XIAN NAT 5
ESTB 7 25
merri ok
SEE FUNDAMENTALISM // VIOLENCE ~ EMPATHY HIERARCHY
see DOMINIONIST NAR REFORM THEOCRACY
NOEM NEO NAZI POSTERS
SEE ROLLINS AFPI
SEE HEGSETH 3
SEE MISO 4
SEE EVANG 6 WACKO MISO
SEE KIRK 6
YIKES SEE SCHOOLS 10 COMM, PRAGER u PURITY TEST
SEE CLAREMONSTERS NATCON
ISLAMOPHOBE MICH PENDING TEXAS
NAR?
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RWW VID
Judge James Ho, Right-Wing Favorite for SCOTUS, Promotes Christian Nationalist Vision for Courts
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RWW
10 26
Rob McCoy Keeps Spreading False Christian Nationalist History
White Christian Nationalists Will Gather In Texas To Lay Out 'Battle Plans' To 'Seize Power'
MISC RWW
10/20/2026
- Brett Meiselas @ MeidasTouch Network: Vivek’s Sick New Ad Targets Amy Acton With Mother Who Defended Her Abuser
Ramaswamy faces backlash after an attack ad features Amy Acton’s estranged mother, who allegedly stayed with the man who sexually abused her daughter and fled town with him after his arrest.
- Natalie Alms @ The Washington Sun: Trump Is Cutting Right-Wing YouTuber Nick Shirley a Check for His Minnesota Video
Shirley is receiving $10,000 as part of a new fraud tipline rewards program.
- Martha McHardy @ The Daily Beast: Trump’s Truth Social Plunges to All-Time Low as Users Flee
Trump’s tiny social media platform is facing a user exodus.
- Phil Williams @ Confront The Hate: Hymns, Hate, and ‘Holy Wars’: What I Saw Inside a Christian Nationalist Conference
Phil Williams goes inside a Tennessee conference to find an eye-opening battle, involving segregationists and Nazi sympathizers, for the soul of the Christian nationalist movement.
- Alex Nguyen @ Mother Jones: Trump’s Voter Raids Have Begun
Federal agents launched raids and arrests Monday based on a list of 20,000 people the White House alleges have illegally registered to vote.
- Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Republicans Finally Have Their First “Goth Groypette” House Candidate
Kelley Dennison has embraced the movement’s symbolism. Its leaders are fixated on her weight and tattoos.
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RWW VID 10 26
Christian Nationalist Stephen Wolfe Says The Government Should Treat Blasphemy As a Crime
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rww 10 26
Potential SCOTUS Nominee Judge James Ho Joins Dominionist Extremists at Christian Nationalist Event
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AN 9 26
Christian nationalists like to claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, even though scholars and moderate pastors overwhelmingly agree this was not the case. Now a recent report reveals that Christian nationalists are growing in the United States — and doing so by spreading hateful views about vulnerable minority groups.
"Michael Spangler does not look like a white supremacist and antisemite," wrote Bob Smietana from Religion News on Sunday. Despite his clean-cut appearance, however, Smietana pointed out that Spangler eventually "began talking about Jews. And a broad smile broke across his face."
Spangler then asked Smietana, “You’re asking if I oppose the Jews who murdered Christ?", adding that he believes the Bible condemns Jews as “the enemies of God and all men. We need to consider them and treat them accordingly.”
Smietana described Spangler as in the same category as Joel Webbon and Joshua Haymes: "A segregationist and 'race realist' whose start-up church, which has a handful of families, bars Black people out of fear of 'harmful race-mixing,' Spangler is one of a small but growing group of pastors and internet influencers who openly embrace racist and antisemitic views, casting them as true Christian ideas."
Dale Partridge is another example in this trend.
"For Dale Partridge, an Arizona pastor and another member of the New Christian Right channel, that one-way trip has included significant transformation," Smietana wrote. "A decade ago, Partridge was a lifestyle blogger and social justice evangelical entrepreneur who had been 'saved from success.' In 2015, he gave a TEDx talk called 'How to Value People over Profits' based on his book of the same title. His most controversial view was that yoga pants are sinful."
Smietana added, "In recent years, Partridge, who has more than 300,000 social media followers and more than 40,000 on YouTube, has rebranded himself as a chain-smoking, hardcore Christian nationalist, claiming women should not be allowed to vote, Black Americans should not be citizens and Jews were ruining Germany before the Nazis took over."
"'So this Nazi or National Socialist movement terrified the Jews because it represented a powerful form of Christian nationalism,' he said in a video clip posted on social media." Smietana continued.
He also pointed out that "Partridge has argued for America to become 90 [percent] white again, as it was in the 1960s, and called for the deportation of 100 million immigrants."
Earlier in September, The Dispatch's Eli Kronenberg reported that the late Charlie Kirk's activist group Turning Point USA is also being taken over by Christian nationalists.
"Jonah Scott became president of the University of Central Florida’s Turning Point chapter within months of arriving on campus in the fall of 2024, after previously founding a chapter at Seminole State College," Kronenberg wrote. "He said the chapter’s meetings in his first year took place in a small conference room that held 30 to 40 students, but after Kirk’s death, the chapter had to start booking the campus’s largest meeting room in order to accommodate more than 200 students."
Kronenberg continued that "with a growth in attendance came a shift in tone. When Scott stood for reelection as president this spring, some new members sought to push the chapter in a different direction, and Scott lost." Scott told Kronenberg that "I think Turning Point became a lot more of a Christian organization since Charlie passed, and they wanted more Christian leadership. I myself am Jewish, so there was a lot of that. Though we did incorporate a lot of Christian stuff into the group, I think a lot of people wanted it to be a more explicitly Christian organization.”
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RWW VID
Christian Nationalist Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins Says The Trump Administration Is 'Bringing The Light To A Very Dark World'
09/17/2026
Christian nationalist Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins sat down for an interview with right-wing broadcaster Erick Stakelbeck at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month, during which she bragged that she knows God is supporting the Trump administration because they are a "group of warriors" who are dedicated to "bringing the light to a very dark world."
After serving in various capacities during the first Trump administration, Rollins and other Trump insiders launched the America First Policy Institute, which has subsequently played a key role in staffing the second Trump administration. In her current capacity as Agriculture Secretary, Rollins has been leading right-wing Bible study sessions for members of Trump cabinet.DROLLINGER
"I believe so strongly that God was not done with our country, that we are the greatest country in the history of the world.," Rollins said. "So, building that organization [AFPI] to prepare for a second term of America First—whether it was President Trump or somebody else—is what we did. But now to be able to step up and meet the moment; I pray a lot that maybe we don't feel like Moses, frankly, in Exodus, maybe we don't feel like we're fully prepared for this moment, but that God's got us."
"Walking into the West Wing every morning, I could feel God was with us," she continued. "I felt just this peace. These jobs are hard. You're being shot at figuratively, and our president literally, 24-7. The mainstream media is so dark. Big business, big government, big agriculture, big all of it is against you and so walking in that first term and seeing all of those wins in the first term, [it was a sign] that God was with us."
"I held Bible studies in the first term, we prayed all the time," Rollins added. "We built the America First policy Institute on the biblical foundations of everything: It's biblical to want a secure border. It's biblical to put children first in their education.
It's biblical to put patients first in healthcare. It's biblical to fight back to the land of milk and honey in the Old Testament, to fight for our farmers and ranchers. And now to be here the second time and to see this extraordinary amount of winning that we've been able to do, none of it is possible without God. We are a group of warriors to our core. gathering once a week to have a cabinet Bible study and remind all of us what we're fighting for."
"I do use this platform," Rollins admitted. "I believe in making disciples of all the nations. I believe that God has blessed this country and so ensuring that we are using this and bringing the light to a very dark world, that's what this administration is about."
"I have been sued a couple of times for, they say, talking about Jesus too much, but I'll never stop talking about Jesus, " Rollins vowed, before claiming that America will be doomed if Republicans do not maintain control of government in the midterm elections.
"The stakes couldn't be higher," she warned. "It's an existential threat to the future of not just America, to the world. ... I have two daughters and two sons. I will hopefully someday have some grandchildren and they will not have an America that we have unless we're able to win at the ballot box. We can keep fighting every day, but if those socialists, those Democrat socialists who believe in bigger government, who don't believe in God, their religion is a radical climate agenda, wake up America. This is real and the darkness will overcome the light in this country if we're not successful at the ballot box today and in the future."
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MAGA Pastor Robert Jeffress Calls Democrats ‘Advocates for Evil’
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AN 9 26
A political activist group that has long supported President Donald Trump, the late Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, is reportedly struggling with its identity as Christian nationalism has become an increasingly potent influence within its ranks.
"Jonah Scott became president of the University of Central Florida’s Turning Point chapter within months of arriving on campus in the fall of 2024, after previously founding a chapter at Seminole State College," reported The Dispatch's Eli Kronenberg on Thursday.
"He said the chapter’s meetings in his first year took place in a small conference room that held 30 to 40 students, but after Kirk’s death, the chapter had to start booking the campus’s largest meeting room in order to accommodate more than 200 students."
Kronenberg added that "with a growth in attendance came a shift in tone. When Scott stood for reelection as president this spring, some new members sought to push the chapter in a different direction, and Scott lost." Scott told Kronenberg that "I think Turning Point became a lot more of a Christian organization since Charlie passed, and they wanted more Christian leadership. I myself am Jewish, so there was a lot of that. Though we did incorporate a lot of Christian stuff into the group, I think a lot of people wanted it to be a more explicitly Christian organization.”
A former chapter president also told Kronenberg that "Everything’s like, ‘Oh, God did this, God did this. If you don’t support us, you’re not a God-loving person.’ That kind of feels like the vibe. It feels like it’s more like Christian extremism now.”
Kronenberg added that "several students" who he spoke to echoed that critique. Additionally, as right-wing influencer Candace Owens spreads conspiracy theories about Kirk's death, the organization has fought radicalization from that angle too.
"Most chapters have taken a big-tent approach to discussions surrounding Owens’ criticism of Turning Point," Kronenberg wrote. "Van Lemay, a high school student who leads a Club America group at West Michigan Aviation Academy, said it was 'sickening' to hear lies about Turning Point leaders, but cited Kirk’s support for the free exchange of ideas as a reason to hear critics out in meetings. 'I think that it’s really good actually to bring these conversations into real life, because most of this is online rhetoric and kind of lives within social media,' Lemay told The Dispatch. 'When you have something completely online, that’s often when it gets spun to the more extreme.'"
He added, "Asked how he would encourage chapters to handle discussions surrounding Owens’ conspiracy theories, Kolvet pointed out that today’s high school and college students came of age during the COVID pandemic, which he said led to a collapse in trust of authority figures. 'I’m super sympathetic to young people that question … official narratives or information from government authorities,' Kolvet said. 'Yes, it’s okay to ask questions. It’s quite another thing to engage in warrantless, reckless character assassination of people who themselves are victims, in this case Erika Kirk.'"
Kirk was assassinated one year ago as of Thursday, a moment that galvanized a Christian nationalist movement that has already largely rallied behind Trump.
“The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state,” reported Vox's Christian Paz in May. “Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.”
Despite Christian nationalist claims, America was not founded as a Christian country.
President Thomas Jefferson, who also co-authored the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists during his administration arguing that “believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
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rww 926
- Madeline Peltz @ Number Two Pencil: Turning Point USA tour features influencer who thinks women shouldn’t have the right to vote
Joshua Haymes, a former pastoral intern at Pete Hegseth’s church, is a Christian nationalist who has also said Adolph Hitler was “misunderstood.”
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MAGA Pastor Hank Kunneman Calls For 'Divine Intervention' In The Midterm Elections
Kevin Swanson: I’m Not a Nazi, But Are Liberal Democracies Any Better?
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- Lauren Windsor @ Zeteo: The Right’s ‘War on Woke’ Is a Cash Grab on State Treasuries
Derek Kreifels led a decade-long crusade against ‘woke’ corporations. Now, he’s getting state business for his Christian finance firm. Read Lauren Windsor’s year-long corruption investigation at Zeteo.
AN 8 26
President Donald Trump's political movement, Make America Great Again (MAGA), heavily relies on Christian nationalists who ignore the Founding Fathers' secularism to argue the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian country. Yet according to a groundbreaking new report, Christian nationalists are engaging in self-dealing on a massive scale — and through connections with American government entities.
"Ballrooms, slush funds, jumbo jets. Worship services in the Pentagon, electioneering in churches, the Ten Commandments in schools," reported Zeteo's Lauren Windsor on Wednesday based on over a year's worth of reporting. "Conflicts of interest and Christian nationalism have been hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The epic flood of corruption swamping Washington isn’t just overwhelming American politics – it’s also obscuring the grift occurring in red states across the country, as officials work to put public investment funds under the control of their friends at Christian finance firms."
Windsor added, "A major conduit for that corruption is the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a small but powerful nonprofit that convenes Republican state treasurers and auditors, right-wing activists, and Christian finance executives to strategize over how to defeat liberals and weaponize state treasuries against allegedly woke corporations, while steering state treasury money to their ideological allies. Much of their “War on Woke” consists of boosting the fossil fuel industry and crushing efforts to mitigate climate change, under the notion that corporate safeguards are bad business."
Although Windsor's report briefly mentioned the state of affairs in Kentucky, she focused on Alaska, including a character named Derek Kreifels.
"Derek Kreifels was the CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation for more than a decade," Windsor wrote. "He resigned from this role in the fall of 2024, but he remains an SFOF board member, and his wife serves as one of its top executives. Now, Kreifels is lobbying SFOF treasurers to put public retirees’ savings and other funds they oversee into faith-aligned financial products and services offered by his firm, Prospr Aligned, and its affiliates in the Christian finance industry."
Windsor added, "Kreifels’s firm has already won business from the Kentucky auditor’s office, which is led by a member of the State Financial Officers Foundation’s leadership team, as I can report for the first time. Another state Kreifels has targeted heavily is Alaska, where he has friends in former Revenue Commissioner and ex-SFOF Vice Chair Adam Crum and Alaska Permanent Fund Chair Jason Brune."
She also said that in an interview with her in Anchorage last year, "Brune defended Crum and his collaboration with Kreifels as efforts to promote resource extraction in the Arctic – arguing that he and Crum, as members of the governor’s cabinet, 'are pimping for the state.'"
Describing one event, Windsor reported that "in the weeks leading up to the event, SFOF honored Crum, naming him its vice chair for 2025, and Kreifels announced he was resigning as CEO to embark on a private business venture he would soon reveal.
She added, "'I have been called to a new mission,' Kreifels declared. The Anchorage summit presented great synergies for Kreifels. He could, using nonprofit money, convene right-wing finance officials and industry executives who lobby them – while lobbying those officials himself on the services offered by his new business venture and celebrating his tenure at SFOF with friends and family in an exotic locale. According to emails from Kreifels that I obtained, SFOF covered travel costs for public officials and their staff."
The State Financial Officers Foundation has also helped support Kreifels’s private business ventures. According to state travel disclosures, SFOF paid for at least one treasurer’s travel to the New York Stock Exchange launch party for Prospr’s Alaska investment fund, reports Windsor, adding that SFOF also arranged for a special speaker: longtime ally Paul Atkins, who as chairman of the Trump Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the Prospr fund."
IRS rules prohibit self-dealing and private benefit from nonprofit money, Windsor said.
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Christian nationalism is ‘America’s most dangerous political movement’: Rep. Jared Huffman
8 26 jan 6
Aug 18, 2026 #christiannationalism #politics #democracy
Rep. Jared Huffman, D-CA, joins Morning Joe to discuss his new book: “No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism.” Huffman, a former devout Christian, tells Joe he wrote the book to “expose” what he calls the country’s “most dangerous political movement.” From behind the scenes of the Capitol, he explores in the book the strategy Christian nationalists use to push their agenda. Christian nationalism, Huffman says, “erupted for all of us to see,” during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But in the years since, Huffman says Congress has failed to confront the movement.
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RWW
8 26
Hunter Walker @ Talking Points Memo: Colorado GOP Gov Nominee Claims to Have Battled ‘Demons’ With ‘Reptilian’ Eyes
Improbable stories are a foundational element of Marx’s career as a Christian Nationalist Evangelist preacher and podcaster. Marx, a Marine veteran, claims to hold multiple high-level black belts stemming from his stepfather’s creation of a martial arts system, “Keichu-Do” or “Cajun Karate.” At points, Marx has suggested that he’s used these deadly skills to rescue tens of thousands of women and children from hot zones around the world.
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tc AN 8 26
Christian nationalism, a worldview that sees the United States as a Christian nation and believes that Christianity should have a privileged role in American civic life, has been shown to be related to a host of social attitudes.
Research shows that people who hold Christian nationalistic beliefs tend to, on average, also show antipathy toward religious minorities and racial and ethnic minorities, as well as have sexist and anti-democratic attitudes.
Our research found that many Christian nationalists endorse religious pluralism, meaning that they value religious diversity – in principle. But we also found that this support for religious pluralism is often drowned out by perceptions of threats to Christians.
How we did the research
For our new research, published in the academic journal Politics & Religion in March 2026, we surveyed 1,500 American Christians in January 2024.
In healthy democracies, most citizens respect the civil liberties of others, including members of social groups they dislike. We asked our respondents which social group they liked the least, such as Christian fundamentalists, environmental activists, President Donald Trump supporters or atheists. We then asked them if they thought members of that group should be able to make public speeches, teach in public schools or run for political office, among others. The responses, taken together, showed respondents’ political tolerance for people who they dislike.
We also asked respondents how much they agreed with a series of statements commonly used to measure support for Christian nationalism, such as whether the federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation. On a scale of 0 to 1, the average Christian nationalism score was 0.64, indicating that American Christians tend to support the idea of a Christian America.
To capture ideas that run directly counter to Christian nationalism, we then asked about their support for religious pluralism. Respondents agreed or disagreed with statements such as “nations should not favor one religion over another,” and “we need to advocate the Christian values of loving your neighbor as yourself.” Together, these made up our anti-Christian nationalism measure.
On average, participants rated their agreement with these statements as 0.74, higher than the agreement with Christian nationalist ideas – suggesting that anti-Christian nationalist views were more widely supported by American Christians.
What the research found
Some of the survey questions measuring Christian nationalism and anti-Christian nationalism captured opposite ideas.
Without assigning respondents to any categories, we asked them if they agreed with statements like “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” or “Nations should not favor one religion over another.” We found that people who agreed with one were likely to agree with the other. In other words, respondents who advocated for a Christian nation also affirmed religious freedom for all.
While this might seem surprising, social scientists have long known that people hold lots of conflicting arguments in their heads. American Christians have likely heard both Christian nationalist and anti-Christian nationalist messages through their congregations, media and social networks.
Our statistical models show that religious pluralism is related to tolerance differently depending on views on Christian nationalism. We isolated strong supporters and strong opponents of Christian nationalism. Predictably, among strong opponents of Christian nationalism, anti-Christian nationalism views were associated with increased tolerance. But, surprisingly, strong supporters of Christian nationalism maintained the same level of tolerance.
According to our data, people who agree with anti-Christian nationalist ideas, yet also embrace Christian nationalist ones, tend to have a fear of persecution. We asked respondents if their least-liked social group posed a threat to the American way of life and people’s freedom. Both groups had similar perceptions that the “American way of life” and everyday freedom were threatened.
This perception of threat was lower only among respondents who both strongly rejected Christian nationalism and embraced anti-Christian nationalism. In other words, support for religious pluralism, on its own, isn’t sufficient to reduce the sense of threat among those who hold Christian nationalist views.
Why it matters
Christian nationalism has emerged as a significant challenge to religious pluralism. Efforts to counter it can often be more credible if they came from other Christians. But for those efforts to work, they need to tackle Christian nationalism at its root.
Many American Christians prioritize religious pluralism and love of neighbor. Benjamin Hanson/Middle East Images via AFP via Getty images
Our findings indicate that the root of the problem is not a lack of support for religious pluralism or insufficient willingness to love thy neighbor. It is perceptions of threats posed by disliked groups.
We have observed that the Christian media ecosystem is saturated with messages that American Christians are excluded from public life – ostracized from social institutions like higher education, discriminated against in everyday life and only one election away from losing their Bibles or being jailed for their faith. This sense of threat can trigger authoritarian tendencies, including support for taking away civil liberties like the ability to give public speeches or run for political office from disliked others.
What still isn’t known
Political scientists need to know more about the contours of threat: By whom and what do some Christians feel threatened? Social scientists also do not fully understand how that sense of threat can be dialed down, not just in a lab experiment but also in Christians’ experiences.
Improving our understanding of threat could guide the work of faith leaders striving for a more tolerant, pro-democratic role of faith in the public sphere.
Brooklyn Walker, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee and Paul Djupe, Director of the Data for Political Research Program, Denison University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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AN 8 26
Great Replacement conspiracy theorist and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter Jake Lang brought his racial grievances and “Christian Crusader March” to Dearborn and its city council meeting on Tuesday, where the right-wing provocateur told council members Muslim people are “looking to outbreed” white people and “steal our wealth.”
