Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, was on message Wednesday night. Asked about passing judicial ethics reform to address the legitimacy crisis in the Supreme Court, she went right to “We’ve got an election coming up.”
Democrats need to build their majority in the U.S. Senate and hold their majority in the House. Bottom line.
Don’t just scream at your TV between now and November 8, Warren said. Ask, “What can I do to influence the outcome of the election in November?”
How much power the court will have to determine our lives going forward is on the line. Abortion rights are on the line. If Republicans gain enough power in 2022 and 2024, they will ban abortion nationally, either directly or effectively, and states’ rights be damned.
Each of the GOP’s court nominees swore under oath that Roe v. Wade was settled law. [Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.] As soon as conservatives had the court majority, they overturned Roe and eviscerated a constitutional right protected for the last half century.
Other rights are now negotiable. Rights to personal autonomy and privacy. Voting rights. Same-sex marriage. Labor protections. Equal protection under law. Democratic theory underlying the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives representing an autocracy-curious fringe minority have set their sights on making democracy a mockery. In Jesus’s name.
Revanchists want to put women back in their places. They won’t stop with women, a majority in this country. Every minority not on Team Theocracy is wearing a judicial target on their backs, or worse. We’ve only been warning about the New Apostolic Reformation and its “seven mountains mandate” here for over a decade.
“It’s hard to know what will happen if these people begin to exert even stronger influence over the Republican party in a time of great stress and transition in this country,” Digby wrote in 2010.
Now we do.
What are you going to do about it?
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Find a pdf of the Watchman Decree here. It begins:
WHEREAS • we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth • we have been given legal power from heaven and now exercise our authority • we are God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth • through the power of God, we are the world influencers • because of our covenant with God, we are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy,
There is much more, of course. Four minutes’ worth of decreeing and declaring, including a reference to Seven Mountains Dominionism. We’ve been following this movement here for over a decade.
I cannot find attendance numbers for FlashPoint LIVE in the Atlanta area this month, but this is not an insignificant movement. They fill stadiums.
And they fill elected offices. Here in North Carolina, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson recites from the Christian nationalist gospel. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is fluent in it. E.C. Sykes was Executive Director of Faith and Religious Liberty for Ted Cruz for President and member of the Council for National Policy, “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” and listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He returned to North Carolina after 20 years and ran unsuccessfully in 2020 for secretary of state against incumbent Democrat Elaine Marshall. He is running for state senate in 2022.
The shape of the Christian nationalist movement in the post-Roe future is coming into view, and it should terrify anyone concerned for the future of constitutional democracy.
The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.
A good place to gauge the spirit and intentions of the movement that brought us the radical majority on the Supreme Court is the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference. At this year’s event, which took place last month in Nashville, three clear trends were in evidence. First, the rhetoric of violence among movement leaders appeared to have increased significantly from the already alarming levels I had observed in previous years. Second, the theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society — is now explicitly embraced. And third, the movement’s key strategists were giddy about the legal arsenal that the Supreme Court had laid at their feet as they anticipated the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
They intend to use that arsenal — together with additional weaponry collected in cases like Carson v. Makin, which requires state funding of religious schools if private, secular schools are also being funded; and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which licenses religious proselytizing by public school officials — to prosecute a war on individual rights, not merely in so-called red state legislatures but throughout the nation.
Although metaphors of battle are common enough in political gatherings, this year’s rhetoric appeared more violent, more graphic and more tightly focused on fellow Americans, rather than on geopolitical foes.
“The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be,” said former President Donald Trump, who delivered the keynote address at the event. “The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.”
Speakers at the conference vied to outdo one another in their denigration of the people that Mr. Trump was evidently talking about. Democrats, they said, are “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within,” engaged in “a war against the truth.”
“The backlash is coming,” warned Senator Rick Scott of Florida. “Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country. It is time to take this country back.”
Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referencing a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”
It is not a stretch to link this rise in verbal aggression to the disinformation campaign to indoctrinate the Christian nationalist base in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, along with what we’re learning from the Jan. 6 hearings. The movement is preparing “patriots” for the continuation of the assault on democracy in 2022 and 2024.
The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.
The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights.
