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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/26/us/politics/republican-national-committee-2024-posobiec.html

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uQvsTJ9Svc

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06/27/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

• Intercessors for America did an entire program about "the demonic roots of our monetary systems."
• Lance Wallnau warns that the ceasefire between Israel and Iran is fragile because right-wing Christians are not praying hard enough.
• Kandiss Taylor calls for deporting pedophiles, Satanists, and liberal white women.
• Pastor Lorenzo Sewell told the audience at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Road To Majority" conference that Jesus knows that when it comes to the midterm and next presidential election, "the church is the only entity that can stop the steal."
• Finally, HUD Secretary Scott Turner spoke at the "Road To Majority" conference today and his remarks sounded more like a sermon than a political address.

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former President Donald Trump received a rapturous hero’s welcome Saturday night as he delivered the closing keynote address to a room packed with religious-right activists in Washington, D.C. for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference.

Trump knew his audience. “We are warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, atheists, globalists, and the Marxists,and we will restore our republic as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all,” Trump said. As part of his typically long and rambling speech, he denounced his recent indictments, bragged about his administration’s accomplishments–including his Supreme Court justices cementing the right-wing majority to overturn Roe v. Wade—and declared that Democrats have become “monsters.”

Trump thrilled the crowd with promises about what he would do as the 47th president, saying, “When I get back in the Oval Office,I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”And he vowed to push “school choice” plans—which divert public education dollars into private and religious schools and homeschooling—and, oddly, called for public school principals to be chosen by direct election by parents.

Trump’s speech and others at the conference signaled the issues and strategies around which the MAGA movement is mobilizing to try to take power in the 2024 elections: waging war on “wokeness,” demeaning transgender people and calling for institutionalized discrimination against them, mocking corporate support for diversity, equity, and environmental protection, and, in the name of parents’ rights,purging schools and libraries of materials that do not align with MAGA activists’ political and religious worldviews.

Trump’s speech was preceded by awards given to right-wing movement fundraising godfather Richard Viguerie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Viguerie declared that the nation is in “a spiritual civil war” that “the left has launched against Western civilization, America, our Constitution, Judeo-Christian moral values, and much else we value at home.” Viguerie encouraged activists to get more involved in any way they can, signing off with, “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. See you on the battlefield of the spiritual civil war, and don’t be late!”

Viguerie was not the only speaker equating American politics with spiritual warfare. Huckabee said that “the battle that we’re facing in this country is not a political battle. And it’s not an economic fight. And it’s not a sociological fight. It is a spiritual battle between the forces of evil and good.” Huckabee concluded with, “Let’s not give up, because the battle is not over, folks. It’s just getting started.”

Earlier in the conference, Christian nationalist and anti-LGBTQ North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson drew cheers when he declared, “This nation is at war, and we need a warrior at the helm,” and endorsed Trump’s bid to return to the White House. Robinson noted his own campaign for governor, and compared himself to the Union soldiers at Gettysburg, the Marines on Iwo Jima, and civil rights marchers, and insisted that he only looks “crazy” to people who are “insane.”

Before Saturday night’s gala, activists heard from nearly all the Republican presidential candidates, hard-right Republican elected officials, and MAGA movement activists likeKari Lake, the defeated-but-still-refusing-to-admit-it candidate for Arizona governor in 2022.

Trump’s major contender for the Republican nomination, Florida’s authoritarian Gov. Ron DeSantis, was greeted enthusiastically on Friday—giving a stump speech attacking “the woke mind virus” and declaring “We did not start this fire, but as president of the United States, I will lead the effort to extinguish the fire of cultural Marxism once and for all.”DeSantis pledged to “discipline” the federal bureaucracy, “impose our will on it,” and turn the Justice Department “inside out.”

At the beginning of Road to Majority, Reed urged participants to treat all speakers respectfully, which most did until former New JerseyGov. Chris Christie had the audacity to question Trump’s character and tell activists that Trump had let them down—eliciting a chorus of boos.

The conference kicked off at a Thursday afternoon “town hall” on Capitol Hill, where Faith and Freedom founder Ralph Reed told the audience that God told him to create the organization because Christians who love this country and love God “should be the head and not the tail, and at the top and not the bottom of our political system.” Among the members of Congress who spoke were Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty and Reps. Jim Banks, Patrick McHenry, Burgess Owens, Alex Mooney, and Tom Emmer—who spent much of his speech attacking the government of his own state of Minnesota.

Other speakers sounded Christian nationalist themes, including former Trump faith advisor Paula White, who declared, “We were established as a nation under God,” and Lake, who said, “With God on our side, nothing can stop us from taking back this government.”

At a panel featuring African American speakers representing the seven “mountains” in Seven Mountains Dominionism, Florida congressional candidate Carla Spalding declared that public officials must “write laws that are going to be according to the Bible” and if they don’t, “one by one we get them out.” Other speakers on the panel include anti-abortion activist Alveda King and failed congressional candidates Kim Klacik and Mark Burns. Burns is a Trump-promoting Christian nationalist pastor fond of warfare rhetoric; he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on the eve of the Capitol insurrection, where he declared that the attempt to deny Trump a second term was “a demonic attack from the gates of Hell” and insisted that Joe Biden would “never” become president.

In addition to the relentless invocations of “wokeness” and its variants—Indiana representative and Senate candidate Jim Banks bragged about creating an “Anti-Woke Caucus” among House Republicans—speakers frequently denounced transgender people and their supporters, the “deep state,” and corporations that consider diversity and environmental consequences in their investment decision-making.

Another theme running through the conference—which fell on the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade—was the need for Republican candidates to deflect focus from their unpopular abortion ban laws by portraying pro-choice Democrats as the “real extremists”—complete with lies from Trump and others that Democrats support killing babies after they are born.

Feminism itself—now “woke feminism”—continues to be a target of the religious-right movement. Nick Adams, a right-wing activist who immigrated to the U.S. from Australia, claimed that men are the most persecuted and maligned demographic in the world. “Every single problem in America today can be traced back to the absence of strength, strength that can come only from real men, genuine masculinity, and an alpha male mindset,” he said.

Also on display was the right-wing political strategy of “parents’ rights” as a rallying cry and voter mobilization tool. Moms for Liberty, a group founded to resist mask requirements that moved quickly into promoting book bans, school board takeovers, anti-LGBTQ smears, and authoritarian politics in general, had a significant presence at Road to Majority, which was held just a week before their own national summit in Philadelphia. During Q&A at a panel on school choice, M4L’s national director Catalina Stubbe calledteachers unions “enemies” and claimed that public schools are “abusing” and “indoctrinating” children.From the main stage, M4L cofounder Tiffany Justice claimed that “our parental rights are being obliterated by our government every single day.”  She said that the group’s 135,000 members in close to 300 chapters spread out over 45 states are “unifying” their communities, a laughable assertion given the anger and chaos they have created at school board meetings and after they take over school boards.

In its speakers and panels, the Faith and Freedom Coalition made an effort to highlight its outreach to conservative Black and Hispanic Christians, a group that the Republican Party hopes to win over in greater numbers in 2024 and beyond. The 2024 elections were a major focus of conference speakers, and not just the presidential candidates. Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Adam Pipkin described the organization’s turnout strategies, including its use of postal change of address data to track targeted voters and make sure they update their registrations, and evangelical church-based ballot harvesting operations in Californiaand other states where permitted by law.

