On this first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol by hordes of angry right-wing fanatics, I post this essay which appeared on the New York Times page today. I think it is true.
Christian Nationalism Is One of
Trump’s Most Powerful Weapons
Jan. 6, 2022
By Katherine Stewart
Ms. Stewart has reported on the religious right for more
than a decade. She is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the
Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
This
article is part of a collection on the events of Jan. 6, one year later.
The most serious attempt
to overthrow the American constitutional system since the Civil War would not
have been feasible without the influence of America’s Christian nationalist
movement. One year later, the movement seems to have learned a lesson: If it
tries harder next time, it may well succeed in making the promise of American
democracy a relic of the past.
Christian
nationalist symbolism was all over the events of Jan. 6, as observers have pointed out. But the movement’s contribution to the
effort to overturn the 2020 election and install an unelected president goes
much deeper than the activities of a few of its representatives on the day that
marks the unsuccessful end (or at least a temporary setback) of an attempted
coup.
A
critical precondition for Donald Trump’s attempt to retain the presidency
against the will of the people was the cultivation of a substantial population
of voters prepared to believe his fraudulent claim that the election was stolen
— a line of argument Mr. Trump began preparing well before the election, at the
first presidential debate.
The role of social and
right-wing media in priming the base for the claim that the election was
fraudulent is by now well understood. The role of the faith-based messaging
sphere is less well appreciated. Pastors, congregations and the religious media
are among the most trusted sources of information for many voters. Christian
nationalist leaders have established richly funded national organizations and
initiatives to exploit this fact. The repeated message that they sought to
deliver through these channels is that outside sources of information are
simply not credible. The creation of an information bubble, impervious to
correction, was the first prerequisite of Mr. Trump’s claim.
The
coup attempt also would not have been possible without the unshakable sense of
persecution that movement leaders have cultivated among the same base of
voters. Christian nationalism today begins with the conviction that
conservative Christians are the most oppressed group in American society. Among
leaders of the movement, it is a matter of routine to hear talk that they are engaged
in a “battle against tyranny,” and that the Bible may soon be outlawed.
A final precondition for
the coup attempt was the belief, among the target population, that the
legitimacy of the United States government derives from its commitment to a
particular religious and cultural heritage, and not from its democratic form.
It is astonishing to many that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack on the
constitutional electoral process styled themselves as “patriots.” But it makes
a glimmer of sense once you understand that their allegiance is to a belief in
blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government “of the
people, by the people, for the people.”
Given the movement’s role
in laying the groundwork for the coup attempt, its leaders faced a quandary
when Mr. Trump began to push his repeatedly disproven claims — and that
quandary turned into a test of character on Jan. 6. Would they go along with an
attempt to overthrow America’s democratic system?
Some
attempted to rewrite the facts about Jan. 6. The former Republican
Representative Michele Bachmann suggested the riot was the work of “paid rabble
rousers,” while the activist and author Lance Wallnau, who has praised Mr.
Trump as “God’s chaos candidate,” blamed “the local antifa mob.” Many leaders,
like Charlie Kirk, appeared
to endorse Mr. Trump’s claims about a fraudulent election. Others, like Michael
Farris, president and chief executive of the religious right legal advocacy
group Alliance Defending Freedom, provided indirect but no less valuable
support by concern-trolling about supposed “constitutional irregularities” in
battleground states.
None appeared willing to
condemn Mr. Trump for organizing an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of
power to President-elect Joe Biden. On the contrary, the Rev. Franklin Graham,
writing on Facebook, condemned “these ten” from Mr. Trump’s “own party” who
voted to impeach him and mused, “It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of
silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”
At
Christian nationalist conferences I have been reporting on, I have heard speakers go out of their way to defend and even
lionize the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. At the Road to Majority conference, which
was held in Central Florida in June 2021, the author and radio host Eric
Metaxas said, “The reason I think we are being so persecuted, why the Jan. 6
folks are being persecuted, when you’re over the target like that, oh my.” At
that same conference, the political commentator Dinesh D’Souza, in conversation
with the religious right strategist Ralph Reed, said, “The people who are
really getting shafted right now are the Jan. 6 protesters,” before adding, “We
won’t defend our guys even when they’re good guys.” Mr. Reed nodded in response
and replied, “I think Donald Trump taught our movement a lot.”