And indeed it is personal. Much of the rhetoric on the right invokes visions of vigilante justice. This is about “good guys with guns” — or neighbors with good eavesdropping skills — heroically taking on the pernicious behavior of their fellow citizens. Among the principal battlefields will be the fallopian tubes and uteruses of women.
At a breakout session called “Life Is on the Line: What Does the Future of the Pro-Life Movement Look Like From Here?” Chelsey Youman, the Texas state director and national legislative adviser to Human Coalition Action, a Texas-based anti-abortion organization with a national strategic focus, described the connection between vigilantes and abortion rights.
Instead of the state regulating abortion providers, she explained, “You and me as citizens of Texas or this country or wherever we can pass this bill, can instead sue the abortion provider.” Mrs. Youman, as it happens, played a role in promoting the Texas law Senate Bill 8, which passed in May 2021 and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion. She was exultant over the likely passage of similar laws across the nation. “We have legislation ready to roll out for every single state you live in to protect life regardless of the Supreme Court, regardless of your circuit court.” To be sure, Christian nationalists are also pushing for a federal ban. But the struggle for the present will center on state-level enforcement mechanisms.
Citing the fight against Nazi Germany during the Battle of the Bulge, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina said, “We find ourselves in a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referencing a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, he added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”
It is not a stretch to link this rise in verbal aggression to the disinformation campaign to indoctrinate the Christian nationalist base in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, along with what we’re learning from the Jan. 6 hearings. The movement is preparing “patriots” for the continuation of the assault on democracy in 2022 and 2024.
The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.
I’ll just let you sit with that for a while.
We’ve been writing about this stuff here for a very long time. It’s gotten much more organized and much more mainstream as you can see by the fact that US Senator Rick Scott who is not even thought of as one of the true crazies in the GOP (although he is.) And look at the violent imagery these leaders are evoking among a fanatical following that is also armed with deadly weapons. We’re sitting on a powder keg.
Katherine Stewart, author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” warns that seeing the end of women’s right to control their reproduction is just the beginning. “Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project,” she explains.
At the annual Road to Majority Policy Conference last month in Nashville, the activists were giddy over the expected overturning of Roe, she writes in the New York Times.
“The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about,” former President Donald Trump said in his keynote address.
He’s talking about Democrats, whom various speakers described as “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within.” Senator Rick Scott of Florida and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina invoked the imagery of war.
The intensification of verbal warfare is connected to shifts in the Christian nationalist movement’s messaging and outreach, which were very much in evidence at the Nashville conference. Seven Mountains Dominionism — the belief that “biblical” Christians should seek to dominate the seven key “mountains” or “molders” of American society, including the government — was once considered a fringe doctrine, even among representatives of the religious right. At last year’s Road to Majority conference, however, there was a breakout session devoted to the topic. This year, there were two sessions, and the once arcane language of the Seven Mountains creed was on multiple speakers’ lips.
The hunger for dominion that appears to motivate the leadership of the movement is the essential context for making sense of its strategy and intentions in the post-Roe world. The end of abortion rights is the beginning of a new and much more personal attack on individual rights.
And indeed it is personal. Much of the rhetoric on the right invokes visions of vigilante justice. This is about “good guys with guns” — or neighbors with good eavesdropping skills — heroically taking on the pernicious behavior of their fellow citizens. Among the principal battlefields will be the fallopian tubes and uteruses of women.
They want a federal ban on abortion but will work on state-level bans for now, and on punishing “abortion trafficking.” Women who cross state lines in search of legal abortion services are their targets “along with people who provide those women with services or support, like cars and taxis.”
Stewart advises:
Americans who stand outside the movement have consistently underestimated its radicalism. But this movement has been explicitly antidemocratic and anti-American for a long time.
[…]
Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.
This is not new information. Not at this blog, anyway. Digby has written about theocrats’ intentions for well over a decade. The whole point of the doctrine is that their God has promised them dominion — control — over the entire world. Democracy is a convenient means to that end and to fulfillment of God’s purpose for them. The last shall be first, every knee shall bow, etc. Meaning you to them. Jesus was Machiavellian before Machiavelli.
They don’t want to govern. They want to rule … you. In Jesus’ name.
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With Roe on the chopping block, we’ll need it, says Dan Froomkin bluntly:
The Republican Party wants to usher in a new Dark Age in America.