While Reed and the Faith and Freedom Coalition gave a platform to major, minor and relatively unheard of Republican presidential candidates,Road to Majority made it utterly clear that it is Donald Trump who has won the hearts of these activists, and that they will do everything they can to once again put him in the White House so that he can wage merciless war against the Americans they view as their common enemies.

Tags: Alex Mooney Bill Hagerty Burgess Owens Carla Spalding Catalina Stubbe Donald Trump Jim Banks Kari Lake Kimberly Klacik Mark Burns Mark Robinson Marsha Blackburn Mike Huckabee Patrick McHenry Paula White Ralph Reed Richard Viguerie Ron DeSantis Tiffany Justice Tom Emmer Anti-Abortion Anti-Choice Anti-LGBTQ Christian Nationalist Civil War Election 2024 Road to Majority Conference Spiritual Warfare Faith and Freedom Coalition Moms for Liberty Republican Party

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/chrisitan-nationalism/

Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian proto-fascists—have been generally ecumenical and areligious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of antisemitism. But that’s beginning to change, as Jack Jenkins explored this week at the Washington Post.

With “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes leading the way, it’s becoming much more common to hear them embracing Christian nationalism—an ideology long embraced by the larger radical right, particularly the so-called “Patriot” movement. Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even farther into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,”that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all nonwhite people are soulless “mud people.”

As Jenkins reports, since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Fuentes’ white-nationalist “America First” organization has increasingly employed Christian nationalist rhetoric: Chanting “Christ is King” at the antiabortion “March for Life” last week and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”

“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told Jenkins.

Christian nationalism has long been a feature of the nation’s extremist right, dating back to the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and its later version in the 1920s.Fuentes’s rhetoric “could have come word-for-word from a Klan speech in 1922,” historian Kelly J. Baker told Jenkins. “The Klan’s goal here was patriotism and nationalism, but it was combined with their focus on White Christianity.”

This worldview was a powerful animating force at the Jan. 6 insurrection, embodied by the moment when the self-described “Patriots” entered the vacated Senate chambers, took over the dais, and proceeded to share a prayer led by Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley.

 captured by The New Yorker shows the moment: One insurrectionist shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” The men bellow “Amen!” Then Chansley begins to lead them in prayer, saying: “Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity tostand up for our God-given inalienable rights.” He also thanks God for allowing them to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”

He concluded: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to bereborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”

As historian Katherine Stewart explained in the New York Times:

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.”

A number of the groups, notably the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the insurrection similarly voiced their affinity for Christian nationalism. The morning of Jan. 6, as Jenkins reports, a group of Proud Boys led by Ethan Nordean—the primary leader of the men who later spearheaded the siege of the Capitol, were seen praying together.

At a gathering of Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Dec. 11 by independent journalist Dakota Santiago for Religion News Service,Nordean had spoken about “sacrificing ourselves for our country” while speaking at an impromptu Proud Boys rally near the Washington Monument, according to footage provided to Religion News Service (RNS) by independent journalist Dakota Santiago.

Nordean—a notorious street brawler nicknamed “Rufio Panman”—described an epiphany he had during a protest about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross:

I had a moment of realization where I was like, “You know what, I’m going to be diehard about everything in my life. I’m gonna be real.” Because everything that we have sacrificed—because you know how hard it is in this environment that we live in—it is time that you rise to the occasion. Be real.

Now you may not believe in that, but it’s important in the very least for my case for me, because this man did this thing. Just as we sacrifice ourselves for our country. A man provides and protects even when he’s not loved. That is what we do. We are hated but we do it in anyway, we keep showing up every day and we protect these people from these tyrannical dictators.

The same religious fervor has intensified in the aftermath of the insurrection, particularly as “Patriot” movement believers and their mainstream Republican enablers have doubled down with a gaslighting narrative insisting that what happened Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was a righteous protest by Real Americans.

That narrative has been ardently adopted by Christian nationalists like the Trump supporters interviewed earlier this month by NPR:

Outside on the walkway, Murray Clemetson stands with an armful of hand-made signs he brought to church, such as, "Set the DC Patriots Free" and "We Are Americans, Not Terrorists." The law-school student and father of three —all home-schooled— was at the "Stop The Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., last year.

"The only insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 was by the agent provocateurs, paid actors, and corrupt police and FBI," he says, disputing all the evidence made public in the more than 700 criminal cases that the rioters were Trump fanatics.

The church the interviewers reported from is Ken Peters’ Patriot Church in Tennessee, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian nationalist congregations. Peters is a rabidly pro-Trump pastor who has appeared onstage in recent months with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” conspiracy theorist who claims Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud. Peters also spoke to the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 at a pre-rally for the next day’s “Stop the Steal” protest that devolved into the Capitol insurrection.

Peters’ predilection for linking arms with violent white-nationalist thugs like the Proud Boys manifested itself in summer 2021 in Salem, Oregon, outside a Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by Peters’ “Church at Planned Parenthood” campaign. A phalanx of Proud Boys provided “security” for the event, including notorious brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, currently in jail awaiting trial on assault charges.

The sermon Peters delivered during NPR’s visit to his church turned asimilarly convenient blind eye to Donald Trump’s manifest flaws as a Christian hero."We consider the left in our nation today to be a giant bully,” Peters said. “And when there is a bully on the schoolyard and somebody rises up and punches back, 'Hallelujah!' So we are thankful for Trump."

Then he added: "But you know what? If Trump passes away tomorrow, God forbid, does that stop us? Does that slow us down? Not one bit. We'll be looking for the next guy to lead the way."

Indeed, the long-term determination of Christian nationalists to impose a narrow sectarian view on American government and society are reflected in its legislative assault on state laws, an attempt to reshape U.S. laws from the ground up as well as the top down. Their program “Project Blitz,” revealed by journalist Frederick Clarkson in 2018—a detailed and complex system of proposed legislation with which Christian nationalist beliefs are gradually embedded within state laws—is only one example of the breadth and depth of their assault on liberal democracy.

"The use of Christian symbols, iconography, Scripture in efforts to dominate and exclude are as old the republic itself," Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told Trevor Hughes of *USA Today*. "It's deeply baked into our nation. It's deep, but it's also been proven time and time again to be wrong."

While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of broadening their community of white supremacists and expanding their recruitment base.

"For them, it's just shorthand for identity," Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Hughes. "There absolutely is a connection between far-right political extremism and far-right religious extremism, but I doubt these people are showing up at church every Sunday and reading their Bibles."

Research sociologist Matthew DeMichele told Hughes that many of today's religious displays are an "intense redeployment of old tactics."

"People don't want to say that this is a country founded on white supremacy. But we know that to be true," DeMichele said. "It's very important to understand that it's not new for white supremacists to have a Christian identity. But it is intriguing there has been the strengthening overlap of the white nationalists and those of Christian Identity."

The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented “Patriots” to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult.Alex Newhouse, deputy director of theCenter on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies .  Besides faith, told Jenkins that social media have been powerful vectors for this confluence.

“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Newhouse said. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”

Newhouse particularly has noticed a sudden uptick, since 2019, of interest in Christian Identity, the infamous religious movement long associated with neo-Nazis, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church. Newhouse noted that Christian nationalist appeals may “disguise a much more dangerous uptick in adoption of Christian Identity.”

One of the leading voices in this resurgence of Identity beliefs, Newhouse says, is Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys-affiliated Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knightswho later attempted to create an explicitly racist and antisemitic offshoot called “Proud Goys.” (Chapman is currently awaiting trial in Idaho on charges of assaulting a health-care worker when he was hospitalized last November.)

