evangelicals, such messages turn their religious beliefs into political issues.

The Class Dynamics of this Focus on the Family 

While conducting research on American evangelicals, I attended a national Christian Right gathering in Washington, DC. At an awards banquet I sat next to a middle-aged white lawyer from Tennessee. He talked about his passion for conservative politics and the importance of family values. He shared a perspective I’d heard repeatedly from Christian Right leaders that positioned the nuclear family as the solution to virtually every social problem. He told me that while thirty percent of American families were living in poverty, poverty affected only five percent of two-parent families (his numbers). “Isn’t that amazing?” he said. “It just shows how important the family is, and how much we need to support it.” I heard similar appraisals from many others.

The poverty rate among single-mother households in the U.S. is indeed much higher than for married households, with around 31% of female-headed households with children living in poverty compared to 6% of married couples. However, implying that marriage is the solution ignores a complicated breadth of data, not the least of which is the fact that, as a 2013 Pew Center report made clear, “there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S.” Only 46% of children are currently living with parents who are in their first marriage, with many children living in single-parent families (26%), with stepparents (15%), or with unmarried co-habiting parents (7%). There is also a large racial discrepancy in family formation, with 69% of white children and 81% of Asian-American children living with two biological parents, and only 30% of African American and 54% of Hispanic children living in such families.

Like the conservative Christian lawyer I met in DC, white evangelical leaders use this data to say the solution to poverty, as well as child neglect, crime, and a variety of other social ills, is to encourage heterosexual marriage. And yet, the social science literature actually tells us the opposite. Instead of a solution to poverty, the decrease in marriage is actually a result of increasing poverty and economic stratification. In other words, people are marrying less because of the very economic policies touted by Christian Right leaders since Reagan.

What we are seeing now in the United States and Western Europe is a new phenomenon where marriage is often a marker of class stratification, in that wealthier individuals are increasingly more likely to get and stay married. It isn’t then that marriage leads people out of poverty, but that financial wealth itself is a better predictor of which people are more likely to marry. The actual reasons why poverty rates are lower for married couples are thus complex, reflecting the broader realities of economic inequality. Whereas evangelicals see marriage as the solution to poverty, the data suggest the inverse. Alleviating poverty through government-sponsored social services would likely see the marriage rate increase, as many working-class individuals value marriage but prioritize economic stability in a partner. Countless choose not to marry if they cannot find a financially secure partner.

By emphasizing the importance of “family,” today’s Christian nationalists offer a false solution to the callousness of neoliberal capitalism. A religious left position, and policy leaders with no religious persuasion, point to the structural factors that have created increasing economic distress for the majority of Americans, whereas the Christian Right defends the family as the way to offer a privatized solution to capitalist inequality. Take, for example, when JD Vance was asked in a recent forum how to address the high cost of childcare, he responded: “maybe grandma and grandpa [want] to help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more. If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we’re spending on day care.”

Arguing that marriage and the family curtail poverty also provides moral justification for opposing the welfare state. If the government provides services like childcare, according to this conservative Christian logic, people will be less likely to marry or stay in marriages. In turn, Christians with such views do not see themselves as coldhearted or unsympathetic for the poor, but as compassionate advocates for families.

Abortion: “The Department of Life”

As the family politics of Christian nationalism shifts away from same-sex marriage and towards denigrating childless women and families that don’t resemble the patriarchal norm, how does abortion politics fit into this? While the Trump campaign waffles now on its views on abortion, let us look at Project 2025’s abortion policy directives, which, shall we say, do not waffle. The nearly 900-page document calls for ending the “Healthcare Access Task Force” within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and installing “a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children. Additionally, HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

Although now disavowed by Trump’s campaign, Project 2025 is the product of a broad coalition of Christian nationalists who will surely work to implement these goals in the case of a second Trump presidency. In research I’ve completed in Tennessee after the implementation of the state’s total abortion ban, we found that reproductive healthcare providers are now practicing hesitant medicine, often compromising the safety of pregnant people, in order to try to comply with the state’s abortion ban. In a more extreme case, we can also see the possible effects of such a ban in the closure of Sandpoint, Idaho’s only labor and delivery ward—where I myself happen to have been born—due to complications after the implementation of Idaho’s abortion ban. This has forced local pregnant people to drive sometimes hours to the nearest hospital, causing stress and possible complications. In the first year after the closure of the ward, five babies were born in the hospital’s emergency room, including 32-week twins. Luckily all five babies were healthy, but the possible effects of a national ban are significant and treacherous.

Diversions from Class Warfare

The policies supported by Christian nationalism are harmful to actual families, but this focus on the family is strategic in that it also works to shift attention away from an increasingly staggering wealth gap in the United States. Over the past few decades, the reduction of government services and a changed tax structure to support corporations and the wealthy, policies prioritized by  Christian nationalists, have facilitated a staggering $50 trillion “transfer of wealth” from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Christian nationalism, and its ongoing culture wars against families, continued to support the very economic policies that have devasted this country’s people: married, single, parents, and otherwise. As long as this coalition wants to divert attention away from these class dynamics, we are likely to continue to hear about “childless cat ladies” and the imagined threats they pose.

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the U.S. based Religious Right and white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the Guardian (UK).

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(Image source: iStock)

In late-July 2024, a video resurfaced of Tucker Carlson’s 2021 interview with then-Senate candidate JD Vance in which he complained, “We’re effectively run in this country…by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Given that Vance had just been selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, the outcry was swift. Democrats immediately turned “childless cat lady” into a badge of honor, complete with T-shirts, hats, and signage, drawing comparisons to Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment that mobilized the MAGA base in 2016.

But many may have been too distracted by the misogynistic accusation that childless women are miserable to understand the real point of Vance’s comments, and just as importantly, who would find them most compelling. In the 2021 video, Vance went on to explain that the Democratic leadership (citing Harris, Buttigieg, Ocasio-Cortez) had never had biological children, and therefore, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” Vance’s real point wasn’t that childless women are bitter, but that having children makes you more invested in the nation, and thus, more politically deserving. This was made clear in another resurfaced video of Vance proposing that parents should have more votes because their commitment to the nation’s future is greater.

These comments imply a connection between childbearing and nationalism. Those who produce children are truly committed to the nation, and thus, national power and privilege rightfully belong to them. Autocratic leaders around the world like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban have made similar claims, promising large financial rewards for families who make more native-born Russians and Hungarians.

To be sure, Vance’s group-centered pronatalism has recently drawn applause from the growing number of secular, mega-wealthy pronatalists like Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, and other tech bros who have insisted that we must reverse declining birth rates to save civilization. But this idea of having babies for your nation, your tribe, your people has appealed to the Christian Right for decades. And in fact, Americans who demonstrate a commitment to the Christian Right’s underlying ideology—Christian nationalism—are the most likely to endorse the nationalistic pronatalism promoted by JD Vance, Putin, and Orban. They’re also the most likely to endorse the racial pronatalism we see among White nationalists.

***

When I say “Christian nationalism,” I mean an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a very particular kind of Christianity. That “particular kind” of Christianity is not the kind in which penitent sinners ask Jesus into their hearts or believers seek to emulate Jesus’ compassion for the sick and poor. That particular kind is ethno-cultural. Historically this was Anglo Protestant but now encompasses White conservative Protestants and Catholics (like JD Vance). You can think of Christian nationalism as an ideology that 1) idealizes a mythology in which White Christianity laid the foundations of our national identity and prosperity, and 2) advances a vision of American civic life that institutionalizes the supremacy of White Christianity, and ultimately, White Christians. This ideology is older than the nation itself, but its intensity ebbs and flows throughout our history in response to various internal threats to the supremacy of White Christian culture and people.

Recent experimental evidence shows that fear of losing the battle for religious supremacy drives Christian nationalism for many Americans. Two recent teams of social scientists found that when they randomly told groups of Christians that their population was in decline and that they would become the numerical minority in the United States within the next few years, Christians in both studies responded with more Christian nationalism, and in one study, more Trump support. At its foundation, Christian nationalism represents a circling of the cultural wagons. It is most appealing to Americans who feel compelled to re-emphasize to themselves and others who made this nation great (us), who are its rightful rulers (us again), and who threaten its prosperity and security (them).

But the threats are not merely religious; they are ethno-cultural and political. As Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport observed back in the 1950s, “religion…usually stands for more than faith.” The sects of Christianity, he argued, “have become tied into subcultural and national groups so that religious divisions march hand in hand with ethnic and national divisions.” Christian dominion, in other words, is tied into ethno-cultural and political dominion, and threats to one are threats to the other.

Let me show you what I mean. In a 2022 survey fielded by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), roughly 6,000 Americans were asked how much they agreed with the statement, “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background,” which is an excellent example of what we call “replacement theory.” PRRI also asked Americans a number of questions about Christian nationalism.

Figure 1 shows results from a statistical model that allows me to plot Americans’ agreement with the statement, “The US government should declare America a Christian nation,” by how much they agree with the replacement theory (controlling for other political, religious, and demographic characteristics). Clearly, the more Americans believe their cultural and ethnic heritage are being replaced by immigrants, the more likely they are to support Christian nationalism. This is likely for the same reasons the other experiments have shown, namely, those who believe the nation is being stolen must double-down to reassert the nation’s proper identity.

(Figure 1: Predicted Agreement that The U.S. Government Should Declare America a Christian Nation by How Much Americans Agree with Replacement Theory. Source: Public Religion Research Institute (2022). The error bars are 95% confidence intervals.)

But how do Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism seek to respond to their looming replacement by a more secular and ethnically diverse demographic?