Dearborn, home to the largest Arab American population in the country, has long been the target of anti-Muslim rhetoric from people outside the community. Lang had spread his anti-Muslim message in the community as recently as August 2, when he was reportedly assaulted by a Dearborn resident. The Arab American News reports the resident, Abbas Abdoush, was later detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The Muslims are being used by the Democrats to instill socialism in America,” Lang said during the city council meeting as the crowd lingered outside. “Once the Muslims have power in this county, then they will start throwing homosexuals off the roofs.”
The protest before the city council meeting was defined by diametrically opposed groups of Christian nationalist and counterprotesters screaming to drown out the sound of each other.
A line of police in riot gear kept the peace by standing between Lang’s group of provocateurs and the rest of the crowd that had gathered outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library, where the council meeting had been moved for safety reasons. Michigan Advance estimated the crowd size peaked at roughly 2,000 people.
“Here is to staying free from the Muslim Brotherhood takeover” yelled Lang ally Jayden Scott in a megaphone as he stood behind the police line separating him from the crowd. “We must fight back. This is a Christian nation. A Christian nation it shall remain.”
A throng of supporters answered with chants of “U.S.A, U.S.A.,” while a man with a megaphone of his own yelled “Jake Lang, repent”, saying Lang doesn’t follow the teachings of Jesus.
Lang organized the protest with the help of Detroit Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, a supporter of President Donald Trump who was criticized for attempting to enrich himself through a cryptocurrency scheme after speaking at Trump’s second inauguration. Sewell is also a member of the Faith Coalition Leadership Team of Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Rogers, who faces Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim, in November’s election.
“Michigan families deserve a Senator who will stand up to hate rather than enable it,” El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak said in a press statement issued just prior to the rally. “Mike Rogers must immediately disavow this rally, his affiliation with Jake Lang and January 6th terrorists, and explain why his campaign’s faith advisor is rallying alongside out of state agitators against Michigan faith communities.”
A request for comment was made to the Rogers campaign, but was not returned. This story will be updated when a response is received.
Democratic elected leaders including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan Secretary of State and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson, U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin and U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) all condemned Lang’s protest as an attempt to stir hatred that could directly harm Dearborn’s Muslim community.
“Islamophobic racists are yet again marching in Dearborn to terrorize a whole faith community,” Tlaib said. “Dearborn is a beautifully diverse place, home to a vibrant, loving Muslim community, and our families do not deserve to be subjected to such hate and bigotry.”
At several moments, it seemed as if the clash between Lang’s Christian nationalist supporters and counterprotesters, mostly Dearborn residents, could turn violent. A small segment of the two groups — almost all men who appeared to range in age from their late teens to early 40s, some wearing masks or hoods to hide their faces — spewed much of the vitriolic rhetoric and tried to provoke each other into physical confrontations while denouncing the other side’s beliefs and defending their own.
“These (are) fake Christians!” One young Dearborn man yelled at a man in a U.S. Navy hat.
“Go back to your country!” The man responded.
Both men ignored an interview request from the Advance.
Muhammad al-thihabawi in his own words.
The unity he describes here is a little pollyanna. There were some real tense moments and anger. But he says he found unity amongst people of different religious and ethnic groups who believe in the “amendments” and that Dearborn isnt bad pic.twitter.com/CK9yGQbum9
— Tyler Scott (@T_Scotttttt) August 19, 2026
A significant portion of the crowd was uninterested in violence. The Advance observed several women urging their male partners to “shut the f---- up,” and stay calm out of concern that “you’re going to get arrested.” Some seemed only interested in observing Lang’s promised spectacle or trying to keep the peace. Most of the animosity seemed verbal. Dearborn police said information about arrests or violent altercations was not immediately available.
At the end of the city council meeting’s public comment period, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who was recently the target of death threats by an Alaska man, addressed the crowd saying that word of Lang’s return to the city sparked fear across the city, with some businesses deciding not to open Tuesday. Hammoud said he met a young boy who asked “if the crusaders were going to kill him.”
Of the Christian nationalist protestors Hammoud said, “they are attacking the idea that everyone can belong to America at the same time.”
Donna Brandenburg, gubernatorial nominee of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, attended the protest and said the whole event seemed orchestrated to stoke political resentment.
“It seems like a big act,” Brandenburg said. “It’s trying to divide people. People in Dearborn want peace. They don’t want the fighting. I saw more American flags in Dearborn than I did in Byron Center. People need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Despite the palpable tension and verbal hostility that dominated the evening, Dearborn resident Muhammad Al-Thibabawi said he felt “unity” with people of different ethnic and religious groups and that most of the Christian nationalist protestors were uninformed about what Dearborn is.
“I spoke to a lot of these guys who are like ‘dude we got here and this is just a normal city that practices their amendments to the fullest’” Al-Thibabawi said. “We take pride in what we have. We love America.”
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08/12/2026 RWW
by
President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement was not enough to convince Minnesota Republican voters to choose “MyPillow guy” Mike Lindell as their candidate for governor. Lindell lost by more than 10 percentage points to the state’s House Speaker Lisa Demuth, but true to his status as one of the nation’s preeminent election conspiracy theorists, Lindell has so far refused to concede, vowing instead to investigate supposed “anomalies” in the results.
Lindell, whose early lead in the polls had been cut by Demuth, declared himself “very confident” on Election Day. “We can’t reconcile these,” he said as the results came in. “This is mathematically impossible.”
Lindell reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars in a quixotic quest to prove that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being stolen were true. He made similar claims about the 2022 midterms.
Rep. Ted Lieu mocked Lindell’s claims in a social media post, writing, “Many people say Venezuela rigged the election against Mike Lindell because they don’t like his pillows. Never seen anything like it.”
Lindell has also been a favorite of religious-right figures like podcaster Eric Metaxas, one of the right-wing media figures that benefitted from MyPillow advertising. Last year, Lindell touted his plans to run for governor on FlashPoint, a platform for Christian nationalist and MAGA propaganda, calling Minnesota “a Trojan Horse for a lot of evil.” He has portrayed his promotion of election conspiracy theories as a spiritual crusade, using a Christian nationalist graphic to raise money to support his efforts.
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RWW
8 26
Dale Partridge Says Nazism 'Represented A Powerful Form Of Christian Nationalism'
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- Kiera Butler @ Mother Jones: Oh Look, Another Far-Right Extremist at the Pentagon
A senior defense official in Hegseth’s department appears to share these ties—and has expressed Christian nationalist and far-right views on social media. Justin Overbaugh, a retired US Army colonel, currently serves as Deputy Under Secretary of War for Intelligence and Security.
8 26
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July 28, 2026
The Many Kingdoms of Sean Feucht
Sean Feucht built a multimillion-dollar Christian nationalist empire while becoming a regular presence in Trump’s White House. As whistleblowers allege financial misconduct and a major donor sues for fraud, this profile examines how one of the movement’s most influential figures built a vast political, financial, and religious network while remaining a key ally in post–Project 2025 America.
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RWW
07/28/2026
by
- Elisabeth Zerofsky @ The New York Times Magazine: What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right
- The bastion of American conservatism best known for Project 2025 has been consumed by an ideological — and generational — civil war.
- Robert Kuttner @ The American Prospect: Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup
- If we are vigilant, he won’t pull it off.
- Nikki McCann Ramírez and Jack Crosbie @ Rolling Stone: MAGA Rep. Allegedly Assaulted Wife, Put Gun to Her Head. Republicans Don’t Care
- Max Miller is the subject a string of disturbing allegations. His party doesn’t seem to mind.
- GPAHE: The Inside Man: William Wolfe and the Capture of the Southern Baptist Convention
- Wolfe is the Christian nationalist movement’s inside man. Others preach for converts or run for office. Wolfe captures institutions that already exist. When the first Trump administration ended, he took a fellowship at Russ Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where the work was planning the next Trump term. In March 2024, he turned the same method on his own denomination, which keeps a pulpit in nearly every county in the South.
Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
He helped Project 2025 architect Russ Vought scope out “a sound Christian Nationalism,” and has pushed the 12.3 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention toward Christian nationalist policies. In June, the denomination elected the president he campaigned for.
Key Takeaways
- Wolfe served in Trump’s Pentagon and State Department and calls himself a Christian nationalist. He helped draft the 2023 manifesto demanding that American law acknowledge “the Lordship of Christ.” That October, he made his case to the audience of white supremacist Stew Peters, who calls for executing Democratic officials.
- His Center for Baptist Leadership launched in March 2024, telling the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest US Protestant denomination, to elect leaders willing to call its documented sexual abuse crisis a lie.
- Wolfe endorsed Willy Rice and spent two years campaigning for him. Rice won the SBC presidency on June 9, 2026. A constitutional ban on women pastors cleared its first vote the next morning.
- In April 2026, Wolfe campaigned for Rice on an all-male far-right club’s podcast, days after one of its hosts answered a comparison between the movement’s deportation politics and the Ku Klux Klan with a video celebrating the Klan: “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not.”
A few hours before the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) handed out presidential ballots in Orlando on June 9, 2026, Willy Rice stood at a lunchtime forum and told a room of young SBC pastors what he thought of their denomination’s decade. “I’m afraid … we’re going to hug ourselves to death,” he said. “We are going to wake up one day and be Kodak or Blockbuster.” That afternoon, the Clearwater, Fla. pastor, who had waved off the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis as closer to hoax than fact, took 5,217 votes — 57 percent — and the presidency of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The man behind Rice’s talking points holds no office in the SBC. He has never pastored a church. Christian nationalist William Wolfe spent seven months as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the first Trump administration, and the day Rice won, he told Religion News Service the election was “a major vindication of the issues we have addressed and fought for.” Three months earlier, on March 14, 2026, from the pulpit of Bethel Church in Petersburg, West Virginia, Wolfe had explained what those issues add up to: “Frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you.”
Wolfe is the Christian nationalist movement’s inside man. Others preach for converts or run for office. Wolfe captures institutions that already exist. When the first Trump administration ended, he took a fellowship at Russ Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, where the work was planning the next Trump term. In March 2024, he turned the same method on his own denomination, which keeps a pulpit in nearly every county in the South.
The Orlando convention gave Wolfe more than a president.
Southern Baptist churches govern themselves; what binds them is the annual meeting, where congregations send voting delegates, the denomination calls them messengers, and where amending the SBC constitution requires a two-thirds vote in two consecutive years. Proposed amendments are also supposed to spend a year under executive committee review before messengers ever see them. On the meeting’s first day, messengers voted to skip that waiting period for a proposal from Al Mohler, president of the denomination’s flagship seminary. His “Truth and Unity” amendment proposes to expel churches that let a woman preach to the assembled congregation, and the next morning, it cleared the first of its two required votes with nearly 75 percent in favor.
In February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News counted more than 700 people abused in SBC churches since 1998 and roughly 380 church leaders and volunteers accused of sexual misconduct. At his June 10, 2026, press conference, Rice signaled where the denomination’s abuse reforms are headed. The movement to address abuse, he said, “absolutely was weaponized, just like the Me Too movement in the secular culture.” Christa Brown, a survivor of abuse by an SBC pastor and a longtime advocate for reform, told the AP that if anyone politicized the issue, it was the people fighting over SBC power.
The Center for Baptist Leadership titled its post-convention podcast recap “SBC Reformers Just Scored Their Biggest Win in Decades” and walked listeners through how the show had mobilized messengers to Orlando. Baptist News Global counted Rice as the first reform candidate to defeat an institutional candidate for the presidency in 35 years.
The Title He Sells
Wolfe grew up lower-middle-class outside Charlotte, North Carolina, shopping at Goodwill. By his own account, politics came before faith. He traces his politics to watching his friends’ fathers lose construction work to trade deals and to contractors paying undocumented workers cash under the table — an experience he says “put a fire in my bones.” His 15-year-old brother died in June 2011, and his life collapsed. He was 22 when the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., shared the gospel with him, Wolfe recounted in a 2024 interview. He was baptized into a congregation at the center of the SBC’s establishment wing. He earned a degree in history from Covenant College and stayed in the capital for a decade, working in three congressional offices. From the Hill, he moved to Heritage Action for America, then to the State Department as a director of legislative affairs, and finally to the Pentagon.
That last title is the one he sells. Conference bios introduce him as “a Senior Official in the Trump Administration.” The job lasted from June 2020 to January 2021, through the election and through January 6.
Instead of cashing in as a lobbyist, Wolfe went to Louisville to finish a master of Divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He already knew the school. Baptist News Global identified him as a former intern to its president, Al Mohler, whose amendment his group would one day whip votes for.
American Reformer takes its theology from the 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin and its politics from the hard right. The men behind the venture firm New Founding, a Project 2025 advisory board member, co-founded it. The magazine made Wolfe a fellow, and by September 2022, he was speaking at the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) in Miami, where the transnational far right gathers. Three years later, he was back on the NatCon stage, in Washington this time, to lecture on “Recovering the Evangelical Political Voice.” To make America great again, he told the room, “We’re going to have to make it Christian again.” The talk was a call for “a Protestant Christian political Manhattan Project,” complete with a joke about rounding up Protestant pastors, putting them “in camps” for reeducation.
“A Sound Christian Nationalism”
Russell Vought was running the Center for Renewing America on January 25, 2023, when he tweeted that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” Vought now directs the federal budget.
Three months after Vought’s tweet, Wolfe made an appearance on Christian nationalist Joel Webbon’s podcast for an episode recorded April 19, 2023. He had traded complementarianism, the mainstream evangelical teaching that assigns men and women distinct roles, for “biblical patriarchy,” he said. White guilt, he argued, drove the failures of evangelical leaders. His sign-off urged Baptists to “beat your plowshare into a sword” and join him on the front lines.
The 2023 Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel, which Wolfe drafted with Webbon and a third author, binds every nation, in every age, to the moral principle of each of the Ten Commandments. In October 2023, he went on the show of Stew Peters, a white supremacist who has urged the execution of Democratic officials, and told the audience that Christian nationalists in office must save America from “globo-homo nationalism.” That December, Wolfe posted part of the agenda and thought better of it; The New Republic preserved the deleted thread: end no-fault divorce, gestational surrogacy, and sex education in schools. Christian nationalism is “inevitable,” he argued, and young men disaffected by the secular order find the label appealing: “I want to work with those young men.”
Pulpits Money Can’t Rent
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) holds roughly 47,000 congregations by veteran Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams’s count, plus six seminaries, two mission boards, the Lifeway publishing house, and a policy office in Washington. In Orlando, messengers approved a $186 million budget to run it all, even as the denomination has shed 3.6 million members over two decades, down to 12.3 million.
The SBC’s right turn did not start with Wolfe. Dallas hosted the 1985 showdown that sealed the conservative takeover of the convention and drove out its moderates. Decades later, Russell Moore ran the denomination’s policy office in Washington, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), where he refused to endorse Trump and pressed the denomination to face its sexual abuse crisis. After years of fighting SBC leaders over Trump and over immigration, Moore quit on May 18, 2021.
Twenty-one months after he left, on February 21, 2023, the Executive Committee expelled Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, the SBC’s second-largest congregation, for naming women pastors. Rick Warren, who founded Saddleback and wrote The Purpose Driven Life, flew to New Orleans that June and asked the messengers to let his church back in. They voted 88 percent to keep it out. Hours later, the same messengers gave first-round approval to a constitutional amendment barring women from any pastoral title. The votes were not there in Indianapolis in 2024 or in Dallas in 2025. Al Mohler, the seminary president Wolfe once interned for, rewrote the ban for Orlando. His version reaches past the title to the act: a woman preaching.
At that same 2025 Dallas meeting, a resolution went to the floor demanding the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, and calling for civil laws that “reflect the moral order revealed in Scripture and nature.” Nobody rose to argue. The SBC had condemned the ruling since it was issued in 2015, without ever asking the court to reverse it. The Southern Seminary professor who chaired the resolutions committee told reporters he was “clear-eyed about the difficulties” and has argued elsewhere that Christians are “called to play the long game.” Wolfe wasn’t playing anything that patient. Same-sex marriage, he said on a Liberty podcast that same month, “is fundamentally an impossibility. It doesn’t exist.” When SBC leaders drafted resolutions for Orlando warning against ethnonationalism and antisemitism on the dissident right, Wolfe grumbled that “The Ghost of Russell Moore stalks many of the SBC resolutions this year.”
A Clock, Not a Cudgel
Wolfe spent December 2023 calling the denomination’s most famous woman Bible teacher “an ungodly, even demonic, influence on the SBC.” He opened the Center for Baptist Leadership (CBL) — a pressure group with no official role in the SBC — three months later, on March 8, 2024, and the group announced its diagnosis on social media: “leaders in the SBC allowed CRT [Critical race theory], DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], and feminism to infiltrate our seminaries, our entities, and our churches.” The CBL’s first published piece urged Southern Baptists to elect leaders who would say that the claim of systemic abuse in the SBC “is a lie.” The “lie” was that February 2019 investigation. Wolfe describes the CBL as a subset of American Reformer’s larger project of Protestant renewal — “kind of like a House Freedom Caucus for the Southern Baptist Convention” — and his stump line is that the SBC has “less financial transparency than Planned Parenthood.”
The CBL’s main target was the ERLC. The commission had angered the hard right by opposing criminal penalties for women who seek abortions and by defending immigrants. Four months after the CBL launched, the chair of the ERLC’s board announced that the commission’s president, Brent Leatherwood, had been fired. The rest of the board overruled him, and the chair resigned instead. Leatherwood kept the job for another year. Willy Rice stood up at the Dallas meeting on June 10, 2025 — 40 years after the takeover fight in the same city — and moved to abolish the agency. Wolfe posted the talking point within hours: the vote “is not a cudgel, it’s a clock.”
On June 11, nearly 43 percent of messengers voted to abolish the commission. Any pastor who lost the confidence of 40 percent of his congregation “would resign the next day,” Wolfe said afterward. Leatherwood resigned on July 31, 2025, seven weeks later, the third ERLC president in a row to leave under fire. Wolfe’s CBL issued a statement the same day: Leatherwood “was not the right Baptist for this job.” On April 13, 2026, the trustees installed a new president, the change of leadership that the CBL had demanded in writing. The clock Wolfe set ran out on schedule.
The Iron Fist
Wolfe’s co-authors on the Statement on Christian Nationalism have records of their own. Joel Webbon wants a “Christian Nationalist Caesar” to rule the United States with an iron fist, Constitution be damned. The third author, Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, sits on the CBL’s advisory board and files bills to criminalize abortion as homicide. CBL’s roster includes a sitting ERLC trustee who was also strategizing for the group trying to kill it.
In June 2025, on a Liberty podcast episode billed as “America Was Made BY Christians FOR Christians,” Wolfe read the founders’ promise to “our posterity” as a bloodline. “When the founders of America wrote for our posterity, they did not mean millions of Indian immigrants. They did not mean millions of Muslim immigrants to America or millions of South American immigrants. Again, no offense, they have their own countries.”
At a Valentine’s Day gathering in 2026, Wolfe told a story about being “the only person in line speaking English” at a North Carolina DMV, and drew the conclusion himself: millions must be deported so his sons will not grow up as minorities. Right Wing Watch circulated the clip in March. Wolfe stood by the remarks (“I am actually not sorry”), called the group demons, then denied saying what the video showed him saying.
Southern Baptist messengers have gone the other way. In New Orleans in 2023, they affirmed the “inherent dignity and value” of immigrants regardless of legal status and asked the government to open legal pathways to permanent status. In 2011 and in 2018, they had called nativism inconsistent with the Gospel.
The Greene Tavern, an online talk show, comes out of the Nathanael Greene Society, the North Carolina chapter of the Old Glory Club, a nationwide network of men-only far-right clubs whose members, a 2025 Guardian investigation found, include “prominent antisemitic influencers.” One of its hosts posts under the name Kaiser von Lohengramm. On April 6, 2026, he answered a Phil Williams article titled “In Far Right’s Growing Remigration Talk, Echoes of KKK America.” “Yes, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not,” he posted over a video of an anime figure in the white robe and hood of the Klan, set to an anthem urging men to “go with the Ku Klux Klan.”
Days later, Wolfe joined the show. Rice “would very much be our guy,” he told the panel, and electing him was “really my main focus” in the run-up to Orlando. The campaign, he said, was transferable: for anyone “in another denomination that’s fighting with a leftist … what we’re doing is showing that you can win. You bring political grassroots organizing and activism and apply it to these denominational fights.” He gave the same advice about the Republican Party: show up at your local county GOP meetings with three or four friends, and “try to take these things over. I don’t mean it in a hostile sense.”
On air, Wolfe dismissed the Klan comparison as “completely laughable” and described the people who make such charges as “morally reprehensible troglodytes.” He called for “mass deportations, denaturalizations, and remigration” — “not out of hate for anybody,” he said, but “out of love for the American people.”