Newhouse said Chapman has been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram, while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda.” Another key Trumpist figure—Qanon influencer GhostEzra,who has 300,000 followers on Telegram—posted explicit Identity messages. Identity theology—including references to the “two seedline theory,” which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews—has been popping up with regularity on QAnon and Proud Boys channels on Telegram, Newhouse reported.

“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.

As Stewart explained in the NYT,Christian nationalist beliefs are not merely spreading among far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious is their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the Republican Party:

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.

As I’ve observed previously (while reviewing Stewart’s excellent review of Christian nationalism, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism):When viewed through the lens of its real-world outcomes, fundamentalist Christianity is less a coherent theology than it is a form of spiritual or religious totalitarianism, one that requires abject submission to what is actually a very perverse and narrow interpretation of the meaning of Scripture.

This approach translated naturally into political authoritarianism—the kind that Donald Trump practices. And Trump in turn has proven very adept at feeding the psychological needs of the kinds of personalities that adhere to such movements.

Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.

We can only be grateful that he is out of power now. And it will be incumbent on everyone who treasures their democratic institutions to do everything in their power to defend them against this lethal tide of extremism now.

ref 1  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/christian-right-fighting-impeachment-as-spiritual-warfare.html

kilgore

When the conservative evangelical publication Christianity Today called for the president’s removal from office last week, it sent a familiar thrill through secular circles where there’s always a willingness to believe that the Christian Right is dying or divided. As my colleague Sarah Jones pointed out, however,CTis not all that influential these days in conservative politico-religious precincts, and in addition, the op-ed in question narrowly focused on Trump’s behavior in the Ukraine scandal and not on the immorality of his policies.

If you doubt white Evangelicals are still on Team Trump in a big way, I recommend you read a recent investigative piece from Sarah Posner that demonstrates how the abiding loyalty so many of them have to the president is not just a matter of him “keeping his promises” on judges, opposition to reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and support for “religious liberty” (interpreted as broad exemptions from anti-discrimination laws). Many Christian Right leaders and members of their flocks view political battles involving Trump as spiritual warfare between holy and demonic forces, with the crude, self-idolizing, and heathenish POTUS treated as unquestionably the champion of the Prince of Peace.

In mid-October, less than a month into the House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Jim Bakker, the televangelist and convicted fraudster, was in front of a studio audience at his Morningside Church complex in Blue Eye, Missouri, a remote village of less than 200 people in the Ozarks. As the crew prepared the semicircular desk where the 79-year-old conducts freewheeling interviews with evangelical celebrity guests, Bakker took a moment to deliver an important message to the hundred or so people who had come to watch the taping: “God’s sending judgment.”

God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

That morning, news had broken of the unexpected death of Democratic Congressman and House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, who aggressively investigated Trump and who would have played a key role in impeachment proceedings. But there would be no prayers or condolences for the civil rights advocate from Bakker, who would only call Cummings “that man.” Instead, Bakker concluded with satisfaction, “one of the number-one enemies of our president fell dead last night. A man who insists on impeaching the president of the United States, he fell dead.”

This isn’t an unusual attitude, at all. As Trump has tweeted and raged and blustered his way through the impeachment crisis, conservative Evangelical leaders are mobilizing to support him, right through 2020, when they plan an even more impressive turnout on his behalf than the remarkable numbers they posted in 2016, Posner reports:

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation. Top names in this circle include Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. The two are part of a group of about two dozen Christian leaders who meet regularly at the White House and who blast out full-throated defenses of the president through their organizations’ mailing lists, radio shows, podcasts and television programs.

Inside this ecosystem, impeachment is, at best, a partisan sideshow concocted by Democrats to distract the public from Trump’s many important accomplishments. At worst, it is a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan for America, which was to install Trump in office in order to ensure the nation is governed by Christians who espouse “biblical” values.

At the apex of the army marching to Zion for Trump is his top Evangelical adviser, Florida televangelist and prosperity-gospel prophet Paula White, who is also his chief ambassador to the less conventional Evangelicals who are comfortable with bringing apocalyptic visions into daily political life. Posner describes White directly invoking divine power in a recent conference call designed to mobilize prayer warriors for Trump:

On the [One Voice Prayer Movement launch] call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriorssay they are engaged in on his behalf. (“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.”)

… “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the [call,] “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

No, these people are not going to abandon Donald Trump. They are now so complicit in his presidency that to question him is to condemn themselves to a judgement too terrible to contemplate.

==

kilgore ref

https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2019/12/19/the-army-of-prayer-warriors-fighting-trumps-impeachment/

posner

no lnx

In mid-October, less than a month into the House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Jim Bakker, the televangelist and convicted fraudster, was in front of a studio audience at his Morningside Church complex in Blue Eye, Missouri, a remote village of less than 200 people in the Ozarks. As the crew prepared the semicircular desk where the 79-year-old conducts freewheeling interviews with evangelical celebrity guests, Bakker took a moment to deliver an important message to the hundred or so people who had come to watch the taping: “God’s sending judgment.”

God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

That morning, news had broken of the unexpected death of Democratic Congressman and House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, who aggressively investigated Trump and who would have played a key role in impeachment proceedings. But there would be no prayers or condolences for the civil rights advocate from Bakker, who would only call Cummings “that man.” Instead, Bakker concluded with satisfaction, “one of the number-one enemies of our president fell dead last night. A man who insists on impeaching the president of the United States, he fell dead.”

KEY FINDINGS

As Trump faces impeachment challenges, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders; two-thirds believe he did nothing wrong in Ukraine.

The president has secured the loyalty of the evangelical base by handing the movement control over personnel and policy at a level they’ve never seen before.

Evangelical leaders talk about Trump as divinely anointed, and call impeachment a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan to have Trump lead a Christian nation.

Evangelical leaders across the country are laying the groundwork for a historic effort to support Trump’s reelection campaign.

As Trump faces increasingly grim polling numbers over impeachment, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in late October, about a month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the official launch of the impeachment probe, 80% of white evangelicals opposed impeaching Trump and removing him from office (compared to just 47% of the public at large). Two-thirds of white evangelicals believed Trump did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Among white evangelicals who identify as Republican, 99% of them opposed impeachment, according to an October analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute.

This unwavering support is consistent with white evangelical voters’ attitude toward Trump in general. In 2016, 81% of them voted for him, and over the course of his tumultuous presidency, polling has consistently shown white evangelicals to be unfazed by Trump’s scandals and corruption — from pussy grabbing to Stormy Daniels to family separations to Russian election interference. Moreover, white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance more than any other demographic does ? a rate 20 and 30 points higher than those of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, respectively. These numbers have remained static even in the face of House Democrats’ probe into Trump’s efforts to shake down Zelensky for the public announcement of a corruption probe against Joe Biden and his son.

In early December, as the House Judiciary Committee held impeachment hearings, Mark Meadows, the Republican congressman from North Carolina, accepted an award at the Impact Luncheon, hosted by Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Speaking at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, Meadows drew enthusiastic applause for his shoutout to his “two buddies,” Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who were “fighting the impeachment fight as we speak.” With Thomas at his side, Meadows said he wanted to figure out how “to compete with mainstream media, when they’re out there each and every day trying to form a narrative that would suggest that this president should be impeached.” He then credited grassroots activists for retweeting his and Jordan’s tweets enough times that they received 163 million impressions, “which is more than the viewership of all the networks combined.”

As impeachment moves to the Senate, where a Republican majority will control the trial, GOP lawmakers are acutely aware of the clout wielded by the Christian right ? not only in the upcoming elections, but in the Trump White House. For them, crossing Trump does not just mean facing his wrath, but also, by extension, the wrath of his most devoted base in the voting booth.