For starters, its leaders want to roll the calendar back 50 years and more, to a time when pregnant women’s medical decisions were made by the government.
Other human and civil rights, especially for the LGBTQ community and people of color, would inevitably be next.
They want to wipe away decades of slow, painstaking progress toward becoming a more inclusive, tolerant and humane society.
They consistently use lies and conspiracy theories to mislead the public and the press. They thrive on disinformation and misinformation. They have their own propaganda outlets to incite hatred and division. They want to use the power of government to punish people and corporations who speak out against them or teach their children the truth.
The “party of radical reactionaries,” says Froomkin, has “no governing agenda beyond wanting to punish and rebuke and marginalize and demonize.”
The left has its authoritarians. Mostly young, black-and-white thinkers spun up on their own righteousness. Determined to remold the world as they see it, they stay angry at their inability to impose their will. Like libertarians that way. A lot of them read Ayn Rand in high school. Most grow up. Most of the left’s authoritarians mellow.
But the right’s authoritarians are raised from birth to see the world as hostile, Devil-occupied territory to be conquered. For Jesus. Or just to put snotty, overeducated, urban elites in their places. When the righteous come into their God-promised inheritance, the last (them, of course) shall be first, and the first last. Women shall remain silent and submit to their husbands. Every knee shall bow. To Jesus, to them, whatever.
Feeling persecuted is reflexive, a sign you’re doing their brand of Christianity right, and that ruling is just around the corner. If it takes 50 years, well, they are still waiting for Jesus to return after 2,000.
“We will govern over kings and judges and they will have to submit. … We’re called to rule! To change history! To be co-regents with God,” says “The Keys to Dominion.”
Although the anti-abortion movement began as a reaction to the collapse of segregation, today it is a key part of that right’s fight to put everyone not aligned with them in their places.
Ashton Pittman of the Mississippi Free Press cites Dr. Anthea Butler, author of “Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.” She teaches religion and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Pittman writes:
“What is hard for people to understand about Christian dominionism is that it is not just about being evangelical. It’s about a certain way of looking at the world and saying that Christians are supposed to rule in every area, sort of the ‘seven mountains’ of power,” Butler said, referring to the late NAR founder C. Peter Wagner’s ideas about Seven Mountains Dominionism, which says Christians must seize power in the realms of family, religion, education, business, government, media and the arts.
“What you’re looking at with dominionism is something very different. They’re not only talking about spiritual warfare, they’re talking about principalities and powers that rule over nations and places.”
Just as activism is a way of life for some on the left, for some on the right winning the power to dominate Others is all-consuming. Women’s rights, education, politics, culture. All will bow.
Take some advise about where they are headed from a guy who spent a few formative years in a WWII internment camp. In. This. Country:
My best, worst-case scenario right now is that the Supreme Court kills off Roe in June and Democrats in Congress (don’t ask me how) restore it with the Women’s Health Protection Act in July and save the republic in November. The choice for the majority of Americans could not be more black hat vs. white hat.
Read the tagline.
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This novelty “permit” has been on sale at gun shows for decades and represents attitudes that are not at all new.
Even as the right screams and tears its hair about cancel culture, conservatives are doubling and tripling down on cancelling democracy. Christopher Rufo (of critical trace theory fame) has a quote outstanding to absolve himself of any fallout from his incendiary rhetoric on that (Zack Beauchamp at Vox):
On Tuesday, Rufo elaborated a bit more on the project he has in mind: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards,” he tweeted.
Confronted with unsavory parallels to militant fascist rhetoric against intellectuals, Rufo clarified that he was not calling for violence. “For the Godwin’s Law aficionados: remove the attorney general through resignation or impeachment, lay siege to the universities through cutting federal subsidies, abolish the teachers’ unions through legislation, and overturn school boards through winning elections,” he tweeted on Tuesday night.
Whew. Thank goodness that, post-Rittenhouse acquittal, the guys who’ve been buying and selling the stickers above at gun shows for decades won’t take Rufo the wrong way.