Movement leaders now
appear to be working to prime the base for the next attempt to subvert the
electoral process. At dozens of conservative churches in swing states this past
year, groups of pastors were treated to presentations by an initiative called
Faith Wins. Featuring speakers like David Barton, a key figure in the
fabrication of Christian nationalist myths about history, and led by Chad
Connelly, a Republican political veteran, Faith Wins serves up elections
skepticism while demanding that pastors mobilize their flocks to vote
“biblical” values. “Every pastor you know needs to make sure 100 percent of the
people in their pews are voting, and voting biblical values,” Mr. Connelly told
the assembled pastors at a Faith Wins event in Chantilly, Va. in September.
“The
church is not a cruise ship, the church is a battleship,” added Byron Foxx, an
evangelist touring with Faith Wins. The Faith Wins team also had at its side
Hogan Gidley, a deputy press secretary in the Trump White House, who now runs the Center for Election
Integrity, an initiative of the America First Policy Institute, a group led in
part by former members of the Trump administration. Mr. Gidley informed the
gathering that his group is “nonpartisan” — and then went on to mention that in
the last election cycle there were “A lot of rogue secretaries of state, a lot
of rogue governors.”
He was presumably
referring to Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia
who earned the ire of Trumpists by rebuffing the former president’s request to
find him an additional 11,780 votes. “You saw the stuff in Arizona, you’re
going to see more stuff in Wisconsin, these are significant issues, and we
can’t be dismissed out of hand anymore, the facts are too glaring,” Mr. Gidley
said. In fact, the Republican-backed audit of votes in Arizona’s largest county
confirmed that President Biden won Arizona by more votes than previously
thought. But the persecution narrative is too politically useful to discard
simply because it’s not true.
Even as movement leaders
are preparing for a possible restoration of a Trumpist regime — a period they
continue to regard as a golden age in retrospect — they are advancing in
parallel on closely related fronts. Among the most important of these has to do
with public education.
In
the panic arising out of the claim that America’s schools are indoctrinating
young children in critical race theory, or C.R.T., it isn’t hard to detect the
ritualized workings of the same information bubble, persecution complex and
sense of entitlement that powered the coup attempt. Whatever you make of the
new efforts in state legislatures to impose new “anti-C.R.T.” restrictions on
speech and teaching in public schools, the more important consequence is to
extend the religious right’s longstanding program to undermine confidence in
public education, an effort that religious right leaders see as essential both
for the movement’s long-term funding prospects and for its antidemocratic
agenda.
Opposition
to public education is part of the DNA of America’s religious right. The
movement came together
in the 1970s not solely around abortion politics, as later mythmakers would
have it, but around the outrage of the I.R.S. threatening to take away the
tax-exempt status of church-led “segregation academies.” In 1979, Jerry Falwell
said he hoped to see the day when there wouldn’t be “any public schools — the
churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.”
Today, movement leaders
have their eye on the approximately $700 billion that federal, state, and local
governments spend yearly on education. The case of Carson v. Makin, which is
before the Supreme Court this term and involves a challenge, in Maine, to
prohibitions on using state tuition aid to attend religious schools, could
force taxpayers to fund sectarian schools no matter how discriminatory their
policies or fanatical their teachings. The endgame is to get a chunk of this
money with the help either of state legislatures or the Supreme Court, which in
its current configuration might well be convinced that religious schools have a
right to taxpayer funds.
This
longstanding anti-public school agenda is the driving force behind the
movement’s effort to orchestrate the anti-C.R.T. campaign. The small explosions
of hate detonating in public school boards across the nation are not entirely
coming from the grass roots up. The Family Research Council, a Washington, D.C.-based
Christian right policy group, recently held an online School Board
Boot Camp, a four-hour training session providing instruction on how to run for
school boards and against C.R.T. and to recruit others to do so. The Bradley Foundation, Heritage Action for America, and The Manhattan
Institute are among those providing support for groups on the forefront of the
latest public school culture wars.
A decade ago, the radical
aims at the ideological core of the Christian nationalist movement were there
to see for anybody who looked. Not many bothered to look, and those who did
were often dismissed as alarmist. More important, most Republican Party leaders
at the time distanced themselves from theocratic extremists. They avoided the
rhetoric of Seven Mountains dominionism, an ideology that calls explicitly for
the domination of the seven “peaks” of modern civilization (including
government and education) by Christians of the correct, supposedly biblical
variety.
What
a difference a decade makes. National organizations like the Faith &
Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent
Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven
Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and
their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what
before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts. Whether the
public will take notice remains to be seen.
Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) is the author of “The
Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