An Evangelical Bubble

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation. Top names in this circle include Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. The two are part of a group of about two dozen Christian leaders who meet regularly at the White House and who blast out full-throated defenses of the president through their organizations’ mailing lists, radio shows, podcasts and television programs.

Inside this ecosystem, impeachment is, at best, a partisan sideshow concocted by Democrats to distract the public from Trump’s many important accomplishments. At worst, it is a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan for America, which was to install Trump in office in order to ensure the nation is governed by Christians who espouse “biblical” values.

Just before Thanksgiving, as the House Intelligence Committee completed its crucial round of public hearings, Reed made a plea for donations, promising that “while we fight to defend the President from the Democrats’ ongoing political assassination attempt, we’re also laying the groundwork for a historic effort that will secure his reelection next year.” In December, as the House Judiciary Committee began a new phase of the impeachment proceedings, Perkins warned followers that “the radical Left is rallied around a single goal: impeaching this president to stop his pro-life, pro-family values, pro-religious liberty agenda, so they can force their radical, anti-American agenda onto voters.”

This rear guard has been poised at every turn of the impeachment investigation to defend Trump. The Family Research Council’s marquee annual event, the Values Voter Summit, came this year in October, just days after FBI agents arrested Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani, as they were attempting to leave the country. The two were charged in a scheme to violate election laws by funneling foreign money to Republicans including then-Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, who in turn pressed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to recall the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. (Both men have pled not guilty.) As the Values Voter Summit got underway, Yovanovitch testified that she had been told by a top State Department official that she was recalled from her post prematurely due to “a concerted campaign against me, and that the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018.”

[TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

Pastor Robert Jeffress leads the Pledge of Allegiance before President Trump speaks during a "Keep America Great" Rally on October 17, 2019 in Dallas, Texas.]

To Values Voter Summit attendees, however, this tumble of calamitous news was only evidence of a partisan attack against a divinely anointed president. Carly Eli, an attendee from Atlanta, said in an interview that God has told her that Trump is “chosen” and “anointed,” and that she believes God has placed a “hedge of protection” around Trump. Eli claims to have received visions of God placing a crown on Trump’s head twice — something she interprets as a prophecy that Trump will serve two terms.

Another attendee, Jason Farris, came from Colorado, where he is a volunteer with the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a new political advocacy group that is based on 7 Mountains theology, which holds that Christians must take control of the seven major spheres of society — religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. When Farris read the July 25 call summary, he said it was “easy for me to see he [Trump] didn’t do anything wrong.” Echoing an increasingly common GOP talking point, Farris claimed that the impeachment proceedings were instigated by Democrats who are disappointed that “the Mueller report didn’t give them what they wanted. ... Even since before the inauguration, the progressive left has wanted to undermine and remove him from office,” he said.

Another attendee, Eric Swanson, a graduate of Liberty University and host of a podcast called All-In America, called the impeachment probe “disgusting” and “the biggest witch hunt in American history.” Instead, he insisted, Joe Biden should be investigated for bribery, echoing a widespread conspiracy theory that Biden “confessed” to bribery in a 2018 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

In this evangelical bubble, the Republican lawmakers who disrupt the impeachment investigation and confuse the public about both the process and the facts of the case are heroes. On Oct. 23, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and other Republican lawmakers stormed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where a closed-door deposition was about to take place. That same day, former Arkansas Gov. and onetime Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was taping his flagship weekly television program for Trinity Broadcasting Network. In a segment Huckabee calls “Facts of the Matter,” during which he tries “to make sense of some of the certified Washington, D.C., insanity,” a viewer named Carlos asked whether Gaetz had accomplished anything with his stunt.

In response, Huckabee, who is the father of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, proceeded to spout disinformation about what had happened. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Huckabee claimed, “was so frightened by” the Republicans’ entry “that he shut the meeting down, got up and he walked out.” (In fact, the room had to be swept for security reasons after the Republican lawmakers broke security rules by bringing their cellphones inside.) Huckabee further misled his audience that “this was all happening behind closed doors, where only one side even got to call witnesses, one side got to hear the full testimony.” (This also was not true; Republicans could and did attend the depositions and ask questions.) To applause, Huckabee declared that such proceedings might take place “in North Korea, maybe in China, maybe in Iran, but not in America.”

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors.

In the eyes of evangelical loyalists, Trump is a salvific figure who must be defended to save Christian America from a catastrophic downfall at the hands of overweening Democrats. After 25 evangelical advisers met with him at the White House in late October, participants, including the Christian public relations guru Johnnie Moore, whom Trump appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, pushed out photographs of them praying with the president on social media. (Moore did not respond to interview requests for this article.) In an interview the day after the meeting, evangelical adviser Robert Jeffress, the Dallas megachurch pastor and Fox News personality, said that most evangelicals “believe this impeachment is an attempt to overthrow the 2016 election and therefore negate the votes of millions of evangelical Christians.” These voters, he went on, “see it as a war for the soul of our nation.” Jeffress predicted that evangelicals would react “very poorly” to Republican senators voting to convict Trump in an impeachment trial.

Trump’s evangelical boosters have also mobilized their foot soldiers into a spiritual army of prayer warriors who fervently believe their intercession will aid Trump against demonic enemies. This effort fans out far beyond leading Beltway players like Perkins or Reed, or popular television stars like Huckabee or Jeffress. In fact, Trump’s validation has meant greater celebrity for a proliferating network of “prophets” and televangelists, like Lance Wallnau, a speaker and author known for comparing Trump to the biblical King Cyrus, who restored Jerusalem. Wallnau claims to receive divine revelations about Trump, his power, and the attacks on him from a demonic left. Bakker’s Prophetic Encounter conference also featured the evangelist Jeremiah Johnson, who claims to have received many visions from God about Trump, and wrote a book called “Trump, 2019, & Beyond,” in which he claims, among other things, that God warned him about Hillary Clinton in 2012, telling him to “take careful notice of the secrecy that she operates in,” and warning, “The Church must resist her. She has plans to control, plans to influence. Beware!”

As the impeachment probe intensified and the House approved a resolution laying out its procedures, Trump actively sought to reward powerful evangelical figures for their support. In late October, for example, he elevated controversial Florida televangelist Paula White to an official White House post as the adviser to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative, a reinvention of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. White, Trump’s top spiritual adviser and friend, hails from the world of the prosperity gospel, where God is portrayed as blessing believers with finances and good health, and where prophecies from God — about Trump and otherwise — are commonplace. She has long been a key emissary between Trump and this world, elevating his profile in this community while he in turn has expanded theirs.

Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called White “unfit” for her new position, and denounced the appointment as “yet another example of President Trump pandering to his evangelical Christian supporters as he scrambles to secure his base amidst an impeachment investigation.”

Forming A Defense

The blueprint for the evangelical defense of Trump against impeachment was crafted during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and obstruction of justice by Trump and his associates. In early May, a few weeks after Mueller released his report, Trump assembled his closest evangelical supporters for a Rose Garden ceremony for the National Day of Prayer. There, White declared the White House “holy ground” and prayed that Trump would “fulfill all the will of the Lord and do the assignment God has carried him to do.” Later that month, Franklin Graham organized a group of more than 250 pastors to make June 2 a special day of prayer for the president because his “enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family, and the presidency.”(White did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new.