Patrick J. Deneen published an essay this week explaining the need for real conservatives not only to supplant a Conservatism Inc. co-opted by the left, but to crush “liberal totalitarianism.” Deneen’s “happy warrior” stance recalls Grover Norquist’s invitation to a post-election party at his Capitol Hill home. Norquist quoted Conan the Barbarian: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Deneen explained Republicans have so far failed in that:
What is the reason for this failure? Deneen cites mainstream conservative adherence to seven liberal principles — religious liberty, limited government, “the inviolability of private institutions (e.g., corporations),” academic freedom, constitutional originalism, free markets, and free speech — as the root of its defects.
“Liberalism has become consistently more aggressive in extending each of these features to their logical conclusion — their own contradiction in the form of liberal totalitarianism,” Deneen argues. Liberalism inevitably produces “the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue: family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.”
“Rufo and Deneen are part of a bigger intellectual trend on the right — one in which America’s core institutions are described as hopelessly corrupted by liberal forces,” Beauchamp explains. The view is promoted now by conservative think tanks such as California’s Claremont Institute:
In a March article in the American Mind, Claremont’s blog, writer Glenn Elmers declares that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and wage “a sort of counter-revolution” against these “citizen-aliens,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured.”
And an August essay in the Claremont Review of Books by scholar Angelo Codevilla describes a country whose government is clinging to “an illusion of legitimacy” after “a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse” has demolished American society.
Rufo and Deneen’s stances are dressed-up versions of white backlash to a diversifying country. With demographic shifts and growing demands by traditionally marginalized groups including, most prominently, Black Americans for actual equal treatment, conservatism as a whole now reflects evangelical Christianity’s reflexive sense of persecution. When you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.
“The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law,” Tabachnick said. “Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it’s important to recognize the movement’s impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.
Consider the parallels between Deneen’s rhetoric and that from figures Tabachnick cites. Do yourselves a favor and have a listen to Tabachnick’s take on what’s happening just below the surface of our broken politics:
“This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government,” Tabachnick told Salon. “Therefore, any ‘rights’ that conflict with their interpretation of God’s law are not actually rights. They are ‘humanist’ or a product of man’s laws and not God’s laws. This theme of ‘human rights’ versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings.”
She pointed to “What’s Wrong With Human Rights,” an excerpt from a book of the same name by the Rev. T. Robert Ingram published in “The Theology of Christian Resistance,” a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as “a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union,” and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason in 1776.
The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning “That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights,” is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an “error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life.” The second, beginning “That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them,” he dismisses as well: “The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that ‘power belongeth unto God.'” In short, there are no human rights.
I wrote this month that “well-meaning” Americans’ aversion to seeing what’s in front of them has allowed Christian Reconstructionists to move into positions of power unnoticed.
“The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law,” Tabachnick said. “Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it’s important to recognize the movement’s impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.”
When clips of a speech by North Carolina Republican lieutenant governor went viral this week, many will not have recognized the dominionism behind his promise that “Christian patriots will own and rule this nation.” But when he declared non-Republicans “our enemies” and the most populous state in the U.S. “Commie-fornia” [timestamp 8:10], what he put on public display was Christofascism.
This movement does not get a lot of press. The players seem too fringe for most of the media to cover. Until they storm the Capitol. While they scream the loudest about being cancelled, they will cancel democracy if that’s what it takes to retain their accustomed privilege.
In the view of Christian dominionists, they own this country. Jesus himself gave it to them to rule, and they are, more than ever, bent on making that a reality (Washington Post):
It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.
The Post sketch of the growing nondenominational movement describes loud, highly produced services (requiring ear plugs) at a Fort Worth, Texas church named Mercy Culture. Donald Trump adviser Paula White comes from such a place. Predictions of a “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising” from the movement led some to believe they’d been led by God to assault the Capitol on Jan. 6th.
Pauline Bauer, a Pennsylvania pizzeria owner, is accused of multiple counts of violent entry, disruptive conduct, and obstruction of Congress after she allegedly broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6. Prosecutors allege that Bauer tried organizing buses to transport people to D.C. for a rally that preceded the riot, and that while in the Capitol rotunda she told police that she wanted to kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But in what experts describe as an inadvisable legal strategy, Bauer has demanded to represent herself in court, appeared to threaten a court clerk with prison time, and declared herself a “self-governed individual” with special legal privileges.
“I am here by special divine appearance, a living soul,” she told a judge. She wants to represent herself.