Messengers at the SBC’s 150th-anniversary meeting in Atlanta in 1995 repudiated “historic acts of evil such as slavery,” which the resolution tied to the convention’s 1845 founding, and resolved to “genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”
Laying Hands
In February 2025, Wolfe told a podcast that Trump was filling the government “with people who are our guys” and that the second term was “shock and awe.” Paula White-Cain runs Trump’s Faith Office, and on March 19, 2025, she gathered a group of religious-right leaders in the White House to pray over the president. Wolfe stood in the room with David Barton and laid hands on Trump. Barton’s WallBuilders operation supplies the movement’s version of American history. After the meeting, Wolfe posted a video in which he marveled at his access and explained that under a Harris administration, Christians like himself would have been shipped “to the gulags.” Three weeks later, on April 7, he described on a podcast what he had actually done with that access: urged the administration to accelerate deportations, because Southern Baptists and Christians “want to see mass deportations,” and the evangelical organizations objecting to Trump’s immigration crackdown were “astroturf.”
Per procedure, in June 2027, the convention meets again in Indianapolis. Mohler’s amendment comes back with it for its second and final vote, and the abuse reforms fall under Rice’s gavel. Wolfe will be there the way he was in Orlando: off the ballot, working the floor. At NatCon in Washington last September, he reminded the room that America “was essentially 98 percent Protestant at its founding.” “You’re very welcome here,” he said. “We’re glad to have you, but it is ours, and we would like at least some of it back.”
In His Own Words
“I want a Christian nation if only 5% of our population is Christians and somehow we’re the ones who control the reins of power and we pass good and just laws that will benefit the 95% of the population who aren’t converted. I still want that. That’s what I want.”
— April 19, 2023: his terms, offered on Joel Webbon’s podcast between calls to purge “loser theology.”
“If we have ever lived in a point in time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are getting close.”
— October 21, 2023: his warning at a “Jesus and Politics” conference, delivered while quoting a 1758 militia sermon.
“I don’t care how much they scream. I don’t care how much they cry.”
— January 2026: his defense of ICE deportation raids, given on a Liberty University show.
“I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities.”
— February 14, 2026: his case for mass deportations, made to a room of allies.
“I am going to enforce my morality on you, inasmuch as our morality is God’s morality.”
— March 14, 2026: his sermon at a West Virginia church, preached three months before his candidate won the SBC presidency.
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Real Power At The Local Level: The Christian Nationalist Plan To Take Over The GOP
07/14/2026
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When Christian nationalists gathered in Utah last month at "War For Normal" hosted by New Christendom Press, in addition to having access to a vendor selling Nazi and "pro-white" books, they also heard from a variety of far-right speakers. Among them was Stephen Wolfe, author of the book "The Case for Christian Nationalism," who wants to see an "acknowledgement of the lordship of Christ" incorporated into the Constitution while imposing Christian nationalism on the nation.
During a panel discussion at the conference, Wolfe declared that attendees can wield "real power at the local level" by getting involved in their local Republican Party and taking it over, which is something that far-right Christian nationalist activists have been openly advocating for a while.
Wolfe said that the first step is for Christian nationalists to begin to identify one another and gather in small groups to create a "network that would allow people to be politically active."
"I was able to meet at a cigar bar with a friend of mine, and eventually we had 40 guys show up to that," Wolfe said. "We've gone from isolation to now people are meeting in groups and they sat around and they talked and they became friends."
"But now, how do you transition from being guys who were just talking and smoking cigars and drinking to actually doing something?" he continued. "What you need to do is begin thinking about how can I apply these human resources—your friends—to actual political action, by which I mean, perhaps look at your local GOP. Your local GOP is likely [an] average age [of] 65 or 70. If you are 35 or 30 or 25 and you show up and you look like us, they will immediately put you into a leadership position. I'm not exaggerating. They love the fact that you are 25, 30, 40, 50; looking nice. You are in."
"You show up with like 5 or 10 friends, you can take over that GOP," Wolfe proclaimed. "That's not an exaggeration. I've seen it happen. I have friends across the country now doing that very thing. It is happening. We don't talk about it publicly because it's still kind of under the radar, but you can be a part of that as well."
"Let's say next week you're going to meet at this bar or that restaurant or that cigar place," Wolfe advised. "Sit down and say, 'What can we do? What are the opportunities? Is there an election coming up? Oh, you want to run for office? Oh, there's an executive committee position on the district GOP or the county GOP, or I can be a precinct chair.' Whatever it is, you can actually do that. You who don't know anything can show up and [say], 'I want to be a precinct chair.'"
"There's a ton of opportunity in local politics where you can actually do something effective," Wolfe said. "You screaming about national politics on Twitter or Facebook is not doing a whole lot. You can devote that energy to real power at the local level and have significant influence. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not giving a stump speech. It's just true and you guys can do it. Trust me." VID]
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07/07/2026
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- Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick featured Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton on his most recent podcast.
- Rick Green claims that the American healthcare system is terrible because "we have a socialist healthcare system in America, thanks to their candidate, Barack Obama."
- Sean Feucht was honored to receive the Pennsylvania Freedom Medal from Christian nationalist state Sen. Doug Mastriano.
- Dale Partridge asserts that "restoring order will require not being moved by the screeching of women, the manipulation of foreigners, or the cries of liberals."
- Brian Sauvé wrote a song about the dangers of young women getting an education, a job, and independence, proving that Christian nationalists can take just about any topic and turn it into terrible, heavy-handed art.
- Finally, Hank Kunneman declares that "our country was founded on Christian principles": "Most of our documents were based on the Bible; the way that our civic government and laws and things and the way that our Constitution was framed." None of that is true.
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Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith Says Muslims Have No Right To Exercise Their Faith 'In Our Public Spaces'
07/07/2026
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Earlier this year, Indiana's far-right Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith caused outrage and generated controversy when he boasted that he was giving the residents of his state "permission to hate" the religion of Islam. Undaunted by the blowback, Beckwith steadfastly defended his statement and repeatedly doubled down on it, insisting that attacking Islam is "a political winner" for Republicans.
Recently, Beckwith appeared on the Conservative Review podcast, where he continued to attack Islam and called for Muslims to be banned from engaging in public displays of their faith.
"We should ban the calls to prayer, public calls to prayer," Beckwith declared. "If you're a mosque and you want to have a loudspeaker and you want to start pumping these out five times a day locally, the state can say, 'You're not going to do that. We're not allowing that. We're not going to let you put these words of death and destruction throughout the city streets in any of our cities.'"
"Listen, we are a Christian nation," Beckwith continued. "The Supreme Court in the Coach Kennedy case ruled that. They said, 'Hey, the heritage of America is a Christian heritage and so that's why Christianity takes precedent over all other faiths.' Everyone can worship how they want, but you don't get to implement Islam in our public spaces. You can't put the Quran up on school walls, but you can put the Ten Commandments up on school walls. Why? Because of our Judeo-Christian principles. That's our heritage."
Video URL]
For the record, in no way did the Supreme Court's *Kennedy v. Bremerton School District* decision declare that "we are a Christian nation."
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Christian Nationalists Are Building Their Own Company Towns | Unholy Ground - YouTube
4.6K views•Streamed 1 day ago
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05/29/2026
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- Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Christian Nationalists made a movie about “anti-Christian bias” by the government
“By Dawn’s Early Light” turns minor inconveniences into a full-blown fantasy of anti-Christian oppression.
- Timothy Noah @ The New Republic: Trump’s $250 Greenback Is a Gift to the Criminal Class
Through some combination of malignant narcissism, incipient dementia, and raging dyscalculia, President Donald Trump struggles to distinguish his 80th birthday, which is 17 days away, from the nation’s 250th birthday, which is 37 days away. The latest manifestation is Trump’s determination to commemorate the semiquincentennial by issuing a $250 commemorative bill decorated with an engraving of himself.
- Ryan Grenoble @ HuffPost: Stop What You’re Doing And Watch This Interview With A GOP Front-Runner In Colorado
Victor Marx does exorcisms by phone, says he killed a man at age 7, and will not tell you how to call in military airstrikes as a civilian (but says he's done it before).
- Jonathan Larsen @ Salon: Tom Suozzi lives at C Street, controversial Christian center behind National Prayer Breakfasts
The New York Democrat kept secret his low-rent lodging at a right-wing Christian townhouse.
- Cameron Adams @ The Daily Beast: Disaster for Trump-Friendly Concert as Headliner Flees Event
A country star said she got “misleading” information about the show.
- Parker Molloy @ The Present Age: The GOP’s Birthday Boy Defense
Republicans built a brand on “f your feelings.” Then the DNC called Stephen Miller ugly, and they found theirs.
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[Christian Nationalism ## Much-Hyped ‘Rededication’ of U.S. to God Can’t Draw Trump Off the Golf Course
President Trump called for an event "rededicating" America to God, but he couldn't be bothered to show up for it.
https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/much-hyped-rededication-us-god-cant-draw-trump-golf-course)
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05/18/2026
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- Alex Nguyen @ Mother Jones: Trump Just Gave Himself a $1.8 Billion Slush Fund to Reward His Friends
And the public may never know who their money was spent on.
- Jon Wertheim, Aliza Chasan, Andrew Bast, and Jessica Kegu @ CBS News: Suspected insider accounts net $2.4 million on Polymarket Iran war bets with 98% win rate, firm finds
Nine connected Polymarket accounts have raked in more than $2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. military actions in what digital detectives from the data analytics firm Bubblemaps have identified as a potentially egregious case of insider trading.
- Sarah Posner @ Talking Points Memo: Trump’s Evangelical Allies Gather in DC for Prayer Marathon, Push to Further Erode Church-State Divide
Speakers cast America as ‘morally rotten’ and sinful while embracing the ‘Christian nationalist’ label.
- María Teresita Armstrong-Matta @ Raw Story: Reports attest Trump's 'Rededicate 250' event drew in small crowds
President Donald Trump's free eight-hour Rededicate 250 prayer event held at the National Mall in D.C. Sunday drew a notably sparse crowd, with Reuters photos capturing numerous empty seats.
- Steven Waldman @ Religion News Service: Christian nationalists need to look again at their religious DNA
The ancestors of today’s Christian nationalists weren’t the leaders of Christian America — they were the heretics.
- Warren Throckmorton: Donald Trump's Rededicate 250 is Religious Kayfabe
The Christian worship performance scheduled for the National Mall is a religious show.
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President Donald Trump and his administration have openly preached for Christianity to shape national policy since he began his second term — yet the vast majority of Americans do not share this agenda.
“The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state,” reported Vox's Christian Paz on Thursday. “Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.”
Yet despite this open call for religion to dictate American policy, Paz reported that a recent survey by Pew Research Center reveals that most Americans do not want this to happen. A mere 10 percent identify as Christian nationalists, compared to 31 percent who oppose them and 59 percent who have no opinion. When it comes to the division between church and state, 13 percent want it weakened while 54 percent support it and 32 percent have no opinion.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s president and founder Robert P. Jones, Trump and his administration are pushing for “one sector of Christianity" that has failed to catch on with both religious and non-religious Americans.
“It hasn’t resulted in major shifts in the landscape,” Jones explained. “In other words, they’re not pulling people into that worldview. They’re basically just appealing to a small subset of Americans who already hold those views and who just happen to be their political base.”
Even some former Trumpers oppose Trump’s Christian nationalism. In March former Republican US Rep. Joe Walsh said that the theocrats are “out of the closet. They're loud and proud. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson talks about this. Republican members of Congress talk about this. Republican and MAGA thought leaders talk about the fact that America needs to be a Christian country. It needs to be officially designated as a Christian country.”
Citing how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth openly cited Jesus Christ when discussing his war against Iran with US troops, Walsh added that Hegseth “knows that not every American worships Jesus Christ. So what's he doing? Here's what he's doing. Pete Hegseth is a white Christian nationalist. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, is a white Christian nationalist. He wants America to be a white Christian nation.”
“Our founders were very enlightened,” Walsh continued, saying that even though many of them were religious Christians they made sure that “we do not have an official state religion. The very thought of that, the very notion of that is antithetical to what America is. … Christian nationalism is utterly un-American … as un-American as Islamism is. … Islamism is a radical concept that everybody's got to be Islam. Christian nationalism, same thing. Everybody's got to be Christian. Both are utterly un-American.”
He added, “And I guess what I'm saying right now is, as I close on this, this Un-American, and by the way, un-Christian belief, has overtaken the Republican Party. And we need everybody to wake up to it. Fast. and help all of us, help everyone defeat it.”
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05/13/2026
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- Michelle Boorstein, Laura Meckler and Natalie Allison @ The Washington Post: White House to host 9-hour prayer festival focused on Christian roots of U.S.
Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and Mike Johnson will speak at the event, which centers on the idea that the founders wanted the U.S. to be explicitly Christian.
- Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer @ The New York Times: Justice Dept. Officials Consider Settling Trump Suit Against I.R.S.
One of the settlement terms under review is for the I.R.S. to drop any audits of the president, his family members and businesses.
- Phil Williams @ Hate Comes To Main Street: Far-Right Grudge Match: 'Unite the Right' Organizer Sues Proud Boys Founder
Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes had suggested that Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler may have been on the payroll of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
- Anthony DeBarros and Annie Linskey @ The Wall Street Journal: The Late-Night Truth Social Storms That Offer a Window Into the President’s Mind
A WSJ analysis of thousands of posts found that the president uses the social-media platform to spread conspiracy theories and attack his adversaries.
- Jose Pagliery @ NOTUS: FBI Created ‘Payback Squad’ to Handle Political Cases, Sources Say
Investigators are eyeing cases similar to the recent criminal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, one current government official told NOTUS.
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[Christian Nationalism ## Christian Nationalists, Grifters, Charlatans & More: A Guide to this Weekend’s White House-sponsored ‘Revival’ to ‘Rededicate’ America to God
Trump is bringing a lot of his Christian nationalist boosters to the Mall this weekend to "rededicate" America as one nation under God, part of his hijacking of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.](https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/christian-nationalists-grifters-charlatans-more-guide-weekends-white-house-sponsored)
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RWW
05/12/2026
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- Rick Green says the Democrats "do such evil" that "maybe it's time for the party to be destroyed."
- Mark Meckler claims that fascism is "literally the endgame of all liberalism": "All liberalism ends in fascism."
- Tony Perkins worries that Republican efforts to redraw congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections will end up creating "more moderate" districts that will actually make it harder for the GOP to govern.
- Dale Partridge declares that "homosexual adoption must be outlawed": "To allow a child to be placed in the home of a sexual deviant is a national tragedy."
- Finally, Joel Webbon proclaims that if Christians nationalists want to wield political power, they must "hijack, train, and disciple" the GOP.
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RWW 4 26
Christian Nationalist Joshua Haymes Tells Young Men To Find A Wife Who Will 'Obey You' | People For
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Briefing RWW
04/22/2026
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- Ari Berman @ Mother Jones: Virginia Dems Just Won a Major Battle in Trump’s Redistricting War
Voters don’t like gerrymandering. But they seem to hate Trump even more.
- Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: MAGA Loses It as Trump’s Redistricting Plot Backfires
Republicans are disturbed they’re losing the fight they started, following a major win in Virginia.
- Alex Ashley @ Rolling Stone: Trump’s Long, Strange Relationship With Faith
What the president learned from a prosperity-gospel minister decades ago may help explain his attacks against the pope.
- Ej Dickson @ Wired: This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men
A med student says he’s made thousands of dollars selling photos and videos of a young conservative woman he created using generative tools. He’s not alone.
- GPAHE: Climb Every Mountain
How Christian Nationalism Seeks to Conquer American Democracy.
- Katherine Stewart: We Pay, They Profit
Corruption is the operating principle of autocratic rule.
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RWW
04/21/2026
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Last week, Christian nationalist Sen. Josh Hawley spoke at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky, where he declared that the United States must operate under a "Christian economy" in order to restore "biblical masculinity" in the country.
Warning that young men are being led astray by misogynistic "manosphere" influencers like Andrew Tate, Hawley said that the nation must focus on raising up men who are equipped to lead their families in accordance with the Bible. The key to accomplishing this, Hawley asserted, is creating a Christian economy "where a man can support himself and his wife and family by the work of his hands."
"The Lord calls you men to something more, and your lives are central to the revival of this nation," Hawley proclaimed. "As a culture, we have to reclaim that truth, and we have to raise up healthy examples of biblical masculinity to say that, 'No, we need strong men.' We need them. We need men and families who are leading them, who are choosing to get married, who are providing for their families."
"You know what else we need?" he continued. "We need an economy where men can get a job and afford to have a family. And increasingly, they cannot in this country and that's a problem. It's more than a problem. It's a crisis. it is almost impossible now in this country, 21st century America, to support a wife and children on a blue-collar wage."
"We need an economy where a man can support himself and his wife and family by the work of his hands," Hawley said. "Not dependent on government, not dependent on somebody else; by the work of his own hands. Today, more and more families, if people do get married, if the husband and wife do get married and have children, both spouses have to work jobs, increasingly long hours, just to pay for the basic necessities of life, just to have the family."
"The corporations love it," Hawley claimed. "I can't tell you how many corporate lobbyists I've had in my office who said, 'Sen. Hawley, we need to do more to get more people in the workforce. And particularly, we need to get all the men and all the women we can in the workforce. We need everybody working all the time.'"
"If you've got to have two incomes of full-time work in this country to raise a family, who's going to raise the children?" Hawley asked rhetorically. "I'll tell you who's going to raise the children: it's going to be government daycare, which is what the government wants and the corporations want. They would love for that to happen. They'd love for the government to raise our kids. We'll go work endlessly—husband and wife—endlessly, and the kids will be raised either by YouTube, Netflix, or the government. What a terrible series of choices."
"I just submit to you that we don't need a more conservative economy, we don't need a more liberal economy, we need a Christian economy," Hawley continued. "We need a Christian economy that rewards the family, that protects the family, that rewards marriage. And I think, as Christians, we ought to be unabashed by it."
"If we say we're for the family, we've got to be for a society that supports the family," Hawley said. "My worry right now is we're trending in this country increasingly towards one of two extremes: Either communism, and we see that in places like New York—universal basic income, just give us the money, we don't want to work, just give us the money—or a kind of neo-feudalism [where the wealthy enrich themselves while] everybody else will have to slave away for endless hours, husbands and wives together, working for companies ... and barely make enough to see their children once a week."
"I just submit to you, that's not the United States of America, and more importantly, that is not the kingdom," he declared. "No, we need a kingdom economy. Last I looked, the Lord Jesus was king over our economic life, over our labor, over our families, as much as he is over the church. Amen? We need to reassert the Lordship of Christ. And for those who say to us, 'Leave this to us. Christians, leave the economics to us. Christians, leave the social policy to us. Christians, leave the family to us,' we will say, 'Not on your life, because we serve a Lord who's lord over all of those things. And we will raise up an altar to claim this ground for him, for this country, over the innocent unborn, over our families, over our men and over their labor.'"
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AN 4 26
The Trump regime has an “erratic” and “theologically incomprehensible” preferred religion, a “bellicose, nationalist Christianity,” that is organized along various “fiefdoms,” argues Sarah Posner at Talking Points Memo. However, those spheres of control and influence are “aimed at protecting, and even justifying, the regime’s impunity.”
Posner writes that the “goal of the Christian nationalist project is to subvert democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”
She posits that during Trump’s second term, the White House and federal agencies “have been bludgeoning federal employees, the press, and the public with religious pronouncements of moral superiority to perceived enemies.”
On Easter Sunday, several administration agencies posted social media messages “heralding Christ’s resurrection,” the Associated Press reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote: “The tomb is empty. The promise is fulfilled. Through His sacrifice, we are redeemed. We stand firm in faith, courage, and truth.”
“He is risen,” was the message from both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The Department of Justice went even further.
“Today, as millions of Christians gather in their churches across the nation to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, this Department — is proud to protect and defend religious liberty,” the message read.
Posner argues how various administration officials use religion.
JD Vance “starts fights with the pope over his anti-war statements (even as Vance leaks to the press, with an eye to 2028, that he was against the war).”
Through his prayer meetings and press conferences, Secretary Hegseth “aims to compel Americans to embrace his Christian nationalist bloodlust and war crimes, and this week compared reporters to Pharisees for insufficiently cheerleading for the military.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer “has promoted her Catholicism in prayer meetings modeled on the ones Hegseth hosts at the Pentagon.”
“All these moves,” Posner writes, “are designed to crush dissent, marginalize other Christianities and religions, and empower government officials to violate the law. The fiefdoms, in different ways, prop up the would-be king’s corruption, and that of his allies.”
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RWW
04/16/2026
Kiera Butler @ Mother Jones: Tech Billionaires Want Christians to Believe in AI
Much in the way they have shaped culture with social media algorithms, tech evangelists now are attempting to normalize the use and acceptance of AI by wrapping it in a spiritual message.
