Earlier this year, Chrissy Stroop reported for Religion Dispatches, NEW REPORT ON (WHITE) CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND THE J6 INSURRECTION SHOWS JUST ‘HOW DIRE THE THREAT IS’ (excerpt):
Readers who follow my work will be aware of my conviction that neither the press, nor the American public generally, is taking the serious threat to democracy and human rights posed by the Christian Right seriously enough. It’s a concern I share with Andrew Seidel, a constitutional lawyer and the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Director of Strategic Response. Commenting on the continuing danger of the theocratic threat a year after the January 6 insurrection, Seidel stressed to RD that it’s Christian nationalism that “created a moral permission structure that granted the insurrectionists a mental and moral license to attack our government and attempt to overthrow a free and fair election.”
In a nutshell, Christian nationalism is the ideology behind a theocratic movement of mostly white Christians who are motivated by the beliefs that America was founded as a Christian or “Judeo-Christian” country; that the nation has a special calling from God and will be blessed if its leaders are “obedient” to him–and they do mean “him.” For Christian nationalists, the suggestion that God could be referred to by any pronouns other than the masculine ones is a cause for outrage.
To them, making the nation “obedient” to God means putting right-wing Christians in charge, banning abortion, taking away LGBTQ rights, and putting prayer and the Bible in schools. Christian nationalists also tend to view contemporary political tensions in terms of “spiritual warfare,” seeing America as beset by “godless,” “satanic” forces such as liberals, “communists,” queer people, racial justice advocates, and “globalists” from whom “real Americans” have a sacred right and duty to “take the country back.”
Christian nationalism has been a consistent indicator of support for Donald Trump since 2015. It can also be found at the root of much of the political violence that’s racked the US since that time, up to and including the 1/6 insurrection itself.
According to several people intimately involved with the project, Seidel was the driving force behind the new report “Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection,” produced jointly by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and FFRF and released on February 9. The report features a variety of secular and Christian voices—including scholars, religious practitioners, and civil society advocates—who, each from their own disciplinary and religious or nonreligious perspectives, thoroughly document the history and present realities of Christian nationalism in the United States and strategize about how to combat it, a goal all the contributors see as urgent.
In a February 9 webinar for journalists and the interested public, Amanda Tyler, executive director of the BJC, set the tone by asserting that “combating and ultimately defeating Christian nationalism will take a broad coalition” consisting of both nonreligious people and religious people. She stressed that, while they may seem like unlikely partners, what unites the BJC and FFRF is their strong commitment to the separation of church and state.
Next, FFRF’s president Annie Laurie Gaylor spoke, calling the BJC “a treasured ally” in an encouraging display of pluralism in action. It’s long been my own position that coalitions across lines of faith and non-faith, centered on shared values rather than shared beliefs, will be critical in the fight for a pluralist, multiracial democratic future in the United States—a future opposed by the conservative, mostly white Christians who seek to impose minority authoritarian rule.
The New York Times reports this week, A Crusade to Challenge the 2020 Election, Blessed by Church Leaders:
The 11 a.m. service at Church for All Nations, a large nondenominational evangelical church in Colorado’s second-largest city, began as such services usually do. The congregation of young families and older couples swayed and sang along to live music. Mark Cowart, the church’s senior pastor, delivered an update on a church mission project.
Then Mr. Cowart turned the pulpit over to a guest speaker, William J. Federer.
An evangelical commentator and one-time Republican congressional candidate, Mr. Federer led the congregation through an hourlong PowerPoint presentation based on his 2020 book, “Socialism — The Real History from Plato to the Present: How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control.” Many congregants scribbled in the notebooks they had brought from home.
“I believe God is pushing the world to a decision-making moment,” Mr. Federer said, building toward his conclusion. “We used to have national politicians that held back the floodgates of hell. The umbrella’s been ripped after Jan. 6, and now it’s raining down upon every one of us. We had politicians that were supposed to certify that — and instead they just accepted it. And, lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”
Evangelical churches have long been powerful vehicles for grass-roots activism and influence on the American right, mobilized around issues like abortion and gay marriage. Now, some of those churches have embraced a new cause: promoting Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. They have opened their church doors to speakers promoting discredited theories about overturning President Biden’s victory and lent a veneer of spiritual authority to activists who often wrap themselves in the language of Christian righteousness.
For these church leaders, Mr. Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.
It’s difficult to measure the extent of churches’ engagement in the issue. Research suggests that a small minority of evangelical pastors bring politics to the pulpit. “I think the vast majority of pastors realize there is not a lot of utility to being very political,” said Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor.
Still, surveys show that the belief in a fraudulent election retains a firm hold on white evangelical churchgoers overall, Mr. Trump’s most loyal constituency in 2020. A poll released in November by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 60 percent of white evangelical respondents continued to believe that the election was stolen — a far higher share than other Christian groups of any race. That figure was roughly 40 percent for white Catholics, 19 percent for Hispanic Catholics and 18 percent for Black Protestants.