One avenue has been expelling foreigners. Multiple studies have shown Christian nationalism to be powerfully related to support for restricting immigration, building border walls, and instituting Muslim bans.

Another avenue has been voter suppression, which attempts to neutralize the threat of minority or secular influence in politics by making it more difficult for people of color and young Americans to vote. And Christian nationalism is a strong predictor that such Americans support making voting more difficult, disenfranchising felons for life, and even mandating civics tests to vote.

But one tactic that was formerly thought of as a fringe approach was outbreeding the enemy. To be sure, among the most militantly evangelical Americans, pronatalism has long been a strategy for filling the world with soldiers for the cause of Christian dominion. The Duggars from the hit TV show 19 Kids and Counting were part of a broader patriarchal Christian movement dating back to the 1960s. But the appeal of group-centered pronatalism—having children not just because you find it personally fulfilling, but because it strategically benefits your religion (as well as your race, your political movement, your nation) is becoming a more common talking point among the Christian Right and some influential fellow-travelers. And as it turns out, Christian nationalism is the engine driving this childbearing motive for many.

In an earlier study of over 1,000 Americans, my co-authors and I demonstrated that Christian nationalism was among the strongest predictors that Americans broadly support national pronatalism. The more Americans agreed with Christian nationalist statements, the more likely they were to affirm statements like “Our declining fertility rate should alarm us as a nation,” and “Married couples in our country should have more babies, not fewer.” In fact, the only ideological factor we found more strongly associated with national pronatalism was a commitment to patriarchal gender roles. This makes perfect sense, because a nation organized around higher birth rates is a nation in which women will have more babies earlier, requiring them to limit their educational and career aspirations, and ultimately, their financial autonomy apart from men. Not surprisingly, research shows Christian nationalist ideology and patriarchal attitudes go hand in hand.

And there’s evidence to suggest Christian nationalism shapes Americans’ personal views about fertility, not just national fertility in the abstract. Using a representative sample of roughly 1,500 Americans from the 2021 General Social Survey, Figure 2 presents results from a statistical model in which I plot the number of children Americans think is ideal for a family to have by how much they subscribe to Christian nationalist views (like the country’s success is part of God’s plan, the government should advocate Christian values, and society would be better with more religious influence). Even after controlling for someone’s religious, political, and demographic characteristics, the more Americans subscribe to Christian nationalism, the greater their ideal number of children. At the extremes, those who completely reject Christian nationalism reported around 2.2 as their average ideal number of children, while those who strongly affirm Christian nationalism indicated nearly 2.7 on average—roughly half a child greater. (If that doesn’t sound like a lot, consider that fertility norms are often passed down from generation to generation, and thus, modest fertility differentials quickly lead to huge population differences due to exponential growth.)

(Figure 2: Predicted Average Ideal Number of Children for Americans Across Christian Nationalism. Source: General Social Survey (2021). Error ban represents the 95% confidence interval.)

But I wanted to go a step further than this and test how much Christian nationalism might undergird specific group-oriented reasons beyond the idea that more babies would be better than fewer. So, in a March 2023 survey, psychologist Joshua Grubbs and I asked nearly 1,500 Americans, “Which of the following are good reasons to have children?” The reasons included: 1) Because you want to help reverse our nation’s declining fertility; 2) Because you want to perpetuate your religious heritage; 2) Because you want to perpetuate your ethnic or racial heritage; and 4) Because you want to secure influence for those who share your political views. Respondents could answer from 1 = Very bad reason to 5 = Very good reason. What we found is that Christian nationalist ideology is the strongest factor predicting support for all four reasons to have kids.

In Figure 3, I’ve plotted the relative influences of several key ideological variables I tested in predicting these various reasons to have children. Christian nationalism is measured with six questions in which Americans were asked about their agreement with common Christian nationalist ideas: America has a special place in God’s plan, the government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation, the Bible should be the foundation of our legal system, the founding documents were divinely inspired, Christians have a responsibility to take dominion over national institutions, and being a Christian is an important aspect of being truly American.

As you can see, adhering to Christian nationalist ideology is a more important predictor of support for each reason to have more children than whether Americans already think having children is personally fulfilling, whether they are “social traditionalists” (they oppose abortion and same-sex marriage), whether they are personally religious, whether they are more ideologically conservative, and whether they are more partisan Republicans.

(Figure 3: Relative Marginal Effects of Americans Affirming Group-Based Reasons to Have More Children by Key Ideological Predictors. Source: National Addiction and Social Attitudes Survey (2023). The error bars are 95% confidence intervals.)

One important fact to keep in mind is that in none of these studies shows a difference by gender. Whether Americans are men or women, Christian nationalism corresponds to national pronatalism, higher personal fertility ideals, and supporting group-oriented reasons to have more children. It’s also important to remember that the questions we use to measure Christian nationalism say nothing about children or race. Yet, the more Americans affirm those abstract Christian nationalist views, the more they support the idea of perpetuating their own racial heritage through childbearing, in addition to having babies to perpetuate their religious heritage and secure political power for their group.

What’s the connection?

Ultimately, Christian nationalist ideology reflects an understanding that our nation has and should always belong to “Christians,” but what that really comes down to is “people like us.” And as I explained earlier, the “people like us” isn’t just about religion, but politics and ethno-culture. So, the more the nation is populated with “people like us” the better. That includes native-born Americans like us, Christians like us, members of our ethnic or racial group, and people who share our politics.

What this means is when GOP politicians speak the language of nationalist pronatalism—or any sort of group-based pronatalism, for one’s religion, race, or political party—they are speaking the language of the Christian Right. And this group-based pronatalist appeal dovetails perfectly with other emphases in the contemporary Republican platform that also strongly align with Christian nationalist priorities such as opposing abortion (more American babies) and restricting immigration (fewer foreign babies).

Is having more children a bad thing? Of course not. Neither is having large families. And there are, in fact, legitimate economic and political reasons to worry about declining birth rates given their impact on the social welfare system, workforce, and government budgets. Moreover, as sociologist Lyman Stone has pointed out, to the extent we see a growing discrepancy between how many children women want to have and how many they end up having, we should consider what policy changes might allow more women to reach their stated fertility goals (e.g., paid maternity and paternity leave, subsidies for childcare and other parenting needs, tax credits, etc.)

Yet the underlying ideology driving much of the modern pronatalist push on the right is not primarily the joy of having more children (see Figure 3 above). It’s babies as ammunition in a cultural, ethnic, and political war. It has been for years on the Christian Right, and those goals are now conveniently aligning with a growing concern about demographic winter among the wealthy and influential like Elon Musk and autocratic leaders around the globe. Politicians like JD Vance are dialed into both the replacement scare and pronatalist push on the right. And in lauding those we might call “fertility maxxers” as Americans worthy of more influence, Vance is making a strategic appeal to those who want to see more of “us,” and fewer of “them.”

Samuel L. Perry is the Sam K. Viersen Presidential Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. Along with dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, Dr. Perry is the author or co-author of five books including the award-winning Taking America Back for God (with Andrew Whitehead) and The Flag and the Cross (with Philip Gorski). His most recent book is Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion.

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(MAGA hat on a Caesar statue. Image source: Boston Globe Staff Illustration)

The gymnasium smelled of teenage body odor and sweat. Earnest adults were busy shooshing chatter and shepherding everyone inside. We sat on the wood floor, facing a makeshift stage under one of the basketball hoops. It was a Sunday night, sometime in the late summer of 1996. After a dinner of pizza and soda, and a game of dodgeball, it was time for the devotional part of our youth group’s gathering.

“Now, I’m going to bring up Brad Onishi to share what’s on his heart for the new school year,” Rick said. As I made my way to the stage, I could feel the surprise in the room. Rick, our youth pastor at Rose Drive Friends Church—a mini-evangelical-megachurch of 2,000 people in North Orange County, CA—hadn’t told anyone that I would be speaking. I hadn’t either.

This was my first sermon, given a week or so into my sophomore year of high school and about eighteen months after my conversion to evangelical Christianity. Standing in front of the eighty or so teenagers in our youth group, I wasn’t nervous. God had given me a message—it was time to deliver it.

“One of the things I learned recently,” I began, one hand on the cordless mic, another in the pocket of my corduroy surfer shorts, “was that salmon swim upstream in order to spawn. Many of them die in the process, losing their lives in order to reproduce themselves. For them, it’s worth the sacrifice in order to make more of themselves—and ensure life for future generations.”

Though caught off guard by the metaphor, my audience quickly caught on. As we swung into the new school year, it was our duty to make more Christians; to evangelize to the increasingly godless world around us; to sacrifice our vanity and insecurity to ensure future generations had eternal life.

Without knowing it, my sermon fit into an emerging movement in evangelical circles—a missional understanding of the church in the world. Spreading the Gospel wasn’t new. American born-again Christians have been that doing for centuries. What was new was the understanding that we Christians were doing so in a culture no longer accurately described as Christian. If America was no longer a godly nation, then we were missionaries to a secular culture, not the proponents of our society’s dominant ethos. And, two years later, in 1998, the movement found its central text in Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, an edited volume that called on Christians to see Western culture—the world that many of them still assumed to be predominantly Christian—as a post-Christian society in which they were not the dominant cultural group, but missionaries sent to evangelize in the same way as those in India, China, or Kenya might do. The missional paradigm spread to Southern Baptist churches, Reformed circles, and nondenominational churches across the country. In this framework, Christians would have to embrace their roles as countercultural disciples of Jesus swimming upstream in a current no longer moving toward or with Christianity.