Adam Kinzinger @ AdamKinzinger.com: Franklin Graham Defends Trump’s Jesus Post. Again.
The pattern is clear: when Trump crosses a theological line, a familiar roster of pastors arrives to explain why it isn't really a line.
Vittoria Elliott @ WIRED: Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated with Religion
“From executive orders to agency-wide directives to even early dismissal emails, it is abundantly clear that this administration is not so much proudly Christian as it is belligerently so.”
Kristin Du Mez @ Du Mez CONNECTIONS: American Dominion: The Rise and Radicalization of a New Christendom
Rooted in an intense, literalized reading of Scripture, dominionism is animated by spiritual warfare: demons are not metaphors but actors, and demonization becomes both a theology and a tool of political mobilization.
Kylie Cheung @ Abortion, Every Day: How Celebrity Smear Campaigns Are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Contro
Conservative billionaires are weaponizing pop culture news to draw in a new generation of young women
Fred Wertheimer @ Wertheimer’s Political Report: Trump Grossly Abuses His Pardon Powers, Harms Victims
Trump has egregiously abused his pardon powers since the day he took office, often at the financial expense of the criminals’ victims.
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04/09/2026
Jason Salzman at Colorado Times Recorder: How a Stealth Conservative News Service, Called Center Square, Infects Local Media Across America
Center Square has figured out how to have an under-the-radar right-wing “political agenda” and present readers with the basic elements of journalism, which helps it score higher ratings from watchdogs.
Yunior Rivas @ Democracy Docket: Former Proud Boys leader urges MAGA to give Harmeet Dhillon ‘a fair shot’ if promoted at DOJ
Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in coordinating the effort to block certification of the 2020 election. He later received a pardon from President Donald Trump.
Robert Reich @ Substack: The truth about Harmeet Dhillon, Trump's likely pick for attorney general
Harmeet Dhillon is the last person who should be running the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She should never become attorney general — which means Trump will probably nominate her.
Justin Jouevenal @ Washington Post: Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights
The court is the first since at least the ’50s to reject claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities
Meghna Chakrabarti @ NPR’s On Point: What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power?
How Christian extremism came to influence the Trump administration and offer moral underpinnings for the new war in the Middle East, with guests Katherine Stewart and Robert Jones
Aaron Earles @ Christianity Today: Pastors Want More Ways for Immigrants to Arrive and Remain Legally
While pastors are divided on the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, a large majority oppose deporting persecuted Christians and blocking refugees.
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AN 4 26
In the late 19th Century, women gained the right to vote in some states and municipalities. But it wasn't until the U.S. Constitution's 19th Amendment was adopted in 1920 that voting became a national right for U.S. women — millions of whom voted for the first time in the 1920 presidential election, which found Republican Warren G. Harding defeating Democratic nominee James M. Cox by roughly 26 percent (Cox's running mate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, went on to enjoy a landslide presidential victory in 1932).
The 19th Amendment has been considered settled law for more than a century. But during Donald Trump's second presidency, more and more evangelical Christian nationalists are seriously calling for the 19th Amendment to be abolished — including Pastor Doug Wilson, a close ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
In an article published on April 2, New York Times reporter Vivian Yee takes a look at Christian fundamentalists who believe women should lose the right to vote. This proposal, according to Yee, is now "gaining adherents beyond the fringe" — and they believe that The 19th Amendment "drove America into national decline."
"Instead, they support 'household voting': one household, one vote — the husband's," Yee explains. "While many Americans would see this as an unthinkable regression to a time when women were treated as second-class Americans, proponents of the concept believe deeply that this arrangement is what God envisioned in a marriage. If, a decade ago, the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe."
Yee adds, "Male influencers and podcasters in the ultra-conservative corner of the internet known as the Manosphere often push to 'repeal the 19th,' and far-right young women have also backed the idea…. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a clip, last summer, of pastors in his ultra-conservative denomination, which holds that America is a Christian nation whose laws should reflect Christian tenets, arguing that women should be barred from voting."
Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University, has changed the way she discusses fundamentalist proposals to repeal the 19th Amendment.
Barr told the New York Times, "I used to teach this as, 'This is this fringe thing that's out there.' Now, I teach it as, 'This is no longer fringe.'"
Yee notes that while "repealing the 19th Amendment would require approval by three-quarters of the states," other MAGA proposals — including the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (the SAVE or SAVE America Act) — wouldn't make it illegal for women to vote but would make it more difficult.
"Some obstacles to women voting could come sooner," Yee observes. "President Trump and Republican allies are pushing legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, a restriction that opponents say could disenfranchise the many women whose married names do not match those on their birth certificates or other documents."
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AN 3 26
Now in his early seventies, Pastor Douglas Wilson is hardly a newcomer to the Religious Right. Wilson, the pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, has been preaching a severe version of evangelical Protestant fundamentalism since the late 1970s. But during the 1980s and 1990s, he was a marginal figure in the evangelical world. Wilson, in those days, wasn't nearly as well-known as prominent Religious Right figures like the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, or the Christian Broadcasting Network's (CBN) Rev. Pat Robertson.
In recent years, however, Wilson has achieved much greater prominence on the Religious Right, enjoying a close relationship with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Wilson is an unrelenting proponent of Christian nationalism as well as dominionist theology, which believes that the United States should be a total theocracy governed by strict Biblical law. Critics of that ideology argue dominionists would govern the U.S. in much the same way that the Sunni Taliban governs Afghanistan and Shiite Islamists govern Iran, albeit with fundamentalist evangelical Christianity rather than a Sunni or Shiite version of Shariah law.
Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies scholar and author of the book "Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction," is known for her expertise on extreme ideologies like Christian reconstructionism and dominionist theology. And in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 18, she examines Wilson's growing prominence in the GOP and the MAGA movement and the ways he would like to see the U.S. governed.
"In the college town of Moscow, Idaho," Ingersoll explains, "a once-obscure pastor-theologian has spent decades building his church into an empire. Today, he leads not only that church, but a denomination to which more than 150 churches around the world belong — plus a private school and an association of over 400 Christian schools, a college, a seminary, and a publishing house. In his writing and speaking over the decades, he has sought to revise our understanding of the reality of chattel slavery in the American South; articulated a vision of innate, virtuous hierarchy that includes an extreme form of male headship; and advocated the wholesale conversion of the United States of America to a theocracy that would apply Old Testament law across the land. Democracy, he once said, is 'foolishness.' And in his view, God is not just a God of love, but a God who actively participates with his people in war."
The religious scholar adds, "Last month, that pastor, Douglas Wilson, stepped up to a lectern at the Pentagon to address a monthly gathering of military leaders. He had come at the personal invitation of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth."
Ingersoll emphasizes that although Wilson is way outside the mainstream of Protestant Christianity, he is now well-connected in the GOP, the MAGA movement and the Trump Administration. The scholar describes Hegseth as "Wilson's most powerful and well-known follower in Donald Trump's America."
"Proponents of America as a Christian nation are often somewhat hazy about what the end state of a 'Christian nation' would look like specifically," Ingersoll observes, "but Wilson and his followers have carefully laid out a detailed vision. For them, a Christian nation would be governed directly by biblical law — and in every area of its common life and culture, it would be shaped by a comprehensive 'biblical world and life view'…. If you accept that the Bible is true, Wilson believes that the rest of his political-theological paradigm must follow."
Ingersoll adds, "A Christian nation, in his account, is a nation in which there is no area of life and culture where the Bible is not the ultimate authority. Wilson and other Christian nationalists draw on a framework known as 'sphere sovereignty' to interpret and apply the Bible to every area of modern life."
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Good Christian Sexism': Dale Partridge Seeks To Repeal The 19th Amendment In The Next Decade
Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge is releasing a book that he hopes will lead to the repeal of the 19th Amendment within the next decade: "If we can repeal Roe v. Wade, then I think we can overturn the 19th Amendment."
William Wolfe And Donald Trump
William Wolfe Admits Christian Nationalists 'Are Going To Impose [Our Morality] Upon You'
Christian Nationalism
Dale Partridge
'Good Christian Sexism': Dale Partridge Seeks To Repeal The 19th Amendment In The Next Decade
William Wolfe And Donald Trump
William Wolfe Admits Christian Nationalists 'Are Going To Impose [Our Morality] Upon You'
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KEVIN KRAMER SEN SAYS WE HAVE BIBLICAL DUTY TO ISRAEL?
AN 3 26
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quoted the Bible — specifically the Old Testament — on Tuesday during remarks on the progress of the war against Iran, leaving some to express concerns about Christian nationalism and his potentially executing a holy or religious war.
Noting that he had just returned from Dover Air Force Base to accept the dignified transfer of another service member killed in the Iran war, Hegseth said, “I’ll close with Scripture, drawing strength from Psalm 144.”
“Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle,” he said. “He is my loving God and my fortress. My stronghold and my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge. May the Lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors. Unbreakable protection to them in our homeland. And total victory over those who seek to harm them. Amen.”
Critics slammed his introduction of the religious text.
At The New Republic, Malcolm Ferguson wrote: “The Christian nationalist undertones of this war are getting even more obvious.”
“Listening to Hegseth read Psalm 144 feels like an ominous justification for further aggression rather than a comforting message,” Ferguson said.
“While it’s a lovely verse traditionally attributed to King David, it does not accurately portray the reality of the situation whatsoever,” he wrote. “The United States is the Goliath of this story, along with Israel. The countries’ joint attacks of aggression have killed over 1,200 Iranians, many of them young schoolgirls. Iranian fuel depots were hit so hard that oil rained from the sky in Tehran on Sunday. Seven American service members have died because a president who promised peace sent them to war for money and regime change, not liberation.”
Professor of public policy Josh Cowen responded to Secretary Hegseth’s reading of scripture: “He could have chosen Jesus’s words ‘Blessed are they who mourn’ or if he was really craving a psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd.'”
“Instead he’s sporting militant quotes not to assuage grief but to justify his actions that caused it,” Cowen said.
Dutch journalist Michael van der Galien, according to a translation on X, called it “concerning that Pete Hegseth uses a passage from the Old Testament to suggest that God would bless a specific war between America, Israel, and Iran.”
“From a Catholic perspective, war is always a tragedy and only justified under strict conditions of just war theory, such as self-defense and the protection of innocents, not as a divine mandate.”
Professor Massimo Faggioli, a Church historian, according to a translation on X, wrote of Hegseth’s Scripture quoting, “they’ll do absolutely anything to make it look like a religious war.”
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an 2 26 Fox News just distorted CNN's documentary on Christian nationalism - Alternet.org
Fox News just distorted CNN's documentary on Christian nationalism
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RWW MANY VIDS
Feucht, Muslim Prayer, And A Case Study In Christian Nationalism
02/24/2026
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On Saturday, Christian nationalist worship leader and right-wing political activist Sean Feucht posted a video on social media expressing his outrage that several hundred Muslims had gathered in Times Square the day before to pray.
"Thousands of Muslims have blocked off Times Square in New York City, shouting 'Allahu Akbar,' releasing demonic prayers and decrees over the city," Feucht fumed. "Are you kidding me? In America!"
"You have Muslims taking over the streets of Times Square [in] New York City 25 years after 9/11," he continued. "The streets are being completely hijacked with prayers to a foreign god in America's greatest city. How did we get here? How in the world is this happening?"
This is happening because Muslims have religious freedom in this country, much to the dismay of Christian nationalists like Feucht, who apparently believes that only Christian worship services should be held in Times Square, like the ones he has organized in recent years.
On top of that, Feucht has also held events in New York City where he used public fountains to perform baptisms.
The greatest irony, of course, is that Feucht partnered with the federal government last year to host a Christian worship service on the National Mall and is partnering with the government once again to host a series of such worship events across the nation throughout 2026.
Feucht's outrage perfectly demonstrates the central tenet of the Christian nationalist worldview, which is that only Christians should be allowed to exercise their faith in public and influence society, culture, or politics.
Calling the Muslim prayer "a forceful display of dominance," Feucht announced that he will be returning to Times Square this summer.
"We're gonna dethrone all that mess and all that stuff that has been released over the last few days," he said. "We're gonna raise up a sound to King Jesus and we're gonna declare his rulership over that city."
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RWW
02/18/2026
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- Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush and Michael S. Schmidt @ The New York Times: A Case Against 6 Democrats Lacked Urgency. Then Came a Swift Bid for an Indictment.
Prosecutors have been repeatedly caught between the president’s insistence that they undertake weak or baseless cases and the necessity of having to go to court.
- Russell Contreras @ Axios: Where Christian nationalism is most dominant in the U.S.
Christian nationalism is now deeply entrenched inside today's Republican Party, according to a sweeping 50-state survey.
- Ewan Palmer @ The Daily Beast: Married MAGA Rep Faces Bombshell Affair Claim From Suicide Aide
The affair involving Rep. Tony Gonzales was said to be “not a secret” among his congressional aides.
- Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo @ City Journal: The Freak World of Nicholas J. Fuentes
Beneath the spectacle, the right-wing influencer has created a heap of human wreckage.
- David Edwards @ Raw Story: 'It has to end': MAGA pastor uses slur to smear Black Democrats
MAGA pastor John K. Amanchukwu Sr. lashed out at Black Democrats, comparing them to "cheap prostitutes" because they did not vote for causes he supported.
- Charlie Nash @ Mediaite: Fox’s Lara Trump Says ‘Many’ Trumps May Run for Office: It ‘May Not End Just With Donald Trump!’
Fox News host Lara Trump suggested on Tuesday that “many” members of the Trump family could eventually run for office, with multiple possible successors to her father-in-law President Donald Trump.
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RWW
02/18/2026
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth invited far-right Christian nationalist Doug Wilson to preach at the Pentagon Tuesday, reported Brian Kaylor at A Public Witness. Hegseth’s monthly evangelical worship services and the appearance of Wilson are signs of just how far the most aggressive forms of Christian nationalism have advanced within the MAGA movement and the Trump administration.
As Right Wing Watch has reported, Wilson is a Christian nationalist extremist who believes women should not have the right to vote. In the “Christian republic” he envisions, liberal Christians and non-Christians would not be allowed to hold public office or worship in public. He wants to see the Apostle’s Creed inserted into the U.S. Constitution.
Hegseth was criticized for apparently endorsing Wilson’s views last year when he promoted a CNN profile of Wilson with the comment, “All of Christ for All of Life.” (Hegseth eventually clarified that he supports women’s right to vote.) But Hegseth’s words and actions since then make it clear that he is intent on imposing his Christian nationalist worldview on the U.S. military.
Kaylor reported earlier that at the Feb. 5 National Prayer Service, Hegseth asserted, “America was founded as a Christian nation” and that public officials “have a sacred duty to glorify him.” He also suggested that serving in the U.S. military was a form of Christian spiritual warfare and that serving that mission could earn a soldier eternal life.
In 2023, Wilson’s Canon Press published The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel, which declared that the United States must formally “acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in all its laws, “abolish abortion,” outlaw marriage equality, and “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities who present a grave threat to civilization.” The statement affirms that “the Christian Nationalist project entails a national recognition of essential Christian orthodoxy” and supports laws against “public blasphemy.” Wilson is also notorious for publishing a book downplaying the evils of slavery.
Wilson oversees an expanding influence network that includes the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of “classical” Christian academies, and a cadre of far-right “theobros” who embrace his ultra-patriarchal Christian nationalist ideology. The Idaho-based Wilson planted a church in Washington, D.C. last year to “calibrate” conservative Christians working in the Trump administration in alignment with his worldview. Right Wing Watch recently noted that the mother of Brook Potteiger—the pastor tapped to lead Wilson's new church in D.C.—recently told an interviewer that Potteiger became psychically abusive and domineering after falling under Wilson's influence, so much so that she filed a report against him with child protective services.
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an 2 26
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was founded after the Wall Street Crisis and mortgage collapse that happened in 2007 and 2008, with the specific purpose of having a government agency that would regulate the financial industry for customers, not prioritize profits. But the top conversation wasn't the affordability crisis. It was prayer.
The president now welcomed prayers at the start of every government meeting. Federal employees are also encouraged to spend an hour each week in prayer while at work, CNN reported Sunday.
While Trump may not be focused on it, his allies are plotting to remake America in the image of a kind of Christian version of Sharia Law.
"By this summer, the group — Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission — is expected to produce a blueprint for policy changes that could redefine the boundaries between government and religion in American life," wrote CNN.
Trump told the commission that they must bring religion back to America. The group is focusing on ways to sue state and local governments that they say block "religious freedom." They'll try to block public funding of K-12 schools, they say, that are hostile to faith.
They're also watching for ways to bring cases before the Supreme Court that could give them an opportunity to remake the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, which bars the government from endorsing a national religion.
“We are in a religious and cultural war right now, and every single one of us is a combatant,” said TV "psychologist" Dr. Phil McGraw during a September meeting. “Nobody can afford to sit on the sidelines.”
The White House continues to berate devout Catholic President Joe Biden, claiming that he "weaponized" the federal government against the church.
While the Trump commission has some Jewish and Muslim leaders on it, the panel is dominated by far-right Christianity.
It wasn't until last week that the commission broke into the popular zeitgeist, when commissioner and "former beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean Boller, challenged Jewish speakers about their beliefs and Israel’s war against Hamas."
She's one of many on the commission eager to talk about the "satanic" forces coming from other religions they deem incorrect.
The commission, housed in the Justice Department, issues only nonbinding recommendations, but its influence is already evident. The Education Department recently warned schools they could lose funding if they block students or staff from praying, mirroring a proposal floated at a commission hearing, and the Pentagon moved to reinstate faith into the U.S. military after commissioners pushed for more power for chaplains and a return of prayer.
Commission member Kelly Shackelford claimed the group is finding “problems” with religious freedom across schools, government, the private sector, health care, and the military.
It's all part of a wider Trump‑era shift to faith‑based units across federal agencies that have been repurposed from mainly coordinating with religious charities to actively promoting far-right Christianity.
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RWW
02/05/2026
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- Jim Garlow thanks God for President Donald Trump: "We have been profoundly blessed, as the people of God."
- Joshua Haymes declares that there will be "no more drag shows, no more Pride parades": "We are done with it. We are going to put an end to the public display of this filth and we're going to do it because Christ is king. We will see it done."
- William Wolfe says that Jesus "would support ICE and mass deportations" and proclaims that "if we want to save Western Civilization, we must become immune to the tears of liberal women."
- Joel Webbon claims that a college student recently informed him that all the rich, popular, smart frat bros love Nick Fuentes.
- Finally, Trump announced that his administration will be hosting a day of prayer, praise and thanksgiving on the National Mall in May during which participants will be "solemnly rededicating our country as One Nation under God."
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AN 1 26
Although President Donald Trump's overall approval ratings are weak, he continues to poll well among his hardcore MAGA base — including far-right white Christian fundamentalist evangelicals. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her allies in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are using Christian nationalist arguments to recruit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, quoting scripture in videos posted on Instagram.
But Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner, in an article published by The Atlantic on January 20, argues that the Trump Administration's militarized ICE raids are inconsistent with traditional "Christian values."
To make his point, Wehner references Tobias Cremer — a member of the European Parliament and author of the 2023 book, "The Godless Crusade."
"Right-wing populists don't view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the 'pure people' against external 'others,' while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions," Wehner explains. "Many right-wing populists, despite being secular, are successfully recruiting Christians to their cause. And rather than Christians leavening the secular right-wing movements, those movements are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus."
Wehner continues, "The Trump Administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling, in a dozen different ways, cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies."
The Never Trump conservative notes that Christianity, over the years, has had "glorious moments" as well as "some very dark turns."
"Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals — not just cultural Christians, but also, those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings — prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus," Wehner laments. "Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so, they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It's rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist — who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless."
Wehner adds, "The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for. This moment, and what it reveals about American Christianity, will be studied for a long time to come."
*Peter Wehner's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).
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Although President Donald Trump's overall approval ratings are weak, he continues to poll well among his hardcore MAGA base — including far-right white Christian fundamentalist evangelicals. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her allies in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are using Christian nationalist arguments to recruit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, quoting scripture in videos posted on Instagram.
But Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner, in an article published by The Atlantic on January 20, argues that the Trump Administration's militarized ICE raids are inconsistent with traditional "Christian values."
To make his point, Wehner references Tobias Cremer — a member of the European Parliament and author of the 2023 book, "The Godless Crusade."
"Right-wing populists don't view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the 'pure people' against external 'others,' while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions," Wehner explains. "Many right-wing populists, despite being secular, are successfully recruiting Christians to their cause. And rather than Christians leavening the secular right-wing movements, those movements are prying Christianity further and further away from the ethic and teachings of Jesus."
Wehner continues, "The Trump Administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling, in a dozen different ways, cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies."
The Never Trump conservative notes that Christianity, over the years, has had "glorious moments" as well as "some very dark turns."
"Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals — not just cultural Christians, but also, those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings — prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus," Wehner laments. "Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so, they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It's rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist — who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless."