Evangelical leaders also freely weighed in on the substance of the Mueller report itself. “No collusion,” Jeffress told me in June during the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in Washington. “I’ve said to the president several times … unless Bob Mueller can produce a photograph of you holding the flashlight while the Russians were breaking into a voting machine — anything short of that he won’t need to worry about,” Jeffress said.

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in June, attended by a thousand grassroots activists from around the country, administration officials and evangelical activists portrayed Washington as a bubble disconnected from reality and obsessed by the “phony Russian collusion scandal.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of having “Trump derangement syndrome.” Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, told the audience, “Fewer and fewer people believe what they hear on the evening news. They listen to it with skepticism and doubt.”But this conference will “shore you up and give you the information you need to talk to your friends and neighbors,” Blackburn said, because the “most important name in news is you and your circle of friends.”

Conference attendees also heard from John Solomon, the Fox contributor and former opinion writer for The Hill, who reportedly was at the center of spreading disinformation about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. His articles fomented the recall of Ambassador Yovanovitch based on a false claim by a Ukrainian prosecutor who later recanted it, and they promoted the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton. At the Faith & Freedom conference, Solomon took aim at his mainstream media peers, lamenting that they had lost their neutrality in reporting the news. “If the media had been neutral, it would have taken a deep breath at the beginning of this Russia scandal and they would have had reason to pause, and say, some of this doesn’t add up, it’s too easy, it doesn’t make sense,” Solomon told the audience. “Instead they just went on this bandwagon and drove off. They eventually drove off a cliff, and they have a story that today is overtly wrong.”

David Brody, political correspondent for the Trump-cheerleading Christian Broadcasting Network, who was moderating the panel on which Solomon spoke, left that comment unchallenged — even though the intelligence community had concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump. After Mueller gave a press conference about his report in late May, stating, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Brody’s network ran a story headlined, “Case Closed: Special Counsel Mueller Says Russia Investigation Is Over, Nothing More to Say.”

Unprecedented Power

Whether Trump’s evangelical boosters actually believe he is anointed by God or that the evidence really does exonerate him, they have one powerful motive for their unflagging support: Trump has given evangelicals unprecedented power. With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts, including Mike Pompeo at the State Department, Bill Barr at the Department of Justice, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos at Education. Ralph Reed has told his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”

At the Faith & Freedom conference in June, Mercedes Schlapp, who at the time served in the White House but later moved over to the Trump reelection campaign, described her office as “the West Wing Chapel.” Derek Kan, a political appointee at the Office of Management and Budget, recounted how the books of Leviticus, Joshua and Genesis shape his views on regulation and taxes.

Health and Human Services has been ground zero for Trump administration efforts to scale back reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and eroding church-state separation and framing it as “religious freedom” for Christians. HHS Secretary Alex Azar then delivered a speech enumerating “many of the ways that under President Trump HHS has protected life, conscience and faith.” The department, he said, has “never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death. That is thanks above all to the work, the leadership and the courage of President Trump, the most pro-life president in American history.” At the Values Voter Summit, two officials from HHS — Shannon Royce, the head of the department’s Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, and Roger Severino, the head of the Office of Civil Rights, which in 2018 launched a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division — were given front-row seats and a shoutout from Tony Perkins.

In turn, evangelical organizations provide top Trump deputies a platform to tout their Christian credentials to the base ? and shield them from the glare of mounting scandals. The same day that Yovanovitch testified in her closed-door deposition, Pompeo delivered a speech, “Being a Christian Leader,” to the American Association of Christian Counselors, which is led by Tim Clinton, another top evangelical ally to Trump. (Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.) A week and a half later, Pompeo touted religious freedom initiatives carried out by the State Department to a Heritage Foundation President’s Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., joking that the gathering had provided him “shelter from the storm.”

Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new. While many of the expressed fears — that a Democratic president would nominate pro-Roe v. Wade judges or take away Christians’ religious freedom — are familiar, the motivation now is not just to avert liberal judges and policies. It is much more deliberately an imperative to reelect a singularly “Christian” president. As Ralph Reed reportedly will argue in a book to be published this spring, evangelicals “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” Trump in 2020.

With Trump’s reelection once again hinging on slim margins in a few key states, a multifaceted get-out-the-vote operation is getting underway. Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition is aiming to raise $42.7 million for its 2020 Project, aimed at bolstering its “unparalleled values-voter database, supporting field offices, and coordinating volunteers and staff to get out the vote.” It will be, Reed promised supporters, the “largest Christian Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort in history,” necessary because “the left is already turning the re-election of Donald Trump into a three-ring circus, aimed at impeaching our president and reversing all progress for voters of faith.”

Reed’s organization is not alone. United In Purpose, an organization that provides polling and voter data to Christian right organizations, helped organize a pivotal 2016 meeting between a thousand evangelical leaders and Trump, during which he sealed an alliance by promising to nominate judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the Johnson Amendment,which prohibits churches from using tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although his organization is “still in the planning stages” for the 2020 election cycle, UIP’s president, Bill Dallas, said in an interview that the conservative Christian get-out-the-vote operation ? as well as its opposition’s ? will exceed 2016 in terms of “the sophistication, not just the data mining, using every technique to get the votes out.”

Maximizing white evangelical turnout for Trump will be key in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states he won in 2016 by narrow margins. White evangelicals made up 27% and 28% of the electorate in those states, respectively, according to exit polling data. Other closely watched states with high percentages of white evangelical turnout in 2016 include North Carolina (38%), Iowa (34%) and Ohio (33%).

According to Dallas, the views driving Trump’s support among the Christian voters that United in Purpose targets have already begun to solidify. “The reason why Trump has such a strong support base is because he did what he said he would do,” said Dallas. “I don’t see that [impeachment] turning off Christian voters. What would turn off Christian voters is if he didn’t fulfill his promises and commitments that he said he would do if he was elected.”

For the 2020 cycle, My Faith Votes, an organization that boasts Huckabee as its honorary national chairman, has also been organizing voter registration drives. “As Christians,” Jason Yates, the group’s CEO claims, “we must always look to elect leaders who defend our values and believe that God is the ultimate authority in this nation.” (Yates did not respond to interview requests.) In an email to My Faith Votes supporters, Huckabee described the group’s efforts in more detail. Over the course of the year, he wrote, “TV and radio PSAs will be running around the country reaching millions; millennials and Generation Z will be reached on Christian campuses; hundreds of thousands of Christians will be mobilized using peer-to-peer texting and door-to-door outreach, all in an effort to motivate and equip Christians with everything they need to take action.”

In November, Yates announced a partnership with Intercessors for America, an organization based in Purcellville, Virginia, that hosts weekly prayer calls and enlists supporters to engage in prayer against supposed deep-state and George Soros-led schemes against Trump and his allies. In a webcast, Yates and Dave Kubal, Intercessors for America’s president, announced they were developing a phone app to identify Christian voters with a “low propensity” to vote. But apps and microtargeting of voters are not the only way to keep evangelical voters in the Trump camp. The next day, Kubal was on a conference call with Paula White, her chief of staff, Todd Lamphere, and the evangelists Jon and Jolene Hamill announcing the launch of the One Voice Prayer Movement, carrying out, according to Kubal, White’s “vision to see the church of Jesus Christ come together, and pray for this administration and pray for our country.” (Kubal did not respond to an interview request. The Hamills, who are hosting a “Revolution” conference on New Year’s Eve at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, also did not respond to interview requests.)

On the call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriors say they are engaged in on his behalf. (“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.”)