The missional church model fit within larger trends in religion and politics from that era. Throughout the late 1990s, evangelical men attended Promise Keepers rallies in stadiums across the nation, where speakers emphasized racial reconciliation and responsibilities facing Christian men. Promise Keepers wasn’t as much about converting souls as transforming how evangelical men viewed their place in society. Speakers asked attendees to take stock of men’s roles in home and in the country. The movement remained patriarchal—and in my view deeply problematic— but nonetheless it was based on multiculturalism (at least in name) and vulnerability (men were often seen weeping at these rallies). By the early 2000s, George W. Bush was arguing for a compassionate conservatism that would enlarge the conservative base by recognizing the need to make room for Americans of different ethnic and racial backgrounds.

To be clear, I have no interest in paying homage to these religious or political trends. My goal is neither to reminisce upon, nor restore the legacies of the missional church movement, Promise Keepers, or George W. Bush’s presidency. Rather, these touchstones from my evangelical youth serve to draw a sharp distinction from where we were a quarter-century ago and where many in evangelical and other conservative Christian spaces have arrived today. Currently, there is little room in the evangelical world for seeing the church as swimming upstream in an increasingly secular society. There is even less appetite for compassion and reconciliation—whether in racial, gender, or any other terms.

Instead of calling for a missional church made up of countercultural, self-sacrificial disciples, now the call—or at least one influential call—is for restoring Christendom through the eradication of diversity, the cultivation of ethno-nationalism, and the use of imperial force. This call is coming from pastors and theologians who support Trump as an instrument for moving the country toward the Christian nation they envision. But what they really want is a Christian leader—a prince or Caesar—who will go even further than the 46th President ever imagined.

***

The Nation Conservatism Conference is a right-wing organization dedicated to fostering Christian political conservatism in the United States and beyond. According to its statement of principles, NatCon (as it is colloquially known) maintains that “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision.” Backed by the Edmund Burke Foundation, NatCon conferences have become the vanguard in recent years for Christian nationalists, right-wing speakers, and elected officials to articulate their visions “to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought.” In July 2024, NatCon 4 took place in Washington, DC. At the close of the session, the moderator, Yoram Hazony, asked these questions: “When you think of this coming state where the Christian commitments are maximized, is there room for Jews or fellow Bible Believers? Is there room for Muslims, Hindus?”

Hazony was addressing the two panelists—a duo once thought unlikely to appear on stage together but whose political commitments now seemed resonant: Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Doug Wilson, the pastor, publisher, and podcaster headquartered in Moscow, Idaho. For those attentive to Protestant politics, this was a watershed moment—the figurehead of the largest Protestant denomination in the country sharing a stage with the firebrand provocateur who once praised slavery and has labeled himself the spokesperson of American Christian nationalism. Mohler holds sway over millions of Southern Baptists as the leader of their most important institution; Wilson reaches his millions through sermons, his publishing house, his media empire, and his network of churches.

(Mohler (L), Wilson (R). Image source: Zach D. Roberts/Bucks County Beacon)

By the time Hazony asked the question, the two men had been discussing their political-theological visions for the United States for nearly an hour. Mohler responded: “I want to maximize the Christian commitments of the state. I call that ‘acknowledgment.’ I’m not claiming that every citizen will be a confessing Christian. But that does not mean they are not obligated to the acknowledgment of the Christian structure of this civilization.” In other words, one does not have to be a Christian to be part of the United States, but for Mohler they should have to acknowledge that the country is a Christian one. He continued, “I don’t think a nation can survive without theological commitments. That does not mean it cannot allow others to be a part of the community and even invite others in a certain sense into the community, but it does mean that there has to be the explicit acknowledgment that this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological commitments.”

Wilson: “I agree with everything he said.”

According to Wilson and Mohler, for Hindus, Muslims, and presumably anyone who doesn’t hold to the Christian faith, within the ideal Christian nationalist scenario is a de jure second-class existence under a state theologically committed to the Christian God.

The panel ended with neither Wilson nor Mohler explaining how non-Christians would be part of their ideal Christian society. Would they be allowed citizenship? Would they be eligible for political office? To teach in public schools, volunteer in electioneering, or coaching athletics?

***

A few weeks later, Wilson clarified this point at a conference at New St. Andrews College, a classical Christian college he founded in connection with his church, Christ Church:

“In the republic I envision, Hindus would not be able to hold political office . . . So in the Christian nationalist project, we don’t want this smudge or hodgepodge. We want it to be explicitly Christian. We would want prayers at the political convention to be to God the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This aligned with what Wilson said in an interview from earlier this year: “This is a Christian republic, and … you’re not singing off the same sheet of music that we are,” he told Religion News Service. “So, no, you can’t be the mayor.”

Wilson has been a controversial figure for decades, but he has seen a mainstream resurgence over the last few years. He did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson, was praised by Charlie Kirk, then appeared on stage at NatCon with Al Mohler. But his influence goes well beyond his own popularity as an author and speaker.

Joel Webbon is one of Wilson’s protégés. As the founder of Right Response Ministries and the Covenant Bible Church in Austin, Texas, Webbon often holds conferences and conducts interviews with Wilson.

When asked recently what a revival in the United States would look like, Webbon answered that “it would look like millions of people being deported. It would look like mothers getting death row for murdering their children.”

When asked about the presence of non-Christian and non-White people in the United States, Webbon argued that their presence is a sign of judgment on America.

“Throughout scripture, the idea of full-blown invasions from foreign peoples who worship foreign gods, it is never, in scripture, spoken of as a blessing of liberty. It is always spoken of as a judgment. I believe that America is under God’s judgment. And I don’t think that the forms or the expressions of God’s judgment merely lie with Drag Queen Story Hour, but that they also include the fact that my neighborhood is 30 percent Hindu.”

And when asked about what should be done to revive America and relieve it of God’s judgment, Webbon declared the need for a Caesar who would take the reins: “We’re degenerates. The constitution, it’s not suited for governing degenerates…But, I think for our population that is degraded morally and culturally, religiously, as far as we have, you need power. Men must be governed. You need a Caesar type…I don’t think constitutioning even harder is going to get us out of our current mess.”

How would Christians rule if they gained power – whether through a Caesar or by other means? In addition to ensuring women can’t vote, an extreme position even among American evangelicals, Webbon outlines his vision thusly: “I want Christians to have power, and with that power, I want it to be wielded righteously. What does that mean? It means crushing our enemies and rewarding our friends.”

Webbon’s Christian nationalism aligns closely with Stephen Wolfe’s, another Reformed figure aligned with Wilson. Wilson’s Canon Press published Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, a popular book among extremist Christian nationalists that once reached the top 100 on the Amazon book charts.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Wolfe’s book draws on the concepts of volk, a German term describing ties within an ethnic group, and homeland in order to justify the idea that Christians should love those who are more like them, more. It’s not, according to Wolfe, that Christians shouldn’t love all people. It is just that societies can only be built by people who share the same ethnicity and religion—and thus love each other more than outsiders and foreigners. Wolfe’s Christian nationalism is an express ethno-nationalism based on blood and soil rhetoric.

Speaking of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Wolfe said at a conference recently that “There’s no distant place that we call home. We have nowhere else to go. But this is our home. This is our native land. We are Native Americans, born of those who didn’t immigrate, but who settled here.” And, conversely, speaking about those who are not WASPs, Wolfe recently said in a podcast interview that it should be “permissible for Christians to deem certain groups to have positions that are detrimental to the fundamental features of society and to rescind their political equality.” While there has been a deep and effective alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelicals since the rise of the Moral Majority, Webbon and Wolfe envision a “distinctly Protestant” Christian nation.

In September of 2023, Wolfe tweeted: “And thus while intermarriage is not itself wrong (as an individual matter), groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves.”

These are only a few examples of the pastors and theologians outlining a Christian nationalism based on Christian supremacy. While there have always been racist and ethno-nationalists on the American Right, the current generation has become mainstream by dint of its Christianity. When Al Mohler shook hands with Doug Wilson at Natcon in July, 2024, it was a symbol of the embrace that legacy denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention are willing to make with extremists in order to build a coalition that will force the acknowledgment of Christian authority on all Americans in one way or another.

***

From the time I gave my first sermon in 1996 to Natcon 4 in 2024, the trendy buzzwords among evangelicals and other conservative Protestants transformed from “missional” to “nationalist.” One could point to a number of causes for the shift. One clear one came in the 2010s, when White Christians officially became less than half of the American population. For the first time in the nation’s history, they were the minority. This coincided with the second-term of the first Black president, the building momentum for legalizing same-sex marriage, and the continual decline in religiosity across the United States. It might have been one thing to view the church as a countercultural force in American society back before White Christians lost their demographic majority and executive exclusivity. Since then, figures like Wilson, Webbon, and Wolfe have emerged to give voice to a White Christian nationalism bent on regaining power through non-democratic means, fortifying White identity by demoting the political equality of those not like them, and calling for the political denigration—and in some cases, excision—of non-Christian people. It seems that they were never going to settle for the title of “missionary” in their own country, never going to let what Caesar’s be his, never going to accept the reality of American multiculturalism. Instead, they declared themselves settlers and demonized immigrants, started calling for a Caesar to replace the Constitution, and proclaimed other cultures a dangerous hodgepodge and a judgment on the United States.

Bradley Onishi is a social commentator, scholar, and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus (SWAJ) podcast. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, Rolling Stone, and he is the author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – And What Comes Next.