Among evangelicals, “a high percentage seem to walk in lock step with Trump, the election conspiracies and the vigilante ‘taking back of America,’” said Rob Brendle, the lead pastor at Denver United Church, who recalled that when he criticized some Christians’ embrace of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in a sermon the Sunday after the riot, he lost about a hundred members of his congregation, which numbered around 1,500 before the pandemic.
He thinks many fellow clergy may share that view. “I think the jury’s still out, but it’s not a fringe,” he said.
Some of the national evangelical figures who supported Mr. Trump during his presidency and his 2020 campaign, like Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas, separated themselves from his insistence that the election was stolen. Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham and the president of Samaritan’s Purse, equivocated. Writing on Facebook the month after the election, Mr. Graham acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory but said that when Mr. Trump claimed the election was rigged against him, “I tend to believe him.”
Others embraced Mr. Trump’s claims or argued for the preservation of his rule in spite of his loss. Shortly after the election was called for Mr. Biden, Paula White, a Florida televangelist who served as the White House faith adviser during Mr. Trump’s presidency, led a prayer service in which she and others called upon God to overturn the election.
Greg Locke, a preacher who leads the Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Juliet, Tenn., spoke alongside Alex Jones of Infowars at a “Rally for Revival” demonstration in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Locke offered a prayer for the Proud Boys, the violent far-right group, and for Enrique Tarrio, the organization’s leader who has since been indicted on charges of conspiracy for his role in the Capitol insurrection.
Mr. Locke — whose congregation is relatively small, but who claims a social media audience in the millions — is one of more than a dozen pastors who have appeared onstage at the ReAwaken America Tour: a traveling roadshow that has featured far-right Republican politicians, anti-vaccine activists, election conspiracists and Trumpworld personalities, including Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a central figure in the effort to overturn the election in late 2020.
The event has drawn crowds of thousands of Trump supporters in nine states in the past year. All but one of the tour’s stops have been hosted by megachurches, and the tour is sponsored by a charismatic Christian media company.
The performances wrap the narrative of election fraud in a megachurch atmosphere, complete with worship music and prayer, and have drawn criticism from some Christian clergy. When the tour came to a church in San Marcos, Calif., this month, a local Methodist minister denounced it as an “irreligious abomination” in an opinion essay.
Smaller churches, meanwhile, have proven an important support network for the individual activists who now travel the country promoting the narrative of a stolen election.
“Churches and bars, baby. That’s where it was happening in 1776,” wrote Douglas Frank, a high school math and science teacher in Ohio whose widely debunked analyses of the 2020 results have been influential with election conspiracists, in a Telegram post last month. So far this year, more than a third of the speeches he has promoted on his social media accounts have been hosted by churches or religious groups.
[C]hurches are commonly used as spaces for events they do not directly endorse. Often, though, pastors at the churches hosting these speakers have used their appearances as an occasion to opine about the election to their congregation.
“This will be your opportunity to find out real information about what really happened at the polls,” D.J. Rabe, a pastor of The House Ministry Center, a nondenominational church in Snohomish, Wash., told his congregation at the Sunday worship service before a speaking appearance by Mr. Keshel in August. “Here’s what we’re going to find out: What everyone thinks happened didn’t really happen. The information is coming out.”
The connection between churches and election activists has been particularly visible in Colorado Springs, a longstanding hub of conservative evangelical political power that has lately become a hotbed of the “election integrity” crusade.
The city is home to two particularly active groups dedicated to the cause: the U.S. Election Integrity Plan and F.E.C. United, a right-wing organization that protested Covid lockdowns in early 2020 and later became a prominent promoter of election conspiracies.
Both groups have support from local churches. Church for All Nations has twice hosted talks by U.S. Election Integrity Plan leaders in its sanctuary as part of the church’s current events forum. At the first event, after a woman in the audience said, “I want to see butts in jail!” Ken Davis, a group leader at the church, replied: “I think there’s a certain punishment for treason in this country, and it’s not jail.”
The second event, in March, was held shortly after the regional N.A.A.C.P. chapter and other groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Election Integrity Plan. The organization’s volunteers — some of whom were carrying firearms, the lawsuit claims — visited addresses they believed to be potentially associated with fraudulent ballots, asking residents how they voted in the 2020 election. The lawsuit argues that their actions violated both the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Holly Kasun, U.S. Election Integrity Plan’s co-founder, called the lawsuit a “baseless claim” in an email.
In February, The Rock, a nondenominational evangelical church in nearby Castle Rock, Colo., hosted F.E.C. United for a talk featuring Shawn Smith, a founder of U.S. Election Integrity Plan, and Tina Peters, the clerk and recorder of Mesa County, who has since been indicted on charges that she devised a scheme to copy voting-machine hard drives and share the data with prominent 2020 election conspiracists. (In a statement, Ms. Peters, who is running for secretary of state in Colorado, maintained her innocence.)