Wehner adds, "The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for. This moment, and what it reveals about American Christianity, will be studied for a long time to come."
*Peter Wehner's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).
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Christian nationalists believe Trump on a 'mission from God' to occupy cities: author
MAGA claims of 'massive religious revival' meticulously debunked
Christian leader debunks MAGA claim that America was 'intended to be a theocracy'
'Moral stain': Catholic outlet questions VP's faith after his Minneapolis shooting speech
How Christian Reconstructionism influences US politics: scholar
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CA Gubernatorial Candidate Chad Bianco Claims 'Our Government Was Formed Only For A Christian Nation'
01/14/2026
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Chad Bianco, who currently serves as sheriff of Riverside County, California, is among the leading Republican candidates running for governor. Bianco is also a Christian nationalist, which was on full display during a recent appearance he made on the His Glory TV network.
"It's been beat into us that there has to be a separation of church and state," Bianco said. "There is, but it's backwards: The government cannot be involved in your church. The government can't tell you you can't go to church. They can't tell you you can't pray. They can't tell you what church you have to go to. That was the founding of our country. The founding of our country was them coming here with Protestant Christian values that formed our country so they could practice freely their religion."
"[That] how they developed the Constitution," he continued. "In all their founding paperwork, it said the government shall stay out of religion. It also said that our government was formed only for a Christian nation. Without Christian values, our form of government will not work. That means that our Christian values absolutely must be in our government."
"Tyrannical government cannot oppress the churches, but our values are supposed to be in our government," Bianco asserted. "You should be electing people that have your values. Not your political party; it's your values. Vote on your values and this country would be basically how it was 200 years ago, 250 years ago now this year. We can turn this around easily if we would all just get out and vote."
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Bianco's assertion that "all the founding paperwork" declared that "our government was formed only for a Christian nation" is patently false, which is quite obvious given that the Constitution itself explicitly declared that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
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Christian Nationalist Pastor Dale Partridge Says Freedom Of Religion Is 'A Really Bad Idea'
01/12/2026
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On Friday, filmmaker Tobiah Powell released a documentary called "What is Christian Nationalism?" The film featured a variety of far-right activists and pastors—including Andrew Isker, Joel Webbon, Joshua Haymes, Stephen Wolfe, Calvin Robinson, and Brian Sauvé—offering up their thoughts on the need to impose Christian nationalism on the country.
The general message of the film was aptly summed up by Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge, who asserted that it was "a really bad idea" for the Founding Fathers to create a nation that guaranteed the freedom of religion.
"I think that when the Founders founded America, the unfortunate reality is they used the word 'religion' instead of Christianity," Partridge said. "I believe when they talked about freedom of religion, they're talking about freedom of denominational choice ... The focus wasn't a freedom over choosing which gods to worship."
"Freedom of religion is, in all intents and purposes, a really bad idea," he continued. "I don't want freedom of religion because I don't think Jesus wants freedom of religion. I don't believe he's interested in the freedom of religion. I think it's a violation of the first commandment to have the freedom of religion. There shall be no worship of any other gods."
"A great way to love the culture is to make sure that society is ruled by Christian rulers and under a Christian government,'" Partridge asserted. "A great way to hate your neighbor is to make sure that they are ruled by godless people or by pagan people or people who hate God and are passing laws that are out of step with his holy and righteous law. "
"So, should mosques be legal in America?" Partridge asked, rhetorically. "I don't think so. I believe that America has a firm Christian identity in its founding. I believe that it's a violation of the first commandment to have the worship of other gods in our land. We can't sing 'God Bless America' and at the same time expect that God won't curse America for the permission of allowing other people to worship gods on our soil."
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For the record, the country’s founders had every opportunity to create a “Christian government” when they wrote the U.S. Constitution, but they instead gave us an explicit ban on any religious test for public office and a First Amendment that guarantees religious freedom and forbids government establishment of religion. As for Patridge’s claim that the founders were only thinking about “denominational choice” for Christians, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, a precursor to the First Amendment, “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew, the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”
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[Christian Nationalism ## MAGA Pastor Rob Pacienza on ‘Destroying’ the ‘Stronghold’ of Progressive Christianity
MAGA pastor Rob Pacienza devoted an episode of his "Truths that Transform" series to "Destroying Strongholds: Progressive Christianity"](https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/maga-pastor-rob-pacienza-destroying-stronghold-progressive-christianity)
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Ross Vought is often credited as the architect of Project 2025, and as Donald Trump's director for the Office of Management and Budget, he has helped oversee historically destructive government cuts throughout 2025. In addition to his standing as an "amoral political actor," per a new analysis from The New Republic, what sets him apart from the worst of the White House "hatchet men" is his claim to carry out his actions in the name of his "devout" Christianity.
Writing an extensive breakdown of Vought's tenure as OMB director on Monday, journalist Timothy Noah observed that "conservatives used to think you could be a political hatchet artist or you could serve the Lord." Now, he argued, "they say: Why choose?" This idea is typified by Vought, who has stressed his devout adherence to Christianity throughout his time in politics, suggested that the US is an exclusively Christian nation and written in defense of "Christian nationalism."
"Vought wishes trauma on civil servants and has inflicted same; boasts about turning his think tank into a 'Death Star'; panders to the right’s paranoid streak by claiming Marxists rule America; helps Trump withhold aid to Ukraine illegally after its leader declines to investigate the son of Trump’s 2020 opponent; and impounds congressional appropriations in gleeful defiance of court precedent," Noah wrote. "Pretty sinful, no? Not to Vought. While doing all this Vought proudly declares his deep devotion to the Christian faith."
Vought, he continued, does not practice any form of Christianity devoted to helping the poor or downtrodden, or any sort of "sentimental nonsense about the least among us." Noah highlighted a part of Project 2025 in which Vought decried the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as “a permanent and immiserating feature of the global landscape.”
"That’s a novel way to describe a program to alleviate global poverty," Noah wrote.
According to an October profile of Vought from ProPublica, when it was suggested that the agency's budget be cut in half, he countered that it should be brought as close to zero as possible. An estimate from Boston University estimated that these cuts have been responsible for "640,000 people, 430,000 of them children," with the total deaths estimated later being increased by 38,000.
"... How on earth does the prevailing Christian ethos in Donald Trump’s Washington, as practiced by Russell Vought, align with the Christianity that the goyim have been telling me about my whole life?" Noah wrote in conclusion, suggesting that "Vought would run over his own grandmother to serve his president," and "also do it to please his Creator."
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In rural Appalachian areas of Tennessee and Kentucky, Josh Abbotoy operates a real estate company called Ridgerunner. And he uses socially conservative rhetoric to promote his company, declaring, "Faith, family and freedom — those are the values that we try to celebrate."
According to BBC reporters Ellie House and Mike Wendling, some of Abbotoy's clients are far-right Christian nationalists who openly push extreme ideas like repealing the U.S. Constitution's 19th Amendment — which gave women the right vote — and overturning civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
"Initially, he didn't attract much local attention after setting up shop in Jackson County, (Tennessee)," House and Wendling explain in a late December article. "But in late 2024, a local TV news report broadcast controversial statements made by two of Mr. Abbotoy's first, and most outspoken, customers: Andrew Isker, a pastor and author originally from Minnesota, and C. Jay Engel, a businessman from California. They are self-described 'Christian nationalists' who question modern values, such as whether female suffrage and the civil rights movement were good ideas, and call for mass deportations of legal immigrants far in excess of President Donald Trump's current plan. Another thing they sometimes say: 'Repeal the 20th Century.'"
The BBC reporters note that although "Abbotoy himself does not identify as a Christian nationalist," his tenants' extreme views are worrying their neighbors."
House and Wendling quote Jackson County resident Nan Coons as saying, "You don't know who these people are, or what they're capable of. And so, it's scary."
Engel has even called for deportations of legal non-white immigrants, writing, "Peoples like Indians, or South East Asians or Ecuadorians or immigrated Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately."
Gainesboro, Tennessee resident Diana Mandli, however, is calling Isker's church out.
Mandli told the BBC, "I believe that they have been attempting to brand our town and our county as a headquarters for their ideology of Christian nationalism."
*Read the full BBC article at this link.
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Religious scholar explains how Christian nationalists use and abuse the Bible - Alternet.org=
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12/18/2025
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- Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck @ The Washington Post: Dan Bongino announces he is leaving FBI deputy director job in January
Bongino told colleagues more than a week ago that he would not be returning to Washington headquarters this year, according to people familiar with the matter.
- Erkki Forster @ The Daily Beast: Trump Rants Incoherently at 2X Speed in Bonkers TV Address
The billionaire president’s delivery grew frantic as his speech on the economy wore on, ending with him practically shouting.
- Anna Merlan @ Mother Jones: How Benny Johnson Went From BuzzFeed Plagiarist to MAGA’s Chief Content Creator
He says he did “some very bad things.” But in Trumpworld, that’s a plus.
- Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate @ The New York Times: ‘Don’s Best Friend’: How Epstein and Trump Bonded Over the Pursuit of Women
The president has tried to minimize their friendship, but documents and interviews reveal an intense and complicated relationship. Chasing women was a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
- Warren Throckmorton: Tennessee Says Yes to Christian Nationalism
State partners with Turning Point USA to form clubs in every Tennessee school.
- Tess Owen @ Slate: Trad-Wife in Chief
Katie Miller, the wife of Trump henchman Stephen Miller, is trying to reinvent herself as a squeaky-clean model for MAGA women. People who knew her growing up saw someone far different.
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Handpicked Kennedy Center board members vote to rename it the ‘Trump-Kennedy Center’
The president’s obsession with self-aggrandizement and self-glorification is pitiful, and it’s getting worse.
- Hemant Mehta @ Friend Atheist: Oklahoma's Supreme Court overturns Ryan Walters' Bible-heavy Social Studies standards
The judges rejected a Christian Nationalist curriculum that downplayed systemic racism, spread election lies, and pretended the Bible was history.
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For most of his life, Doug Wilson — the 72-year-old pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho — was a fringe figure even on the Religious Right. Wilson's Christian nationalist views were so extreme that he gained a reputation for being to the right of familiar evangelical fundamentalists like Liberty University's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the Christian Broadcasting Network's Rev. Pat Robertson, and Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
But during Donald Trump's second presidency, Wilson has become increasingly visible. Trump's allies, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, openly embrace Christ Church.
Religion News Service (RNS) reporter Tracy Simmons examines Wilson's growing prominence in the MAGA movement in an article published on December 12.
"Critics say that Christ Church's renown has less to do with the Almighty than with Wilson's dedication to Christian nationalism and his ties to like-minded officials in the Trump Administration and among its allies," Simmons explains. "Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has attended a Christ Church-affiliated congregation in Tennessee and has amplified Wilson's most controversial views, including his argument that women should not be allowed to vote. In the space of a month in April 2024, Wilson was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk on their respective podcasts."
Wilson, who believes that Christ Church is now "punching about our weight," started out as a Baptist but later moved to a severe form of Calvinism.
"Wilson came to national attention in 2003, when he organized a conference at the University of Idaho at Moscow about revolutions throughout U.S. history," Simmons explains. "Some in the community picked up on a booklet titled 'Southern Slavery, As It Was' that Wilson had co-authored some years earlier arguing that slavery, besides being allowed for in the Bible, was not as harsh in the antebellum South as is commonly portrayed. Soon, the campus and Downtown Moscow were plastered with flyers referring to Wilson’s university event as a 'slavery conference'…. To maximize his footprint in Washington, Wilson planted a church there this year, introducing what Wilson critic Kevin DeYoung called 'the Moscow mood' — cultural engagement 'with a spirit of … having fun while you’re doing it.'"
*Read Tracy Simmons' full Religion News Service (RNS) article at this link.
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Christian Nationalist Organization Lays Out Plans To 'Invade' Local GOP Parties In 2026
12/11/2025
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Recently anti-Muslim Christian nationalist Texas state Rep. Nate Schatzline announced that he would not be seeking reelection and will instead be taking a position with the National Faith Advisory Board, an organization created by White House faith advisor Paula White.
In addition to this new position, Schatzline also runs a Christian nationalist organization call For Liberty & Justice, which "trains activists and candidates how to run for local office, honor the Lord and their family, and lead righteously once they win."
Earlier this week, For Liberty & Justice released an ad boasting of the success it had in 2025 and laying out its plans to work with churches and local groups across the nation in 2026 and train them to "invade" local Republican parties and bring "spiritual reformation in the governmental realm."
"Over the last year, we've seen God do incredible works through For Liberty & Justice," Schatzline said in the ad. "We believe the Holy Spirit has given us a specific blueprint to mobilize local churches, wake up cities, and take a stand for religious liberty and for biblical justice in the governmental realm."
"This is about mobilizing the big C church," the ad continued. "In order to take back the culture, the local churches must invade and reform the local GOP. Our organization is not a right-wing or left-wing organization. We are a kingdom organization. We believe For Liberty & Justice is not only called to mobilize the church to be civically engaged, but also to disciple the civically engaged to do the work of the church."
"Rather than abandon a broken system, For Liberty & Justice will invade the GOP with the goal of bringing God back to the Republican Party and ensuring that there is a political party that represents our values for the next generation," Schatzline proclaimed. "We've now helped 110 of our friends and family candidates win local office to take ground for the Kingdom of God. And let me tell you something: We're just getting started. Revival is not coming, revival is here and it's on us to ensure this spiritual revival translates into spiritual reformation in the governmental realm."
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12/12/2025
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- Jane C. Timm @ NBC News: Indiana Senate rejects GOP-drawn congressional map in a major rebuke of Trump
Trump and national Republicans pushed Indiana lawmakers for new district lines that could have allowed the party to gain two seats in next year’s midterms.
- Michael Luciano @ Mediaite: Indiana Lt. Gov. Confirms Trump Threatened Entire State if It Didn’t Redraw Congressional Map
Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R) said the Trump administration threatened the state if the Republican-controlled legislature failed to gerrymander its congressional map.
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump’s pardon for Colorado’s Tina Peters suffers from one fatal flaw
Presidents can’t pardon individuals convicted of state crimes. Whether Trump understands that isn’t entirely clear.
- Leigh Kimmins @ The Daily Beast: Marjorie Taylor Greene Plots Major Move to Make Fresh MAGA Chaos
The Trump-bashing congresswoman is said to be quietly trying to stage a revolt against House Speaker Mike Johnson.
- Tracy Simmons @ Religion News Service: Christ Church at 50: How Doug Wilson pushed Christian nationalism to the center
The pastor, celebrating 50 years in his pulpit, has never had more influence than he does under the current presidential administration.
- David Badash @ The New Civil Rights Movement: ‘Positively Authoritarian’: White House Tweets and Deletes ‘Naughty List’ of Journalists
The White House appears to have tweeted then deleted a “Naughty List” of journalists, including top news reporters and outlets, in an act that is being described as “positively authoritarian” by one legal expert.
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12/04/2025
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- Jason Rapert's National Association of Christian Lawmakers is basically the Christian nationalist version of the American Legislative Exchange Council, so it seems fitting that Rapert was invited to lead a devotion during a recent ALEC meeting.
- Nick Fuentes insists that he is not an antisemite, but we have multiple clips that suggest otherwise.
- It is clear that North Dakota state Rep. Nico Rios is a groyper.
- Elijah Schaffer revealed that far-right QAnon conspiracy theorist Anna Perez is the producer of the "DC Dive" program that airs on his network.
- Shane Vaughn declares that conservatives cannot believe Candace Owens' conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and still support President Donald Trump: "If you believe Candace… then you believe Donald Trump either allowed it, ignored it, or orchestrated the environment for it."
- Finally, warning people not to listen to conspiracy theorists like Owens, Ryan Helfenbein said that "if someone has been consistently wrong, if their theories collapse, if they show no humility, turn it off and move on." Helfenbein does not, of course, apply that same standard to Trump.
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11/13/2025
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Fascist Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon calls on Trump to become "the American Caesar" and start arresting and imprisoning judges, mayors, governors and any other elected official who opposes his deportation policies: "He must cross the Rubicon."
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Nate Schatzline Claims Muslim Elected Officials Are Plotting To Subjugate Christians
11/04/2025
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Last week, Christian nationalist Texas state Rep. Nate Schatzline announced that he would not be seeking reelection and, instead, will be taking a position with National Faith Advisory Board "to equip pastors to step up and speak out about religious freedom."
The National Faith Advisory Board was created by White House faith advisor Paula White and claims that its mission is to, among other things, "fight religious discrimination," which makes the decision to hire Schatzline somewhat questionable, given his views on Islam.
Two days after he announced his new position with the NFAB, Schatzline posted the latest episode of his "Wake Up Church" podcast, which was largely dedicated to declaring that Islam is "a death cult" and "is not compatible with Western society."
"One of the greatest threats to America's national security is the Islamification of the United States," Schatzline said, warning that "the Muslim false god of Allah commands Muslims to lie."
As such, Schatzline claimed that Muslim elected officials are engaged in a coordinated campaign of deception designed to take over the government and subjugate Christians.
"We have to apply it to the public policy positions of the elected Muslims that we see," he said. "When you look at a Muslim who is currently elected in the United States of America; Rep. Ilhan Omar is a great example—openly Muslim—and she will actively, actively vote for pro-abortion policies. However, she herself will never have an abortion, and the reason is because she's never going to kill a Muslim child, but she definitely wants Christians and infidels, Jews, to kill their children."
"We look at these Muslims that are elected to office," Schatzline continued, "and they will continuously advocate for social welfare programs that take away from the taxpayer and replace God with government and local church with government. And you wonder, 'Are you advocating for Muslims to take part in these programs?' Of course not. This is why their mosques and their Islamic communities take care of their communities. So what they're advocating for is not that Muslims would join social welfare programs; what they're advocating for is that Christians, Jews, infidels would join those social welfare programs and then in 50 to 100 years, maybe sooner, when Islam rules as the prime law of the land and we see things like the Ten Commandments and our biblical foundation thrown out the window, then Christians and Jews are in complete submission to the Muslims in power because they control our social welfare programs."
"People, it's not a conspiracy theory," Schatzline insisted. "I'm trying to expose the evil and the darkness that is surrounding this."
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11/06/2025
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- Jim Garlow hopes that the board of the Heritage Foundation will force president Kevin Roberts to resign over the controversy caused by his defense of Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes.
- Speaking of Fuentes, he declares that his America First movement "must infiltrate, and subvert, and take over the Republican Party."
- Following Zohran Mamdani's election as mayor of New York City, Shane Vaughn brags that President Donald Trump will cut off federal funding for special education programs, school lunch programs, after school programs, universal pre-K programs, and various social services.
- Joel Webbon vows that he will never pronounce Mamdani's name correctly "on principle" because "when it comes to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, how many Zohrans where there?"
- The Daily Caller's Amber Duke is likewise outraged by Mamdani's election: "Many of the immigrants who came to the U.S. recently are entitled, refuse to assimilate, bitch incessantly, hate American values and resent our Judeo-Christian traditions."
- Finally, Andrew Torba proclaims that "Christian nationalists are ascendant": "We are the ones who will labor in the fields until the land is reclaimed and restored. We are the ones who will see the seeds sown in 2022 blossom into a nation renewed by faith and bound by divine purpose. We will not stop. We cannot be bargained with. The future belongs to us.
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11/04/2025
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- Michelle Goldberg @ The New York Times: Nick Fuentes Was Charlie Kirk’s Bitter Enemy. Now He’s Becoming His Successor
Plenty of conservatives, especially Jewish ones, abhor Fuentes’s growing clout. But by cheering on Donald Trump as he promoted conspiracy theories and systematically destroyed bulwarks against nativism and bigotry in the Republican Party, they helped make Fuentes’s rise possible.
- Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Groyper War Consumes the Biggest Right-Wing Think Tank
BEN SHAPIRO DID SOMETHING UNIQUE on Monday. Not only did he open his show with a fiery intervention in the right’s roiling feud over white nationalist Nick Fuentes—he devoted his entire show to the topic.
- Alex Griffing @ Mediaite: Nick Fuentes Calls For Mark Levin to Be Deported In Hateful, Unhinged Rant
White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes went on a hateful and unhinged rant against Fox host Mark Levin this week, openly calling for his deportation for comments he made in support of Israel.
- Scott Nover and Drew Harwell @ The Washington Post: Laura Loomer is now credentialed to cover the Pentagon
The far-right activist and former congressional candidate has repeatedly criticized defense officials on her website and social media accounts while boasting of her close ties to President Donald Trump.
- Nikki McCann Ramirez @ Rolling Stone: Mike Johnson Wants You to Believe He Lives Under a Rock
Mike Johnson has a reflex. When asked about a major breaking news event that is dominating headlines and conversations around Capitol Hill’s proverbial water coolers — usually the president’s latest authoritarian endeavor or national humiliation — Johnson defaults to pretending he has no access to the internet, newspapers, or staff who are quite literally paid to keep him informed.