The post From Missionaries to Settler-Colonialists for Christian Supremacy appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Eric Thayer for the New York Times)

The day after the 2020 election, before news outlets officially called the presidential race for Joe Biden, a woman got up in her church to preach. Petite, blonde, fashionably dressed, she spoke with the verve and cadence of a gifted televangelist enrapturing a crowd. Stamping her foot and intermittently speaking in tongues, she called for angels from Africa and South America—“angelic reinforcements”—to come to the United States to help assure that Donald Trump would be declared victorious.

That preacher was Paula White-Cain, personal pastor to then-President Trump and chair of his Evangelical Advisory Board. She was also, at the time, a paid White House staffer, leading Trump’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

The news stories and academic articles that took note of this episode—often mockingly—chalked it up as a potent example of “Christian nationalism” or, as it’s commonly rendered, “white Christian nationalism.” In American political discourse today, these phrases are usually invoked as though they are uniquely American phenomena. Yes, Paula White-Cain is white, and she does espouse Christian nationalism. But in the background of this ecstatic scene and this pastor’s story lies a radical, ascendant, Independent Charismatic paradigm of Christian nationalism that is neither bounded by American shores nor exclusively inhabited by white Christians. It’s a story that may or may not involve angels transferring between continents, but it definitely involves transcontinental webs of relationships among Christian leaders from North America, Africa, and South America.

Though counterintuitively more transnational, racially diverse, and gender inclusive than other forms of Christian nationalism, this insurgent force in the American religious right should not leave us sleeping more calmly at night. Indeed, the Independent Charismatic style of Christian nationalism that Paula White-Cain and Donald Trump have helped usher into the mainstream of the American right was a driving force in the January 6th Capitol Riot, and it is powering Trump’s third (ever more authoritarian) bid for the White House.

Paula White-Cain, therefore, serves as a useful entry point into understanding the globally attuned charismatic Christian movement that has furnished the spirituality of Christian Trumpism.

The Wild West of Modern Christianity

The phrase “Independent Charismatic” probably sounds obscure to many, so it’s worth pausing to consider the structure and environs of this incipient segment of global Christianity. “Charismatic” here describes a form of Christian belief and practice focused on recapturing the supernatural dimensions of early Christianity, where speaking in tongues, miracles, and prophecy abound. This charismatic subculture feels like home to hundreds of millions of people around the globe but feels utterly foreign to many who locate themselves within the European and North American cosmopolitan mainstream.

Independent Charismatics are the rowdy, unregulated cousins of the Pentecostals, those Holy Spirit-filled, revivalist denominations of modern Christianity. Additionally, there’s a thriving global trend today of Catholics adopting effusive charismatic spirituality. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was raised in such a community.

But the key characteristic that sets Independent Charismatics apart from these other types is that they are nondenominational. The Independent Charismatics occupy the Wild West of modern Christianity: a free-flowing culture of perpetual new frontiers. Scholars estimate that there were approximately 44 million Independent Charismatics in the world in 1970, but by 2020 they numbered 312 million. That means that, globally, Independent Charismaticism has been roughly doubling in numbers every 20 years, making it one of the fastest growing religious movements ever.

Two features of this global charismatic trend have proven central to the Christian embrace of Donald Trump: 1) a highly networked leadership culture and 2) the aggressive politics of “spiritual warfare.”

For many Christians, “nondenominational” signals the absence of structure (to “denominate” is, literally, to name or categorize), but church governance, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In lieu of institutional superstructure, the entrepreneurial Independent Charismatic leadership culture that has emerged in the past few decades is collaborative and intricately networked. Independent Charismatic leaders go by many titles—pastor, apostle, evangelist, prophet, televangelist, Messianic rabbi, worship leader, revivalist—but they all work together. And among the thousands of global, top-tier nondenominational charismatic pastors and leaders, there is rarely more than two degrees of separation. These webs of relationships among the leaders weave together charismatic movements around the world.

One of the central organs of this leadership culture is a relatively new model of church governance called apostolic networks. The concept emerges from a modern reinterpretation of Ephesians 4, where the biblical author lists five ministry gifts Jesus gave to the church: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. In the past century, many charismatic leaders began seeing this passage, with its five differentiated roles, as the central New Testament template for church leadership. Though it’s at great variance from how most Christians think of church, the proponents of this “fivefold” or “apostolic and prophetic” model argue that this was the original arrangement of the early church and should be restored now.

In this fivefold model, modern apostles are network-building luminaries whose authority and vision surpasses that of congregation-bound pastors. Apostles offer guidance and oversight to vast coalitions of churches and ministries. Prophets are divinely gifted oracles who hear and speak God’s word, giving supernatural insights to the apostles and the churches under their imprimatur. Within the past 40 years, thousands of churches in the U.S. (hundreds of thousands around the world) have either left their denominations or abandoned their congregational autonomy to join apostolic networks.

The second distinctive feature of Independent Charismatics, as it relates to Christian nationalism, is their high-octane vision of spiritual warfare. “Spiritual warfare” refers to a popular Christian belief in an invisible war going on all around us between angels and demons. Many evangelical, Pentecostal, and Catholic Christians participate in spiritual warfare, using practices like prayer or exorcisms to join the battle against the multitudinous devils and their diabolical agenda to derail Christian faith and thwart God’s purposes on Earth.

Independent Charismatics put these spiritual warfare practices on steroids. Through various correlated revelations from their prophets and new readings of old Bible passages, they have developed elaborate vocabularies and protocols for battling demons. Blowing shofars (ritual rams’ horns that were originally used in Jewish liturgical services), singing worship music, and even dancing can all serve as weapons of spiritual warfare. And they often describe their apostles and prophets as generals of spiritual warfare: divinely appointed leaders with enough authority to take on even the most high-ranking demonic “principalities and powers.” Spiritual warfare is part of the grammar of Independent Charismatic culture, and to even dip your toes into this pulsing subculture is to be drawn into the drama of cosmic combat.

From “Messed Up Mississippi Girl” to Pastor to the President

That context brings us back to Paula White-Cain’s invocations for angels from Africa and South America to aid President Trump. This self-described “messed up Mississippi girl” typifies—and has helped shape—the American branch of this global Independent Charismatic trend.

Born Paula Michelle Furr in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1966, Paula’s early life was marked by escalating tragedy and trauma. After her father’s apparent suicide by car crash when Paula was five years old, her mother took to drinking heavily, and Paula, barely in elementary school, was often left to care for herself.

In her autobiographical books, she recounts numerous sexual and physical abuses she endured from caregivers, relatives, and neighbors. She developed bulimia and characterizes herself at eighteen as “an old soul,” blind to all but “the hopeless carnage of today.”

Then Paula found Pentecostalism. In her late teens, she began dating a singer in a local Maryland rock band, Dean Knight. When she became pregnant unexpectedly, they quickly married and began attending the Pentecostal Church of God where Knight had been raised. The raw devotion and euphoric experiences of Pentecostal piety resonated deeply with Paula, therapy for her wounded soul, and she thought, “This is me.”

But within a few years, their marriage was on the rocks, and Paula fell in love, instead, with the associate pastor of the church, Randy White. Randy was married with three kids, eight years her elder, a fifth-generation Pentecostal preacher, and the son of the senior pastor.

The ensuing scandal of Pastor Randy and Paula both divorcing their spouses to marry each other pretty much ended Randy’s career in the denomination. Denominations have guidelines, strictures, and accountability measures for ordained clergy, and they tend to frown on pastors getting divorced to marry a younger—and mid-divorce—congregation member.

In the face of denominational scrutiny and communal disgrace, Randy and Paula White reinvented themselves and moved to Tampa, Florida in 1991 to start their own church. Their new endeavor was charismatic and nondenominational, and they named it Without Walls International Church.

Without Walls was founded on the cusp of a flood of American megachurches (Protestant churches with more than 2,000 regular attendees), and it rode the rising tide. Their church attracted more than 700 attendees within the first year of opening. By 2006, when Paula turned 40, they had more than 20,000 members, making it one of the largest churches in America. What quickly became evident was that Randy might have the pastoral pedigree, but Paula was the breakout talent.

(Paula White-Cain with Donald Trump. Image source: Chip Somodevilla for Getty Images)

The Whites’ burgeoning megachurch, like the larger Independent Charismatic sector, was startlingly multiethnic — 30 percent white, 30 percent Latino/a, and 40 percent Black. Recognizing her potential, T.D. Jakes, a popular, up-and-coming Black charismatic preacher, offered to mentor Paula.

She soon got a televangelism show of her own on the Black Entertainment Television (BET) network. Her show was explosively popular, eschewing many conventional televangelism tropes in favor of raw, honest conversations where Paula could speak from her own traumatized past and draw guests into sharing similar stories. A sociologist and a historian who’ve studied her ministry have argued she “represents a nonconfrontational style of postfeminist leadership.”

One day in 2002, out of the blue, Paula received a phone call from famed real estate mogul Donald Trump. He had seen her preaching on television and told her, “You have the it factor.” Paula, half-jokingly rejoindered, “Sir, we call that the anointing.” White and Trump became friends, and she viewed the New York celebrity as “a spiritual assignment” from God. She would visit Trump when she was in New York, and she eventually bought a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower.

As her fame and stardom rose, Paula faced a series of public scandals. In 2007, Senator Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, announced an investigation into Paula and five other major charismatic televangelists. Coinciding with a messy divorce from Randy, the investigation caused Without Walls to crumble and go into foreclosure. The Senate Committee’s eventual scathing report detailed the Whites’ decadent lifestyle and, tacitly, accused them of corruption.