Mr. Smith made headlines when he accused Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, of election fraud and told the crowd: “If you’re involved in election fraud, you deserve to hang.” Mike Polhemus, The Rock’s pastor, later distanced the church from the event and told a local TV station that Mr. Smith’s remarks were “inappropriate.”
“Smith believes in due process and has said so on the record numerous times,” Ms. Kasun said.
Other pastors have continued to associate with F.E.C. United. The week after its event at The Rock, the group held a meeting at Fervent Church in Colorado Springs. The event was emceed by the church’s pastor, Garrett Graupner.
Mr. Graupner has been an outspoken opponent of Covid restrictions throughout the pandemic, and he said his issues of greatest concern were not necessarily the election but rather abortion, gender identity and teaching about systemic racism in schools. “C.R.T.” — critical race theory — “is a hill for me to die on,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, “I have seen some evidence to believe that the elections were tampered with at some point.” “I could send you tons of material,” he said.
White Christian Nationalism is the counterpart to fundamentalist Islam. They are the Christian Taliban. They are antithetical to the establishment clause of the First Amendment guaranteeing no state religion, and establishing religious freedom for all faiths, and even those of no religious faith.
Even though they want to deprive everyone else of their rights, they will be the first to yell “religious discrimination” when they are called out for it.
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Jennifer Rubin writes at The Post, “The GOP is no longer a party. It’s a movement to impose White Christian nationalism.”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/27/gop-no-longer-a-party-movement-impose-christian-nationalism/
People might be confused about how a Republican Party that once worried about government overreach now seeks to control medical care for transgender children and retaliate against a corporation for objecting to a bill targeting LGBTQ students. And why is it that the most ambitious Republicans are spending more time battling nonexistent critical race theory in schools than on health care or inflation?
To explain this, one must acknowledge that the GOP is not a political party anymore. It is a movement dedicated to imposing White Christian nationalism.
The media blandly describes the GOP’s obsessions as “culture wars,” but that suggests there is another side seeking to impose its views on others. In reality, only one side is repudiating pluralistic democracy — White, Christian and mainly rural Americans who are becoming a minority group and want to maintain their political power.
The result is an alarming pattern: Any moment of social progress is soon followed by reactionary panic and claims of victimhood. It’s no mere coincidence that Donald Trump, the leader of the birther movement, succeeded the first African American president. Nor should the anti-critical-race-theory movement surprise anyone given the mass protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Understanding his phenomenon is crucial to preserving pluralistic democracy.
Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently recalled the period of protest after Floyd’s murder in an engrossing podcast with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The movement, Ifill explained, was the first time many Americans collectively empathized with those who had experienced systemic injustice. But “those who are arrayed in opposition to justice and equality have not lost sight of it,” she said. “What they saw [in the protests] is part of what undergirds the current movement that you’re seeing around the country right now.”
Thus, Ifill argued, the MAGA crowd is frantically maneuvering to halt education “about the truth of the history of racism and white supremacy, of the struggle for justice in this country.” The goal is to stymie the development of children’s empathy and awareness of racial injustice.
In a real sense, the MAGA response is an effort to conserve power and to counteract the sense of a shared fate with Americans who historically have been marginalized. The right now defines itself not with policies but with its angry tone, its malicious labeling and insults (e.g., “groomer,” “woke”), and its targeting of LGBTQ youths and dehumanization of immigrants. Right-wingers’ attempt to cast their opponents as sick, dangerous and — above all — not “real Americans” is as critical to securing power as voter suppression.
The indignation of MAGA personalities when presented with the reality of systematic racism is telling and very much in line with White evangelical Christian views. As Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute who has written extensively on the evangelical movement, explained in an interview with Governing:
Indeed, rarely has King’s admonition been more appropriate: “I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, ‘Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with.’ ”
Today, those who argue that America is a White, Christian nation simultaneously insist they are devoid of bigotry. The MAGA crowd is offended by any attempt to identify the ongoing reality of systemic racism (evident, for example, in the criminal justice system, maternal health care, housing discrimination and gerrymandering to reduce minority voting power). The notion that institutions they refuse to reform perpetuate racism is a sort of moral challenge to their claim to be “colorblind.” Perhaps it is simply self-interested blindness.
No one should be surprised that the “big lie” has become gospel in White evangelical churches. The New York Times reports: “In the 17 months since the presidential election, pastors at these churches have preached about fraudulent votes and vague claims of election meddling. … For these church leaders, Mr. Trump’s narrative of the 2020 election has become a prominent strain in an apocalyptic vision of the left running amok.”
