Members of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group that has engaged in political violence, raise a cross on January 6, 2021, at the Michigan State Capitol during a protest of the 2020 election.Adam J. Dewey/AP
Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.
In response to rising concern among liberals and others about the spread of Christian nationalism, conservative voices have been pressing a counterattack, claiming all this fretting is just lefty hysteria from secularists who are not willing to acknowledge the role of Christianity in American society and who want to brand all politically active Christians as extremists. Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation published an article declaring that Christian nationalism is a term “mostly used as a smear against conservative Christians who defend the role of religion in American public life” and that the “lack of standard definition allows critics to bundle evils like white supremacy and racism with standard conservative views on marriage, family, and politics.” More recently, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, addressing liberal unease, wrote, “Today’s religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy.” He added, “It’s not clear to me that secular liberals should really fear Christian nationalism more today than in 2000 or 1980.”
Really?
By now, you’ve heard of Project 2025, the enterprise established by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing outfits to both set a radical-right agenda for a possible second Trump term and recruit Dear Leader loyalists for government posts in that administration. As I’ve noted, this venture has cooked up plans and measures with an authoritarian bent. It also has been preparing to inject Christian nationalist ideas into a Trump 2.0 presidency. One example from the Project 2025 handbook: “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.” That does sounds a bit Gilead-ish.
The anti-anti-Christian nationalists’ effort to cast libs as the-sky-is-falling worrywarts is either naive or a purposeful effort to deflect attention from this threat to civil society. And though it usually is best to avoid dependence on one data point, allow me to zero in on a single tweet that appeared recently to highlight the danger.
Following President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union speech, William E. Wolfe, a midlevel official at the Pentagon and the State Department during the Trump administration and a Christian nationalism advocate, tweeted out his response. Here it is in full:
My response to the #SOTU:
We need to see the deeper spiritual realities at play. This ain’t just a political fight, it’s a spiritual war. Heaven and Hell are real. Demons exist.
And there are two main demons being worshipped in America right now:
1) Molech, who demands child sacrifice (abortion)
2) Baphomet, whose demonic goat-like representation is gender-bending (LGBTQIA+) The “Equality Act” and “Reproductive Rights” aren’t just “policies” that the radical Left/Democrats support
They are sacraments, acts of worship to their demon gods
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12
It’s time for Christians to call on America to repent of our idol worship of demons and return to the One True Living God and His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ
Maybe God raise up more idol smashers for our days yet.
This tweet illustrates a basic component of Christian nationalism: spiritual warfare. That’s the notion that all that transpires in our world is a manifestation of the mammoth and eternal clash between God and Satan. The tussle over abortion is not an argument between fellow citizens with conflicting views on bodily autonomy or the question of when life begins; it is a battle between Jesus and Lucifer. Consequently, those who support reproductive freedom are demons or, at the least, in league with or controlled by demons.
Wolfe contends that Americans who champion reproductive rights are doing so as a ritual sacrifice to Molech, who in the Bible appears to be a Canaanite god (though there’s disagreement among scholars over who or what Molech is). And he insists that passing LGBTQ protections is a form of praying to Baphomet, a deity that the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order active early in the second millennium, were accused of worshipping that later became associated with the occult. (You might recall the Knights Templar from The Da Vinci Code and the Indiana Jones movies.)
This is esoteric stuff and a bizarre and troubling political analysis. Yet it’s telling. Wolfe sees the political opposition to Trump, Christian fundamentalism, and conservatism as literally a satanic force. How then can he and his comrades expect to have civil discourse with it? You certainly cannot work with or strike legislative compromises with actual demons. And why should you accord them or their allies any civil rights or protections? These servants of the devil must be crushed by any means necessary to make way for a nation that is ruled according to the precepts of Christian fundamentalism, right? This is the core of Christian nationalism.
Now why should we care about the radical view of this one fellow? Wolfe is a close associate of Russell Vought, who was budget director for the Trump White House and now is president of the Center for Renewing America, one of the right-wing organizations behind Project 2025. As Politico recently reported, “Vought’s beliefs over time have been informed by his relationship with Wolfe. The two spent time together at Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy group. And Vought has praised their yearslong partnership. ‘I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,’ he posted on X, then Twitter, in January 2023.”
Wolfe, who is now the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership (which battles liberalism within the Southern Baptist Convention) and who has advocated ending sex education in schools, surrogacy, and no-fault divorce, is far from a rando. He’s intimately tied to the fellow who is the architect of the next possible Trump administration and who has been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff for Trump.
There are many carnival barkers within Christian nationalism. For instance, disgraced former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, who has embraced the banner of white Christian nationalism and proclaimed, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
Michael Flynn tonight: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” pic.twitter.com/ShGVrsQ9hW
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 13, 2021
Or Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, who called on men to “fight for Jesus” so the world will be “dominionized” and “conquered” for Jesus.
This intense sermon would be disturbing enough coming from a random pastor.
It's even worse when you realize it's Oklahoma State Sen. Dusty Deevers calling on Christian men to go to war for Jesus. pic.twitter.com/4gZ0F1aQez
— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) March 13, 2024
Yet the most devilish ones are those like Wolfe who are scheming to burrow into the government to advance their radical religious agenda.
Like Douthat and the Heritage Foundation, Wolfe dismisses liberal critics of Christian nationalism. “Apparently, any Christian who wants to see just laws grounded in biblical principles and Christian morality enacted in America these days is now a scary ‘Christian nationalist,’ according to secularists,” he wrote last month. What these detractors want, he added, “is nothing less than to silence politically engaged conservative Christians.”
Yet Wolfe himself goes far beyond the Christian conservatism that underlies the right’s opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and much else. He is promoting a Manichean worldview that holds that only the Christians he deems true Christians deserve to serve in government. Dismissing criticism of Christian nationalism as a sneaky liberal ploy to attack all right-of-center Christians is profoundly disingenuous. But I suppose when you’re combatting Beelzebub in the name of Jesus, the Ninth Commandment is not operative.
Back to Douthat. In his column, he concluded that “religious conservatism” would “influence a second Trump administration,” but “it would be the influence of an important but weakening faction in a de-Christianizing country, not a movement poised to overthrow a secular liberalism.” He should spend some time with Wolfe.
David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, has been released in a new and expanded paperback edition.