She don’t need no stinking constitution. She has a Bible and she knows how to use it.
Is Bauer a dominionist or just another sovereign citizen? Who knows?
We’ve covered Dominionism here at Hullabaloo so many times that I’ve lost count (search for dominionist or Dominionism in the side bar). But for those who need it, the Post provides a very brief referesher:
Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.
A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.
And make His Own the overseers, naturally. All fueled by the prosperity gospel.
Someone must have a Venn diagram of how Christian reconstructionism, dominionism, and Christian nationalism intersect, but I can’t find one just now. Bill Berkowitz mentions another NAR faction that has abandoned the politics of the right and moved to the Pacific Northwest to await societal collapse and the emergence of a new Christian order they will build. Underlying it all is the belief that Christians should rule, and all others shall bow to Jesus (and to them).
Christianity Today describes Christian nationalism thusly:
Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future. Scholars like Samuel Huntington have made a similar argument: that America is defined by its “Anglo-Protestant” past and that we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural inheritance.
Christian nationalists do not reject the First Amendment and do not advocate for theocracy, but they do believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square. The term “Christian nationalism,” is relatively new, and its advocates generally do not use it of themselves, but it accurately describes American nationalists who believe American identity is inextricable from Christianity.
As for not advocating a theocracy, Christianity Today might have to explain that part to the theocrats themselves.
They expect not to govern but to rule … in God’s name. That last is about the only thing differentiating them from leading Republicans.
One of the ongoing fascinating sideshows of the Conservative Crack-up is the deep schism Trump has revealed within the Christian Right. It’s is just one of many sub-stories in the campaign but since the so-called conservative Values Voters have been such major players in GOP politics and American political life in general for decades now it’s an important one. Although there have been rumblings of discontent over the past few years as younger evangelicals with more tolerant views began to infiltrate the movement the embrace of Trump by millions of evangelical Christians is a development very few people saw coming. (I certainly didn’t when I wrote this piece last year about the history and impending break-up of the conservative coalition between Catholics and Protestants — I ended it by saying the evangelical right was solid as a rock. Chalk that one up to yet another pundit fail.)
The current split among the evangelical right started to become obvious when Donald Trump was feted as an exalted visiting dignitary by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. It turned out that he had visited before and had been making gestures of friendship for some years. Jerry Falwell Jr is a big fan who says that Trump reminds him of his own father. It became clear that this wasn’t an anomaly when Trump’s electoral success among this cohort derailed Ted Cruz’s southern strategy with which he had hoped to corner the Christian Right and therefore take the delegate lead long before the campaign got to more Godless environs. That didn’t work out, obviously, and Cruz along with everyone else was surprised by the willingness of so many people who call themselves conservative Christians to vote for man who is anything but pious and repeatedly shows that he is religiously illiterate. As it turned out a lot of those people aren’t actually all that religious themselves:
[E]vangelicals do boast higher worship attendance numbers than other faith communities, and those who do go to church regularly tend to vote and behave in ways that match the greater evangelical agenda. But that doesn’t mean they all sit in the pews every Sunday, nor does it mean they blindly accept whatever their pastor tells them: anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of evangelicals attend church occasionally, seldom, or never. You’re less likely to see this more wayward subset of evangelicalism singing hymns on Sunday morning, but they’re happy to identify as evangelicals on opinion polls anyway, and have often been the group lifted up by progressives as examples of evangelical “hypocrisy.”
[…]
As it turns out, these biblically “prodigal” evangelicals are the heart of religious support for the equally prodigal Trump: According to the Wall Street Journal, only 38 percent of Trump supporters attend worship weekly or more, compared to 56 percent of social conservative voters and 43 percent of Republican establishment voters.
It was reported earlier that some evangelical preachers of the “prosperity gospel” are all in with the Trump campaign which is hardly surprising. He is nothing if not conspicuously prosperous. But as Peter Montgomery of Right Wing Watch reports, they aren’t the only ones:
What is a bit more surprising is the support Trump is getting from a leading advocate of Seven Mountains dominionism, which teaches that government and other spheres of influence — “mountains” like media, entertainment, business — are meant to be run by the right kind of Christians. Lance Wallnau is an influential leader in the Seven Mountains movement. In 2011, he declared that it is the obligation of Christians to “seize those high places” in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ — something he has said they should do by both “overt” and “covert” means. In 2012, he said that the mountains of government, media, and economics were currently occupied by Satan.
