The above quote – “to hell with democracy” –– comes from a clip in a new movie, Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy. (A link is provided near the end of this blog.) The words are spoken passionately, from a deep conviction that U.S. has taken a spiritual turn for the worse, and that God must be in charge of family, religion, education, media, the arts, business, and government. For God to be in charge, the values and beliefs of the enemies of this God’s kingdom on Earth must be totally vanquished, because (and this is believed fervently) God wants America to be a White and Christian nation.
Let’s look back a bit. The “freedoms” that animated the tumultuous 1960s in the U.S. – feminism, the civil rights movement, the freedoms proclaimed by anti-war “peaceniks,” and the “free love” of the sexual revolution (“free love” meaning uncommitted sexual relations), were seen as antithetical to the freedom and true humanity that comes full flower only by following God’s commands. But those commands now seem to require a far more militant Christianity, because to so many, the U.S. has “gone to hell.”
So let’s start with freedom, and religious freedom in particular.
“It’s a free country.” I heard this so many times growing up. We are free to believe what we want, and say what we want. Few other countries can claim that diversity of thought and belief. But that same freedom will be deliberately jettisoned by an evangelical-led movement that wants government to serve God. That movement sees the current administration (and Democrats) as spiritually corrupt, if not downright demonic. This explains why rumors on Q Anon claim that Hilary Clinton eats babies. When Donald Trump falsely claimed on June 27 in the CNN “debate” that Democrats want to kill babies, he was tossing “red meat” to the religious right. All of which can easily justify violence against such demonic forces.
The movement to make the U.S. a White, Christian nation has been growing for quite some time. A trio of decisions from the Warren Court (1953-1969) inflamed religious conservatives: ending segregation in public schools (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, 1954), ending compulsory prayer in public schools (Engel v. Vitale, 1962) and Roe v. Wade, 1973), allowing a woman to choose to end a pregnancy in the first trimester (roughly 15 weeks). In that era, some new freedoms were established by those decisions: a black student’s “freedom” to attend integrated public schools, a woman’s freedom to decide in the first trimester whether to have an abortion, or a student’s freedom not to be compelled to say or listen to a prayer (or a set of Commandments) that does not align with their religious beliefs. We now have the Court sympathetic to compulsory prayer, Roe v. Wade is gone, and even integrated public education is on the ropes with charter schools and the “school choice” movement.
(Studies have demonstrated that charter schools can worsen existing disparities and draw resources away from public schools. A study by the Network for Public Education found that charter schools cost school districts over $400 million in funding each year, resulting in reduced resources for public schools.)
Since the 1950s, opposition to a “secular America” without “Godly values” has animated an increasingly large movement, mostly led by some Evangelical Christians, and Christian nationalism now has the support a majority of GOP voters.
Support is not confined to the GOP; 30% of Americans look favorably on the concept.
Today, 30% of Americans support tenets of Christian nationalism, according to a study released earlier this week from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Researchers asked more than 22,000 Americans how much they agreed with statements such as: “The US government should declare America a Christian nation”; “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American”’; and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” Ultimately, about 10% of Americans qualify as “adherents” to Christian nationalism, and another 20% are “sympathizers.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/02/christian-nationalism-alabama-ivf-ruling-politics
The Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, is an avowed Christian nationalist. As Thomas Edsall wrote in fall, 2023, when Johnson became speaker:
“Mike Johnson is the first person to become speaker of the House who can be fairly described as a Christian nationalist, a major development in American history in and of itself. Equally important, however, his ascension reflects the strength of white evangelical voters’ influence in the House Republican caucus, voters who are determined to use the power of government to roll back the civil rights, women’s rights and sexual revolutions.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/opinion/mike-johnson-christian-nationalism-speaker.html
Johnson also may have been instrumental in gathering support for Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020, and his position in the GOP owes a great deal to his complete loyalty to Trump, as well as his “big lie” about the “stolen election in 2020.”
In terms of public policy, the Christian Right has worked to end abortion, euthanasia, contraception, pornography, gambling, and have managed to influence many states and legislatures to place strict restrictions on abortion after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
In consistent efforts to undo the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, even contraception is on the line.
As Lauren Weber reports in The Washington Post, Republicans in both Missouri and Louisiana recently blocked pro-contraception bills by lying that they cause abortions. A right-wing Idaho think tank is urging the state to ban the morning-after pill and IUDs by claiming, falsely, that they are ‘abortifacients.’”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/05/birth-control-access-abortion-ban
According to evangelical Christian doctrine, God’s plan is for sexual relations to take place only in the context of marriage between a man and a woman – and preferably for the purpose of procreating. (So, who needs contraceptives, right?) And now, many state governors and legislatures have outlawed any form of gender altering therapies; gender fluidity, and the use of pronouns like “they” look like a definite rejection of traditional values.