But Paula landed on her feet. She took over leading a majority Black megachurch in Orlando and renamed it City of Destiny. She also found a new mentor, a charismatic Ghanaian apostle named Nicholas Duncan-Williams, who is credited as one of the most influential religious leaders in Africa. The blonde white woman preacher from Mississippi regularly travels to Africa to sit at the feet of her “spiritual father.” The mentorship of Duncan-Williams corresponded with Paula’s embrace of the fivefold ministry model, and she began calling herself an apostle in 2012. In fact, it was Duncan-Williams who blessed Paula’s third marriage in 2015, this time to Jonathan Cain, keyboardist from the band Journey, famous for helping write the hit songs “Don’t Stop Believin’” and “Faithfully.”

Donald Trump and the Independent Charismatics

Just a couple months after her third wedding, Paula’s “spiritual assignment” rode down the escalator to declare his candidacy for president. Like any savvy Republican politician, Trump knew there was no path to the presidency without evangelical voters, so he invited Paula to “be in charge of reaching out to the evangelicals.”

This presented an interesting problem, in that Paula White-Cain was hardly a conventional evangelical herself. She was a female pastor—which most evangelicals believe is verboten — uncredentialed, thrice married, and a scandal-ridden preacher, to boot. Not having inroads with the buttoned-up, elite evangelicals of the religious right, Paula began inviting her kind of Christian leaders—apostles, prophets, televangelists, Messianic rabbis, and megachurch pastors—to meet with Candidate Trump.

She convened a series of meetings between members of the Independent Charismatic celebrity class and Trump in New York in the fall of 2015. These offbeat outsiders were the first Christian leaders to endorse the reality TV star. They prayed and prophesied over him, pronouncing that he had a special anointing and destiny from God.

This is the untold backstory of how Donald Trump won over evangelical voters: the elite evangelical establishment kept the uncouth Trump at arm’s length during the 2016 Republican primary. It was Paula White-Cain’s coterie of television preachers and populist prophets who threw open the doors of American evangelicalism to Trump. They vouched for him as “a bold man, a strong man, and an obedient man” and claimed—months before a single voter had cast a ballot—that this notorious miscreant was a chosen instrument in the very hand of God.

By the time Trump had won almost all the 2016 primaries, the old guard of the Christian right had to swallow their pride if they wanted to get in Trump’s good graces. As Stephen Strang, a media mogul of the charismatic world and a long-time friend of Paula’s, put it to me in an interview: “these evangelical hot shots… had to go hat in hand to this thin little blonde lady who looks more like a fashion model than she does a preacher.” As Trump consolidated Republican support and pivoted to the general election, Paula White-Cain was, unexpectedly, in the catbird seat, the gatekeeper portioning out religious leaders’ access to the candidate.

And then, to everyone’s surprise, Donald Trump won the election. The Independent Charismatics, who were the most ardent regiments of Christian Trumpists, rejoiced for their prophecies had been fulfilled.

Fittingly, Paula White-Cain became a trusted advisor to the new president. She was the first female religious leader to offer an invocation prayer at a presidential inauguration: “Let Your favor be upon this one nation under God. Let these United States of America be a beacon of hope to all people and nations under your dominion, a true hope for humankind.”

President Trump asked Paula to chair his official Evangelical Advisory Board, and, in what would become a pattern of her leadership, she stacked it with ethnically diverse Independent Charismatic megachurch pastors, apostles, and prophets. It is a striking fact that among the Christian leaders of color who prominently advised Donald Trump, of whom there were more than a dozen, nearly all of them were nondenominational and charismatic, with most being part of fivefold ministry networks. Paula even managed to finagle having Nicholas Duncan-Williams, her Ghanaian apostle mentor, offer a prayer at Trump and Pence’s private religious service on Inauguration Day. Through Paula White-Cain, the global Independent Charismatic celebrity class was offered unprecedented entrée to the White House.

Amid the chaos and upheaval in the early days of the Trump presidency, it was easy to miss some of the abnormal (at least, by the conventions of the religious right) Christian groups and spiritual practices that surrounded Trump. A group of fivefold apostles and prophets, some of whom were among Trump’s evangelical advisors, created a spiritual warfare prayer initiative in 2017 titled “POTUS Shield.” The POTUS Shield leaders gathered regularly in Washington, DC to do spiritual battle on behalf of Trump and his agenda. They organized round-the-clock prayer shifts for Christians to beseech heaven against the “witches, warlocks, satanists, and anti-christ spirits” that would dare defy God’s anointed leader.

POTUS Shield included some prominent white prophets, but the leadership team featured other voices like Alveda King, a charismatic evangelist, conservative activist, and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, and Mark Gonzales, a charismatic apostle and founder of the United States Hispanic Action Network. Charismatic pastor Herman Martir, a member of Trump’s Asian Pacific American advisory committee, was central to POTUS Shield, even as he led his own Asian Action Network. Mosy Madugba, a highly connected Nigerian apostle and author, was also included. Needless to say, these leaders do not fit the mold of white American Christian nationalists, but they were all deeply linked to the global charismatic leadership infrastructure and became spiritual combat commanders on Trump’s behalf.

(Background image from the POTUS Shield website)

Likewise, in a little-noticed episode in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump launched his “Evangelicals for Trump” sub-campaign at El Rey Jésus, a bilingual megachurch in Miami led by another of his evangelical advisors: Guillermo Maldonado, a Honduran-American apostle who leads his own Supernatural Global Network with more than 450 affiliated ministries in more than 72 countries. On stage at that event, Trump was iconically photographed being prayed over by Maldonado, Alveda King, Paula White-Cain, and another of Trump’s charismatic Miami-based advisors: Alberto Delgado, a Cuban American pastor.

Of course, to declare Trump anointed by God is to cast his opponents as enemies of God. The more evangelical spiritual zeal and hope built up around Trump, the more these charismatic leaders literally demonized the “Demo(n)crats,” Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and any other mere mortal who would dare defy God’s chosen. When the politics of spiritual warfare are layered into a democracy, polarization and, in extreme cases, political violence are the downstream consequences.

The charismatic spiritual fervor around Trump continued to grow throughout his presidency. Hundreds of charismatic prophets issued prophecies about Trump and his divine mission to bolster and defend conservative Christians, confident that God intended for Trump to have a second term. So, while Paula White-Cain’s petitions for “angels from Africa” to come and reinforce Trump’s cause after the election got the attention, her prayers that day were in step with her cohort’s militancy, sense of divine destiny, and desperation at that moment.

The Spirituality of January 6th

Perhaps the most visible materialization of this convergence of Donald Trump, the global Independent Charismatic celebrity class, and Paula White-Cain is the Capitol Insurrection on January 6, 2021. When Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election and Trump claimed the election had been stolen, Independent Charismatic celebrities kicked their spiritual warfare efforts into the highest possible gear. The Trump-aligned apostles and prophets galvanized their followers to battle against the demons they claimed were stealing the election from Trump. They launched a massive spiritual warfare and activism campaign, enlisting hundreds of thousands of American and global charismatics, to entreat heaven for a Trump miracle. This post-election campaign entailed countless prayer gatherings, prophecy podcasts, conference calls, television shows, and coordinated “Jericho Marches” (charismatic worship and prayer gatherings in swing-state capitals and Washington, DC).

Paula White-Cain was not only the first female religious leader to serve as an advisor to a U.S. president, or the first female religious leader to offer a prayer at a presidential inauguration. She was also the first female religious leader to lead an invocation over an American insurrection. That’s right, the infamous rally on January 6th, the same rally where Rudy Giuliani would lustily call for “trial by combat,” where Donald Trump would demand the angry crowds “fight like hell”—that rally officially began with a prayer by Paula White-Cain. It was a quintessentially charismatic prayer:

“Let us pray, because God is going to be in today. We believe in miracles… God, we ask right now in conclusion for your provision, for your protection, for your power, for an outpouring of your Spirit like never before. I secure POTUS… As his pastor, I put a hedge of protection around him. I secure his purpose. I secure his destiny.”

There were plenty of garden-variety Christian nationalists who showed up on January 6th, but the overwhelmingly dominant form of Christian identity and spirituality on display that day was nondenominational and charismatic. Rioters carried numerous “Appeal to Heaven” flags, a Revolutionary War banner appropriated by prophets and their followers as a spiritual warfare symbol. Groups of Christians around the Capitol did battle against demons, singing worship songs, speaking in tongues, blowing shofars, and prophesying over the besieged building. Over the past three years of research, I have tracked at least 60 Independent Charismatic leaders to the Capitol Riot, far more than any other denomination or expression of Christianity. Only seven of those have faced any legal consequences for their participation that day.

As we hurtle inexorably toward another presidential election with Donald Trump on the ballot, with hints of violence and promises of election-denial gathering like storm clouds on the horizon, Paula White-Cain is still at Trump’s right hand, leading his new National Faith Advisory Board. We are still living through the charismatic sea change in the culture of the religious right that she has helped inaugurate.

The great irony is that this tenacious, talented, tragic, triumphant woman, a religious leader with no formal training to speak of, has helped diversify the religious right in the United States, bringing women, international perspectives, and people of color into the molten core of American Christian nationalism. But in globalizing and diversifying the leadership of the American religious right—aligning the U.S. with the most important and fastest growing trend in global Christianity—Paula and her confederates have also introduced a destabilizing new energy and vision of Manichaean combat into the already fractious American political landscape. They believe God has given them a political savior and promised them ultimate victory over the devil and their liberal enemies—the only question that remains, for them, is when.

Matthew D. Taylor is the author of the new book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.