- Sarah Posner @ Talking Points Memo: Traditional Media Never Took the Christian Right Seriously
Back in the early 2000s, when we were outraged by the excesses of authoritarian dilettantes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a friend suggested I start a blog. I had been a lawyer, but was eager to change careers. Having studied the rise of the Christian right as a college student in the 1980s, I was now watching their aspirations unfold in real time. I wanted to investigate, expose, weigh in on all the things other people were missing. I was accustomed to writing fast. I was built to blog.
- Kevin J. Burke and Heidi Hadley @ The National Education Policy Center: Christian Nationalism and Educational Policy in the United States
American public education, though historically rooted in Christian ideals, has long navigated tensions among denominational differences and, in modern times, secularism. The growing influence of Christian nationalism—a movement blending Protestant religious identity with political ideology—threatens this balance.
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Jesse Leon Rodgers Calls For Muslims To Be Banned From Holding Public Office
10/24/2025
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Earlier this week, right-wing pastorJesse Leon Rodgers released a promotional video for his City Elders organization, which is a Christian nationalist group that seeks to "establish divine order in spiritual and civil governance" by bringing local pastors together with elected officials and religious-right activists.
In the video, Rodgers proclaimed that the Democratic Party is quite possibly "the most wicked institution" in world history, while also calling for Muslims to be banned from holding public office.
"We almost lost our country, our nation, our republic: the United States of America," Rodgers proclaimed. "Had the wicked won the election in 2024, this nation would have gone to Hell so rapidly you would not be able to recognize it today. They would have kept the border open, granted amnesty to 20 million illegals, stacked the Supreme Court, and gotten rid of the Electoral College. They would have continued their evil agenda to destroy the family, morality, marriage, children, and the unborn. Truly, the Democrat Party has become the most wicked institution in the history of the United States and possibly the world."
Later in the video, Rodgers repeated his warning that Muslims are running for office, which is something he falsely claimed had once been illegal.
"In this last election cycle, more than 800 Muslims ran for public office in the United States," he said. "Before Joe Biden was in the Senate, we had a law on the books in the United States prohibiting a Muslim from holding public office in this nation. And short of a divine miracle, New York City, America's largest city, in this next election cycle will have a Muslim mayor. We said we would never forget September 11, 2001, but 24 years later, the largest city in America is electing a socialist, communist, Muslim mayor. The United States of America must once again put a law on the books prohibiting a Muslim from holding public office, and the rest of the nation must do what the state of Texas has done, making Sharia illegal in this nation."
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Ed Rush Says Christians Are 'To Be In Charge Of Everything'
10/21/2025
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On Monday night's edition of the Christian nationalist program "FlashPoint," host Gene Bailey and his guests discussed the "No Kings" rallies that took place all over the country last weekend during which millions of Americans turned out to protest the Trump administration's increasing authoritarianism.
Bailey and guests dismissed the significance of the protests and declared that America does in fact have a king: Jesus Christ.
"We do have a king," Bailey declared. "We do worship that king, and the government rests at his feet."
Right-wing commentator Ed Rush agreed, proclaiming that God has made Christians "kings on the earth" who are to be "in charge of everything."
"Not only do we have a king, but we have the King of Kings," Rush said. "Not only do we serve the Lord, but we serve the Lord of Lords. I quoted Isaiah 9:7 a little bit earlier—'of the increase of his government and of his peace there will be no end'—and basically what that tells you is that no matter what, He is increasing his government and his peace."
"Maybe from 2016 to 2020, it's kind of slower than it is right now, but God is moving," Rush continued. "And he's made us, according to the Bible, kings and priests ... God has put kings on the earth; it's you, Flashpoint Army. God has given you dominion and authority over your place and your sphere of interest. And the moment that we recognize that as the church, and the moment we grab a hold of it and understand that God has given you unbelievable authority over this world, we will be in charge of everything. And I mean, everything. I'm talking about not only the government, but also the school system ... we will be in charge of the legal system, will be in charge of the education system."
"That's not Christian nationalism, that's just Christian internationalism," Rush declared. "So I think, we might as well get started now."
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10/10/2025 rww
In the years before he was murdered, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk had transitioned the group away from its libertarian leanings and toward a dominionist Christian nationalist ideology and agenda. It appears that the group’s current leadership is continuing that shift.
TPUSA Faith, the group’s religious organizing arm, is hosting a “pastor roundtable” featuring two Christian nationalists, Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers and author and former Trump administration official William Wolfe, according to a flyer Deevers posted on his X account Wednesday. Both men have connections to extreme Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, who has been in the news recently, both for his claim that women should not have the right to vote and for his efforts to strengthen his influence within the Trump administration.
Right Wing Watch noted recently, “Few elected officials can match Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers in their desire to see the United States turned into a Christian nationalist theocracy.” Deevers calls the separation of church and state “blasphemous.” In a sermon at Wilson’s Idaho church last year, Deevers declared that it is the duty of civil leaders to “submit” to the authority of Christ. He has called on Christian men to “make offensive war on the gates of hell” and “dominionize” the world.
Wolfe is an ardent Christian nationalist who declared in 2023 that "we are getting close" to a point where Christians will have to "heed the call to arms." Wolfe has charged that Democrats are Marxists and “violent revolutionaries” and claimed that “the Democrats hate God, they hate family, they hate marriage, they hate children, they hate our nation." At the far-right National Conservatism conference this year, he called for a “Protestant Christian Political Manhattan Project.”
Wolfe was a visiting fellow at OMB Director Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America, which identified Christian nationalism as a priority for the Trump administration. Early in Trump’s second term, he celebrated that the administration was being filled with “people who are our guys.” After meeting with Trump in March, Wolfe declared, “This is our land and we've had it really sort of violently taken away from us by radical leftists who are fundamentally steeped in a Marxist worldview that is anti-God, anti-human, anti-family, all those things.” He has been a cheerleader for the Trump regime’s mass deportation agenda.
Deevers and Wolfe, along with theobro Joel Webbon, were among the drafters of a 2023 document called The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel. It declared that the United States must formally “acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in all its laws, “abolish abortion,” outlaw marriage equality, and “recapture our national sovereignty from godless, global entities who present a grave threat to civilization.” The statement affirms that “the Christian Nationalist project entails a national recognition of essential Christian orthodoxy” and supports laws against “public blasphemy.”
The TPUSA roundtable is being co-sponsored by the Center for Baptist Leadership and its parent organization American Reformer. The Center for Baptist Leadership, founded by Wolfe, thinks the Southern Baptist Convention is too liberal. The American Reformer is a group backed by venture capitalists that wants to bring the U.S. back into alignment with what they see as its explicitly Protestant Christian heritage. It’s connected to networks of theobros associated in various ways with Wilson; its advisory board is rich with people connected to the hard-right Claremont Institute.
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RWW
10/01/2025
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- Vittoria Elliott @ Wired: Federal Workers Are Being Told to Blame Democrats for the Shutdown
Workers at one agency were given unhinged, partisan language to use when setting out-of-office replies.
- Deepa Bharath @ The Associated Press: Worship leader Sean Feucht mismanaged millions in ministry funds, former associates say
Alongside his Christian rockstar status, revenue to Feucht’s ministry also skyrocketed, jumping from $243,000 in 2019 to $5 million in 2020 — the last year his ministry filed a Form 990 with the IRS. It’s that deluge of money, Feucht’s and his ministry’s amassing of expensive real estate in its wake and their lack of financial transparency, which has former ministry staff and volunteers now accusing the worship leader of mismanaging ministry funds.
- Molly Olmstead @ Slate: This Is the Moment Christian Nationalists Have Been Waiting For
Some MAGA Christians see Charlie Kirk’s killing as the start of a “revival”—and the moment for remaking America.
- Patrick Svitek @ The Washington Post: Madison Cawthorn, ousted from House in 2022, tries comeback in Florida
The Republican will run for Florida’s 19th Congressional District, where a seat is open because Rep. Byron Donalds (R) is seeking the state’s governorship.
- Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Liberty Counsel manufactured panic over "Witchy Wednesday" at a Florida high school
A Florida teen's segment during morning announcements became fodder for the Christian outrage machine.
- Matthew Sheffield @ Flux: Trump’s mass censorship is what far-right Republicans have always wanted
Historian Seth Cotlar discusses how far-right Republicans like William F. Buckley and Ben Shapiro embrace authoritarianism and conspiracism.
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RWW
10/01/2025
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- Ché Ahn says that he is running for governor to be "a father for California."
- Tony Perkins claims that "corporate America has blood on its hands" for having donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
- Michele Bachmann says that what she loves about President Donald Trump is that "he puts his Superman suit on ... and he says, 'I'm going to stand up for the American people.'"
- It's fitting that Rob McCoy's tribute to Charlie Kirk was filled with Christian nationalist myths and disinformation.
- Finally, William Wolfe declares that "Ta-Nehisi Coates might be the most high-profile black supremacist in the country": "He’s been given handout after handout for the mere combination of mediocrity plus his skin color. The only reason he has a platform is because he’s a DEI 'intellectual' for the Left."
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an 9 25
I was a political science student in college when 9-11 happened. Almost overnight, the air in our classrooms thickened with talk of the Middle East—of regimes and sects, of the supposed sickness in other people’s faith. At the same time, I sat in lectures on American government, absorbing lessons on freedom, the separation of church and state, and the principles that anchor a democracy. The story was tidy: Extremism existed “over there,” and here was civility, rationality, liberty.
But even then, I felt the story was too neat. We were trained to see extremism as foreign, an affliction of others. No one asked us to look for it in our own pulpits, in our own chambers of power, where faith is wielded not only as belief but as authority.
For decades, we were told that extremism abroad is born of poverty, oppression, and lack of democracy. That dignity and fair governance could inoculate against violence. Yet here at home, the extremists are not poor. They are not desperate. They are wealthy, white, and privileged, carrying Bibles in one hand and power in the other. These are the people shaping foreign policy, writing the rules of engagement, and insisting that God Himself is on their side.
It is easy to sneer at fundamentalism when it wears a beard and prays to a different God. We do this without noticing how our own leaders claim the same divine sanction. Take Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who recently said, “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed,” a statement guiding policy on the basis of religious prophecy. As a result, borders are drawn and redrawn, not by maps or treaties, but by the conviction that scripture demands it. Tanks move forward because some believe the end times will be hastened by the blood spilled today. I have heard lawmakers speak of Israel not as a nation among nations, but as a ticket for their own salvation—a stage for the rapture. Lives are traded away for a promise written in ancient ink. Too often, it is prophecy, not policy, that carries the weight of law.
The divine is always invoked to conquer, to exclude, to strip away the humanity of others.
IN THE NAME OF
Charlie Kirk was another voice in this chorus. His platform rested on the claim that his words bore the imprint of Jesus Himself. And that is the mark of fundamentalism: not just to speak, but to declare speech holy. Not just to pass laws, but to claim the laws come from God. When movements convince their followers that every act of war, every border drawn, every vote cast is sanctified, fundamentalism is no longer a fringe—it is the system itself.
This is America’s problem. We imagine fundamentalism as the product of religion alone, but in truth it is about power. It thrives in systems that punish dissent and demand obedience. It flourishes where inequality is already deep, where racism already wounds. Whether it calls itself Christian nationalism or Zionism, the fruit is the same: oppression disguised as divine order.
Christian nationalism, in particular, is theater. Fear of the stranger is the script. The Gospels are props—quoted when convenient, discarded when not. The gun becomes holy; violence is celebrated as sacrament; scripture appears only to bless white entitlement and empire. And somehow, the divine is always invoked to conquer, to exclude, to strip away the humanity of others.
“Love the stranger as yourself” has been rewritten into “expel the immigrant.” “Turn the other cheek” has become “press his cheek into the ground.” The inversion is so stark you can only call it blasphemy.
It is time to see the truth we’ve trained ourselves to ignore: that the politics of faith are not a distant problem but a domestic one. That prophecy and scripture are invoked to shape our laws, and our laws shape our lives. That the moral high ground, so often claimed, is little more than a thin veneer of power and entitlement.
We are not exempt from the damage. We are participants in it. And we cannot keep pretending that America’s fundamentalists are not pulling the strings.
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AN 9 25
Far-right MAGA pundit Candace Owens is claiming that Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk was getting ready to convert to Catholicism near the end of his life, but evangelical Christian fundamentalists are denying that claim. And reporters Sam Stein and Will Sommer appeared skeptical about that alleged conversion during a conversation for the conservative website The Bulwark.
Kirk, who was 31 when he was fatally shot in Utah, was closely identified with evangelical Christian nationalism. And The Guardian's J. Oliver Conroy, in an article published on September 20, reports that Christian nationalists are "positioning Charlie Kirk as a martyr for their movement."
After Kirk's murder, his widow, Erika Kirk, posted, on Instagram, that the "world is evil" and declared, "They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife."
Author Jeff Sharlet, known for his writings on Christian nationalism, discussed Erika Kirk's comments with The Guardian — warning, "That's holy war, that's accelerationism, and it's incredibly powerful."
Conroy notes some of the other things far-right Christian nationalists have been saying since Kirk's death.
In a video, megachurch pastor Matt Tuggle said of Kirk's murder, "If your pastor isn't telling you the left believes (in an) evil demonic belief system, you are in the wrong church."
Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist pastor who worked with Kirk, said, "We know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The devil is not gonna win. The forces want us to be silent; they want us to shut up.… We need to be more bold."
Conroy describes Christian nationalism as "the belief that the U.S. is and should be an explicitly Christian nation."
"Kirk had been an evangelical Christian since childhood but earlier in his career, expressed reluctance at politicizing his religious views," Conroy explains. "That changed during the peak of the early pandemic, when Kirk made the acquaintance of several charismatic megachurch pastors protesting church lockdowns. He began to traffic in ideas influenced by the (New Apostolic Reformation),including the seven-mountain mandate. Turning Point USA also began to forge partnerships with churches."
*Read J. Oliver Conroy's full article for The Guardian at this link.
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09/12/2025
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Christian nationalist podcaster Joshua Haymes says that the only possible hope for America in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder is "total defeat of leftist liberal ideology": "It's Christ or chaos."
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AN 9 25
The far-right National Conservatism Conference used to be an event that many traditional Goldwater and McCain conservatives made a point of avoiding. But with President Donald Trump's MAGA movement now dominating the GOP, NatCon is drawing a lot more attention in Republican circles.
In an article published on September 13, Salon's Heather Digby Parton points to growing interest in NatCon as a troubling example of how much Christianity's lunatic fringe is influencing the GOP and the MAGA movement.
Describing the most recent NatCon gathering — which was held in Washington, D.C. in early September — Parton explains, "'Overturn Obergefell' was one featured panel, the AP's Joey Cappelletti reported. 'The Bible and American Renewal' was another. The conference, he wrote, 'underscored the movement's vision of an America rooted in limited immigration, Christian identity and the preservation of what speakers called the nation's traditional culture' — which is putting it very mildly. It certainly doesn’t seem there was much talk of individual freedom, free markets or liberty of any kind, and that is a big change from the conservative movement that has dominated Republican politics since the Reagan Administration."
READ MORE:'Doing a pretty terrible job': Trump official mocked over response to dismal economic data
The far-right NatCon gathering should not be confused with National Council for Mental Wellbeing event that is also abbreviated NatCon. The health event was held in Philadelphia in May, not in Washington, D.C. in early September, and has zero connection to the political event.
This year's political NatCon, Parton observes, featured some prominent figures in the Trump Administration — including National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard; Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of Project 2025; and border czar Tom Homan.
"But perhaps the most revealing moment was a viral speech by Missouri GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt titled 'What is an American?' in which he made the claim that the country belongs to the descendants of white Europeans who took the land from the violent Native Americans fair and square because they were just plain superior," Parton observes. "He said straight out: 'America doesn't belong to them — it belongs to us.… We can no longer apologize for who we are. Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness. We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean's shores.'"
Schmitt, Parton adds, even promoted the Great Replacement Theory during his speech.
READ MORE:'Republican for Trump': Alleged Kirk shooter's grandmother confirms entire family is MAGA
A recurring theme of NatCon, Parton warns, is that the U.S. is not only a Christian nation — it is a white Christian nation.
"It's tempting to write off NatCon, and Schmitt's speech in particular, as an example of a bunch of right-wing kooks indulging their little fever dream of creating a white Christian autocracy," Parton stresses. "But these are powerful people now, and if there's any person in government who is trying to create 'a pastiche of past glories' — largely by erasing the true American past, both good and bad — it's the most powerful one of all, Donald Trump, who has certainly discovered that 'you can just do things!'"
Parton continues, "Nobody paid attention to Project 2025 until it was too late, and look where that got us. It would be foolish to make that same mistake again."
READ MORE: 'Doing a pretty terrible job': Trump official mocked over response to dismal economic data
*Heather Digby Parton's full article for Salon is available at this link.
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09/11/2025
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Three months ago, a right-wing Christian assassinated a MN state legislator and her husband and shot another state legislator and his wife, yet Christian nationalist Mario Murillo reacted to the murder of Charlie Kirk by declaring that "assassination attempts are the entire domain of the left."
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Trump’s unofficially re-named "Department of War" likes to post clips of military personnel performing outdoor training as Bible verses play across the screen. In early August, Religion News reports the Department of Defense posted a video on X showing military aircraft and soldiers in operations as the words, “I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back till they were destroyed” from Psalm 18:37, appear onscreen.
Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and the author of the upcoming book “The Bible According to Christian Nationalists,” said the videos thwart the original intent of these words.
“Those verses were not about the United States military,” Kaylor told RNS. “They weren’t really even about any imperial military force, and quite the opposite. These were passages about marginalized people, people under attack. It’s a very dangerous conflation of scriptural ideals with the U.S. military.”
READ MORE: 'Is that really necessary?' Psaki gives her take on Leavitt's 'crazy' White House briefing
By Wednesday, the video was shared 1,600 times on X and received 8,100 likes.
Kaylor told Religion News that the DOD’s videos, like the Department of Homeland Security’s Bible-quoting social media posts, promote a literal interpretation of Scripture, a key feature of Christian nationalist rhetoric.
“Christian nationalism is itself selectively literal,” said Kaylor, who is also president and editor-in-chief of Word&Way, a Christian media company in Missouri. “… The irony about this Christian nationalism is that they’re justifying themselves with the Bible, but they’re only able to do it because they’re being very selective on what verses they choose.”
Religion News reports one post, shared on the [DOD] Rapid Response X account on Aug. 24, quoted Psalm 23: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for YOU are with me.” The video shows U.S. military members equipping each other, firing weapons and jumping out of helicopters.
Kaylor said the inclusion of this prayer, written by King David, which is asking God for support and guidance in difficult times, was particularly inappropriate, as the passage actually talks about God leading someone away from a fight.
READ MORE: 'One of the loudest voices on the right' hammers Trump — and WH stays quiet 'out of fear'
Michael Weinstein, a Jewish former Air Force officer who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the posts suggest that non-Christian military members aren’t “worthy or honorable or trustworthy human beings to be able to fight for your country.”
The U.S. Constitution bans religious tests for positions in the federal government, including military personnel, but Weinstein’s organization has flagged examples the DOD’s “evangelization efforts” in events like the lunch break with “Christian prayer and worship service”
“This is nothing more than a fast-ticking time bomb that will blow up in our faces,” said Weinstein, adding “… It is encouraging a tremendous response by our enemies who are out there, many of whom follow their own extremist religious views.”
Read the full Religion News report at this link.
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an 9 25
President Donald Trump announced Monday that the Department of Education will soon release updated guidelines to safeguard “the right to prayer” in public schools.
Speaking before the White House Religious Liberty Commission, Trump reaffirmed his strong religious convictions and criticized how he sees the separation of church and state as being used to marginalize devout students.
He declared, “To have a great nation, you have to have religion,” adding, “I believe that so strongly.”
READ MORE:'Irreconcilable with our constitutional guarantees': Sotomayor slams SCOTUS in stunning dissent
During the ceremony, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner delivered a prayer.
"Father, we thank you for our president, Donald J. Trump, whom you have anointed and appointed for this time, for such a time as this. Lord, thank you that the president prioritizes prayer," he said.
Turner's prayer led to strong reactions on social media from the president's critics.
Author Jennifer Valent wrote on the social platform X: "This brash taking of the Lord's name in vain by claiming His favorable anointing over a man with an unrepentantly blackened soul will never cease to make me feel physically ill. Nor should it."
READ MORE:Revealed: Wall St. giant erupted into intense clashes over Epstein's 'heinous crimes'
The X account @AntiToxicPeoplewrote: "What an insane cult. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sick. The last line is the best."
Journalist Michael McGough said: "What was that line about God not being mocked?"
Writer Paul Hughes-Cromwicksaid:"Interesting that the Father would anoint someone who abuses woman, lies with nearly every word, and is fond of bullying people of color. Must have been a slow day for anointing. Oh, and the Antichrist prioritizes prayer? Well, that's news!"
