What's more dangerous to democracy than Trumpism: Christian Nationalism

We are just less than a year away from what is surely the most fateful Presidential election in the life of our democracy. It seems like the warnings about the risks to our freedoms have yet to resonate with the required sense of urgency that would compel the peoples of this country to coalesce as a vanguard against the rise of fascism and Trumpist authoritarianism.

While the media continues (irresponsibly, it must be said) to afford disproportionate time, visibility, and normalcy to the rantings and fabrications of Donald Trump, there is another danger to democracy that merits equal if not greater attention and concern. That is the specter of Christian Nationalism.

In order to understand the dimensions of this particular threat to democracy, pluralism, and diversity, the purpose of this essay is to take a look at the movement’s key proponents and the principles and goals of their movement…and to arouse your sense of alarm.

Mike Johnson

On Tuesday of this week, December 5^th, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the person third in line to the Presidency, will be the featured speaker at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL).

This is the man famous for his support of the effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election; his belief that his own election as Speaker was ordained by God; his challenges to the First Amendment's Establishment Clause (the separation of church and state); and his editorials for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) against marriage equality and for the criminalization of sexual activity between consenting adults. (By the way, the ADF is a major driver of Project 2025 which prescribes an agenda for the next Republican administration that includes gutting LGBTQ+ protections and terminating government officials who are considered disloyal to their extremist agenda.)

It is of no small consequence, therefore, that Speaker Johnson’s affiliations and associations lean to the extreme right of the political spectrum ~ to include the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA); Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO); Mike and Cindy Jacobs, founders of Generals International; Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA; Paula White, televangelist and spiritual advisor to Donald Trump; Tucker Carlson; Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor; former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee; and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council…just to name a few.

The National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL)

So, what about the NACL?

The mission of the organization, formed in 2019, is

“to become a functioning legislative organization providing education and support for Christian elected official at the local, state and Federal level. The NACL will provide a national forum where major policy issues will be discussed and debated. The NACL will provide education on every major issue facing our nation to help policymakers promulgate policies that will strengthen our American forms of government. The NACL membership will formulate model statutes, ordinances and resolutions based upon a biblical worldview for introduction in cities, states and the Federal government.”

The three-member board of directors includes:

• Stanley Jason Rapert, a former member of the Arkansas State Senate, whose reactionary positions range from banning abortions without exception (i.e., not for victims of rape, incest, or the health of the mother) to prohibiting adoptions by gay couples opposing same sex marriages.

• Pastor Happy Caldwell who, with his wife Jeanne, founded VTN in Little Rock, Arkansas1988 by Pastors Happy and Jeanne Caldwell as a result of a direct calling from God to reach the state of Arkansas with the life-changing message of Jesus Christ.

• Hunter Lundy, an attorney and Independent candidate in this year’s Louisiana gubernatorial election.

With revenues for the 2021 calendar year totaling $372,200 (per the latest Form 990 to the IRS), no paid staff, the bulk of its expenses for conferences, conventions, and meetings ($110,000) and consultants ($82,000), NACL now has legislatures in over 30 states participating in the drafting of model legislation “to reestablish and protect conservative values in America.”

What are these conservative values?

To address this question, let me turn to a compelling essay in the February 2021 issue of Christianity Today by Paul D. Miller, a professor in the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Miller cites the following, but not inclusive, menu of policy values all of which center on the proposition that the United States is Christian nation and should therefore “promote a specific cultural template as the official culture of the country:”  

• an amendment to the Constitution to recognize America’s Christian heritage

• the reinstatement of prayer in public schools

• the enshrinement of a “Christian nationalist interpretation” of American history in school curricula, “including that America has a special relationship with God or has been “chosen” by him to carry out a special mission on earth”

• immigration restrictions to prevent a change in America’s religious and ethnic demographics

• stronger governmental actions to restrict “immoral behavior.”

Likewise, NACL members have introduced model legislation that includes, among other policies, the deputizing of private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who aids and abets an abortion after six weeks and the State Heartbeat Act, which would make abortions illegal as early as six weeks gestational age (two weeks after a woman's first missed period). 