The post Christian Nationalism Gone Global appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Selcuk Acar for Getty Images)

At an Iowa rally in late 2023, former president Donald Trump proclaimed, “As soon as I get back in the Oval Office, I’ll also immediately end the war on Christians. I don’t know if you feel it. You have a war. There’s a war. . . Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before.” As Trump knows well, the language of war and persecution can spark a group’s desire for survival, defense, and retribution. It also encourages a search for a savior, someone who can protect the group’s interests.

Speaking to the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit several months later in July 2024, Trump told those gathered, “Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. You’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.” This apparent promise to end future elections was a classic example of Trump rhetoric—using language to motivate his intended audience but employing enough ambiguity to escape any claims that he, in this instance, made a direct promise to roll back voting access and cripple American democracy.

Since 2015 when Donald Trump burst onto the national political scene, commentators have highlighted numerous examples of authoritarianism in his speeches. And in each of these cases, Trump is appealing directly to American Christians, promising privilege and power, so long as they pledge their support to him as the only leader willing to fight for them. Trump routinely taps into the desire of many Americans to make the United States a properly “Christian” nation, one made for people like them.

Years of social scientific research demonstrate that a vital element of Christian nationalism is authoritarianism. Americans who consistently embrace Christian nationalism are primed to walk down authoritarian paths to ensure their rightful place atop the national hierarchy. We also know a strong connection exists between Christian nationalism and a comfort with violence and the weakening of democratic values. So, when Trump uses Christian nationalist rhetoric he is, in a sense, preaching directly to a choir ready and willing to make his rhetoric a reality.

What is Christian Nationalism?

Christian nationalism is a cultural framework aimed at fusing together a particularly conservative expression of Christianity with various aspects of America’s civic and social life. It holds that all levels of our government should preserve and defend this cultural framework as central to our national identity, that it should determine who can engage in various forms of civic participation, and that it should be pivotal to feelings of social belonging.

A key aspect of this definition of Christian nationalism is the phrase “a particularly conservative expression of Christianity.” It refers to the fact that the Christianity of Christian nationalism is a specific expression—overwhelmingly conservative both theologically and politically. So, it isn’t just referring to historic Christian beliefs like the divinity of Jesus or eternal salvation. Rather, it includes a collection of cultural elements alongside those widely shared Christian beliefs. I like to refer to these elements as “cultural baggage.” In survey after survey, research demonstrates the Christianity of Christian nationalism contains the following cultural elements.

Traditionalist Social Arrangements

Let’s begin with the first element of Christian nationalism—a desire for a society organized according to traditionalist social arrangements and hierarchies. A strong nation is one where men and women are complementary in their roles where men lead and women support, couples are ideally heterosexual, and families contain a mom and dad committed to procreation. American citizens and families that represent these ideals should have the easiest access to civil rights and liberties. Those who do not embrace these ideals are consequently viewed as something less than a “true American.” LGBTQ citizens may be denied the opportunity to adopt. Single, childless women who own cats get denigrated as what is wrong with the country, as J.D. Vance once claimed. For many Americans who embrace Christian nationalism, the United States has largely abandoned structuring itself according to these arrangements. These folks believe this is a dangerous predicament where the Christian God might soon punish our country for our sins.

Strong Ethno-racial Boundaries

The second element of Christian nationalism is strict ethno-racial boundaries. The narratives and symbols inherent to the cultural framework of Christian nationalism imagine the United States as created by white, Anglo-Protestant men, according to white, Anglo-Protestant values, for the benefit of modern day white, Anglo-Protestant natural-born citizens. It is this group who should remain central to the country’s cultural identity and political leadership, as ethnic diversity is not our national strength, but a hindrance. To maintain control, however, these lines have been moved multiple times throughout our nation’s history. For instance, up until the middle of the 20^th century, Catholics were racialized as non-white and un-American. Even into the 1960s, white Christian Protestant leaders, like Billy Graham, were opposed to John F. Kennedy’s candidacy for President since he was Catholic. But soon after, during the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970s, conservative Catholics and Protestants found common political cause—so much so that conservative Catholics now occupy five of the nine seats on the United States Supreme Court.

Therefore, the “white” of white Christian nationalism refers not to skin color, but to how white Americans, as a group, tend to have greater access to power, privilege, wealth, and other benefits bestowed by various social institutions. So, non-white Americans can and do embrace white Christian nationalism in service of upholding the values, habits, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes that perpetuate the status quo that tends to benefit white Americans. People who embrace Christian nationalism believe racial or ethnic groups talking about racial inequality are denigrating this country, where all have equal opportunity.

Populism and Conspiratorial Thinking

The third element of Christian nationalism is an embrace of populism and conspiratorial thinking. The populist impulse that this country was made for the common man and woman creates space for Americans to embrace feelings of victimization—that certain “elites” are trying to persecute them—which lends itself to adopting more conspiratorial thinking. For example, Americans embracing Christian nationalism are more likely to adhere to QAnon, believe the “Big Lie,” endorse false claims about scientific findings like vaccinations, and subscribe to various other conspiracy theories.

Authoritarian Social Control

The final cultural element is particularly important in our current context: a comfort with authoritarian social control. In the cultural framework of Christian nationalism, the United States has a special covenantal relationship with the Christian God, which is why our nation is so exceptional compared to other nations. Because the world is a chaotic place, the Christian God places demands on the United States. If we fail to meet those demands and live up to certain standards, our standing with God is in jeopardy. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas, sums it up this way when describing the contents of his book America is a Christian Nation: “many concerning changes have taken place in our nation in recent years, including legalized same-sex marriages, altered views of gender, and a dramatic escalation of anti-Christian socialism. It is increasingly clear that America has strayed far from its biblical foundation. . . the United States was founded predominantly by Christians who wanted to build a Christian nation on the foundation of God’s will. Furthermore, these men believed that the future success of our country depended upon our fidelity to Christian beliefs.”

To ensure the United States will live up to these “Christian beliefs,” the country needs strong rules and strong rulers who, through the threat of violence (or actual violence), defend and enforce the desired social hierarchies and ethno-racial boundaries. For instance, when Robert Jeffress was asked to defend his support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, he said, “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek. I’ve said I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.” Another example is from self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and author Stephen Wolfe in his recent book, where he pines for more authoritarian measures to achieve a more “Christian” nation. He advocates for installing a “Christian prince” who would employ a “measured and theocratic Caesarism.” This leader would exert authority for ordering the nation and leading it to greatness.

How does a comfort with authoritarian social control translate to our everyday lives in the United States? There are two primary avenues, both supported by extensive empirical evidence: embracing political violence and opposing democratic values.

Authoritarian Social Control and Political Violence        

In my book American Idolatry, I show how violence serves as a fundamental attribute of Christian nationalism in relation to two other attributes: power and fear. Christian nationalism is focused on maintaining privileged access to political power, allowing any group to do what they want despite resistance. Holding privileged access to power raises the specter of someday losing such access. So, with power comes fear and a sense of threat that “they” are coming to take power. When facing that possibility, a group will increasingly embrace violence to defend their position.

There’s a particular logic at work here. Conservative political and religious leaders claim that politics in the United States is a battle between good and evil. Using various scriptures from the Christian Bible, such leaders implore American Christians to fight back against evil using any means necessary, even hinting toward violence. The current Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, illustrates this very connection. At a Christian women’s conference, he declared, “Obviously, this is an increasingly hostile culture. We all know that. We need to understand why that is, and we need to commit to do our part to confront it. The kingdom of God allows aggression.”

If God commands Christians to take this country back, can they avoid doing whatever it takes? Even if that includes rolling back democracy and embracing violence to install a God-ordained leader?

Those who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to support various forms of violence, including state-sanctioned violence. In the 2022 book The Flag and the Cross, authors Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry show that Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to say authorities should use any means necessary to achieve law and order; for instance, they believe the biggest problem with the death penalty is that we do not use it enough. These same folks also embrace political violence if it serves to achieve their desired outcome.

(Image source: Patrick Semansky for Associated Press)

In a 2023 report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 40 percent of Christian nationalism adherents agreed that “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Over 50 percent of these same folks agreed “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”

Recent research from political scientists Miles Armaly, David Buckley, and Adam Enders shows the relationship of Christian nationalism to support for political violence is contingent on several factors. Not all Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are running around looking to engage in violence. Rather, their comfort with political violence is activated once they begin receiving cues from trusted political leaders that highlight their perceived victimhood, demand the defense of racial boundaries—like limiting immigration, opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, or battling “wokeness”—and ask them to fight back against “nefarious elites” intent on their destruction. Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are especially susceptible to receiving these cues because they tend to immerse themselves in echo chambers where conspiratorial thinking is much more prevalent. They have been repeatedly told, and have come to believe, that their right to worship will be limited, their Bibles will be taken away, and they will be an oppressed people once they are racially and religiously outnumbered. For some, their whole way of life and America’s special covenantal relationship with the Christian God hangs in the balance.

This fear helps make sense of violent outbursts like the January 6^th insurrection. The Americans who made their way to the Capitol received the necessary cues from leaders, inside echo chambers rife with conspiratorial thinking, which activated the latent potential of Christian nationalism and a comfort with violence to try to achieve their desired political outcomes. And as we will soon see, a desire to weaken democratic practices dovetails with this comfort with political violence.

Authoritarian Social Control and Weakening Democratic Values

Closely related to comfort with political violence is support for weakening democratic values to ensure political outcomes. In this sense, the undermining of democratic values is a subtle but much more nefarious threat than outright political violence to any pluralistic democratic system. Put another way, there is no need to enact political violence—like attacking the Capitol—if the outcomes to elections in the United States are all but ensured for one side. This is yet another part of the playbook for authoritarian leaders.