But White has a plan to protect Trump from those dark forces, vanquish his enemies, and to defend the “biblical” government that has elevated Christian right personnel and policy priorities. And she left no doubt that the multiple roles she plays — presidential personal pastor, White House employee and defender of Trump against his enemies — have merged into a single message of God’s wrath against anyone who dares criticize him. “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the One Voice Prayer Movement launch call, “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations.

ABOUT THE REPORTER

SARAH POSNER

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/religious-right-activists-meet-the-gops-red-new-scare/

Republican senators joined Religious Right activists at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., today, where they warned thatif Democrats are successful in obtaining a supermajority in the 2020 elections, socialism will be implemented in America.

Hysterical warnings about creeping socialism have been a routine staple in conservative messaging for decades. Republicans regularly labeled President Obama a socialist during his time in office, despite no indication that the label was accurate. During this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), speakers renewed their devotion to plastering the socialist label on politicians and policies they oppose, and expressed their continued commitment to the scaremongering as the race to 2020 begins.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told MSNBC yesterday, before the first round of Democratic debates, that she wasn’t sure if there was a single Democrat pursuing the presidency that she would not consider a socialist. Currently, the only Democrat seeking the 2020 nomination for president who has labeled himself a socialist is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

At Road to Majority, the GOP’s strategy met face-to-face with the Religious Right. As plates of chicken and salad were served at the opening session, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas addressed the group, and he warned that “the fate of the nation is being debated.”Cruz asked the audience if they had watched last night’s Democratic Party debate between candidates for president and asked those in attendence to memorize a mantra: “defend freedom.” He criticized Democrats for proposing higher tax rates for wealthy Americans and universal access to health care.

“We saw, last night, an embrace of socialism,” Cruz said. He went on to praise Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful conservative legal group founded in the 1990s that has argued in favor of anti-LGBTQ discrimination practices in the name of “religious liberty.”

After a brief intermission while attendees ate, Sen. David Perdue of Georgia took the podium. His speech centered on warning that Democrats are hellbent on waging an “ideological war” on the historically conservative values of the American political system.

“Democrats want to convert America to a socialist state,” Perdue said, soliciting boos from the audience. “This socialism talk didn’t just start with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Over the last 100 years, America has been on a slow slide towards socialism.”

Perdue claimed that social programs like the New Deal, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the Affordable Care Act had failed to help working people in America, and he praised President Trump for working to roll back regulations and boost fossil fuel production in the United States. He called the Trump administration’s economic policies a “miracle.”

“I never thought in my lifetime I’d be standing here having to defend capitalism, but I have to tell you this, our way of life is in jeopardy,” Perdue said. “I didn’t ask for this fight, but like you, I’m up for it. This is our time. If we don’t do it, who will? If we don’t do it now, when will we do it?”

He added that Democrats won’t use the word “socialism” but that proposed policies were “indeed that.” He said, “What’s at stake here is our freedom. … You and I just cannot let this radical left take our country down that road to socialism. The only thing standing in their way right now is you and me.”

He said repeatedly: “The price of socialism is freedom.”

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky did not fear-monger about creeping socialism in America, but instead stated his anti-choice bona fides and took issue with President Trump on the matter of selling arms to Saudi Arabia. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, however, picked up the fear-stoking tonewhen he followed Paul with a speech that contained similar warnings about socialism coming to America. Rubio told activists in the audience that America was facing a “pivot moment in history” during which “Judeo-Christian principles” were being questioned with regard to their morality and righteousness. During his speech, Rubio said that Democrats wanted to solve problems facing America with socialist policies.

“Is the answer to [those problems] socialism? Of course it’s not. The answer to that is still free enterprise and limited government,” Rubio said.

Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Steve Scalise of Louisianawere scheduled to speak at the luncheon but were unable to attend due to obligations on Capitol Hill.

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/christian-right-donald-trump

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The so-called alt-right may have grabbed most of the attention since Donald Trump’s victory, but it’s the Christian right that got him over the line. And experts say they are much more likely to influence how he governs.

Frederick Clarkson, a senior fellow at Political Research Associates, has studied the Christian right for decades. He says that when it comes to their relationship with the morally erratic Trump, it’s all about the art of the deal.

“The Christian right has matured as a political movement. They recognize that you can’t always get political leaders who conform with your beliefs as consistently and wholly as you’d like.”

“Even though he doesn’t appear to be their guy, they can make deals with him that would make him into their guy in a way that no one else has ever been.”

Ralph Reed, chairman of the evangelical Faith and Freedom Coalition, appeared to confirm Clarkson’s analysis when he spoke to Fox News. “They were never under any illusions that Donald Trump was one of them,” he said [3] of his evangelical flock. “And by the way, they never asked him to be. All they asked was that he shared their issues agenda and that he would fight for it. He persuaded them on both of those points.”

A lot of post-election coverage (some of it unnecessarily fawning [4]) has considered the newer, shinier, openly white supremacist alt-right movement. And people are right to be concerned about the influence of its White House sympathizers like Steve Bannon [5]. But the fascist core of the movement likely numbers around 10,000 or less. Trump, ever the opportunist, has already cut loose some of the more outre leaders, like Richard Spencer [6]. Also, the wide variety of right-wing actors who lay claim to the alt-right tag are already riven by infighting.

The upsurge of hate crimes [7] around the country should be monitored and resisted, but it seems possible that the “hipster fascists” have already peaked in terms of their national political clout. Recent bizarre speeches[8] by Richard Spencer presage a future of increasing isolation.

The Christian right’s adherents, on the other hand, include tens of millions of the most disciplined voters in the country. And there’s a very good case to be made that they won Trump the election. Just look at the numbers.

In 2016, white evangelical Christians composed [9] 26 percent of the electorate—just as they did in 2012, 2008, and 2004.

And their quarter of the total vote in 2016 went 81-16 percent for the Republican. This gave Donald Trump a slightly bigger share of evangelicals than Mitt Romney, the pious Mormon, in 2012, or war hero John McCain in 2008. Trump even slightly outdid George W. Bush’s 2004 share, even though W identified as a born-again Christian. 

According to exit polls, these numbers and proportions meant that the evangelical vote alone almost entirely negated Clinton’s advantage among nonwhites. (Of the 29 percent of voters who were nonwhite, Clinton got 74 percent of the vote.)

And while there’s been a lot of talk about the “white working class” and its grievances, other figures suggest that the combination of race and religious identity may have been even more potent.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute [10], “the proportion of white Christians in each of the 50 states is more strongly correlated with support for Trump than is the proportion of white residents without a college degree in the state.” If we use education as a proxy for class, in the states that flipped Trump it mattered less than religion.

The places where Trump outperformed expectations to clinch the election—like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa—all have white Christian majorities.

As the PRRI’s CEO Robert P. Jones points out, in 2016, when we measure the United States as a whole, white Christians (a category that includes white evangelicals, but is not limited to them) are only 43 percent of the population.

His recent book, *The End of White Christian America* [11], predicted that white Christians would, on the whole, decline in their demographic and electoral dominance. He stands by the overall argument, but admits 2016 didn’t exactly bear out his conclusions.

“Where I was wrong, where I was surprised, is that I said in the book that Mitt Romney’s campaign was the last one in which you could plausibly stack up enough white Christian voters to get you over the line.”

“I would say that what you are seeing is that last gasp of this particular group, rather than any reversal of major trends.”

The key this year was turnout. The Obama coalition, faced with an uninspiring Democratic candidate, stayed home in droves in key states. The Christian right—losing ground demographically and in the culture wars—came out to vote. While Clinton piled up redundant votes in safe states like California, evangelicals helped to pry loose the upper Midwest for Trump.