The account @RepublicansAgainstTrump reacted to the video and wrote: "It's a cult."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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an 8 25
Next to his long-running radio show, Dennis Prager, now 77, is best known for PragerU — which isn't an actual university, but rather, a program of far-right propaganda videos launched in 2009. One of PragerU's admirers is Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's ultra-MAGA public schools superintendent. And according to CNN, Walters is now using PragerU to screen applicants for ideological purity and to make sure teachers in the state's public schools aren't "woke."
The screening process, CNN's Sunlen Serfaty reports, gets underway on Friday, August 15.
"Teachers from 'liberal' states who have relocated to Oklahoma and are seeking to work there must take a controversial new assessment, given for the first time today, that 'keeps away woke indoctrinators,' according to Oklahoma’s top education official," Serfaty explains. "Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's superintendent for public instruction, told CNN that if applicants do not pass the test, they will not earn a teaching certificate to be able to teach in public schools in the state this school year, which begins for some Oklahoma districts on Monday."
READ MORE: This single sentence will fast-track Trump to a prison cell
Serfaty adds, "The decision to use the assessment, developed by PragerU, a conservative media company whose teaching materials are now approved for use in public schools in ten U.S. states, opens a new front in the education culture wars just days before schools are to open their doors."
PragerU's materials, according to the CNN reporter, have "been embraced by the political right for offering curriculums that champion ideas aligned with the Make America Great Again movement."
According to Serfaty, Walters' "multiple-choice assessment for teachers" contains "around 50 questions." One proposed question, Serfaty reports, "deals with gender — asking teachers to select from a series of multiple-choice answers which chromosome pairs determine biological sex."
"Another question asks why freedom of religion is important to America's identity," Serafty notes. "Other questions include asking for the first three words of the Constitution, naming the two chambers of the U.S. Congress, and identifying the number of U.S. senators…. The test specifically evaluates educators on areas including their understanding of 'American exceptionalism' and their 'grasp of fundamental biological differences between boys and girls,' Walters said."
READ MORE: 'Financial ruin': Trump's White House is terrified of losing this lawsuit
*Read the full CNN article at this link.
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The president of the rightwing Claremont Institute and another senior Claremont official are both closely involved with the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”, and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy.
The revelations emerge from documents gathered in public records requests, including emails between several senior members of SACR: Claremont president Ryan P Williams; its director of state coalitions and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor; and others including former soap manufacturer and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood.
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Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo has close ties with ‘dissident right’ magazine
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The trove also contains an “internal” SACR “mission statement” with a far more radical edge than the public “vision” now recorded on the organization’s website.
That document speaks of recruiting a “brotherhood” who will “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise”; whose “objectives” include to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime”.
The document does not indicate that such “renewal” will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the US constitution.
Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont – the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 – the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics.
The Guardian contacted Ryan Williams, Claremont’s president, for comment on his involvement in SACR, and on the extent of Claremont’s ties to the organization.
In an email he said: “While the Claremont Institute acted as a fiscal sponsor to help the Society for American Civic Renewal establish itself as an incorporated 501(c)(10), that was the end of any corporate collaboration between the Claremont Institute and SACR.”
He added: “As a founding board member of SACR in my personal capacity, obviously I think that a fraternal order dedicated to civic and cultural renaissance and rooted in community, virtue, and wisdom is a very good thing.”
Williams also confirmed that he continues to serve as a SACR board member.
The Guardian also contacted Scott Yenor and Boise State University for comment.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said of the SACR documents: “Their planned regime is obviously far from a multiracial democracy. The documents appear to be describing a religious autocracy.”
Laura K Field, a writer, political theorist and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a Washington thinktank, said the documents expressed “extreme Christian nationalism” where “a particular kind of Christianity should dominate as an ideal, and that it should dominate permanently”.
Yenor and SACR
Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University and simultaneously the senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute.
His Claremont appointment came in February 2023. Media reports at that time indicated that Yenor would be working closely with the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and DeSantis-aligned legislators; when the job was announced the governor’s wife, Casey Desantis, tweeted: “Thrilled to welcome Scott Yenor from the Claremont Institute to his new home in Tallahassee.”
Reporting in the New York Times last month put Yenor at the center of a network of activists tied to Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits to wage an “anti-DEI crusade” against diversity, equity, and inclusion measures in educational institutions, corporations and public agencies.
Unreported until now is Yenor’s place as an ideological and organizational leader in SACR, and the radical nature of that organization’s aims as understood by he and other core members.
SACR is structured as a 501(c)(10) body under the section of US tax law that provides nonprofit status for organizations “with a fraternal purpose”.
In 2020 the umbrella organization was incorporated in Indiana with Charles Haywood as principal, and the first local lodge was established in Dallas, Texas. Subsequently, three local lodges were established in Idaho: in Boise and Couer d’Alene in 2021, and Moscow in 2022.
Idaho company filings show that Scott Yenor became president and the only listed principal officer of the Boise lodge on 5 August 2023.
Secrecy at SACR
But emails indicate that he had taken a board role in the national organization even earlier than that date.
On 25 January 2023, lawyer Clyde Taylor – now at Wagenmaker Law but until 2019 an associate at the rightwing litigation firm the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty – wrote to Haywood and Skyler Kressin about their trademark application for the SACR logo.
Haywood forwarded the lawyer’s email to Yenor, Claremont president Williams, and Nathanial “Nate” Fischer, copying in Kressin on two addresses including one hosted at SACR’s sacr.us domain.
“We should probably have a board meeting to discuss this, finances, etc,” Haywood wrote in response to Yenor, suggesting Yenor and the others he copied in were members of that body.
Haywood added a suggestion on encrypted messaging services, indicating an imperative of secrecy inside SACR. “I vote we create a new Signal group and have a board meeting. Any takers?” he said. The group was then set up.
The Guardian reported last August that on his website Haywood has repeatedly envisioned serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” which might at some point find itself in conflict with the federal government.
Haywood has also expressed a desire to recruit “shooters” to help defend the “extended, quite sizeable, compound” he occupies on the western fringe of Carmel, Indiana. According to documents lodged with the city of Carmel, the latest construction project on Haywood’s compound is a six-bedroom faux-classical mansion with a central library room that occupies both of the building’s floors.
He has funded SACR through his Howdy Doody Good Times foundation to the tune of at least $50,000, according to 2021 and 2022 tax filings, along with at least $50,000 to the Claremont Institute.
In the same report, the Guardian revealed that Kressin, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, appears to serve a key administrative role in SACR. Idaho and Texas company records show that Kressin incorporated lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dallas; serves as a director of the Coeur d’Alene and Dallas lodges; and was named as the principal officer of the parent organization on its 2020-2021 tax return.
The Guardian reported last September that Fischer, a Claremont Lincoln fellow, was president of SACR’s Dallas lodge and owns a firm that has won hundreds of thousands of dollars in government ammunition contracts. He also owns another firm that helped produce videos in which Claremont chairman Thomas Klingenstein exhorted rightwingers to join in a “cold civil war” against “woke communists”.
The Guardian contacted Nate Fischer, Skyler Kressin and Charles Haywood for comment.
Neither Kressin nor Haywood responded. Fischer did not respond directly, but on Friday morning on X, formerly Twitter, he left a 900-word post offering some material from internal SACR documents, admitting that the Guardian’s reporting had led him to the conclusion that “this is a good time to share more about the organization.
SACR’s mission: ‘dominance’ and ‘authority’ in an ‘new aligned regime’
Another document suggests reasons that SACR’s leadership might want to avoid scrutiny: in internal discussions. “Civic renewal” appears to equate to regime change in America.
The document is one of two Yenor attached to a 27 April 2021 email, sent from his Boise State email address to a personal email address. The email text simply says “print”.
The SACR document contains two versions of the organization’s “mission statement” – one “public” and one “internal” – along with a list of “objectives” for the organization.
Its authenticity as a working document is indicated by the current “vision” articulated on SACR’s website, which currently features what appears to be a reworked version of the “public” mission statement.
The 2021 document envisions “a vigorous civic renewal that will reflect the past while facing the future”, while the website sets out a “new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future”. Each version promises to “reclaim a humane vision of society”.
A harder-edged “internal” mission statement, however, stands in stark contrast to these anodyne public presentations.
It first announces: “Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.”
The document says the organization’s founders are “un-hyphenated Americans, and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.”
It says: “We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance” of their beliefs.
In terms of recruiting, the document says: “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”
Further down, the document specifies five organizational “objectives” that encompass nepotistic business practices, the grooming of new and emerging “elites” within SACR, and, experts say, an apparently insurrectionary political project.
The first objective is to “identify and provide formation for local elites … capable of exercising authority and who are aligned with our goal of complete civic renewal”, and warning that “concrete temporal achievements, not furthering intellectual discussion”.
The second objective is to help those local elites build “fraternal networks which will advance both the members of those networks and our collective goals” including “direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business”.
The third objectives to coordinate across the “fraternal networks” to bring “political awareness” to matters such as “hiring and promotion; award of contracts; internal policies and procedures; and leadership succession”.
A fifth objective is to “collect, curate and document a list of potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime”, who would likely not be founding participants, but “ … men who grow up in the system”.
Asked what an “aligned regime” might look like, Williams, the Claremont Institute’s president, wrote: “It would, more likely than not, be some form of the US constitutional order, but with much higher fidelity to that order before it was corrupted and subverted by modern progressivism.”
Perhaps ominously, a fourth objective is to “defend fraternal networks, our own and allies, against attacks by those opposed to civic renewal, and strongly deter such attacks”, though no details are offered on what form this defense or deterrence might take.
Although the document makes reference to America’s founding, Field, the Niskanen fellow, said that it contradicted its spirit.
“George Washington, Jefferson, [and] Madison all embraced religious pluralism very explicitly, and the constitution reflects that,” she said.
“This is anti-constitutional, and I think many, many faithful Christians would say it’s anti-Christian.”
Beirich, the extremism expert, said the mission statement and objectives were “essentially a stealth plan to replace everything about the current government with a religious autocracy”, with the addition of an effort to “fashion young people behind closed doors for the eventual takeover of the regime, right?”
“They’re going to grow them up as Christian autocrats.”
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08/08/2025
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is promoting a CNN interview with Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson in which Wilson asserts that women should not have the right to vote. Hegseth boosted the interview on social media, adding “All of Christ for All of Life.”
Notorious for publishing a book downplaying the evils of slavery, Wilson publicly stakes out extreme Christian nationalist positions. As People For the American Way President Svante Myrick noted in a recent column for The Hill, in the kind of Christian nation Wilson wants the U.S. to be, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other non-Christians would not be allowed to hold public office — not even liberal Christians. There would be no public expressions of other faiths allowed, because “the public spaces would belong to Christ.” He would like sodomy to be a felony in all 50 states and have the Apostles’ Creed inserted into the U.S. Constitution.
Hegseth, who seems intent on purging women from the top ranks of the military, belongs to a Wilson-affiliated church in Tennessee, and he has attended the new church Wilson has planted in DC to boost his influence over the conservative Christians who work in the Trump administration.
The Idaho-based Wilson already exerts influence nationally through the Canon Press publishing house, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of “classical” Christian academies, and a cadre of far-right “theobros” like Joel Webbon who promote a similar patriarchal Christian nationalist ideology.
Hegseth has begun hosting monthly Christian prayer services during working hours at the Pentagon. Brooks Potteiger, the pastor of his Wilson-affiliated church in Tennessee, was the main speaker. Joshua Haymes, another pastor at the church, has claimed that the Founding Fathers had not envisioned “mosques being erected” and publicly asserted, "The First Amendment was designed to ensure that every American can be any kind of CHRISTIAN he wants. It was not designed to ensure every American has the right to publicly worship demons. False religion can and should be banned from public life."
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Kenneth Copeland Calls On Angels To 'Pull Those Devils Down That Are Attacking Our President'
07/29/2025
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The Christian nationalist conspiracy theory program "FlashPoint" held a live event in Fort Worth, Texas, last week timed to coincide with televangelist Kenneth Copeland's Southwest Believers' Convention.
FlashPoint, which originated as a program on Copeland's Victory Channel network in 2020 in order to rally conservative Christians to support the reelection campaign of President Donald Trump, has since become an independent entity under the ownership of its host, Gene Bailey. But Bailey and Copeland remain close, as demonstrated by the fact that Copeland was given the opening speaking slot during Friday night's event.
And remaining true to FlashPoint's mission of relentlessly providing spiritual support for Trump, Copeland opened the event by calling on angels to "pull those devils down that are attacking our president."
"Thank you, [Archangel] Michael, you are the guardian of this nation," Copeland declared. "Now pull those devils down that are attacking our president. Pull those devils down that have caused problems in presidents and Congress."
"Because of that knowledge, now at the midterms; whoa," he continued. "Now that we know where the attack is and we know where the victory is and we know it's right here in this book [the Bible,] praise God forevermore. And now we know who to talk to."
"[Archangel] Gabriel, you take the messages to the people," Copeland proclaimed. "Michael, you guard that president. You watch over him. I know you were watching over him when he [almost] got killed. You say [it was] God. Well, yeah, it was God, but it was that angel because he's responsible for him. When he became president of the United States, Michael was responsible for him, to watch over him, to take care of him. And now, glory to God, Father, we thank you, now we have the proper weapon. Now we can have a Flashpoint in the heavenlies!"
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07/22/2025
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Dan Fisher is a right-wing activist, Christian nationalist pastor, and leader in modern-day Black Robe Regiment movement which works to mobilize pastors to get their congregations more involved in politics.
Recently, Fisher appeared on the "Uncommon Sense In Current Times" program where he declared that the government created by the Founding Fathers has failed and the only logical solution is for United States to dissolve itself so that those living in red states and blue states can separate themselves from one another and "do their thing."
"I think we've already lost the republic," Fisher said. "I think that trying to hold together the blue states and the red states that hold diametrically opposed views on some of the core issues of life. ... These are differences about when does life begin? Should you have the right to murder your baby up to 30 days after it's born if you decide you don't want it? Does an individual have the right to self-defense and can own firearms? Do you have the freedom to preach what you believe, regardless of what others think about it? Those are the issues and we're diametrically opposed. You can't reconcile those diametrically opposed views. So, in my opinion, we're holding together a make-believe republic that probably died many decades ago."
"Until we're willing to admit the obvious and then deal with it, we're eventually going to be pulled into some kind of horrific conflict," he continued. "Look at what happens in cities like LA. Look at these fruitcakes that go and shoot these Minnesota representatives, people or members of government, just because they don't agree with them. It's ridiculous. And look at the rhetoric. Look at how [MN Gov.]Tim Walz speaks at his rallies. First of all, he's a buffoon in my opinion, but it's obvious that the rift is there, but we ignore it because we're trying to hold together something that I think has already gone by the wayside."
"Let's admit the obvious and stop trying to live under the same form of governance that won't serve both groups," Fisher asserted. "I think we've probably already lost it and we need to admit that and create, as the Declaration of Independence says, a new form of government that protects our rights."
Fisher said that he is often asked what he thinks would most surprise the Founding Fathers about the nation today and his response is that "we haven't had a revolution."
"I think they would be surprised that we're trying to live 250 years later under the same form of governance that they created two and a half centuries earlier," he declared. "They would look at our present situation and say, 'Good grief, you guys really think that you can live under a republican form of government with these diametrically opposed groups? No. You need to get away from those people and let them do their thing and you do your thing.'"
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said release, then 180 then shut down hse
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During a press conference on Tuesday morning, July 22, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) announced that he was cutting the week's legislative activities short and sending lawmakers in order avoid a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. And he blamed Democrats, accusing them of "endless efforts to politicize the Epstein investigation" and adding, "We're not going to play political games with this."
Johnson's announcement drew plenty of criticism online, with many social media users accusing him of running interference for President Donald Trump.
Mother Jones' Kiera Butler, in a biting article, argues that far-right "Christian nationalism" is influencing that decision and others from the House speaker.
READ MORE: The guy who really controls the MAGA cult isn't Donald Trump
"On Tuesday," Butler explains, "House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released…. It's impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson's about-face, but it's worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation — a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take 'dominion' over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a 'profound influence' on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year."
Butler adds, "It's also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files."
The Mother Jones reporter notes, however, that Wallnau isn't the only far-right evangelical "Christian nationalist influencer" who is closely allied with MAGA Republicans.
"Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump's innocence —but from a different perspective," Butler observes. "Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau — instead, he's a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist Millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the U.S. Constitution."
READ MORE:Fox host quickly ends interview with Senate Republican after he freezes mid-sentence
Butler continues, "Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and (Vice President JD) Vance has socialized with members of the movement as well."
Webbon, according to Butler, isn't shy about expressing "antisemitic views."
In a November 2, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter, Webbon wrote, "I hate Judaism, but I love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity. If you really want to know my full thoughts on the modern nation/state of Israel, you can watch the new series I recently published with @BonifaceOption…. Christ Is King."
Webbon told Mother Jones he stands by "everything I've said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil."
READ MORE:'Could hear Donald say it': Epstein's brother says this line reveals closeness with Trump
*Kiera Butler's full article for Mother Jones is available at this link.
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Most days, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Bible Belt, the old sanctuary at Christ Lutheran Church sits empty. Decades ago, it was home to a congregation of 3,000 people. By the late 1990s, that number had dwindled to seven. At the turn of the millennium, Jody Silliker, a young minister fresh out of seminary, was sent to shutter the downtown church, a mile from the state legislature in Harrisburg.
Instead, she immersed herself in the deindustrialized community, meeting unhoused families, the unemployed, migrant workers, sex workers and other low-wage laborers. Just a few years after welfare reform eviscerated the social safety net and proclaimed the era of “personal responsibility,” Silliker retrofitted the church annex and opened a free medical clinic.
Earlier this spring, we visited Christ Lutheran. We’ve been on the road since April, meeting with leaders from poor and dispossessed communities in this country and sharing notes from our new book, “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty.” As the Trump administration abducts our neighbors off the streets and eviscerates everything from Medicaid to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, we want to better understand what it will take to ignite a democratic awakening in this country. How, in the words of theologian Howard Thurman, the “masses of people, with their backs constantly up against the wall” in Donald Trump’s America, can push back together.
A Battle for the Bible in the Battleground State of Pennsylvania
In small towns, as well as cities like Harrisburg, there is an underreported but epic struggle being waged for the hearts and minds of everyday people, with ripple effects for the entire nation.
In small towns, as well as cities like Harrisburg, there is an underreported but epic struggle being waged for the hearts and minds of everyday people, with ripple effects for the entire nation. And the church — its pulpit, pews, and survival programs — is a critical staging ground for that struggle. There are Christians who are preaching and practicing the ministry of Jesus, the son of God, who himself was unhoused and undocumented and sided with the poor, the sick, the indebted, the incarcerated and the immigrant, while decrying the idolatry of tyrants.
And then there are Christian nationalists, whose religion of empire is more akin to the worship of Caesar than the Jesus of the scriptures.
Today, Christian nationalists are attempting to transform our democracy into their dominion and remake (or simply dismantle) the government in the image of Project 2025. Earlier this spring, even before Trump’s disastrous “Big Beautiful Bill” passed Congress, Paul Dans, the architect of Project 2025, marveled that the new administration’s policies were unfurling on a scale and scope beyond his “wildest dreams.” Now, those same Christian nationalists are gutting access to Medicaid, banning reproductive freedom and gender-affirming health care, criminalizing the unhoused and scapegoating immigrant communities in the courts and Congress, even though the scriptures decry such actions. “Woe to you who deprive the rights of the poor, making women and homeless children your prey,” laments the prophet Isaiah.
Thankfully, there are brave faith leaders standing firmly in the breach, refusing to let the Bible and the church be hijacked by extremists. At Christ Lutheran, Jody Silliker’s successor, Pastor Matthew Best, is now following in her footsteps. Just a few miles from Life Center, an evangelical megachurch that hosted Elon Musk late in the 2024 election season, Pastor Best continues to transform his resplendent church into a community mission. On the second floor, volunteer dentists pull rotten teeth and perform root canals, cost-free. In the basement, nurses treat emergencies, mental health crises and chronic health issues. More than 50 national flags hang from the ceiling, each representing the nationality of a patient. Since 2018, 100,000 people have walked under those flags to receive medical care. Nobody is asked for payment, documentation or insurance.
In early July, right after Trump signed his Big Beautiful Bill, Pastor Best preached a sermon reminding his multiracial, multilingual, intergenerational and predominantly poor congregation that they were not alone in feeling like exiles in their own land. As he put it,
“Jeremiah 29 is a letter written to people in exile — or about to be. It’s sent to those who have lost everything: their homes, their land, their freedom, their safety. It’s sent to those who feel like strangers in a strange land, people who are trying to make sense of how everything they depended on has fallen apart. At the time of this letter, some of the people of Judah have already been taken into exile in Babylon. They were the first wave — the leaders, artisans, and young people deported when Babylon invaded. They are trying to build a life in a strange land. But back in Jerusalem, others are still there — living in a fragile illusion of normal. The temple still stands. A king still rules. But it won’t last. More exile is coming.”