Christian nationalism, authoritarian social control, and undermining democratic norms have a long history in the United States. For instance, leaders of the influential Religious Right were focused on not only getting the “right” people to vote (like conservative, white, evangelical Christians) but limiting access to the vote so the “wrong” people cannot vote. Consider the words of Paul Weyrich, a leader in the Religious Right, speaking to a convention of pastors and political leaders in Dallas, Texas in 1980:

“Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Paul Weyrich and those who embrace Christian nationalism today recognize that if the only people voting are folks like them, well, then “democracy” works just fine. But if everyone is allowed to vote, the chances they will achieve their desired outcomes likely declines. In numerous surveys of the American public, we see the desire to restrict access to the democratic process lives on in the attitudes of the American public who embrace Christian nationalism.

For example, in expert testimony my colleague Samuel Perry and I submitted to the January 6^th committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, we show how Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to agree with the statements, “We make it too easy to vote,” “I would support a law requiring Americans to pass a basic civics test to vote,” and “I would support a law revoking the voting rights for certain criminal offenders for life.” These same folks are also more likely to believe voting is a “privilege” rather than a right. This is an important distinction because privileges can be limited or revoked. Those who do not align with what it takes to be a “true” American are liable to be denied access to the democratic process.

As we move toward the 2024 election, we must recognize the cultural and political significance of Christian nationalism. It is predicated on the assumption that only some Americans may lay claim to the full rights of citizenship. It is fine with weakening democratic values and political violence to achieve desired ends, placing its supporters in fundamental opposition to a pluralistic democratic society. Political leaders with autocratic tendencies, like Donald Trump, who are willing to embrace Christian nationalism can find millions of Americans primed to accept authoritarianism if it delivers on a promise of political privilege and power, all in the service of taking America back for God.

Andrew Whitehead is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Indianapolis. He is the author of two award-winning books on Christian nationalism, American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church and Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, which was co-authored with Samuel Perry.

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(Image source: Win McNamee for Getty Images)

Imagine a world where conservative Christians are the most persecuted group in society; where a leftist government is bent on arresting true believers; where public schools are nothing more than communist indoctrination factories; where the past three and a half years of robust economic growth, low unemployment, and investment in new energy technologies has been an unmitigated hellscape and the worst period in American history; where depriving women and families of their most intimate and impactful reproductive decisions is the ultimate expression of religious freedom; where Donald Trump is not an isolationist and a criminal but the President our allies crave and the innocent victim of a diabolical conspiracy.

If you spend some time in the world of Christian nationalist activists today, you don’t have to imagine very hard, because that is the real world as they see it. “Weird” may work as a characterization of their views for those unfamiliar with the mindset of Christian nationalism, but it misses, among other things, the fear and sense of crisis that motivates its adherents.

If we are to diminish this movement’s forever-war on democracy, it is important to know something about its organization, psychology, and the ways in which it mobilizes millions.

What exactly is Christian nationalism? As a preliminary, let me say that I am referring to a political phenomenon, more specifically a political movement, and not just to an ideology or to a religion – because the movement contains a multitude of denominations and doctrines, not all of them mutually consistent. While the movement has changed significantly from the old days of the religious right and the Moral Majority, our understanding has not always kept up. So, I am going to draw some sharp – perhaps too sharp – distinctions for the sake of highlighting key aspects of this transformation.

First, this is a political movement, not just a social movement. I remember once a wealthy progressive asked me, “What if we just give them abortion—will that make them calm down?” Set aside for a moment the sad idea of trading away women’s rights for temporary political gain. What struck me was that my friend was working with an outdated understanding about the religious right. The common assumption is that this movement came together as a grassroots response to certain social issues, like abortion or gay marriage. It didn’t. This is a movement that came together when a set of reactionary political and religious leaders discovered the power of dividing the population by promoting these issues.

Today’s leaders of the Christian nationalist movement seek political power and the perks that it brings. Many of them speak explicitly of using that power to impose their vision on every aspect of government, society, culture, and education. Abortion politics is just one means to an end; give up on reproductive rights, and the movement leadership will quickly pivot to something else.

Some observers conflate Christian nationalism with white evangelicals. But rank and file supporters of the movement, along with some sectors of leadership, increasingly come from a wide range of religious and ethnic backgrounds. A cadre of ultraconservative Catholic leaders are vital to the movement’s strategy and direction. The movement receives robust support from a subset of Jews. Some movement leaders and funders are even atheistic, though they may adopt a quasi-religious identity for strategic reasons. And the movement draws new energy from certain Pentecostal and charismatic religious movements, such as the New Apostolic Reformation, which are multiracial and transnational, as Matthew D. Taylor’s article in this special issue describes.

Christian nationalism succeeds largely by cultivating and then exploiting a certain mindset. That mindset has four key features:

First, there’s the apocalypticism: Once America was great; now, thanks to the woke liberals and secularists, we are facing an absolute emergency. To borrow the language of contributors to Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for the next right-wing administration, we have one shot to save our country – and if we fail, it is all over for America.

Then, there’s the persecution complex. It is easy to think of many types of people in today’s society who suffer some form of discrimination. Christian nationalists can often name only one such group: themselves. At their conferences one often hears that if they do not prevail in the political arena, the government will ban the Bible and outlaw churches.

Third, membership brings the privilege of identifying with an “in-group.” Christian nationalist leaders promote the idea that people like themselves are the only true and authentic representatives of the nation. Religious nationalism is an exclusionary form of nationalism; it’s about who gets to properly belong in a country and who does not.

And finally, there’s the strongman reflex. The movement’s leaders say nice words about “love” from time to time, but mainly they promote the idea that this world cannot be governed in a nice way. They reject the ideals of pluralism, equality, and rule of law upon which the institutions of democracy depend. In fact, they believe we are too far gone to follow the rules any more, and so they long for someone willing to flout the rules of democracy in order to defeat the “enemy within.”

More than just a mindset or a set of policy goals, Christian nationalism is also a complicated political machine. Like any such machine, it has deeply networked groupings of organizations and a powerful set of leaders—and they are the ones who set the agenda, not the grassroots. The movement also has a powerful set of funders. With the massive rise in wealth inequalities and luxury treatment now afforded to dark money in our political system, these funders have increasingly shaped the agenda.

To be sure, the rank and file matter too—they are the ones who have to turn up on election day—but they are at the receiving end of the leadership schemes, the plutocrats’ investments, and the disinformation system.

Among the underappreciated features of this political machine are the pastor networks that mobilize tens of thousands of conservative-leaning religious and community leaders, who then turn around and help turn out millions of voters for far-right candidates. The movement relies critically on an information sphere, or propaganda sphere, to spread its messaging. Movement leaders know that if you can segregate people into information bubbles and separate them from the facts, they are much easier to control.

At this year’s Road to Majority Policy Conference, an annual gathering organized by the Faith & Freedom Coalition and held in Washington, D.C., the thorough Trumpification of the GOP, as well as what used to be called the Religious Right, was clear. Introducing Michael Whatley, chair of the Republican National Committee, Steve Scheffler, president of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, said, “I just want you to know the Trump campaign and the RNC are now one joint entity.” Whatley added, “Our nation is at a crossroads. We are staring into the abyss,” and declared, “We need a candidate who is going to fight for us. Donald J. Trump is our champion.”

(Image source: Megan Varner for Getty Images)

Like every other speaker at the conference, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was all in for the convicted felon who encouraged the January 6^th attack on our Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election. “How many here want Trump to be our next president?” he asked rhetorically, and the crowd cheered in response.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley also doubled down the narrative of political persecution. “[Trump] brought the truth forward and the Biden administration indicted him. If this is allowed to stand, the U.S.A. will not stand,” Hawley said. “I would just say this: To the attorney general of the U.S. government, Merrick Garland. To the FBI director, Christopher Wray. Preserve all of your documents. Preserve all of your decision papers. Because what has happened to this man is going to happen to you. We are coming for you.” To forceful applause, Hawley added, “We’re going to take back the Senate this fall, and when we do, there is going to be accountability.”

Movement leaders understand that their power derives from their ability to drive voters to the polls. But this does not mean they aim to satisfy expressed voter preferences or safeguard their best interests. On the contrary, they have exploited their power to safeguard their agenda from democratic influences. The best illustration of this point is their relentless focus on capturing the courts and then using the judiciary to impose policy that is unpopular and, by their own admission, would not stand a chance in democratic elections.

The right-wing legal movement in its current form really got its start in the early 1980s, when movement leaders created and began to invest in legal advocacy organizations.

Earlier court decisions that contributed to the start of this movement include Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the subsequent right-wing reaction to school desegregation. But from an organizational perspective, this movement didn’t line up to restructure the courts until the early 1980s to early 1990s. In that period, legal activists formed the Federalist Society, along with other right-wing legal organizations such as the American Center for Law and Justice. The 1990s saw the creation of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which now commands an annual budget of approximately $102 million a year. They, along with Becket, Liberty Counsel, the Pacific Justice Institute, First Liberty, and others, comprise an extraordinarily well-funded right-wing ecosystem that is set on commandeering the courts.

From the beginning, the right-wing legal movement set about picking the right cases to bring to judges favorable to their interests. They were strategic, patient, and long-range in their thinking. Over time they created novel legal building blocks that would lead to significant victories, eventually sidelining the Establishment Clause, turning Civil Rights law on its head, and expanding the privileges of religious organizations, including the right to taxpayer money.