The fact that they did may seem puzzling. Trump is on his third wife, cheerfully admits to serial adultery and even sexual assault [12], and has been inconsistent over time on the kinds of moral issues—abortion, homosexuality—that exercise evangelicals. His own expressions of faith seemed pro forma; he generally gives the appearance of being the most godless candidate in living memory.

As a result, some evangelical leaders, like Russell Moore [13], were firmly in the #nevertrump camp, seeing the candidate’s moral flaws as disqualifying. (Moore declined the opportunity to comment on this story.)

Millions of evangelicals were able to get past this, in part, because of their fear and loathing of Hillary Clinton. Clarkson says they voted from similar sentiments to many other voting blocs, choosing, as they saw it, the lesser of two evils.

“One candidate was beyond the pale and another candidate was acceptable to them.”

Despite Trump’s apparent “lack of a serious religiosity,” and a very mixed record on abortion and homosexuality, Clinton was more feared on the grounds of policy.

“She was not just pro-choice but seen as pro-abortion, she was seen as pro-marriage equality, she was seen as pro-gay rights, she was seen as anti-family. She represented the kind of demonized feminism that has animated their movement for a couple of decades now. It’s hard for liberals to see how people are affected by those issues, but they are.”

Clinton has held her place as a bete noire of the Christian right for decades.

Carin Robinson, a political scientist who coauthored *Onward Christian Soldiers? The Christian Right in American Politics* [14] recalls that when she was studying the Christian right in the 1990s, “On numerous occasions I received mailings from these groups that said Hillary Clinton was going to take away my Bible. She has been used as a means of mobilizing, inspiring fear and getting evangelicals to vote.“

Having her appoint a Supreme Court justice was the worst propsect of all. Robinson says that “The evangelicals I have spoken to, it just came down to that Supreme Court nomination, and having that crystallized by the death of Scalia. It was all about that empty chair.”

But even with this hostility to Clinton as a baseline, how did they come to terms with Trump? How did they come to select him in the primary above candidates with other Christian candidates? Jones thinks it was because his campaign messages were not in fact at odds with evangelicals’ values—in fact he was speaking straight to them.

“It was really this bigger argument Trump was making about turning the clock back. If you’re a white evangelical your numbers are slipping due to immigration, and because your children and grandchildren are leaving the church. Trump’s rhetoric gave a sense of turning the clock back to a time when your values, your demographic had sway in the country.”

“He converted values voters into nostalgia voters.”

He says “the data doesn’t really support” the idea that these voters were holding their noses as they voted for Trump. In pre-election surveys, white evangelicals expressed opinions that chimed with Trump’s key messages. The evinced hostility to migrants, and a belief in pervasive “reverse” racism and a sense that the country is adrift.

“When you look at him on the stump, he was saying to evangelicals, ‘your numbers used to be increasing, now they’re decreasing. If you elect me, you’ll have a friend in the white house who will restore power to the Christian churches. I’m you’re last chance, folks.’

But Clarkson instead points to Trump’s concrete offerings.

“To some extent it didn’t matter who the non-Hillary candidate was. The question was, what kind of deal could they strike? This was the most openly transactional electorate for the Christian right we have ever seen. What did they get? We don’t know the answer exactly, but let’s look at the results so far.”

During the campaign, Clarkson said, Trump made all the right noises about easing Christians’ sense of persecution in an increasingly liberal cultural and legal climate. One key issue carried a particular weight. “He said he was going to be very forceful about religious liberty, and particularly the Johnson Amendment.”

This was a change President Johnson made to the tax code, preventing certain kinds of nonprofits, like churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Trump has called for its repeal.

It’s not just the tax code that concerns them, though. “There’s a deeper agenda” for the big evangelical organizations, according to Clarkson.

“They don’t want to comply with civil rights and labor laws, or “complicit,” as they see it, with abortion in any way, or see taxes go into things they don’t support.”

These beliefs frame attitudes from everything from healthcare to gay marriage. Evangelical organizations and their adherents don’t want to participate in healthcare plans that fund birth control or abortion, any more than they want to bake cakes for gay couples or be forced to consider them for employment.

Religious liberty so defined “is a banner they are willing to follow. If he is prepared to appoint Supreme Court justices that support that view, cases like the Bob Jones decision would be vulnerable.”

That was the decision made back in 1983, where the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS could revoke Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status for banning interracial relationships.

Trump’s promises on these issues have been taken very seriously by Christian right leaders.

Jim Daly, of Focus on the Family, wrote in a newsletter [15] the day after the election, “We are grateful for Mr. Trump’s pro-life pledge and look forward to his promise of a pro-life administration, which includes de-funding Planned Parenthood. We’re also optimistic about the president-elect’s pledge to champion pro-religious liberty policies and once again welcome faith in the public square.”

The elevation of Mike Pence as Trump’s running-mate was a big reassurance to leaders like Dobson, and his millions of followers. Pence identifies as an evangelical Christian, and according to Robinson, “has great credentials among Christian right leaders.” Clarkson says that during the campaign, Pence “personally reassured” evangelical voters. “He spoke to voters at the values voters summit and reassured of them of Trump’s bona fides. He told them that he is in favour of religious liberty. And he had the standing to say that.”

Trump has put Pence in charge of the transition team, giving him enormous power over determining the shape of Trump’s cabinet. His decisions have already pleased the faithful.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition has issued statements welcoming the appointment of Tom Price as Health and Human Services Secretary, anticipating [16] that, “he will lead the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare and its unconstitutional mandate.” Similarly, they welcomed [17] Jeff Sessions as someone who would “to make our country a better place and ensure that the concerns of people of faith are upheld at the highest level of our government.” (AlterNet reached out to the Faith and Freedom Coalition for further comments, but its spokesman did not respond to emails before the deadline for this story.)

As for Jerry Falwell Jr., who heads up the evangelical Liberty University, he says that the transition team offered him the Education Secretary gig, before handing it off to billionaire ideologue Betsy DeVos [18]. He was a strong backer of Trump during the campaign, and even censored anti-Trump material in the University’s newspaper.

But Pence may wind up with even more heft after Inauguration Day.

Reports that Trump offered John Kasich [19] a slew of hitherto presidential powers when he was wooing him as a potential running mate gives Frederick Clarkson pause. If Pence got the same offer, “that would make him the most powerful vice president in American history.”

Meanwhile, the things the administration doesn’t do might be as significant as its positive moves. For example, any relaxation of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by a Sessions Department of Justice will only give white Christian voters greater relative sway. And refusing to fund Planned Parenthood will just make it harder for women to maintain control over their reproductive rights, especially in red states that aren’t inclined to make up the shortfalls.

Trump owes evangelicals, and the early signs are that he will deliver. He will need them again in 2020, and again they might be crucial to the election result.

While it’s true that America is no longer a majority white Christian country, and is grinding toward a minority-majority future, what counts in elections is voters. While Jones thinks that white Christian America is on the slide, Clarkson points to their resiliency, and the way that in spite of population changes, they are still able to make themselves a part of winning electoral coalitions.

“There is a certain wishful thinking that has attended the rise and continuation of the religious right.”

“Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing sector of American Christianity. It is a grouping of people who have gone from being the least political to the most political. They are organized.”

They may be a much more serious long-term danger than the outright fascists, because one of the things they are best at organizing is the vote.

