It may seem odd to find a movement openly talking about hanging political adversaries focused in churches. But that depends on which ones you’ve visited.
“Pentecostal Christianity, despite its immense size, is about as far from elite American culture as Mercury is from Mars,” writes David French at The Dispatch. “And this means it’s quite distant from elite Evangelical culture as well.”
The fringe is one place former Donald Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn finds a welcome. His “ReAwaken America” tour is part tent revival, part trade show. It’s noticeable that his tour is sponsored by a charismatic Christian organization, French writes.
There are several reasons why the movement is difficult even to describe, much less combat:
First, MAGA Christian nationalism is emotional and spiritual, not intellectual or ideological.
Second, MAGA Christian nationalism is concentrated in the churches most removed from elite American culture, including from elite Evangelicalism.
That is, it is concentrated in a subculture as removed from mainstream Christianity as snake-handling. Its symbols, its cultural references, Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd wrote, are “easier to notice than to explain.”
It’s in the air out here
Third, MAGA Christian nationalism is often rooted in purported prophecies. I’ve spent every single day of the Trump era living deep in the heart of Trump country, surrounded by Trump-supporting friends, and attending church with Trump-supporting Christians. If there’s anything I know by heart, it’s the “Christian case for Trump.” I’ve read all the essays. I’ve heard all the arguments. It’s in the air out here.
There’s the pragmatic or prudential cost/benefit analysis—he’s a bad man, but his judicial appointments are good. There’s the cultural argument about threat—the left has grown so terrible that we have to punch back. But there’s also another argument entirely, one that’s impossible to discuss rationally—that Trump is divinely anointed by God to save this nation from imminent destruction.
I have up-close experience with this level of fervor. Some readers may remember that I debated Eric Metaxas at John Brown University in September 2020. While the debate was civil enough, it was clear to me that Metaxas was operating with a level of commitment to Trump that went well beyond reason. He truly believed Joe Biden would destroy America. He truly believed Trump was God’s chosen man for the moment.
The People’s Temple believed in Jim Jones. Since the Reformation decentralized Christianity, by the late 20th century any American huckster with a flashy suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a black, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition could define Christianity pretty much any damned way he pleased. It’s the Wild West out there.
“Post-truth,” Timothey Snyder warns, “is pre-fascism.” In their minds, believers in these circles cannot conceive of themselves as enemies of democracy, French explains. It is why Antifa must be responsible for Jan. 6. “Republicans don’t act like that. That is not what we do.” Even as some call for hangings.
So we have to be careful. When dealing with a potentially insurrectionary subculture, it’s important to separate it from the population. Wrongly tie them to the mainstream, and members of the mainstream may wrongly see the insurrectionists as allies.
But underreaction can be dangerous too. We know that fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic. We know that they can be both deadly and destabilizing. A Christian political movement that’s so focused on the threat from the left can often unwittingly facilitate the rise of radicals, through sins of both commission and omission.
The sin of commission is constant threat-inflation. By focusing relentlessly on “wokeism” or the worst of the left, Christian media exacerbates the sense that Evangelicals are under siege and hanging on to their place in American society by their fingertips. As a leader in a well-known Christian activist group told me this week, threat-inflation leads to “cornered-animal syndrome,” rendering Christians vulnerable to the siren call of the extremists. Join us. We’re the last hope for the nation and the church.
The sin of omission is the deafening silence from so many Christian leaders about the threat to the church and the nation from the far right. Convinced by threat-inflation of the danger from the left, and desperate for the unity that is perceived as necessary to confront existential risks, the last thing they want to do is to divide the right. Indeed, they scorn those public voices who dare “punch right.”
Contra FDR, fear itself is not the only thing mainstream America has to fear. But it drives people to behaviors thay might otherwise abhor. There are concentration camps preserved as testament to that. But this subculture with its alternate reality makes it’s self-reinforced fears difficult to unwind.
(h/t Rachel Vindman)
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