Christian dominionism

It is worth noting that there is a parallel and allied movement called Christian Dominionism whose basic tenets are outlined in the Seven Mountain Mandate. As espoused by the Reformation Prayer Network, the Mandate’s principles constitute “a world-changing strategy” to “bring Godly change” by transforming seven spheres of societal influence:

• religion

• family education

• government

• media

• arts and entertainment, and 

• business.

An Appeal To Heaven

One of the symbols of the movement is the white flag with a pine tree and the phrase, An Appeal to Heaven.

The flag, whose early history was associated with the American Revolution and the Massachusetts Navy, is now the banner of Christian nationalists (as well as evangelical Christians, the Proud Boys, neo-Nazi groups, and January 6^th insurrectionists) who believe that the United States is a Christian nation and that the nation’s laws and practices should be based on the teachings of Christianity.

Ironically, the phrase derives from the following passage in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690) ~ The Right of Revolution.

“And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.”

Locke’s writing ends up as a convenient rationale, in the mind of these groups, to justify the citizens’ right to armed revolution against tyranny…because, for their unique interests, democracy isn’t working! Quite a stretch in logic and the use of history!

Harbingers of A Dystopic Future

I’ll close this piece with a reference to David Neiwert’s new book, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy. Neiwert is a former correspondent for Daily Kos and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has documented in chilling detail “the relentless mainstreaming” of Christian nationalist ideas and right-wing conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement theory.

“Preventing the certification of the Electoral College votes, however, was only the temporal objective of Trump’s army. In a larger sense, the insurrection’s intent was to overthrow democracy itself and replace it with an authoritarian autocracy. The intended outcome was to install Trump as the nation’s permanent president for life: a dictator in the mold of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“In this respect, the tide of authoritarianism that swept over Washington, D.C., on January 6 was in fact only a manifestation of a much larger phenomenon: the global ascent of right-wing authoritarian rule.[iii] In addition to major players where authoritarianism has been in place for a generation or longer like China and Russia, nations around the world—from the Philippines to Italy to Brazil and numerous places in between—autocratic regimes not only have secured political power, but have worked to enact its spread around the world.

“This spread has been enabled by a media, internet, and social media environment in which misinformation and disinformation that readily disrupts democratic discourse have become the ordinary state of things. It’s manifested in the rise of far-right political groups, many of them engaging in intimidation and street violence while others work assiduously to insinuate themselves within the democratic electorate even as they undermine democracy itself.

“Around the globe, democracies have faced sustained campaigns—fomented both by interior forces and those from outside—in which far-right operatives and leaders undermine the rule of law, pervert elections, attack media freedom, and inflame discrimination against minorities and mistreatment of migrants. Nowhere have these attacks had as significant effect on pluralistic institutions than in the United States, long considered the world’s leading exponent of democracy.

“There have been several powerful indicators of American decline: a surge in political domination, embodied in the saturation of intimidation and violence in its discourse; the worsening of long-standing discrimination against racial and ethnic minority groups as well as recent policies on asylum and immigration, eroding their equal treatment under the law; and most particularly the sudden and sharp decline in confidence in its elections, toxified by Trump and his fellow Republicans both before and after his defeat in 2020.

“But the United States is only one of the many democracies under siege. In Hungary and Turkey, democratic institutions have already been replaced by autocratic rule. In other nations like India, a theocratic and intolerant majority has despoiled the principles of pluralism and equal citizenship. In European nations like Germany, Sweden, and Italy, far-right political parties are ascendant and acquiring power and influence.

“In the latter case, the far right’s rise to power was led by a longtime neofascist named Giorgia Meloni, who won the prime minister’s seat in Italy’s September 2022 elections. For many observers, it was the final manifestation of the long process by which right-wing extremism has been mainstreamed in the West—and, for that matter, the world.”

The Bottom Line

If there’s a silver lining in this narrative, it is that no consensus exists on the overarching question of national identity.    

An extensive study by the Pew Center in October 2022 reported that 45% of Americans say that the U.S. should be a ‘Christian nation’ but they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics! (The study is worth reviewing: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/10/27/45-of-americans-say-u-s-should-be-a-christian-nation/)

Nevertheless, history has pointed out the ability of small but tenacious and single-minded groups to overtake the majority ~ and there exists a global anti-democratic trend that compels us to be vigilant, speak out, and vote!