Jason Wilson is a writer and photographer based in Portland, Oregon. His internationally published work has appeared in many outlets including The Guardian (where he is a columnist), AlterNet, The Atlantic, and Religion Dispatches.

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http://www.madisonstrategiesllc.com/team.html

Gary Marx is co-founder of Madison Strategies. He launched Madison Strategies with his long-time friend Jason Miyares after serving almost three years at the helm of the Faith & Freedom Coalition as Executive Director. Prior to joining FFC he was Vice President at Century Strategies heading up their Washington D.C. office while also leading the Judicial Crisis Network which works to confirm judges to the nation’s courts who follow judicial restraint and written words of the Constitution.

His career path has included high level posting as Conservative Coalitions Director for the Romney presidential campaign in 2008 and also at the Bush-Cheney 04 national campaign headquarters where he spearheaded outreach to social conservatives. His coalitions program helped increase the President’s share of the “values voters” to 21.3 million or 36 percent of the total Bush vote.  His corporate affairs work over the years has included industry leaders such as Wal-Mart, Ford, Christian Mingle.com, and Boeing.

Gary is a media veteran and has done hundreds of television, print, and radio interviews including CNN, CBN, CSPAN and FOX NEWS. He has also been a featured speaker for prominent organizations such as The Federalist Society, The Leadership Institute, Hanns Seidel Foundation, The International Republican Institute and The Council for National Policy.

Marx has a degree in Political Science from James Madison University. Gary holds a Master’s degree in Political Management from Regent University. He is married to Aimee and is the father of three children.

Travis Korson

Travis Korson is a veteran of politics with years of experience in campaigns, communications, public policy and fundraising and serves as National Committeeman of the District of Columbia Young Republicans.

Recent roles include Communications Director for Special Projects at Frontiers of Freedom and Virginia Field Director for the Faith and Freedom Coalition (2013). Travis is also a guest lecturer with the Leadership Institute and has previously served in the leadership of the District of Columbia Republican Party.

Travis has also served in the Bush White House and has spent time at various public policy organizations and government institutions including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and the Rhode Island General Assembly. Travis has spoken at several conferences, including the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Road to Majority Conference, Freedom Fest and the State Policy Network annual gathering. His expertise has been quoted in several publications including the Washington Post and he has been published at various outlets including Daily Caller, Human Events, American Spectator, CNS News, and Breitbart. He is a graduate of the George Washington University where he studied International Affairs with a focus on International Economics.

Anthony J. “A.J.” Ferate, J.D.

Anthony J. “A.J.” Ferate has built a multi-faceted background in the areas of the law, policy, elections and defense over the last 20 years.

Currently employed as Vice President of Regulatory Affairs for the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association (“OIPA”), A.J. maintains responsibilities over all government efforts outside of the legislative branch on matters as broad as water, electric generation, commodity marketing, land matters and seismicity. A.J. also maintains responsibility for legal matters at OIPA.

Prior to working for OIPA, A.J. managed public policy strategy for Fortune 500 Company Devon Energy. Other previous employment includes management of the Oklahoma City office of Ryan Glover LLP, a Houston-based energy law firm. A.J. also served as general counsel and chief financial officer of the American Clean Skies Foundation, where his primary responsibilities included all legal, financial, and policy matters of the Foundation.

A.J.’s practice areas include oil and gas law, utility law, energy regulation, campaign finance and election law, state and federal Constitutional matters and practicing in the public policy arena.

For the past five years, A.J. has volunteered as General Counsel to the Oklahoma Republican Party and has represented a number of elected officials, including U.S. Senator James Lankford as well as a number of state legislators and members of Congress. A.J. also holds current representation of Coach Joe Kennedy, a football coach for the Bremerton (WA) School District. The district recently suspended Coach Kennedy for praying on the field after football games.

Additionally, A.J. has assisted elected officials serve their constituents in all branches of government. Early in his career, A.J. held legislative aide duties in the Nebraska Legislature, then went on to work for Former Nebraska Treasurer David Heineman. A.J. gained experience in the judiciary while serving Judge Gary L. Lumpkin at the Oklahoma Court of Appeals, the highest criminal appellate court in Oklahoma. Following this service, A.J. began work with Denise A. Bode of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, assisting her in her duties regulating 80 per cent of Oklahoma’s economy, including oil and gas and electric utilities.

A.J. honorably served ten years as an intelligence analyst for the United States Naval Reserve, including time at the Office of Naval Intelligence in the greater Washington DC area.

A native of Bremerton, Washington and an alumnus of the University of Nebraska and the Oklahoma City University School of Law, A.J. holds licenses to practice law in Oklahoma and before the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

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Chase Reed

Chase Reed is a native of Georgia where he works tirelessly to get conservatives elected at all stations of government. Chase specializes in grassroots mobilization and has worked on several statewide campaigns in Georgia including: Martha for Congress, Jack Kingston for U.S. Senate, and Governor Deal’s 2014 re-election campaign. Chase also works closely with the Georgia Republican Party both state and county wide. Chase is a seasoned face under the Gold Dome where he assists Legislators on various issues.

Reed is a graduate of several leadership institutes including Hall County Youth Mentorship, The Georgia Young Republicans Leadership Basecamp, The National Youth Leadership Council, The Israeli Aramaic Christian Association (ICAA), and most recently became an Inaugural Fellow in the Philos Leadership Institute.

Chase is a frequent commentator on Georgia Politics. He has been published in several different places including marthazoller.com, zpolitcs, and Voices Magazine. Chase has written on several different topics such as education reform, news under the Gold Dome, and policy analyzation.

Chase currently studies Political Science at the University of North Georgia. He serves the Georgia Federation of Young Republicans as the North Georgia Regional Director and also as a GYR County Chairman. 

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has hired two leading conservative operatives to join his political committee Our American Revival, the Washington Examiner has learned.

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Gregg Keller and Gary Marx, who both have deep ties to national conservative groups and have worked previously on high-profile presidential campaigns, will serve as senior advisers overseeing national conservative outreach.

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Keller is a former executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the social conservative group founded in 2009 by Ralph Reed,and is a former executive director of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference. He last year founded a consulting firm, Atlas Strategy Group.

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Marx, a senior partner at Madison Strategies, is a veteran of both of former President George W. Bush’s campaigns and a former executive director of the Judicial Crisis Network.

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Both Keller and Marx worked for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign: Keller as national coalitions director, and Marx as director of conservative outreach.

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Walker’s positive reputation among conservatives nationally, established when he took on teachers unions in Wisconsin and won a recall election, will face a strength test should he run for president in 2016, as is expected. To shore up his appeal among the base, Walker will likely rely upon a classic anti-Washington message — as in a speech to the American Action Network in Washington on Friday, when Walker described D.C. as “68 square miles surrounded by reality.”

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Keller and Marx will help drive that message home, along with a robust and growing campaign team for Walker, who has not yet announced his candidacy for president but has been moving deliberately and publicly in that direction, as evidenced by an aggressive hiring spree in the past month.

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Rick Wiley, a former Republican National Committee political director, signed on last month as executive director of Our American Revival, with the intent to serve as campaign manager once Walker launches a bid for president. Walker has also snagged a political director, former RNC national field director Matt Mason, and David Polyansky as senior Iowa adviser.

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Earlier this week, Our American Revival also announced it would bring on RNC press secretary Kirsten Kukowski as its communications director, the GOP pollster Ed Goeas as a senior adviser, and Joni Ernst alum Mark Stephenson as chief data officer. Brian Tringali and BJ Martino, of the Tarrance Group, will conduct Walker’s polling.