[…]
“When God wants to move in history, he doesn’t always pick the favorite evangelical,” said Wallnau. He said that God brought Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill to power at crucial moments in history, the way He is now raising up Trump for our time. And he knows this, Wallnau said, because God told him so. Wallnau said God told him specifically that Trump is “a wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness.”
It’s not just the people at his rallies Trumps is bring to ecstatic states of near-worship.
But needless to say at least some members of the Christian Right are not amused, most famously the Southern Baptist convention’s Russell Moore who has written several scathingop-eds criticizing Republicans for backing Donald Trump. And just as it has happened among the other factions of the GOP coalition, it’s broken out into open warfare. Moore appeared on Face the Nation on Sunday and let fly:
One of the key aspects of conservativism is to say, character matters in public office and in the citizenry and virtue has an important role to play in our culture and in our politics…And so when you have conservatives who were saying in the previous Clinton era that character matters, rightly so, who now are not willing to say anything when we have this sort of reality television moral sewage coming through all over our culture and conservative who previously said we have too much awful cultural rot on television, who now want to put it on C-SPAN for the next four years and to give a model to our children really with either of these two candidates of an amoral sort of vision of America that isn’t what we believe in.
In fairness, Moore also called Clinton decadent just to be even-handed although I don’t know that she’s called anyone a pussy on the stump or discussed her genitalia in a debate. Maybe I missed it. Trump was angry and fired back on twitter with this:
.@drmoore Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!
It went back and forth with Moore hurling Bible verses at Trump and Trump undoubtedly ordering an intern to look up what they mean. But it isn’t just Moore. As Think Progress reported yesterday there are a few other Christian Right leaders registering concern:
In February, the Christian Post — an evangelical publication — took a position on a candidate for the first time in their history by publishing an impassioned take-down of Trump. And last week, at least one Liberty University board member resigned in protest after the school’s president endorsed Trump.
The Washington Post featured a story about some heartland evangelicals who are upset by the Trump victory in the Republican primary. One pastor from Nebraska named Gary Fuller poignantly put it this way: “In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party. There’s nobody left.”
It wasn’t very long ago that we were seeing magazine cover stories about preachers and other Christian leaders’ outsized influence on American politics with titles such as “Thunder on the Right” and “The Right Hand of God”. They were political powerhouses as much as religious leaders going back to the earliest iteration of the Christian Right, the Moral Majority. They didn’t just have tremendous influence but literal veto power within the Republican party. Now, with a few notable exceptions, most of them are either signing on to the ugly proto-fascist Trump movement or sitting quietly in the back of the bus, saying little as the Republican party bows its head to an amoral man on a white horse. What would Jesus do?
In a sermon last year at an Irving, Texas, megachurch that helped elect Ted Cruz to the United States Senate, Cruz’ father Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as “kings” to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the “Seven Mountains” mandate, and “bring the spoils of war to the priests”, thus helping to bring about a prophesied “great transfer of wealth”, from the “wicked” to righteous gentile believers. link to video of Rafael Cruz describing the “great transfer of wealth” and the role of anointed “kings” in various sectors of society, including government, who are to “bring the spoils of war to the priests”.
Rafael Cruz’ dominionist sermon given August 26, 2012, at the New Beginnings Church of pastor Larry Huch, in Irving, Texas has already received considerable scrutiny due to an excellent Huffington Post commentary by Methodist Associate Pastor Morgan Guyton, who noted the explicitly dominionist nature of pastor Cruz’ sermon, which concerned the divine mandate for believers, with anointing of “kings” in their respective spheres, to take control over all sectors of society.
Cruz spoke of “Kings who are anointed to go to war, win the war, and bring the spoils of war to the priests.”
Discussion of the now-notorious speech by Rafael Cruz has missed the fact that Ted Cruz was subsequently blessed and anointed by prominent dominionist pastors, in effect as a “king” in the political/governmental sphere, at a special blessing ceremony at the Marriott Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, at a July 19th-20th 2013 rally designed to draw pastors into politics.
In 1975 Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade,
and Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission,
had lunch together.