The long war on Roe v. Wade ended with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), explicitly tearing down at least one of the three hated Supreme Court decisions from the Warren and Burger courts. Washing their hands of first trimester abortion as a woman’s right to exercise without government interference, the Court effectively (and explicitly) hands abortion and related issues back to the states. And predictably, since Dobbs, some states have been active in asserting the rights of unborn children –– even zygotes not yet implanted in a womb –– seeing them as God’s creatures that must be saved.
For example, in Alabama, the court allowed a wrongful death claim to proceed against a fertility clinic in a hospital; the clinic had an unauthorized visitor who found some fertilized eggs in a freezer, but dropped them. The would be parent “owners” of the fertilized eggs sued, and certainly it was an expensive loss; in-vitro-fertilization can be a costly, time-consuming process. In February of 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children under state law. In LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc., the Court highlighted that “the Wrongful Death of A Minor Act applies on its face to all unborn children, without limitation.
Pro-life Christians were divided: if we need more children from loving, Christian marriages, isn’t in-vitro-fertilization one of God’s gift to us? Yet after considerable debate, in the June meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention –– the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. –– delegates voted to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization, “signaling the campaign by evangelicals against abortion is widening to include the popular fertility treatment.” With enough political clout, evangelicals may even convince some lawmakers to ban IVF in some states.
But such controversies only reveal how myopic the majority in Dobbs was in believing it had “settled” the question of abortion in the U.S. by leaving it to states. Meanwhile, the current Court has consistently upheld claims of “religious freedom,” even where the “free exercise of religion” impacts the freedom of others to worship (or not worship) as they may freely choose.
The Justia Supreme Court site on the internet lists a number of cases where SCOTUS has upheld the exercise of religion, but none of these cases involve the free exercise of religion by Muslims, Jews, or other religious denominations or sects.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases-by-topic/religion
Listed first is the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case (2022). The thumbnail description on the Justia site is fairly bland, and actually misleading in its description of the “holding” of the Court:
The Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses protect an individual engaging in a personal religious observance from government reprisal. The Constitution neither mandates nor permits the government to suppress such religious expression.
But the facts of the case reveal that football players on Kennedy’s team, wanting to be in good graces with the coach, joined him (mostly voluntarily, supposedly) in Christian prayer after games on the 50-yard line. Justice Gorsuch and the 6-3 conservative majority discarded a 1971 precedent in doing so. The school district, after considerable time and internal debate, had determined that it should not be promoting a particular religious viewpoint, and eventually fired Coach Kennedy when he insisted on his “free exercise” of religion.
But Christian Nationalism is now closely aligned with White Christian Nationalism, although many Christian nationalists are not white and would reject explicitly white Christian Nationalism.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/03/us/white-christian-nationalism-racist-myth-cec/index.html
“In a recent book with sociologist Samuel L. Perry of the University of Oklahoma, Gorski traces white Christian nationalism in the United States to the late 1600s. Adherents believe in the idea that America was founded by Christians who modeled its laws and institutions after Protestant ideals with a mission to spread the religion and those ideals in the face of threats from non-whites, non-Christians, and immigrants.”
https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2022/10/understanding-white-christian-nationalism
The White Christian Nationalist movement is only “traditional” in the sense that it harks back to those times when religious wars were the norm.
Here are some of the obvious signs that Christian nationalism intends to restore Christian values to government, even if violence might be necessary.
The insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.
Christian Nationalists helped to fuel the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Also, House Speaker Mike Johnson has deep ties to a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation—a network of politically ambitious church leaders, pulled largely from a kind of Christianity called Neo-Charismatic Pentecostalism. NAR leaders (typically known as “apostles”) have been credited with stoking the large and influential Christian nationalist contingent at the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The Seven Mountains:
Backed by a network of nondenominational, charismatic Christians known as the New Apostolic Reformation, this mandate calls on its adherents to establish what they believe to be God’s kingdom over the seven core areas of society, It holds that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to influence: family, religion, education, media, arts & entertainment, business, and government.
The “Appeal to Heaven” flag
Notably noticed at Justice Samuel Alito’s second home in New Jersey, the Appeal to Heaven flag has clear political meaning. Andre Gagne is a professor and chair of the theological studies department at Concordia University in Montreal. Interviewed by Slate Magazine, in January 2024, he commented:
“This flag was very much popularized in NAR circles. The flag initially was used during the Revolutionary War. The idea of an Appeal to Heaven comes from John Locke, who wrote about this idea of an appeal to heaven against the political idea of the divine right of kings. You can appeal to heaven: There’s someone greater than the king. This concept was against tyranny. It’s interesting how this flag has completely turned. The way that they understand Trump is like a king. You’re using this flag to support the idea that Trump should be president, that he’s chosen by God. So I think all of this speaks very loudly about their profound fascination with power, and ultimate power.”