To bring his point home, Pastor Best translated the Bible into what he called “Harrisburg English”:
“This is what the Lord says to all of you living in exile — the ones just barely scraping by, the ones pushed to the margins, the ones wondering if God has left.
‘I see you. I haven’t abandoned you. Build your homes — even if they’re one-room apartments. Grow food — even if it’s a tomato plant in a pot. Love your families — whatever they look like. Create beauty in the middle of struggle. Pray for your city — even when it feels broken. Don’t check out. Don’t give up. For in its healing, you will find your own. Don’t listen to those who say things are fine. Don’t trust those who profit off your pain. Because I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘Plans for welfare and not for harm. Plans to give you a future and a hope. When you cry out, I will listen. When you search for me with your whole heart, you will find me. Not in the halls of Congress. Not behind gated communities. But in free clinics. In shared meals. In prayers whispered through tears. In justice rolling down like waters. I will gather you. I will bring you home.’
“That, beloved, is the gospel in exile.”
Pastor Best’s bottom-up ministry is mirrored by others in that area. His friends Tammy Rojas and Matthew Rosing, who have survived homelessness, incarceration and low wages, are commissioned ministers with the Freedom Church of the Poor, a spiritual home for grassroots organizers founded during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are also longtime leaders of Put People First PA!, which organizes poor people across the state of Pennsylvania to defend Medicaid and demand universal health care.
In 2019, Rojas and Rosing led an effort to stop the corporate capture and closureof St. Joseph Hospital in Lancaster, an hour southwest of Harrisburg. For the couple, the fight couldn’t have been more personal: Rojas had been born at that hospital and Rosing received lifesaving care there on multiple occasions. Ultimately, despite their efforts, St. Joseph was closed.
After that defeat, they redoubled their efforts to organize within the region’s abandoned communities. Today, in the wake of Trump’s historic Medicaid cuts and as Rojas and Rosing anticipate the closure of more hospitals, they continue to recruit new members and allies for their “Healthcare is a Human Right” campaign at feeding programs and free clinics like the one at Christ Lutheran. Around their necks, they all too appropriately wear stoles that read: “Fight Poverty, Not the Poor” and “Jesus Was Homeless.”
Dominionism in the “City on the Hill”
Rojas and Rosing face formidable opposition in the region. In Lancaster, where they live, Christian nationalists are working hard to amass power. In recent years, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) has set up shop in that historically Anabaptist area. Once a fringe movement of the Christian Right, NAR has quietly built a sophisticated and well-funded national operation over the last couple decades. In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as the “greatest threat to American democracy that most people have never heard of.”
NAR churches in Lancaster have proliferated, taking over, or “steeplejacking,” historic and dying churches. On first glance, such local church activity may appear quite benign. NAR leaders provide food and other material and spiritual aid through their ministries, artfully deploying the language of diversity and encouraging people to “come as you are.” Some families attend services just to sing lively renditions of contemporary Christian music. Indeed, many people join those churches, which have become de facto community centers, for the most human of needs: connection and fellowship.
Stick around long enough, though, and you’ll discover an institutional pipeline suffused with toxic theology that funnels people toward Christian nationalism. In their churches, food banks, recovery services and community meetings, local NAR leaders offer individual and highly spiritualized explanations for this country’s systemic crises of poverty, homelessness, hunger and addiction. The solution to these and other social problems, they insist, is fidelity to a dominionist God and a theology eager to bring Christian nationalism to, and keep it in, power. Forget science, reasonable public policy, or the separation of church and state. In meetings with more dedicated church activists, these same leaders invoke Biblical imagery to proclaim spiritual warfare against “demonic” influences in our government, schools and family structures — that is, diverse expressions of religious, political or gender identity.
This far-right movement melds its grassroots activity in south-central Pennsylvania with a broader campaign to influence a new generation of county and state politicians, law enforcement officials, businesspeople and educators. In the years ahead, Christian nationalists like them, who now command power at the highest reaches of the federal government, will only intensify their activities across the country. Indeed, a number of figures within Trump’s cabinet and his coterie of advisers, as well as congressional leaders like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, have close ties to the Christian nationalist ecosystem. These are the same politicians who championed Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, including its historic tax cuts for the wealthy; increased military, detention and immigration enforcement spending; and death-dealing cuts to the social safety net.
A Moral Resurrection in the Age of Trump?
To fight back, we need to forge new alliances across racial, religious, geographic and partisan lines. Certainly, today’s ongoing political crisis should remind concerned Christians that they can’t sit out the battle for the Bible and should remind the rest of us that we can’t concede religion to extremists. Christian nationalists weaponize the Good Book because they believe they have a monopoly on morality and can distort the word of God with impunity.
The policy effects of their theological distortions will continue to be devastating. In early June, for example, the Minnesota state legislature voted to strip health care from undocumented immigrants, despite having majority control by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. To rationalize his vote, Republican Rep. Isaac Schultz blithely argued: “The role of the church — the role of people of faith — is to care for our neighbors. Yes…But not in this instance, specifically.”
In scripture after scripture, Jesus condemns the violent policies of empire, which enriches itself on the backs of the poor.
Clearly, Shultz has not studied the Bible closely enough. If he had, he would have discovered that the Bible’s 2,000 passages about poverty and justice constitute perhaps the most important mass media ever produced that had something good to say about immigrants, the poor, the sick and otherwise marginalized people. In scripture after scripture, Jesus condemns the violent policies of empire, which enriches itself on the backs of the poor. Instead, he proclaims the Good News of Jubilee: A vision of social and economic emancipation for the entirety of humanity.
In this country, the liberatory heart of Christianity, among other religious traditions, has always been a source of strength for popular social movements. In every previous era, there were people who grounded their freedom struggles in the holy word and spirit of God. Today, the work of Pastors Best, Rojas and Rosing in Pennsylvania’s Bible Belt underscores the still-vital role of religion in advancing a more just and vibrant democracy in the Trump era. In Harrisburg and Lancaster, these Christians are building a bottom-up and deeply moral movement that recognizes the material, spiritual and emotional needs of everyday people.
“The church speaks to birth, death, and resurrection,” Pastor Best explained while giving us a tour of Christ Lutheran’s free medical clinic. “This is the resurrection.”
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critics of far-right Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters often attack him as a highly performative MAGA troll. Walters' antics include purchasing Donald Trump-themed Bibles for classrooms and promoting the false, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
But Slate's Molly Olmstead, in an article published on July 22, emphasizes that Walters' buffoonish qualities don't make him any less dangerous. And she emphasizes that his plan to screen education applicants for MAGA purity shouldn't be taken lightly.
"This month," Olmstead explains, "Oklahoma's education department announced an innovative new approach to screening aspiring teachers in the state: any applicants from 'woke' states would need to first pass an ideology test created by the right-wing group PragerU. It was an announcement that seemed engineered to draw national news coverage and inflame liberal audiences. Under this plan, teachers from states with 'progressive education policies' would be tested on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, and 'the fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.'"
READ MORE: This White House lie shows they know Trump is in trouble
Olmstead continues, "The screening is guaranteed to test teachers for a deeply MAGA-inflected understanding of U.S. history, government, and society: PragerU, a right-wing group with a stated mission of countering leftism in education, is already known for its white nationalist-adjacent content for schoolchildren."
PragerU is the brainchild of Dennis Prager, a far-right talk radio host and Trump supporter.
"Walters' proposals for the school system have included a mandate that all public schools teach the Bible; a plan to collect children's immigration status when they register for public school; and new social studies standards proposals that would have high school students 'identify discrepancies in 2020 election results,'" Olmstead observes. "Each of these announcements solidified Walters' reputation as a relentless attention-seeker, calculating every action from his office to appeal to the power players of the MAGA movement…. These stunts have paid off. Walters has been profiled in outlets all over the country, and he has become the face of the Christian nationalist campaigns into public education."
The MAGA Republican's stunts, Olmstead argues, raise the question: "Is Walters all superficiality, a media-obsessive without the stamina or standing for real, transformative politics? Or is he actually capable of remaking Oklahoma's schools — and signaling what MAGA could bring to schools across the country?"
READ MORE:GOP sen tells constituent he’s 'not obligated to listen' after she’s denied care over marital status
"In sign of just how bizarre American politics have become in this second Trump era," Olmstead warns, "Walters may be a bit of both. As traditional institutions and procedures buckle under MAGA politics, Walters has proven that with the right national climate, slapdash own-the-lib pronouncements can become serious policy. He's a performer, but he also happens to be a major change-maker…. It may be tempting not to take people like Walters seriously, but he has proven that with enough volume, some gimmicks stick."
READ MORE:'Errand boy': Trump official reveals what president talks about during nightly 1 AM calls
*Molly Olmstead's full article for Slate is available at this link (subscription required).
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POlitical operative David Barton held up a thick Bible with years of wear on its dark brown cover and proclaimed its pages put Protestant Christianity at the center of the country’s very foundation.
*This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.
“This is actually printed by the official printer of Congress,” said Barton, a best-selling author and influential far-right Christian nationalist. Barton has spent the last 40 years arguing that the separation of church and state is a myth — and has built a multimillion-dollar media and lobbying operation to influence public opinion and shape laws around the belief that the United States was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation.
At [VID] in April, Barton appeared before the Texas House education committee and testified in favor of legislation, since signed into law, requiring that posters of the Ten Commandments be placed inside every classroom in the state’s nearly 9,100 public schools by September. With him, Barton brought a small collection of books he claims were foundational to the country’s public education system until the 20th Century.
Barton isn’t just a primary pitchman for the Ten Commandments law in Texas, his home state, an investigation by The 74 reveals. His fingerprints appear on 28 bills that have cropped up before the legislatures in 18 states this year. A data analysis of the bills exposes how their language, structure and requirements are inherently identical. In dozens of instances, they match model legislation pitched by Barton verbatim.
At the Texas hearing, Barton’s eyes fixated on the cover of the rare 1782 Aitken Bible.
“It also says it’s ‘a neat Edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools,’” he continued. “It has the Ten Commandments.”
In actuality, Barton lifted language from Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken calling on Congress to sanction a Bible that could also be for “the use of schools.” Christian nationalists have for years falsely claimed the Revolutionary-era printing includes a government promotion of Christianity. Barton has long been accused of taking historical quotes out of context, and in 2012, the Christian publisher of his bestselling book on Thomas Jefferson ceased its production because “basic truths just were not there.”
Texas is one of three states in the last two years to pass a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in public schools. The mandates are part of a coordinated nationwide effort to overturn a 1980 Supreme Court ruling forbidding Kentucky from requiring Ten Commandments displays in classrooms.
As the influence of Barton and the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement find favor in state legislatures, the White House and with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson — who cites Barton as a “profound influence” — the lobbyists and lawmakers behind the state Ten Commandments bills told The 74 they’re confident the current Supreme Court’s conservative super-majority is on their side, too.
The analysis by The 74 reveals how language in virtually every state bill matches model legislation created by Project Blitz, a Barton-steered Christian “bill mill” that’s long flooded statehouseswith legislative templates that promote Christianity in public schools, legalize discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and restrict abortion.
A dozen bills specify, for example, that the Ten Commandments displays must be hung in a “conspicuous” location. Another 11 specify they should be at least 11-by-14 inches in size. Nearly all of the bills — 25 — mandate a Christian version of the religious and ethical directives be displayed as a “poster or framed.” The 74 tallied 96 instances where bills introduced this year match Project Blitz’s model legislation, including template bills to require the Ten Commandments or the phrase “In God We Trust” in public schools.
Among the architects of Project Blitz is the Barton-founded influence machine, WallBuilders. The flurry of state bills were introduced after WallBuilders — the name is an Old Testament reference to rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem — convened its annual national conference of state legislators in November where the model legislation was promoted.
After Louisiana passed its first-in-the-nation Ten Commandments law last year, new mandates approved in Arkansas and Texas this year follow the same Project Blitz template.
‘No such thing as separation of God and government’
Texas state Sen. Mayes Middleton is the joint author of the state’s new Ten Commandments law and the author of another new law permitting a daily prayer period and Bible readings in public schools statewide. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed both in June.
Middleton, whose district southeast of Houston includes his hometown of Galveston, acknowledged Barton’s influence over not just his own legislative agenda, but Texas’ broader conservative movement. Barton previously served as vice chair of the state Republican Party.
“Of course, WallBuilders is very supportive of the bill,” Middleton told The 74, as were the conservative legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and the First Liberty Institute. “And, of course, all of their missions is to advance religious liberties, especially in the public realm where there is no such thing as separation of God and government.”
Founded by Barton in 1988, WallBuilders promotes theories — discredited by serious scholars — about Christianity’s central role in the formation of the United States through its podcasts, books and a museum with “one of the largest private collections of United States historical documents.”
Through WallBuilders’ lobbying arm, the Pro-Family Legislative Network, Barton leads direct outreach to lawmakers and educators at its annual conferences at a four-star waterfront resort in suburban Dallas. It was at this gathering where Indiana Rep. J.D. Prescott, a Republican, got the idea for Ten Commandments legislation in his state, he told The 74.
Prescott proposed a bill requiring a “durable poster or framed picture” of the commandments in each library and classroom at all public schools statewide. The legislation ultimately failed to garner support. Bills in other states also failed to gain traction, including in South Dakota where the bill’s critics — including some Republicans — said a government mandate was the wrong way to spread Christianity and ran afoul of the Constitution.
“Our early common school system was really designed to teach biblical principles in the Bible, so it’s just getting back to that point,” said Prescott, who described himself as a “student of history.”
The Pro-Family Legislative conference offers lawmakers scholarships and discounted hotel rates to attend the event. In at least one instance, a New Hampshire state lawmakerfiled a disclosure form reporting that he had received $859.47 from the Pro-Family Legislative Network, including $500 reimbursing him for air fare, to attend the November 2024 conference.
Prescott told The 74, “I learned a lot of it at a WallBuilders conference hosted by David Barton. They’ve got a great conference for legislators down in Texas every November. I did look at the WallBuilders model legislation and it’s a good place to start.”
Not everyone’s Ten Commandments
Experts said the bills seek to do more than require “durable” Ten Commandments posters in every public school classroom. The campaign is part of a broader, well-organized and deep-pocketed assault, they argue, on the separation of church and state.
Although WallBuilders isn’t required to disclose its donors, the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy analyzed federal tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service to bring its finances into focus. In 2021, WallBuilders reported $5.9 million in revenue and $6.3 million in total assets.
The group relies heavily on donor-advised giving, a tax loophole that allows anonymous supporters across the political spectrum to contribute to contentious causes without scrutiny. For example, donor-advised funds have been exploited by far-right activists to leverage global campaigns against the civil rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, according to a 2023 investigation by openDemocracy.
Mercury One, a nonprofit founded by high-profile conservative pundit and media personality Glenn Beck, is both a WallBuilders donor and primary sponsor of Barton’s annual Pro-Family Legislative Conference to brief elected officials “on pressing issues from a constitutional perspective.”
Barton, who didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, describes himself as a self-taught historian and the owner of the largest private collection of historical documents about the Founding Fathers. His critics pan the graduate of the Oral Roberts University as a discredited pseudohistorian and propagandist.
Barton is “the granddaddy of Christian nationalist disinformation,” constitutional attorney Andrew Seidel, who serves as vice president of strategic communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told The 74.
John Fea, an American history professor and history department chair at Messiah University, a private evangelical Christian institution in Pennsylvania, accused Barton of cherry-picking historical information to present a misleading portrayal of the past, one that bolsters his own present-day political agenda.
“This is clearly an attempt by Christian nationalists to try to advance their own version of what America should be,” Fea said, noting that even as historians challenge Barton, he’s amassed influence among Republican lawmakers interested in leveraging a distorted accounting of history for political gain.
“Barton provides that history for these lawmakers. It adds a certain depth, even though it’s hollow.”
Darcy Hirsh, the senior director of government relations and advocacy at the nonprofit National Council for Jewish Women, said the Ten Commandments laws present an attack on “the strict wall of separation” between church and state.
“Any efforts to perpetuate the falsehood that the United States is a Christian nation is something that we find deeply alarming,” Hirsh said. Requiring a protestant Christian version of the Ten Commandments in schools, she said, is “exclusionary and coercive” to children from diverse backgrounds.
“A Protestant interpretation of the Ten Commandments is different than the Jewish interpretation of the Ten Commandments, in fact, they are numbered differently,” she said. Constitutional protections separating church and state, she said, are critical to the country’s democratic society.
“It’s that protection that has really allowed the Jewish community and other minority faith communities to flourish in the U.S.”
The laws successfully passed in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas now face lawsuits from parents alleging they violate the separation of church and state. The issue could soon appear again before the nation’s highest court. In June, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, among the nation’s most conservative, struck down Louisiana’s Ten Commandments display mandate, finding it “plainly unconstitutional.”
Parents with diverse religious identities are being backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State in challenging the laws. In a complaint filed in Arkansas, parents allege students will be “unconstitutionally coerced into religious observance” and “pressured to suppress their personal religious beliefs.”
Fea, the evangelical historian, told The 74 the far-right campaign isn’t about the Ten Commandments’ place in the nation’s founding but about advancing the influence of Christianity in society.
“They’re using this historical argument to disguise the fact that they believe that somehow — and I don’t know how this happens, by osmosis or whatever — a student sitting in a classroom where the Ten Commandments is displayed will somehow buy into those ideals and values and become more Christian,” he said.
‘The hostility is gone’
At the Texas House education committee hearing in April, Barton held up a second book. This one was much smaller than the first, but just as old and, Barton testified, just as significant.
Barton lectured the Republican-controlled state legislature on The New England Primer, a widely used Colonial-era reading text. The book, he said, drilled first graders with 43 questions about the Ten Commandments.
Then he introduced a third book, and a fourth.
“The courts have pointed to the Ten Commandments as the reason we have all types of laws,” Barton testified. “So there’s a lot of history and tradition for that document that’s not there for other documents.”
Barton’s prop-focused presentation isn’t just scripted — it’s well rehearsed. This year, the 71-year-old has traveled across the country with his books and a small team of collaborators to spread the gospel of Christian nationalism. Like the bills before the state legislatures, Barton’s speech was replicated again and again.
As Barton testified on the Ten Commandment bills nationally, legislative sponsors routinely parroted his talking points, not just about Christianity’s role in the country’s origin, but the Supreme Court’s support for their movement.
During his recent appearances in Nebraska and other states, Barton’s testimonies invoked the court’s 2022 opinion upholding the rights of a Washington state high school football coach to lead prayers with his team on the 50-yard line after games.
Prescott, the Indiana lawmaker, said he became interested in introducing his bill after learning of the implications of the coach’s Supreme Court victory.
To Barton and other members of his coalition, the court’s opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District creates a clear path to require Ten Commandments in schools — and inject Christianity into other facets of public life — by proving they’re part of a longstanding traditional practice.
In finding for Coach Kennedy, the Supreme Court abandoned its 1971 opinion ruling that religious displays don’t violate the Constitution if they have significant secular or nonreligious purposes. The court’s new standard revolves around whether the religious displays are part of historical practices. In other words, the heart of Barton’s pitch.
“That is the new standard, so the hostility is gone,” he testified. “Showing that this is something that is longstanding practice, you go back to The New England Primer.”
Bought and paid for — according to specs
Even as bill proponents championed states’ rights as one legal justification for their Ten Commandments display mandates, Middleton, the Texas legislative leader, said there is a key benefit to the near-identical requirements in the bills across the 18 states.
“We just wanted uniformity in these displays. We thought that was important,” the oil company president and cattle rancher told The 74. “Obviously, these are primarily going to be donated as well, so it’s probably going to be primarily private funds funding these.”
Project Blitz model legislation devises a funding scheme that revolves around donated displays without the reliance on public funds — a provision that appears in 16 states’ bills. Others invoke the model legislation by encouraging donated displays, but broaden the mandate so schools are also free to spend taxpayer dollars to comply.
Mirroring the Project Blitz model legislation, the new Arkansas law requires the Ten Commandments display be composed of a “durable poster or framed copy” of the document and that it be “prominently” positioned in each public classroom and library across the state. The law also stipulates that the posters should be donated by outside groups, meaning the same private entities who had a hand in crafting the specifications, supporting the bills and getting them on legislators’ radars, will also be the ones buying the versions of the Ten Commandments that wind up in schools.
Even as the Louisiana law is caught up in federal court, religious groups who lobbied for the law’s passage and have close ties to the WallBuilders have plans to donate the displays set to appear in classrooms across the state.
In April, First Liberty Institute and The Louisiana Family Forum announced that Patriot Mobile, which describes itself as “America’s ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider,” had donated 3,000 Ten Commandments displays “as part of a project to provide, at no cost to the Louisiana taxpayer, displays in schools throughout Louisiana.”[CHART]
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RWW
07/18/2025
by
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