As is clear from the colossal amounts of money pouring into right-wing legal organizations, the Christian nationalist movement is profoundly anti-democratic. To be sure, some money comes in through the grassroots fundraising machine that generates donations through individuals, churches, and other conservative and religious organizations and funnels it into partisan operations. But the weightiest piece of the pie comes from a small number of plutocratic donors. These people expect some pretty specific returns on their donations, which often have more to do with far-right and libertarian economic policies than right-wing positions in the so-called culture wars. Their aims include low taxes for the ultra-rich, minimal regulations of business, the evisceration of climate and consumer safety regulations, and the erosion of rights for the workforce. The oligarchs that fund the movement believe they and their fellow billionaires are destined to rule. They have been instrumental in shaping Christian nationalism into an anti-democratic, pro-oligarchic force.

Much is at risk in the outcome of the 2024 election, and I’m going to skip quickly over the obvious ones, like women’s rights, voting rights, public education, and of course the court system. Instead, I want to note four areas that Americans tend not to talk about as much.

The first is that Trump has promised to destroy what the right calls the “administrative state.” The big money interests that back the GOP love this plan because they resent the federal bureaucracy. More specifically, they loathe the regulatory parts that interfere with their monopolistic, anti-environmental, and anti-social business practices; however, they have great affection for those parts of the state that help protect their interests. On the ground, in the event of a second Trump Presidency, MAGA cronies will occupy positions in every major department of the federal government – and they will make sure that federal money and power is devoted not to improving life for all Americans but to enriching Trump’s political backers. This is the way corrupt dictatorships always work.

A second area we should consider is climate and energy policy. The climate and energy bills passed by the Biden/Harris administration have had a significant impact in changing the composition of our energy usage and have generated large numbers of jobs, particularly in red states. Trump, who is supported by the fossil fuel industry, has made it clear he intends to roll back these innovations.

A third arena Americans don’t pay enough attention to is that of international relations and international security. Today, many of America’s closest allies are horrified by the prospect of a second Trump term; they know he will undermine the relationships and agreements upon which our national security – and theirs – depends. A Trump win would be a major victory for Russian strongman Putin, Hungarian strongman Orban, and far-right populists and dictators around the world.

Finally, and most simply, Trump is the biggest national security risk the United States faces right now. He is a convicted felon who needs money and has zero respect for the handling of classified information. He could not get a job as a low-level operative in any national security organization in the United States. And yet, a large percentage of the electorate seems prepared to make him president.

With the stakes this high, we need to remember that the basic tools of democracy are still available to us. We need to make use of them, not just for ourselves but for future generations.

We can also learn something from the Right. They talk a good game about taking on the woke elite. And yet, they are the ones who have managed to create a well-connected and super well-funded elite in their own space. They have invested in the institutions and infrastructure of their movement and not just in political candidates, which is where a significant amount of democratic giving is directed. They support and promote the careers of young right-wing reactionaries through internship and fellowship programs and help them secure their economic futures through sinecures at think tanks and through other means. The movement cultivates leaders through training initiatives and fellowship programs, it unites and empowers those leaders through networking organizations, and it amply funds strategy-driven media and messaging as well as the legal advocacy space.

Those of us who oppose this movement will not wish to replicate its intellectual dishonesty, much less its politics. But we would do well to collaborate with those who share at least a majority of our common goals – the 80 percent friend, as Ronald Reagan put it – and commit to building the infrastructure of a pro-democracy movement at all levels.

Katherine Stewart is the author of the forthcoming Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (Bloomsbury). Her previous book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury), won first place for Excellence in Nonfiction Books from the Religion News Association.

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Dear Revealer readers,

When I was in the seventh grade, in a public school in suburban Indianapolis, I took a required physical science class with a teacher who posted a flyer on each end of the chalkboard that displayed a large cross above the words “Fellowship of Christian Athletes.” According to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes’ website, the group seeks to “see the world transformed by Jesus Christ through the influence of coaches and athletes.” As a seventh grader, I had no problem with school clubs based on religious identity. But I didn’t like staring at two crosses every day in science class. I spoke to my guidance counselor and requested the crosses come down. As opposed to other flyers that announced an event or sought to recruit students at the beginning of the school year, these had no expiration date. And so, the large crosses remained at the front of the room. After a week, the guidance counselor called me into her office and explained that because the posters contained the words “Fellowship of Christian Athletes,” thereby promoting a school organization, they did not violate any rules and the crosses could stay. I lost my small battle to have them removed and was pretty sure the guidance counselor reported the complaint to my science teacher and to other faculty. The science teacher became cold, even though I usually earned the highest marks in his class. And my math teacher, who recommended I skip a year ahead in math, signed my yearbook with “John 3:16,” a reference to a New Testament biblical passage he apparently thought I needed even more than challenging math.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

As I think back to that time, I am struck by the longstanding efforts to infuse public schools with religion and to use children as a way to shape the Christian character of the country. While the Supreme Court outlawed prayer in public schools decades ago, that has not stopped school districts as recently as this year from proposing that educators teach the Christian Bible (as in Oklahoma and parts of Texas) or from erecting the Ten Commandments (as in Louisiana). In fact, we are witnessing a profound resurgence from politicians, lobbying groups, and school board officials who want to lower the wall separating church and state in classrooms.

Schools are but one area currently under siege by supporters of “Christian nationalism,” a broad term that describes a commitment to the idea that America is a Christian country and should be governed accordingly. Many such supporters are white, although certainly not all, and come from conservative Protestant and Catholic traditions. They have found a hero in Donald Trump, the person they believe most likely to appoint the right justices and leaders to make their vision a reality. And this well-funded conglomerate of organizations and institutions has plans should Trump return to the White House.

One prominent plan is Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-page collaboration between the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and more than 100 former Trump staffers. The document offers key insights into what Christian nationalists want. For instance, the publication calls for the government to limit abortion access by taking away the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a medication used for abortions, and to make it illegal to mail abortion medicines, equipment, and information through the U.S. Postal Service. The document also proposes cutting Medicaid funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming healthcare to transgender adolescents, and for the government to sue schools that support trans students. The publication calls for the banning of pornography. And, the “Mandate for Leadership” outlines plans for the mass deportation of millions of immigrants and the cutting of federal funding to schools that teach about race, gender, and “systemic oppression.”

Project 2025 is merely one well-funded vision within a much larger network to support Christian nationalism. Others are even more extreme and insist that, for example, only Christians should be allowed to hold public office. Such goals may seem impractical, and obviously unconstitutional, but people who want them are increasingly well-connected, and their once far-right positions are moving ever more closely to the center of the Republican Party and to multiple local legislatures.

With these concerns facing us, The Revealer is dedicating this year’s special issue to “The Threat of Christian Nationalism.” For each of the past four years, the magazine has published a themed special issue on topics of significant importance, including “Religion and Reproductive Rights,” “Trans Lives and Religion,” and “Religion and Sexual Abuse.” This issue is no exception and features an all-star roster of prominent authors who have been writing and warning about Christian nationalism for the past several years.

Our special issue opens with Katherine Stewart’s “Dismantling Democracy: Christian Nationalism’s Threat to America’s Future,” where she explores the massive money trail going to and coming from organizations that support Christian nationalism so we can understand the well-funded web of institutions supporting these endeavors and their goals. Then, in “Christian Nationalism and Authoritarianism,” Andrew Whitehead examines why proponents of Christian nationalism tend to support political violence and the erosion of democracy when they believe such measures will get them the results they want. After that, in “Christian Nationalism Gone Global,” Matthew D. Taylor profiles Paula White-Cain, Trump’s longstanding spiritual advisor, and sheds light on why the sizable number of Independent Charismatic Christians believe God wants Trump in the White House—and everything they are doing to make that happen. Then, in “From Missionaries to Settler-Colonialists for Christian Supremacy,” Bradley Onishi considers how fringe rightwing voices have found alliances within more mainstream evangelical spaces and what these partnerships reveal about today’s Christian Right. Following that, in “Make America Mate Again,” Samuel Perry investigates pronatalism among Christian nationalism supporters and the growing coalition encouraging white Christians to have more babies. And in “From the Gay Agenda to Childless Cat Ladies,” Sophie Bjork-James considers shifting rhetoric about “family values” among the Christian Right and why they think marriage and maintaining patriarchal nuclear families will solve countless societal problems from poverty to child neglect.

The special issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Christian Nationalism, Charismatic Christians, and Political Violence.” Matthew D. Taylor joins us to discuss Charismatic Christianity, its prominent growth, and its place in the Republican Party. We explore how Charismatic Christians moved from the periphery of the Christian Right into the center, how their beliefs influence their politics, their role in January 6, and what to expect from them and other Christian nationalist supporters if Harris wins the election or if Trump does. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As I think back to sitting in that public middle school classroom with two crosses on the chalkboard, I am reminded that there have always been people who have wanted the culture to reflect their version of Christianity. Today, many such people are emboldened by Donald Trump. They are well organized and well-funded. Should Trump win, and should the House and Senate fall into Republican control, the United States will face an extreme push from rightwing Christians who want this country and its laws to mirror their values. And, as multiple articles in this special issue make clear, proponents of Christian nationalism are more likely to support the erosion of democracy and the use of political violence to keep their people in power and to squash dissent.

The choice before Americans this November could not be starker. And so, as The Revealer did in 2020 when we made our first political endorsement, we believe we face another election where such a move is necessary: for a future that finds value in religious pluralism, for the restoration of reproductive freedom, for the expansion of transgender rights, for the upholding of the “free exercise of religion,” and to ensure the protection of our democracy and fair elections, The Revealer endorses Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice President of the United States.

May you find helpful insights in this special issue. And may you exercise your right to vote this November.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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