In short, it’s about power to install a Godly kingdom, even by violent means; it is not so much about the freedom to exercise and express your values (religious or otherwise) in a pluralistic society. The very idea that we could have different religious views and practices seems to offend Christian Nationalists.
Finally, it must be mentioned that in the past, organized hate groups in the U.S. were willing to use violence to maintain their economic, social, and cultural dominance. The Ku Klux Klan comes to mind.
The KKK conflated the United States with the Kingdom of God. It positioned the U.S. as “an organization whose code of conduct was Christianity.” It referred to the Constitution as an almost divinely inspired document on a level near the Bible. The Klan also spoke of the “restoration” of a bygone era of Christian morality to which the nation must return if it would be great again.
Most glaringly, the narrow racial ideology of Klan is exposed. The “true American” in the view of the KKK is a “native born, white, Gentile, Protestant.” That eliminates immigrants from any non-European nations, Black people, indigenous people, Jewish people, and Catholics among others.
The white nationalist movement has grown considerably since the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center, “documented 1,430 hate and antigovernment extremist groups that comprise the organizational infrastructure upholding white supremacy in the U.S. The years since the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection have been a time for the hard right to prepare. In 2023, those opposing inclusive democracy worked to legitimize insurrection, paint hate as virtuous and transform false conspiracy theories into truth. . .”
Several great books on the rise of Christian Nationalism are worth reading. Here I point to just two, plus two recent films. You must look at these, at the risk of not understanding that, as Q (of Q Anon has proclaimed), “the Storm is Coming.”
The first of these two books is by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, of Calvin College in Michigan, herself raised as an evangelical Christian. She traces the roots of Christian nationalism and its rising influence in “conservative” circles to the post World War II period in the U.S. The majority of white American evangelicals support Trump, Du Mez says, because he embodies the kind of militant masculinity they have learned to love.
“Since the 1960s,” Du Mez notes, “male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing and agriculture had been in decline” while sectors open to educated women “such as health care, retail, education, finance and food service” were rapidly expanding. At the same time, “American culture still associated masculinity with working-class jobs.” By the 1970s, American men were in the throes of an identity crisis. But in the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and second-wave feminism shattered American confidence. If the country was as imperialist, racist and misogynistic as her critics were claiming, the “goodness” of America was cast in doubt.
Today, we see enormous pushback against anything that would change the status quo of the 1950s: proud militancy for the American Way (the Cold War), continued segregation, a woman’s place in the home, back-alley abortions, and an economy energized by fossil fuels.
Scott Coley’s book, Ministers of Propaganda, digs into the rhetoric and Biblical cherry-picking of scripture that supports “Christo-authoritarianism” and an ideology that presses Christian theology into the service of authoritarian politics.
Finally, two relatively new films discuss the rising threat of Christian Nationalism to pluralism and peace in the U.S. The first is “God and Country.”
By all means, watch this trailer. In it, you will hear evangelical leaders saying that “democracy can go to hell” and that anyone is who doesn’t agree with its agenda is a “God hating communist.” That includes all Democrats, and especially Joe Biden, who is evidently Satan’s agent on Earth. (Maybe they should call them “Demoncrats.”)
Religious militancy is a very old story in the history of humankind. In the following link, we can find persecution of all sorts of religions, and of sects within Christianity.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html
I’ve heard and read plenty of scripture, including both Old and New Testaments. I’ve been a regular churchgoer since my baptism at age 4. The Gospel message from Jesus of inclusion, love, and brotherhood is not embraced by Christian Nationalists, who are able to find passages in the Bible that suggest violence as a proper means to a Godly end. In fact, they reject the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus spoke the now oft-repeated Lord’s Prayer. Statements from the Beatitudes such as “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”) are dismissed as “liberal talking points.”
It’s time to put religious militancy to rest, and to again embrace the notion that the U.S is a place of refuge for all beliefs and all religions, not just one. Believing otherwise – that there is one true religion to which we must all bow –– is legal, but deadly wrong, especially when “restoring the U.S. to its Godly mission” is an old and misguided trope, one that invites endless conflict and slaughter. We should be clear to see Christian nationalism for what it is: a threat to a pluralistic, secular society. Its passionate adherents understand this fully; most of us do not.