It’s no longer about Jesus and the Bible
There’s quite a bit of good writing about Christian Nationalism these days largely because we’re spending a tiresome amount of time in Iowa which is the heartbeat of white conservative evangelicalism. This one (gift link) from the NY Times is quite good. And this one from Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker is really excellent. They both report that today’s evangelical GOP evangelicals are different than they used to be.
Wells interviews a number of Iowa pastors and politicians and they’re all interesting. But this one really struck me:
One evening, I drove from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s far-western edge and just a few miles from Omaha, to meet Joseph Hall, another pastor who had delivered the opening prayer at a recent Trump rally. Hall is forty-six years old, a military veteran who grew up in South Carolina and still has a strong Southern accent. His church looked like it was prospering. It got several hundred parishioners on Sundays, he said, and many of his sermons were online. When I asked Hall to recommend one that captured his point of view, he suggested the one he’d given in 2021, on “boldness.”
The next day, Mike Huckabee was scheduled to appear at the church. The following Tuesday, it would be Ben Carson. I had assumed that their host would be, like them, a long-standing member of the religious right, but when I met Hall he told me that he had never been very politically involved before Trump’s loss in 2020. But he was certain that Joe Biden had stolen that election, and for him that conviction tended to color everything: “If an election can be stolen, so can anything—our rights, our freedoms, our property, guns, anything.”
Hall spoke slowly and genially (at the end of our conversation, he asked me to take a selfie with him), and I realized that he was exactly who Dunwell had meant in referring to a “rising strain of Christian nationalism.” The nation, Hall explained, “was founded by men of the cloth.” He said, “The whole point of separation of church and state was never to remove the church from government; the whole purpose was to keep the government out of the church.” The DeSantis campaign was arguing to religious voters in Iowa that Trump’s opposition to fetal-heartbeat bills showed that he wasn’t really on their side. Hall told me that abortion wasn’t everything to him. “There is a bigger picture,” he said. You could tell what a threat Trump was to the secularists because of how desperate they were to beat him. “The enemy only attacks those who have potential.”
For some of Trump’s opponents—Liz Cheney, for instance—January 6th was so transformative that they obliterated previous political affiliations. Trump was at war with democracy; where did you stand? But, for some of his supporters, like Hall, those events had a similar effect in the opposite direction: January 6th had stopped political time, so everything that mattered came in its wake, and was defined by persecution. “I believe with all my heart that through the stolen election there’s been devastation, destruction—there’s been nothing good the last four years,” he said. “Everything seems to be deliberate destruction. Why open the borders? Why close the pipelines? It’s ultimately to destroy our nation and our way of life.”
It was Christmastime. There were wreaths up in Hall’s sanctuary, the caucuses just a few weeks away. Hall’s candidate, and Hall’s perspective, were on the verge of a resounding victory. “This is more than a fight between left and right, Democrats and Republicans,” Hall said. “This is good and evil. Biblically.”
Think about that. Donald Trump inspired someone to become a pastor in order to fulfill his vision. That gives me a headache.
The upshot in both articles is that we are no longer dealing with Republican evangelical Christianity as we’ve known it. There are plenty of the old guard left who eye the new guard with suspicion. But they’re following along with the new guard which is Christian Nationalist. Religion is now a means to power nothing more. The theology is incidental.
A friend pointed out to me the other day that Charlie Kirk, the young wingnut leader who runs Turning Point USA, one of the biggest far right organizations, has suddenly and quite abruptly started using Christian Right rhetoric. It’s no longer a Church thing. It’s a Trump cult thing.