God simultaneously gave each of them a message to give to the other: “The culture is shaped by seven mind-molders or mountains in society. If we can influence each of these areas for Christ, we will win the culture of our nation.”
These 7 mountains are:
Media Mountain
Government Mountain
Education Mountain
Business Mountain
Church Mountain
Arts and Entertainment Mountain
Family Mountain
These 7 mountains will influence our culture. At the top of each mountain is a principal, controlling party (we call them mind molders). These mind molders are either governed by God’s principals or they are governed by darkness and satan. Right now in your city, these 7 mountains are under the control of satan and his kingdom…but that is about to change.
How did this happen?
This has happened because we have limited the Gospel of Salvation to forgiveness of sins only, and not the transforming of nations. By doing this, we’ve reduced our relationship with God as our savior for all things. Somehow, over time, we have allowed God to get pushed out of these 7 areas, we’ve lost the revelation that:
as ‘King of Kings’…. He is the Lord of government
as ‘The Great Teacher’…. He is Lord of education
as ‘Johovah Jira’…. He is our provider and Lord of business
as ‘The Living Word’…. He is Lord of all media
as ‘The Potter/Gardener/Architect’…. He is Lord of all arts and entertainment
as ‘The Father’…. He is Lord of the family
as ‘The Messiah or Lord of Lords’…. He is Lord of the Church However, there is great news.
God is our savior for everything and that is a wonderful revelation. It is time to not only invite God back into these 7 mountains, but it is time to put Him in charge of them. All it takes is the willingness of each of us to step up and make it happen.
Retake Your City is calling on you to make the decision that you have had enough, and that God has been removed for too long from our culture. Accept the calling God has on your life in whatever area He has called you. Decide that God will no longer take a back seat but instead, will be the driver. If you are ready to step up, if you are ready to go to battle for Jesus then start today.
They’re on a mission from God to anoint their King of America and take the money away from you moocher heathens and give to the righteous producers of salvation.
But that’s OK. I’m sure that if Obama just “leads” more, he can convince these people to put country first and do right by the downtrodden and uninsured. He just needs to host a few more cocktail parties or something.
It was through the Pastors’ Policy Briefings that Gingrich—whose campaign declined to comment for this story—reportedly hit on the idea of launching a group called Renewing American Leadership, which he did in 2008. David Barton was among the founding board members. California pastor Jim Garlow, who helped organize the campaign to repeal California’s gay-marriage law and has likened the gay rights movement to an “antichrist spirit,” was later named president. At the time, the Tea Party had just exploded on the scene, and the group’s stated goal was to bring religious and fiscal conservatives together, in part by making a biblical case for conservative economic policies. This has indeed been part of the program. According to a report from the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, just after the 2010 elections, Barton, Gingrich and Garlow hosted a conference call for pastors to celebrate Republican gains in the House and make the case that progressive taxation, deficit spending and the minimum wage ran counter to biblical teachings.
But Renewing American Leadership has also built bridges to the ascendant Dominionist movement, known as the New Apostolic Reformation or NAR. An offshoot of Pentecostalism—the second largest branch of Christianity and one of the fastest growing—the movement has been spreading rapidly within existing churches and congregations. While there are no credible estimates on the number of adherents, the prayer rallies convened by some NAR leaders fill stadiums. At the movement’s core is a group of self-proclaimed apostles and prophets who see themselves as the forefront of a second Reformation that will transform not only the church, but every facet of society. In fact, one of the apostles’ main teachings is that believers have to infiltrate and take control of what they call the “seven mountains of culture”—religion, family, business, arts and entertainment, education, media and government—before Jesus can return. And when they speak of taking dominion in these spheres, they often resort to the language of war. “The way some of the leaders talk, you’d think they were an army planning to take over the world,” says Margaret Poloma, a professor at the University of Akron and a practicing Pentecostal who has studied the New Apostolic movement. “It sounds to me like radical Islam.”
Obviously these Dominionists are either dumb or they are hypocrites, maybe both. Gingrich? I wonder how much money he got out of them.
I’m being facetious, but the truth is that this movement merits keeping an eye on. True, they backed the wrong horse this time — should have gone with Santorum. But there are more of them than we think and they are very influential at the state level. Rick Perry is one of their major pets. And look at what Texas has accomplished.
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