If anti-critical-race-theory crusades are the response to racial empathy, then laws designed to make voting harder or to subvert elections are the answer to the GOP’s defeat in 2020, which the right still refuses to concede. The election has been transformed into a plot against right-wingers that must be rectified by further marginalizing those outside their movement.
Our political problems are significant, but they are minor compared with the moral confusion that is afflicting the millions of White Christian Americans who consider themselves victims. Left unaddressed, this will smother calls for empathy, tolerance and justice.
-It will lead to religious sectarian violence, the very thing that tore apart Europe for centuries.
The NY Times reported earlier this month, “The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/christian-right-wing-politics.html
(Excerpts)
They opened with an invocation, summoning God’s “hedge of thorns and fire” to protect each person in the dark Phoenix parking lot.
They called for testimonies, passing the microphone to anyone with “inspirational words that they’d like to say on behalf of our J-6 political prisoners,” referring to people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, whom they were honoring a year later.
[T]his was not a church service. It was worship for a new kind of congregation: a right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose, whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action.
The Christian right has been intertwined with American conservatism for decades, culminating in the Trump era. And elements of Christian culture have long been present at political rallies. But worship, a sacred act showing devotion to God expressed through movement, song or prayer, was largely reserved for church. Now, many believers are importing their worship of God, with all its intensity, emotion and ambitions, to their political life.
At events across the United States, it is not unusual for participants to describe encountering the divine and feel they are doing their part to install God’s kingdom on earth. For them, right-wing political activity itself is becoming a holy act.
These Christians are joining secular members of the right wing, including media-savvy opportunists and those touting disinformation. They represent a wide array of discontent, from opposing vaccine mandates to promoting election conspiracy theories. For many, pandemic restrictions that temporarily closed houses of worship accelerated their distrust of government and made churchgoing political.
[T]he infusion of explicitly religious fervor — much of it rooted in the charismatic tradition, which emphasizes the power of the Holy Spirit — into the right-wing movement is changing the atmosphere of events and rallies, many of which feature Christian symbols and rituals, especially praise music.
With spiritual mission driving political ideals, the stakes of any conflict, whether over masks or school curriculums, can feel that much larger, and compromise can be even more difficult to achieve. Political ambitions come to be about defending God, pointing to a desire to build a nation that actively promotes a particular set of Christian beliefs.
[T]he parking-lot vigil was sponsored by a right-wing voter mobilization effort focused on dismantling election policy.
[At] a recent conference in Arizona promoting anti-vaccine messages and election conspiracy theories, organizers blasted “Fresh Wind,” from the global church Hillsong, and a rock-rap novelty song with a chorus that began “We will not comply.”
A growing belief among conservative Christians is that the United States is on the cusp of a revival, one where spiritual and political change are bound together.
[T]he explicit use of evangelical worship for partisan protest took root in the early pandemic lockdowns, notably after California banned indoor church services and singing. Sean Feucht, a worship leader from Northern California, ran a failed campaign for Congress in 2020, and then launched a series of outdoor events, titled “Let Us Worship,” to defy pandemic restrictions. Thousands of Christians flocked to his events, where prayer and singing took on a new valence of defiance.
When Mr. Feucht staged a worship event on the National Mall last Sept. 11, Mr. Trump contributed a video in which he praised Mr. Feucht for “uniting citizens of all denominations and backgrounds to promote faith and freedom in America.” Even before the pandemic, he and other worship leaders were courted by Mr. Trump, who identified celebrities within the charismatic movement as natural allies.
[W]orship is increasingly becoming a central feature of right-wing events not aimed at exclusively Christian audiences.
ReAwaken America events, hosted by an Oklahoma talk-show personality and entrepreneur, are touted as gatherings of “truth-seekers” who oppose pandemic precautions, believe that the 2020 election was stolen, distrust Black Lives Matter and want to explore “what really happened” on Jan. 6. Most of the events are hosted by large churches, and the primary sponsor is Charisma News, a media outlet serving charismatic Christians.
[C]ompared with 2016, Trump rallies are taking on the feel of worship events, from the stage to the audience. When Mr. Trump held his first rally of the year in Florence, Ariz., in January, he descended via helicopter into a jubilant crowd.
“I lay the key of David upon you,” Anthony Kern, a candidate for the Arizona State Senate who was photographed on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021, proclaimed to the crowd from the stage, paraphrasing a biblical passage about power given by God. “That means the governmental authority is upon you, men and women.”
[T]ami Jackson, who was also in the crowd, said she had come to see politics as an inherently spiritual struggle.
She said she wanted to be a part of “staking claim” to what God was doing. “This is a Jesus movement,” Ms. Jackson said. “I believe God removed Donald for a time, so the church would wake up and have confidence in itself again to take our country back.”
If Americans would repent of Covid policies and critical race theory and abortion, Ms. Stainbrook said, God would bless future generations for good.